Chapter 210 Alderman Sniff
POV: Administrator Crane | Parliament processing office
My name is Gerald Crane and I have been the Parliamentary Processing Administrator for eleven years and in those eleven years I have developed a philosophy about my work which is that the work is the work and the people it concerns are not my business, because the moment you make the people your business in a job like mine you have introduced a variable that the job cannot accommodate.
The work is documentation. Summons processed, trials scheduled, verdicts recorded, sentences executed. All of it moves through my office in the form of paperwork and all of the paperwork moves through my office in the form of procedure, and procedure is the thing that allows eleven years of this work to be done without what I understand to be the alternative, which is thinking about each individual case as though it concerns an individual, which it does, technically, but which cannot be accommodated at the processing level without the whole system seizing up.
This morning I have received two payments and I am going to address both of them with the professional equanimity that eleven years of processing has produced.
The first payment arrived last night, routed through the standard Parliamentary compensation channel, from Lord Silvain Mordaunt's administrative account, in the amount that is associated in our informal understanding with smooth facilitation of time-sensitive procedures. This payment means the execution is to be processed without delay, paperwork finalized by ten o'clock, execution ready for noon precisely.
The second payment arrived this morning, routed through a non-Parliamentary channel that I have used before and which has never caused me a problem, from a source I do not need to identify because identification would create a record and records are my professional domain and I understand how they work. This payment is associated with a two-hour delay in the final processing, specifically the authorization paperwork for the execution chamber, which requires my signature and which I am able to produce at eleven fifty-eight rather than ten o'clock without this constituting any formal violation of procedure, because the procedure specifies that paperwork must be completed before execution and it does not specify how far before.
I am being paid by both sides of the same situation, which is not unusual in my experience of eleven years, and which produces in me neither guilt nor satisfaction but simply the acknowledgment that the situation exists and that I have navigated it in the manner that produces the best outcome for my continued professional position.
The woman being executed is named Valentina Corvino and she is thirty-two years old and she was a dhampir and is now a full vampire and has been formally charged with three counts of violence against Parliamentary officials and one count of species treason. These facts are in the file. I have read the file because reading files is part of processing them. What these facts mean for the person they describe is not within my professional purview.
I tell my clerk at ten fifteen, having signed the delay documentation and filed it in the correct location, to process the execution at noon exactly.
"Not before," I say. "I was paid well for the timing."
My clerk is twenty-three and has been in this office for eight months and has not yet developed the professional equanimity that eleven years produces, and she looks at me for a moment with an expression that is not within my professional purview to address.
She processes the documentation.
I return to my files.