CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
There was a chair on the floor in front of the platform, turned to face the table, with a microphone on a stand next to it.
The stand was set for a man. I had to pull it down about eight inches and it made a noise in the speakers when I did it, and somebody in the back winced, and that is how I started.
“Mrs. Halloran, do you affirm that the testimony you’re about to give is true and complete to the best of your knowledge?”
“I do.”
“Thank you. Please keep your voice up for the reporter.”
My voice came out of two speakers on the walls about a quarter second behind my own head.
Bell took me through the night in order.
He was good at it. He did not make me tell it as a story. He asked for one thing at a time and he asked in sequence, and when I gave him a time he wrote it down and then read it back to me and asked whether that was right.
Eleven fifty. Eleven fifty-eight. Twelve oh six. Twelve eleven.
“And at approximately twelve twelve you moved to the front door of the unit.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because they were on the other side of it.”
Somebody in the second row made a small sound.
“You’ve stated that you could hear members of the crew from that position.”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell the board what you heard?”
I told them.
All of it, in order, the way I gave it to Ostrander. The door. Steel in a steel frame. The saw. The truck. The one about a better world.
“And then somebody said, has anybody raised Halloran.”
“Do you know who said that?”
“No.”
“Go on.”
“Somebody said his phone was off. Somebody said he’d been called downtown. And then there was a pause, and a second man said, downtown, he’s at Tessa’s.”
The reporter’s hands stopped for a second and then started again.
“And somebody said, Gus.”
“Just the name.”
“Just the name. And the second man said, what, I’ve seen it before.”
Bell wrote for a while.
“Thank you,” he said.
Then the union lawyer stood up.
His name was Kepner and he was maybe fifty and he was perfectly polite for twenty minutes, and I want to say clearly that he was doing his job and doing it well, and that I have no complaint about one single thing he asked me.
“Mrs. Halloran, how long had you been in that apartment before you moved to the door?”
“About twenty minutes.”
“And in that twenty minutes you’d been breathing smoke.”
“Yes.”
“Heavy smoke.”
“Yes.”
“Would you agree that’s a physiologically stressful situation?”
“Yes.”
“Would you agree it can affect perception and recall?”
“I would agree it can.”
“Did it affect yours?”
I thought about it.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I know I can’t find the smoke detector in my memory. It went off, the bureau says it functioned, and I cannot find the sound anywhere. So something happened to my recall that night. I don’t know what else it took.”
He had not expected that and I watched him have to move.
“So you’d accept that your recollection may be imperfect.”
“On some things, yes.”
“Including what you heard through a closed steel door, from men wearing breathing apparatus.”
“Not that.”
“You’re certain about that.”
“Yes.”
“How can you be certain about one part of a night and not another?”
“Because of what it was,” I said.
“Meaning?”
“I lost a sound. I did not lose a name.” I put my hands flat on my knees. “I have been able to tell you every word of that exchange since about one o’clock in the morning on the thirteenth of November and I will be able to tell you every word of it when I am eighty.”
Kepner looked at his pad.
“Had you ever heard that name before?”
“Once.”
“When?”
“In August. In my kitchen. From my husband.” I said it evenly. “He said Tessa wanted a photograph of the crew for the open house and did we have anything on that Saturday. I asked who, and he said the girl from the press office, and I turned the burner down and said Saturday was fine.”
The room went very quiet.
The reporter said, “I’m sorry, can you spell that?”
“T, E, double S, A.”
“Thank you.”
“And the last name?”
“I don’t know it,” I said. “I have never looked it up.”
Kepner tried two more things.
He asked whether I was currently in proceedings with the respondent and I said no. He asked whether I intended to be and I said I did not know yet, which was true on the nineteenth of December. He asked whether I had discussed my testimony with anyone and I said with nobody except the investigator.
And then he asked the one that everybody in that room was waiting for.
“Mrs. Halloran. Do you want your husband to lose his job?”
I sat in a chair on the floor of an auditorium with a microphone eight inches too low and thought about that for what the transcript says was nine seconds.
“I don’t know,” I said.
He waited.
“I’ve thought about it,” I said. “I’ve thought about it every day since somebody handed me a piece of paper with the word five on it, and I do not have an answer, and I am not going to make one up in this room because it would sound better.”
“Would you like to explain that?”
“No,” I said. “But I will.”
Bell put his pen down.
“There’s a woman out in that hallway who told me an hour ago that if he loses this he doesn’t get another one, and she’s right, and she also told me to think about what my son will have in fifteen years, and she’s right about that too.”
I looked at the table.
“And there is a paragraph in the fire report that says a second team could have been on my floor seven minutes earlier.”
“That paragraph also says no causal relationship can be established,” Kepner said.
“Yes. It does. It says both. They’re four inches apart.”
He did not say anything.
“So I don’t know what I want,” I said. “What I wanted was for somebody in this building to ask me what I heard, out loud, on a record, with a person typing it. That’s happened now. You asked me and I answered you and it’s in the machine.”
I looked at the reporter, who was looking at her hands.
“What you do with it isn’t mine,” I said. “I’m the person who was on the floor. I’m not the person who decides.”
Kepner sat down.
Bell had one question at the end. He asked it without looking at his folder.
“Mrs. Halloran, how is your son?”
“He’s home,” I said. “His lungs are going to be fine. He sleeps with the light on and he won’t let a door close and every night at nine o’clock he picks up my phone and reads the battery percentage out loud and gives it back.”
I heard that come out of two speakers a quarter second behind me.
“Thank you,” Bell said. “You may step down.”
I went back up the aisle.
The union table is on the left and the aisle runs past the end of it, and I did not slow down and I did not look sideways.
“Ren.”
One syllable, very low, not meant to carry.
I kept walking and sat down in the third row.
“The board calls Augustin Kraus,” Bell said.