You jolt forward slightly in your seat as your jet touches down on the tarmac of Lake Park International Airport. The land over which you came is unnaturally flat, the coastline unnaturally square, the legacy of the reclamation of this airfield’s land from Lake Michigan. The air as you step out of the plane, however, is naturally cool, the breeze off the lake wicking plane-sweat from your forehead and your cuffed wrists. You sense behind you your guards sizing up their counterparts on the tarmac, and let them have a few moments while you do a little sizing up of your own. The guards look very much like the cars by which they stand, black, streamlined and shiny, the cars’ paint and the guards’ oiled hair glinting in the sun. On their bodies they wear two-piece suits without ties, over white shirts with open collars. On their left arms they wear armbands bearing the insignia of the Socialist Party: red with a white vertical stripe, emblazoned with a upright red torch and a horizontal red hammer. These see you into your car when you descend to the tarmac, and board two other cars of their own to escort you into town.
Your drive will not be taking you to central Calumet. Indeed, you landed at the northern Lake Park airport rather than the larger and more central Calumet-Gary field just to avoid the central city. The drive would have been longer, the streets more crowded, and the panorama not as advantageous to a foreign vistior. The suburb of Chicago was spared most of the shelling the central city suffered during the Great War, and unlike other Calumet suburbs such as Oak Lawn and Harvey were not burned in the Second Revolution and Civil War and subsequently rebuilt. You are comforted by the prewar Queen Anne rowhouses that still dominate the suburb, mostly empty thanks to the hour, until you reach the Chicago DP Canal. This waterfront has obviously been remodeled since the end of the War, the rowhouses giving way to the gleaming white stucco and streamed lines of Embassy Row. There is seemingly no separation between the government buildings and the residences opposite them, and you can hear launches motoring up and down the canal on the other side of the Row. You scan the Row for the flag of your country and tell the driver where to pull over, fingering your credentials for their immenent presentation. The International Commissioner receives new diplomats in the embassy, always arriving first. In other countries you would present them before going to the embassy, but things are different here.
