It was not until the next day that a report on what N'Jadaka had done the previous night was placed on Salomon's desk. The cover of the report, wrapped in kraft paper, bore a black emblem of an eagle with spread wings and another emblem of a snow-capped mountain marked with the Roman numeral I, indicating that it came from the Fimbulwinter First Secret Regiment. It was three in the morning, more than an hour after the incident, and the ruler of the City of Immortals had already returned home. Stephanie, working overtime, spotted the report. She set aside the parchment documents the ruler would review tomorrow, turned a blind eye to the rules she was supposed to follow publicly, casually switched on the desk lamp, picked up the report, and skimmed through it.
Without hesitation, Stephanie took the pen from the desk and signed her name, then placed the report at the very bottom of the stack of documents awaiting approval, indicating that the Internal Affairs Department had reviewed it. This was not the Red Box trick at 10 Downing Street—civil servants sometimes placed important documents at the bottom of the daily document box handed to ministers while making the stack as thick as possible, leaving politicians with neither the time nor energy to read those final documents. Forced by approaching deadlines to skim through them, they might carelessly approve some minor request from the civil servants or overlook incidents they should have known about. These were little tricks civil servants had used before Margaret Thatcher's time.
Later, Whitehall civil servants suffered a crushing defeat at Margaret Thatcher's hands, and such tricks gradually became less useful, because nearly every politician instinctively began by pulling out the documents at the bottom of the Red Box. The cat-and-mouse game between civil