“Muchas gracias,” the cab driver said, and drove off.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Roscoe said as he began walking toward the small building guarding access to the embassy grounds.
“My name is Roscoe Danton,” he said to the rent-a-cop behind a thick glass window. “I’d like to see Mr. Alexander B. Darby, the commercial counselor.”
“You got passport? American passport?” the rent-a-cop asked in a thick accent suggesting that he was not a fellow American.
Roscoe slid his passport through a slot below the window.
The rent-a-cop examined it carefully and then announced, “No Mr. Darby here.”
“Then I’d like to see Miss—” What the fuck was her name? “—Miss Rosenblum. The press officer.”
“No Miss Rosenblum. We got Miss Grunblatt, public affairs officer.”
“Then her, please?”
“What your business with Miss Grunblatt?”
“I’m a journalist, a senior writer of The Washington Times-Post.”
“You got papers?”
Have I got papers?
You can bet your fat Argentine ass, Pedro, that I have papers.
One at a time, Roscoe took them from his wallet. First he slid through the opening below the window his Pentagon press pass, then his State Department press pass, and finally—the ne plus ultra of all press credentials—his White House press pass.
They failed to dazzle the rent-a-cop, even after he had studied each intently. But finally he picked up a telephone receiver, spoke briefly into it—Roscoe could not hear what he was saying—and then hung up.
He signaled for Roscoe to go through
a sturdy translucent glass door.
Roscoe signaled for the return of his passport and press passes.
The rent-a-cop shook his head and announced, “When you come out, you get back.”
Roscoe considered offering the observation that at the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House they just looked at press passes and gave them back, but in the end decided it would probably be counterproductive.
He went through the translucent door, on the other side of which were two more rent-a-cops behind a counter, and another sturdy glass door, this one transparent, and through which he could see neatly trimmed grass around a pathway leading to the embassy building itself.
It’s just as unbelievably ugly as the embassy in London, Roscoe decided.
Obviously designed by the same dropout from the University of Southern Arkansas School of Bunker and Warehouse Architecture.
The door would not open.
Roscoe looked back at the rent-a-cops.
One of them was pointing to the counter. The other was pointing to a sign on the wall:
NO ELECTRONIC OR INCENDIARY DEVICES BEYOND THIS POINT
Incendiary devices? Are they talking about cigar lighters?
“What in there?” one of the rent-a-cops demanded, pointing at Roscoe’s laptop case.