He was already moving.
The drawer under Benedek's bench bore a label in Lucjan's square capitals: B.V. — PYRAMID — DO NOT REMOVE. Inside, on tissue, lay a roll of drawings tied with butcher's twine and a notebook bound in black oilcloth, swollen with age. Roz had seen the drawings in October, when the museum's people came; Elliot had photographed every sheet. She had never seen the notebook. She wasn't sure anyone had opened it in thirty years.
He didn't touch it at first. He laid his overcoat over a sawhorse, rolled his white shirtsleeves to the elbow, and found a pair of cotton gloves in a box on the shelf as if he'd always known they'd be there. Then he opened the cover with two fingers.
The pages were crowded with a slanting pencil hand — Hungarian mostly, German here and there, numbers everywhere — and small, beautiful drawings: gears, cams, a hand holding a chisel, the dome of the rotunda, a woman's profile, a dog.
"Oh," Elliot said softly, the way people say it in church. "You stubborn old man."
"What?"
"The drawings the museum has are the ones he gave the store. This" — he turned a page, then another, quickly now but never carelessly — "this is everything else."
At 11:28 he found it, on the thirty-fourth page: a section through the top tier drawn in pencil so fine it looked engraved, and folded down inside the crown like a telescope, the tower. Arrows. Springs. A long rod running down the central spindle to the bottom ledge, where a hinged plate sat under the oak above a counterweight.
"It's a two-key lock," Elliot said. "The ledge is a pressure plate. Someone has to be standing on it — real weight, a hundred pounds at least — at the same moment the star is seated hard in the socket. Weight below, pressure above. Either one alone does nothing. Then a spring drive lifts the tower." He traced the arrow without touching the paper. "He wrote it in the margin. *Ketten.* Two."
"My father put that star on every year for thirty-one years."
"From a ladder."
"From a ladder," she said slowly, "because nobody stands on the ledge."
"Who made that rule?"
"My father. His mother before him. Liesl before her." She stared at the drawing. "He never knew why. He just knew it was the rule."
"I think," Elliot said, "a rule is what's left of a reason after everyone forgets it."
He kept reading, murmuring translations. *Spring steel from the Allis-Chalmers scrap yard, three dollars.* *Liesl says no.* *Liesl says yes, but only if I make the soldiers' faces kinder.* Then, at the foot of the page, a line he read twice before he said it aloud.