"Just Mina."
Her last name began with a P, which was the reason. It had been nearly twenty years since she had stammered in any way a stranger would notice, but there were still certain consonants that sat at the front of her mouth like a stone at the mouth of a cave, the hard ones, the plosives, the P and the B and sometimes the K, and her own surname had two of them. She had learned to walk around words the way you learn to walk around a loose floorboard in your own house, without thinking, without anyone seeing you do it. In meetings she said "the reporter." On the phone she said "this is Mina, from Department Fourteen." On her license, and on her mailbox, and on the little brass plate on the side of her machine, it said PROKOP, and she was glad of the brass and the paper for saying it for her.
"Okay, Just Mina," Remy Agostini said. "What do you do, that you have a booth?"
"I write things down."
"Like a writer?"
"Like the opposite of a writer. A writer makes things up. I don't make anything up."
"A secretary."
"No."
"A spy."
"Not intentionally." She tilted her head at the gray case beside her. "What do you think is in there?"
He leaned over and looked at it with professional seriousness. "Too big for a typewriter. Too small for a body. Accordion?"
"Do I look like I play the accordion?"