He turned it. It resisted, then gave. Under the onion cap something went *tick*, and one of the eight arcaded faces — the one that looked toward the windows and the street — swung open on a hinge no thicker than a sewing needle.
Inside was a hollow the size of a cigar box, lined with green felt. It held a slim metal tube sealed with wax. And standing beside it, propped carefully upright as if it had been set there to keep watch, was a carved figure no taller than Roz's thumb: a small, stout woman in a long skirt on a stepladder, holding up a broom handle with a star stuck on the end.
Roz made a sound she would not have made in front of anyone else alive.
"That's Liesl. That's *the story.* We always thought somebody made it up."
"He didn't make things up," Elliot said. "He made things."
He lifted out the tube and handed it to her, and they stepped down together. She broke the wax with her thumbnail. Inside was a single sheet of heavy paper, folded twice, written in the same slanting pencil — Hungarian first, then, below a ruled line, German — and at the bottom, in faded blue ink, a signature in a hand she knew from the cornerstone papers and the old payroll ledgers and every Christmas card in the archive: *L. Achterberg.*
She read the German aloud, slowly. It had been her grandmother's language and then her high-school elective, and Elliot followed the Hungarian above it with one gloved finger hovering over the page, correcting her once, gently, when she lost a verb.
*To the two who are reading this:*
*If this tower has risen, then two people have stood where I asked that no one stand, and have held the star together. Good. I made it so that one person alone cannot do it. I learned this in Sopron in 1956, and on the road to Andau, and in a camp in Austria, and again in this city, where Mrs. Liesl Achterberg gave a workbench to a man with no English and no papers worth the name, and where the people of the floor — the salesgirls, the porters, the elevator operators, the women in Alterations, the boys on the loading dock — fed me in their lunchroom all my first winter, before I had a single pay envelope, and never once asked me to say thank you.*
*This pyramid is my thank you. I give it to Achterberg's. But hear what I mean by Achterberg's. I do not mean the office upstairs, though I honor the office. I mean the floor. I mean the people who stand all day.*
*If one day there is no store — and there will be such a day, because nothing stays; I have seen whole cities not stay — then it is not for the office alone to say what becomes of this. Let the floor decide. Let them stand together and decide, the way you two are standing now.*
*Mrs. Achterberg has read this and agreed, and has signed below, and has promised to tell no one, so that it will be found only when it is needed.*
*Benedek Varga, woodcarver. Of Sopron. Of Milwaukee. First Sunday of Advent, 1959.*
And beneath, in the blue ink, in German: *Einverstanden. Von Herzen. — L.A.*
Agreed. With all my heart.
The rotunda was very quiet. Out on Wisconsin Avenue a city bus went by, and its headlights swept across the ceiling and were gone.