Chapter Text
Eamon’s afternoon began with the ambiguous sound of sharp heels clicking on the parquet floor of his office. The door had opened and closed in one smooth, silent movement. Without raising his eyes from the file he was reviewing—after all, there hadn’t been a knock—he smiled to the second paragraph of article 22.
“Carmen.”
The presence of the director-general for Maritime Affairs outside the muted corridors of the Commission was always an ominous sign—and to see her standing there calmly on a Friday evening, when the administrative agenda for the week had just been established, foretold inevitable doom. His, most probably. Yet he could not suppress a shiver of excitement. Through the years, Carmen Saru had been an exceptional foe: poised, acute, with a capacity for lethal administrative attacks he not only respected but admired. It was an age-old story, Parliament and Commission entwined in a murderous waltz, twirling through a maze of strategies to plot each other’s demise, never letting go. They had tea, sometimes—not as often as he’d like. And in a forgotten underground meeting room, they kept an old chessboard to make the occasional move whenever the occasion presented itself. Lately, she’d been taking the advantage.
“Eamon.”
He finally looked at her: a small silhouette in a crisp tailored suit, not a hair out of her usual bun. He’d seen her at midnight, at four in the morning during difficult trilogues, negotiating head to head through unsuspecting delegates. Once, she had let her hair down—he was exhausted, an apocalyptic debate about fishing quotas with Portugal. They had lost that argument.
Challenge wasn’t a rare commodity in Parliament, but it usually took the form of complicated regional legislations, updates in paragraphs numbering and fragile national egos, rather than five-foot tall Romanian Machiavellis. The beauty of European construction was that it was a complex process carried out every day by simple people. Just as he was formulating the thought, Samy’s annoying knocking pattern—a wobbly version of the Ode to Joy—broke the solemnity of the moment. Simple people indeed.
“Not now, Mister Kantor,” Carmen said without bothering to turn, as a halo of messy hair appeared through the framing and immediately retreated with a sense of self-preservation Eamon took appreciative note of.
“What can I do for the Commission?”
Her mouth twisted into an acid smile. When she had been recruited all those years ago, he was still working for the enemy at DG Agriculture, even though he had only six weeks left to serve before his long-awaited transfer to Parliament. On her second day, she’d caught him duelling with a defective coffee machine and quoted Walter Hallstein to him while he burned his hands. He’d replied with The Prince of Homburg, which had won him an intrigued smile and a fresh espresso. Oh, they spoke the same language, to be sure. He suspected she was still mad at him for it.
“As you know, the other committees have been plagued by an unexpected shortage of personnel. It seems the Dutch week at the cafeteria wasn’t such a good idea after all.”
A stock of dubious sausages had decimated the ranks of MEPs and assistants. More unexpected was the number of civil servants, by nature drawn to food of a much more refined nature, affected by this epidemic. Now that he thought about it, it was indeed suspicious: the likes of St. John Egerman (Culture and Education) and Servane du Plessis-Bellière (Public Health) wouldn’t have been caught dead with minced meat on their plate.
“The DG for Personnel would like to know if you’d do the favour of filling in for some of your colleagues next week. With your experience, it shouldn’t be a problem. I was passing nearby, and they offered to relay the message—I suppose they were fishing for solidarity”, she commented with a stony face, as if the idea she might have ventured a joke was mildly insulting.
This was obviously a trap. The final revisions of what would hopefully become EU Regulation 732 on sustainable aquaculture were in full swing, the text going back and forth between their respective departments before a key conciliation meeting with the Council the next Monday. Which, of course, meant war, total and merciless. So far they’d been waging it the EU way: quietly, minutely, at an excruciating pace.
Carmen had stricken first, with a myriad of memos and then a detailed impact assessment, full of charts and dancing numbers. He’d sent the file back with highlights in eight different colours, two complementary annotations systems, shorthand and regular additions and, as a final touch, side stickers distributed at random. After that, some of the most competent MEPs working on the project had experienced malfunctions with their badges and passwords, and found themselves locked out of Parliament for a whole afternoon. In retaliation, the Commissioner for Maritime Affairs’ office had received countless misdirected phone calls, all concerning urgent sushi orders. Things might have escalated. Carmen had sent an assistant to stall things, he had sent Samy (admittedly a low blow); the office next to him suddenly found itself occupied by a particularly loud Italian MEP, her team’s usual meeting room was moved without warning to a basement with no heating and neon lightning evocative of a Russian prison cell.
Searching for signs of deception on her face and, as usual, finding none, he chose to rise to the challenge and nodded:
“With pleasure.”
Carmen smiled a toothy smile, and for a moment he was reminded of Samy’s babble about great white sharks (“C’est genre le Moby Dick des requins, Eamon!”).
“Great. I’ll let them know. It’s very appreciated.”
At least, by next week he’d know how much blood in the water to expect for the final round.