She knew the store in the dark. She had learned it that way as a child, on nights her father stayed late and let her run the aisles after closing, and she had learned it again these last six years, on nights she stayed late herself and walked the floors with the lights off so that no one across the street would see the owner of Achterberg's sitting at a cosmetics counter at one in the morning, doing arithmetic on the back of a price list.
Past Fragrance, left at Gloves, through the gap between Hosiery and the old perfume fountain that hadn't run since 1997. Elliot followed close enough that she could hear him breathing and far enough that he never once touched her.
"Where are we going?"
"The Shop. Capital S. Display department, sub-basement. Where your pyramid was built." She shouldered through a door marked STAFF ONLY. The stairwell was lit by green emergency bulbs. Her bare feet were freezing. She did not stop to put on her shoes, because that would have meant admitting this might take longer than twenty minutes.
"It isn't my pyramid," he said behind her.
"It's going to be the Prairie Museum's. You'll be the one with the screwdriver." She went down. "Why did you stay?"
He didn't answer until the next landing. "I've seen it in photographs. I've seen it with three hundred people around it and a quartet playing 'Sleigh Ride.' I wanted to see it alone for five minutes before I start taking it apart."
"And then I climbed on it."
"And then you climbed on it. You were about to fall."
"I was not about to fall."
"Your left heel was a quarter inch off the edge and your coat was pulling you backward. I've spent eleven years watching things lose their balance. You were about to fall."
She said nothing, because it was true.
The Shop was a long, low room under the street, with a vaulted brick ceiling and a smell she would have known blind: linden shavings, hide glue, turpentine, dust. She hit the switch and the fluorescent tubes stuttered on. Workbenches. Racks of plywood. A forest of mannequin arms. Sixty years of Christmas windows in pieces — a reindeer head, a papier-mâché moon, a rack of tiny velvet coats for the mechanical bears of 1983.
At the far end, under a pegboard of chisels outlined in marker so you'd know where each one went back, stood a bench nobody used. It was older than the others, beech, its top dished and scarred. Lucjan kept it clear. On the brick above it, in faded paint, someone long ago had lettered four words: LASSAN JÁRJ, TOVÁBB ÉRSZ.
Elliot stopped walking.
Roz glanced at the clock above the door — 11:23 — and then at him. He was standing very still, looking at the lettering, and his face had changed in a way she didn't have a name for yet.