CHAPTER 1 #2
I took the stairs down two floors before I remembered that Colette wasn’t up there either, and took the elevator the rest of the way. I stood square in the middle of the car with my hands at my sides. I have never leaned on anything in a building where somebody might see me do it.
The clock over the lobby desk said half past seven.
The night man had the whole floor to himself, a marble bay the size of a church and one monitor turned away from the public side.
The marble carried the sound of my shoes and nothing else.
I put my hand on the brass edge of the counter, worn by years of hands into a shallow dish.
“My badge worked at six o’clock and it doesn’t work now. ”
“I’d like to see the record with my own eyes, if you’re allowed to show it to me.”
He was already turning in his chair before I finished. His name was on a plastic tag and I didn’t read it, which I have regretted ever since. “Come round the side of the desk and I’ll turn the monitor for you.”
“You won’t believe me otherwise.”
“To be fair to you, I wouldn’t believe me either.”
He turned it. There was my name, a green row, and beneath it a gray one, and against the gray row a timestamp that read 18:11.
“That gray line is the withdrawal.” He said it gently, as though I might not have found it myself. “It happens more than you’d think. People get moved between programs all the time.”
“I was not moved between programs. I was reading a file and the file was taken away from me.”
I kept my eyes on the gray row and left them there. “Then tell me how often, in a number, because more than I’d think is a kind sentence and not a fact.”
He took his time over that, which I did not begrudge him. “I couldn’t put a number on it, and I’d only be guessing if I did.”
He kept his eyes on the screen and did not argue. “The record doesn’t say that either way. It doesn’t say who did it, and in my experience it never does.”
“Read me the green row above it as well.”
“The green row is you, at six o’clock, on the Tier One door.”
“Then somebody closed my session from a keyboard in this building that I have never seen.”
“It says internal. Every single one of these says internal.” He turned one shoulder up and let it drop. “I gave up asking about that a long while ago.”
“Who else is in this building tonight above the fortieth floor?”
He pulled the sign-in tablet across the marble and scrolled it with his thumb. “The elevators have been quiet since seven o’clock. I’ve signed nobody up to thirty-nine but you.”
“Then nobody came to my floor to do this in person.”
“Nobody came through my doors, and everybody comes through my doors.”
The cold from the clean room was still in my hands. I left them on the brass. “I would like a printed copy of that row with tonight’s date on it.”
“I cannot print out of this terminal and I’m not allowed to photograph it either.” He turned his palms up on the counter. “You can see the position that puts me in.”
“I can see it perfectly. Then read the timestamp aloud to me and watch me write it down by hand.”
He read it out. I wrote it on the back of a receipt in block capitals and made him watch me do it, saying the words while I wrote them so that later I could say that I had. “I’ve given this firm six years. It has known who I am on every one of them.”
“It knows who you are, Ms. Verdugo. It’s just been told to stop letting you in.” He said it kindly, which was worse than the alternative.
I capped the pen and put the receipt away, folded once. “Then tell me who signs the Tier One list.”
“The Tier One list gets signed on the fiftieth floor. That is all I know.”
The fiftieth floor. My mouth had already started the next sentence before I gave it air. “Then I’ll go and stand on the fiftieth floor in the morning and be extremely pleasant about it.”
“You’d be amazed how often that works.” He said that to the monitor, and the rest of it to my face. “You’d be sadder how often it doesn’t.”
That was when I saw him.
The lobby glass on the Water Street side runs from the floor to somewhere above a tall man’s reach.
Beyond it the pavement was empty except for one man.
Tall. Black hair going iron at the temples, pale, close-shaved.
Very light eyes that didn’t come off me the whole time I stood looking back at him.
He was wearing a gray wool coat. It was ninety degrees out there and the day hadn’t let go of the stone yet, and he was wearing a coat, and that is the only reason I noticed the coat at all.
“The man on the other side of the glass. Is he security, or is he somebody’s driver?”
He knew which man I meant without looking up, which told me he had been looking already. “He’s been standing there since the shift change and he hasn’t asked me for anything.”
“Has he been inside the lobby at any point this evening?”
“He hasn’t come through the doors and he hasn’t sat down.”
“Has anybody gone out and asked him what he is waiting for?”
“There’s no rule against a man standing on a public pavement.” He set the tablet face down in the shallow dish worn into the brass. “I’m certainly not walking out there tonight to invent one.”
He did not lift a hand, or shift his weight, or look at his phone, or run any of the small dishonest errands people perform when they want to be taken for someone waiting. He stood there like a bollard with a pulse.
So I did the last lawyer thing available to me, standing up, in the middle of my own lobby, with my thumbs.
I opened a blank note and said it aloud while I typed, half a joke and half the other thing.
“Memorandum to file. Author, Verdugo. Subject, the evening my own building stopped recognizing me.”
“Facts, in order, with times.”
“At six in the evening I opened a Tier One session in the review room on thirty-nine.”
My thumbs kept going. Behind me the night man had gone quiet. “At eighteen eleven somebody outside that room closed my session and withdrew my clearance.”
“I have not been told by whom, and I have not been told on what basis.”
“I did not agree to any part of it and nobody has asked me to.”
I stopped and read it back, and my voice came out thinner than I expected. “Copy to myself, and to nobody else, until I know who I am talking to.”
I saved it and put the phone away. My hands were steady, which surprised me, and the rest of me was not, which did not.
Then I went out through the revolving door into air that closed over the back of my neck and stayed there.
He was close enough that I could have passed him a document. I walked by at an ordinary pace with my bag on my left shoulder, and I looked at him while I did it, because I have never been able to make myself look away from a thing I don’t understand. He looked at me. Neither of us stopped.
He said nothing at all. He did nothing at all. Doing nothing was the most deliberate act I had seen all evening.
I got into a car at the curb, gave the driver Kips Bay, and turned. He still stood in ninety-degree heat, coat buttoned, watching us pull onto Water Street.
He did not follow. By the next night I knew why, already over somebody’s shoulder.