The reference to the consul was deeply buried in the papers and scarcely noticed, Gundula excepted. She clipped the article and sent it to Hanbury in an envelope marked personal. A photo was enclosed, grainy, taken from far away and blown up. He was clearly recognizable in the VIP area – mouth open, eyes aghast – watching the dripping mess. The Cowboy strikes again! her impertinent caption read. “That Gundula,” he thought. He regretted not having run into her at the demo. He believed that in two sentences or less she would have distilled the motivations of four hundred thousand people into something he would understand. That ability – reducing complexity into simpler components, fashioning order out of chaos – always eluded him. A reason to admire her, to look forward to her columns. Chaos was something he wanted to avoid, though it confronted him daily. It arrived courtesy of his countrymen. Quite a few had a habit of parking themselves in the consulate reception area, where they put on dramatic shows of lives they had managed to gum up.
