Читать книгу An Affair of State онлайн

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He walked up Massachusetts to Dupont Circle, feeling empty and frustrated and baffled. Stud was listening to the eleven o'clock news. "I see you didn't make the grade," Stud greeted him. "Not even lipstick. Is she tied up with Keller?"

"No, she's tied up with herself."

"There are two girls on the floor below," Stud said, "who have been running up here all evening to borrow ice cubes, glasses, bottle openers, and cigarettes. They work in Archives, and they're having a party for the Junior Archivists, Division of Useless Executive Papers. They want us to come down when the party is over."

"Not me," Jeff said.

"They're not bad," Stud said. "They develop a lot of compression, working down there three floors below the Archives Building. They claim all the men in Archives are unburied cadavers."

"I'll skip it."

"What's the matter with you? Sick?"

"Sort of." He didn't feel too good, he told himself. He took two aspirins, and chased them with bourbon, before he went to bed.

He spent the next week in the library of the Foreign Service Institute, studying the departmental regulations. Their complexities awed and alarmed him, but Mr. Dannenberg, the head of the training staff, assured him that the orals weren't necessarily based on knowledge of the regulations. "If they were," he said, "nobody would ever get in the Service. It used to be said that there were only three rules for making a good Foreign Service Officer--sit with your back to the light, listen to your superiors, and go to bed before you get drunk. Actually, you learn by osmosis. In the orals you'll be judged on poise and personality. We want our men to look like representatives of the United States. We want them to look American."