C4 antho - Chamber Four

~292~ The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology
At lunchtime, when the meeting broke up―Herr Doktor
Hühne abruptly rose, declaring his hunger―the line of salesmen,
and among them Herr Halsa, strolled towards the
building’s front door in twos and threes behind the visiting
executive, who was a personal friend of the family that
owned the company. Herr Doktor Hühne had walked ahead
with the highest-grossing salesman, a curly-topped redhead
far thinner than the rest and willing to make any kind of
joke, transgress in any way, even to the point of yanking
Hühne’s tie, beeping like the Roadrunner, and calling the regent
Dingsbums.
Joseph, too, proceeded to the front door. But this was
where his deficiency cut him off. He could ride all of the
other rides, but here at last he came upon a minimum height
for the Tilt-a-Whirl, the requirement of actual Germanness,
which he missed by a finger or two. It was his secret goal to
grow into it, to convince Halsa next year or the year after, by
silent competence―it would take just once to change the expectation
permanently―and then he could board one of the
cars departing for an inner-sanctum lunch.
Along behind the Automationsabteilung, as the only
American invited to the restaurant, the sales rep Jack Wilson
paddled out. He’d been talking all this while to Ted and Alan
and the other non-German speakers in the hobbing area.
Maybe he’d even done the rounds of the service department,
the warehouse that occupied the back two-thirds of the
building and marked the hunting grounds of the only birds
lower than Americans in this peculiar aviary: the Bauern,
Helmut Schall and his staff of Bavarian farmers who’d never
had their moles removed. Joseph liked them, in fact they
were some of the best men in the company, but the defensive
jokes about their moles and so on―Herr Halsa’s repertoire―any
employee would have found funny, and Joseph
felt justified in leaning back from his note-taking and giving