It took her a second. "The clearance group. The people who can open the stair doors from inside the stairwell. Security, engineering, the fire safety director's credential."
"I'm the fire safety director on days," he said. "Did you know that? I took the class at the fire academy in Windsor Locks in 2004. Building needs one on site, it's me, eight to four. My card's in the stair group."
"It should be."
"Then show me," he said.
"Show you what?"
"Show me that stairwell. Show me what he did." He reached for the printout and folded it, along its old soft creases, eight times, very carefully, and held it in his hand. "You're being escorted out of the building. Policy says the escort chooses the route. I'm choosing."
Stairwell C was at the east end of the floor, past the copy room and the kitchen, behind a gray steel door with a narrow wire-glass window and a push bar and a red sign that said EXIT and, below it, a white sign with green letters that Agata had ordered from a catalog in 2019 and had installed herself on every floor that needed one. On twenty-two it said STAIR C — FLOOR 22 — EXIT AT FLOOR 1. Alvin pushed the bar. The door opened with the hollow, rubbery clunk of a heavy door on a good closer and they went through, and it swung shut behind them, and the noise of the building, the air handlers and the printers and somebody's phone ringing three offices away, went out like a candle.
She had been in every stairwell in Stanhope Tower many times. It never stopped surprising her how different they were from the rest of the building. Everything on the floors had been designed to be looked at. The stairwells had been designed to keep fire out. Poured concrete walls painted a gray-beige that had yellowed under the fluorescent tubes. Steel stairs, steel pan treads filled with concrete, a steel handrail painted safety yellow and worn down to silver in a long smooth stripe where a half century of hands had slid. A smell of dust and cold metal. The sound of your own feet coming back at you off the walls a half second late. And under it all a silence that pressed on the ears, because there was nothing inside a stair core to make sound, and no window, and nothing outside it could get in.
Alvin unclipped the radio from his belt and pressed the key. "Desk, Varnum."
What came back was a wash of static with a few syllables floating in it, like someone talking underwater.