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"You're the warden, right, Colonel? When do I get my one telephone call? I just can't wait to talk to the ACLU."
"Just as soon as I introduce you to my grandmother," Castillo said, laughing. "Abuela, this is Sandra Britton. Sandra, Dona Alicia Castillo."
"I'm very happy to meet you," Sandra said. "But what in the world is a nice grandmother doing sitting down with this company?"
"I told you you'd like her, Dona Alicia," McGuire said.
"Or are you also under-arrest-by-another-name?" Sandra pursued.
"Sit down, my dear," Dona Alicia said. "We'll get you some dinner."
"I understand why you're a little upset, Sandra," McGuire said.
" 'A little'?"
"My dear young woman," Billy Kocian said. "I recognize in you not only a kindred soul, but someone else suffering velvet-cell incarceration at the hands of these thugs. May I offer you a glass of champagne? Or perhaps something stronger?"
"Both," she said. "Who the hell are you?"
Kocian walked quickly to
her and kissed her hand.
"Eric Kocian, madam. I am enchanted."
"As well you should be, Billy," Dona Alicia said.
"Pray take my seat, and I'll get the champagne," Kocian said.
"Hey, Jack!" Davidson said. "How goes it?"
Britton shook his head.
"Ginger-peachy," he said. "How could it be otherwise?"
Kocian took a bottle of champagne from a cooler, poured some in a glass, and handed it to Sandra.
"Please excuse the stem. It originally came, I believe, filled with yogurt and decorated with a picture of Mickey Mouse."
"Thank you," Sandra said. A smile flickered across her lips.
"As a prisoner, of course, I am told nothing," Kocian said. "So I am therefore quite curious about your obvious distress. What have these terrible people done to you?"
"You sound like a Viennese," Sandra said.
"How perceptive of you, dear lady. I was born and spent many years in that city."
"I'm a semanticist--I teach at the University of Pennsylvania. Or I was teaching at the university before I was hustled into the backseat of a Secret Service SUV and hauled off before my neighbors." She paused. "You're familiar with Franz Kafka?"
"Indeed."
"He would have had a ball with this," she said.
"You are implying bureaucracy run amok?"
"Am I ever."
"Tell me all, my dear."
