"Me. And Elliot Varga."
"*Varga.*" He shut his eyes. "Of course. The first day that boy came with his little camera, I said to Oge, look at his hands, those are Benedek's hands. She said, Lucek, you think every man with a chisel is Benedek." He opened his eyes. "What was in it?"
She read it to him. When she reached *the people who stand all day*, he took out a handkerchief and held it, unused, in his lap.
"He told me once," he said. "Not what. Only that. I was nineteen. I stepped up on the ledge to fix a shepherd's arm, and he grabbed my collar like a cat and said, *Never, Lucek. The ledge is for the day the store needs it.* I thought it was Hungarian nonsense. They had a lot of it." He folded the handkerchief. "So. The store needs it."
"The store is closing. The *people* need three hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars, and this is going to make a museum lawyer very nervous."
He studied her with the expression he'd worn when she was eleven and tried to fix a mechanical bear with a butter knife.
"You were going to put it back."
She had never been able to lie to him. "I thought about it."
"Good. You should think about it. A person who doesn't think about it is a saint or a fool." He stood, brushing gold paper off his trousers. "But you don't put it back. And you don't send a memo. You go and you tell them, to their faces. The floor. Like it says."
Elliot arrived at nine exactly, carrying two coffees he seemed to have bought with no confidence that he'd be allowed to hand her one. Lucjan met him at the staff door, and Roz, coming down the main stairs, watched the old man take the younger one's face briefly in both hands and say something in Polish and bad Hungarian that made Elliot laugh and then look hard at the ceiling. Then Lucjan went down to the Shop and left them alone.
"I'm going to report it," Elliot said.
She had known he would. It still landed like a slap.
"To my director. The photographs, a translation, the notebook page, the mechanism. It's part of the object. It always was. I can't write a provenance file and leave out the part where the maker says who decides."
"It's a letter from 1959 from a carpenter."
"Countersigned by the owner of the company."