CHAPTER 3
Ana
◆
I turned the retainer letter face down and put my right palm flat on top of it, which is not a thing anybody does with a document they believe.
My left hand rested over the hip seam of my gray coat, where the hardware token lay under stitches I had made myself.
Cassian Kane stood on the far side of my desk.
He had not sat down when I offered him the chair, and he had not moved since.
“I want to be precise about where we stand,” I said. “Precision is the only tool I still have out on the table.”
“You’re not police and you’re not counsel. Nobody in this building has retained you for anything.”
“Both of those are accurate,” he said. “I am not going to improve on either one of them.”
“Then everything you say after this is a request,” I said. “A request is a thing a person is allowed to decline.”
“That is true enough,” he said. “Hear the rest of it before you decline.”
“I heard the rest of it this morning,” I said. “Then I read your letter twice, which is what I do with anything that has a signature on it.”
He looked at the letter under my right hand and did not ask me to turn it over.
The blind’s pull-chain ticked against the mullion, which meant weather outside a window that does not open.
My left palm had gone damp against the coat seam.
I kept both hands where they were, because a hand on a document is an argument, and I had run out of the other kind.
“The people who want that review closed will not write to you first,” he said. “They do not send a man who gives you his name.”
“Neither does a judge,” I said. “A judge is the only person I take instructions from tonight.”
“That is a sound rule. It holds for a building with a night desk in it.”
“Here’s what is going to happen, and I’m going to say it slowly,” I said. “You’re going to walk to the elevator, I’m going to watch the doors close, and then I’m going to call building security and give them your name.”
He took it without argument and he tried to sell me nothing, and that frightened me more than a speech would have. He picked up nothing. He left nothing behind. At the door he stopped without turning all the way round.
“I will be in the garage. If the lights go out on this floor tonight, do not use the north stair.”
“Is that a forecast or an instruction?” I said. “I’d like to know which one of them I’m declining.”
The doors closed on him at about a quarter to eight, and I stood in the corridor and watched the number over them count itself down. Then I went back to my desk and called the security desk.
“Security desk, this is the night line.”
“This is Ana Verdugo on thirty-nine,” I said. “I need a name checked against tonight’s visitor log.”
“I can do that for you,” he said. “The lobby is on my other line, so hold for me.”
The hold music was a recording of an orchestra that had been badly treated.
I put the phone on speaker and opened a new document, because there is a version of me that answers fear by making a record, and she is the only version I have ever been able to rely on.
I typed the heading and the time and the words attendance of C.
Kane, unannounced, floor thirty-nine. I got two paragraphs in.
The thunder came while I was writing the second one. It arrived through the building rather than through the glass, a long low pressure that came up out of the floor and into the soles of my shoes. The clock in the corner of the screen turned over to four past eight.
Then the floor went out.
Everything died at once and came back wrong.
The screen went black, and the emergency lights woke along the ceiling in a green-white line that made the whole floor look like a diagram of itself.
My document was gone. Two paragraphs, never saved, and I said a word out loud that has never appeared in a memorandum of mine.
I did the competent thing before I did the frightened thing, which is the only trick I have ever had.
My left hand went straight to the seam in my coat.
The stitches held; the hard ridge of the token was still beneath them, flat against the interfacing.
I pressed my thumb along the seam until I felt its full length, then took my hand away.
If the lights were gone because somebody wanted the review, the one copy I still controlled was staying where I had put it.
The north stair door opened. I know that sound, because the door drags on its own weatherstrip and has done for six years.
What came back to me was four words in a voice I had first heard that morning, not the north stair, and my feet had already turned me the other way before I finished having the thought.
The pull station is on the wall beside the print nook, under a little glass panel with a hammer that nobody has ever used.
I used it. The glass went in with a flat crack and I hauled the handle down, and the bell came up so loud that the sound arrived in my chest before it reached my ears.
An alarm brings people. People are the whole of what safety is, and I was very clear about that, and I was completely wrong.
A voice came out of the dark near the print nook. It was quiet, and it was unhurried, and that was the part of it I didn’t like.
“Cameras are dark on thirty-nine. The stair doors won’t read a badge until I let them.”
He stood still with a small screen cupped in one hand, and the light off it made his wrists look as though there were nothing under the skin. Black hair, flat and unstyled. He didn’t look at me while he spoke, and he didn’t look at the doors either.
“Then the lights are your doing,” I said. “I’d like your name for the record.”
“My name is Matteo,” he said. “The lights are the building’s fault. The cameras are mine.”
“Everything you’ve just told me is admissible against you.”
“You’re standing under the only working light on this floor.”
He said a number under his breath and then said another one, still watching the screen, and he moved twice so that a filing bank came between me and the corridor.
The north stair door swung properly open then and two men walked out onto my floor.
I knew exactly what they were. People who work in this building move like they’re late for something, and these two came out with their hands low and empty and their heads turning, and the nearer one looked at the broken glass panel and then at me.
The elevator lobby has a house phone on the wall beside the fire plan. A man was already using it, with a laminated card pulled out of the plan holder in his other hand, reading off it in the voice of somebody doing you an enormous favor.
“This is the fire warden on thirty-nine,” he said. “I’m calling it in as a confirmed activation and not a fault.”
He listened. He smiled at the wall with one side of his face, and the dimple that came with it was on the left and nowhere else.
“You’re going to want a full hold,” he said. “You want it now, not after the department is standing in your lobby.”
He listened again, longer, and turned the card over without needing to look at it.
“Recall every car to the lobby and put them into fire service,” he said. “Don’t release one of them to a badge until the department says so.” His voice warmed by exactly nothing. “You’ve done the right thing tonight, and that’s what I’ll tell them tomorrow.”
Above the doors the numbers stopped arguing with one another and began to fall, all of them together, and none of them came back.
“You’ve just lied to a man who will lose his job for it,” I said.
“I’ve lied to a man who is going to keep his job because of it, which is a different transaction entirely, and I’ll explain the difference to you on the way down,” he said. “The whole way down.”
“On the way down to where?” I said. “You’ll notice that I’m asking rather than moving.”
“My name is Luca,” he said. “That’s a very good question, and I’m the wrong man to answer it.”
Somebody’s hand closed around my upper arm, and the hand had already decided. He was red-blond and cropped and freckled to the point of being sunburnt in the middle of September, and his nose had been broken and set by somebody in a hurry.
“We’re going down the south stair,” he said. “We’re going down it right now.”
“My laptop is on that desk,” I said. “The review file is in the drawer underneath it.”
“Both of those things are staying where they are.”
“You don’t understand what you’re asking me to leave,” I said.
“That file is the only paper copy anybody outside this building has put a hand on.” He was already turning me.
“If it walks out of here in your pocket instead of mine, the chain of custody is broken. A court won’t look at it, and then none of tonight was worth anything.
” I got my heels down and stopped him for one whole second.
“I’m not being difficult with you. I’m the only useful person standing on this floor. ”
“Everything you said is probably true,” he said. “None of it survives some bastard coming through that door.”
The glass door at the head of the floor opened and a man came through it fast, and Rian took me down.
He put me behind the filing bank the way you put a bag down when your hands are already full, and my face went into the metal edge of it on the way past. The left side.
My lip split against my own teeth and my cheekbone rang like a struck pipe, and my mouth filled up with the taste of a handful of coins.
At seven past eight he stood up with me over his shoulder. I hit him. I hit him in the back and in the kidney and once, badly, on the back of the head, and he shifted his grip and let me go on doing it.
“I’m sorry for this,” he said. “I’m going to keep doing it anyway.”
“Put me down and I’ll walk,” I said. “I’ll walk faster than you can carry me.”
“You would, and that’s not the part that worries me.”
“Say all of that again when a grand jury asks you.”
“I’ll say it exactly like that,” he said. “I’ll mean it then as well.”