"You can read that," she said.
"*Go slowly, you'll get further.*" His voice was odd. "It's a proverb. My grandfather said it every time I rushed the lathe."
The heating pipes ticked overhead.
"Your grandfather," Roz said.
He turned to her. Under the fluorescent light, with fake snow still on the shoulders of his coat, he looked less like a man from a museum and more like a man who has been carrying something heavy up a long flight of stairs.
"Benedek Varga," he said. "He built the pyramid. He was my mother's father. He died when I was eight."
She had known the name all her life. It was carved on the underside of the bottom ledge, *Varga B. 1959*, Hungarian-style, family name first. Her father used to lie on his back on the floor to show it to her. *A refugee,* he'd say. *Your great-grandmother gave him a bench. He gave us that.*
"You didn't think," she said carefully, "that this was worth mentioning. In forty-one pages. In eleven emails. Tonight, when I stood next to you with a glass of champagne telling you the man who built it was a genius and nobody remembered his name."
"It's in the file. My director knows. I disclosed it when the acquisitions committee met. I asked for this assignment because of it."
"I didn't ask your director. I'm asking you."
She watched him take it, and not flinch, and not reach for an excuse.
"I didn't tell you," he said, "because I needed you to believe the condition report. When I wrote that the wiring was a fire risk and the drive train was finished, I needed you to know I said it because it was true, not because I wanted my grandfather's pyramid in a glass room in Chicago. If you'd known, every line would have sounded like a man trying to carry something home."
"Is that what it is?"
"I don't know," he said. "Some of it."
She looked at the clock. 11:25.
"Fine. We'll fight about it at a reasonable hour. Can you find out what we did?"