"It's sold," Roz said. Her voice sounded thin to her. "I sold it. On the third of November. To your museum. The money is the severance fund. Without it, sixty-one people get two-thirds of what I promised them. I stood up in the employee lunchroom and promised." She looked down at the paper. "The lunchroom. Where they fed him."
"I know," Elliot said.
"Do you? A minute ago you were very happy about a door."
"I know," he said again, not defending himself, and then a flashlight beam swung across the floor from the direction of the elevators and found them both, and held.
"It is eleven-forty," said Ogechi Nwachukwu.
She crossed the rotunda in her navy uniform and sensible boots, a tall woman of fifty-eight with reading glasses pushed up into grey-threaded hair, the keys on her belt making the small music they had made in these halls every night for twenty-two years. She looked at Roz's bare feet, at Elliot's rolled sleeves, at the snow, and then she lifted the beam slowly, past the soldiers and the angels and the shepherds, up to the little red-and-gold tower standing open at the crown.
For a long moment she said nothing.
"Twenty-two years," she said finally, "and Mr. Pieter never once stood on that ledge. He made me promise I'd never let anybody."
"I'm sorry, Oge."
"Don't be sorry. Be clear. What is it?"
Roz gave it to her in English, word by word, from memory, because she found she already had it by heart.
When she finished, Oge stood a while in silence.
"The floor," she said.
"Yes."
"I'm not the floor. I'm security."
"You've walked more of this floor than anyone alive," Roz said. "You're the floor."