The paper vanished from her desk on Wednesday, while Šemsa Husremović was holding a meeting in the next room. One printed page, with her note at the bottom: "Have Armin submit the bid by Friday, I'll take care of the rest." Armin was her brother, and the bid was for the Agency Vrelo tender to repair bridges around Zenica. A page like that in someone else's hands meant the end of twenty years of work, and in those twenty years Šemsa had learned that a reputation is built slowly and lost between two meetings.
She knew who had taken it before Tatjana Kovačina walked in without knocking, a coffee in her hand. "I heard you lost something," she said calmly. "A deputy director could help keep things from getting around." She said nothing more. She did not need to. She sat on the edge of the desk, finished her coffee and left, closing the door behind her very carefully.
Šemsa could prove nothing. So she called Tihana Brkić, an inspector she had gone to high school with, and told her everything. Tatjana agreed to a search, because she wanted to look clean, so for two days Tihana went through her office in Marijin Dvor and her apartment on Alipašina Street. She took keyboards apart, measured the depth of drawers, turned over the soil in flowerpots, even peeled back the lining of a handbag. Nothing. At the end of the second day Tatjana offered Tihana tea.
On the third day Šemsa asked Šerif Maglajlić to come to her office, a quiet old man who had run the agency's archive for years and retired, yet still came by every day for coffee. He listened carefully, without interrupting. "You have searched everything that can be hidden," he said. "What if nothing was hidden?"
While Tatjana was at lunch, Šerif went into her office with Tihana's permission and sat down in the visitor's chair. For five minutes he only looked. On the wall behind the desk hung a notice board, and on it, among the safety instructions and the cleaning schedule, was pinned a page folded in three, its edges worn. The cafeteria menu for last week. "Who keeps last week's menu on a Friday?" he said aloud, more to himself than to anyone.
He took the page down, turned it over and ran a finger along the corners. The menu had come out of the printer on the back of another document: through the paper a thin line of Šemsa's ballpoint pen could still be seen, and at the bottom, under the vegetable soup, letters he had known for years. Tatjana had simply run the page through the printer a second time and pinned it where everyone would look at it and no one would read it.
Šemsa took it without a word. Šerif went home for lunch, as he said, since his part was over, and she sat a long while with the page in front of her, counting how little it would have taken for everything to fall apart.
On Friday afternoon, before Tatjana came for her answer, Šemsa withdrew the Zenica bid under her own signature and reported her brother's interest to the director. Tatjana stood in the doorway waiting, and Šemsa laid the page on the desk, menu side up. "It's just paper," said Tatjana. "It is," said Šemsa. "Now it is."