"Not about the doors. Not about the configuration or the remediation status of any life-safety system at any Stanhope property. I asked her to read me the sentence."
He nodded slowly, as if he had expected that exact sentence. "I've got twenty-two months," he said. "Till I'm sixty-five. I'm one of the last ones on the old pension, they froze it for everybody hired after '02, but I'm grandfathered, and if I go to sixty-five it's a full benefit and if I don't it's not. And Florine's got MS. Secondary progressive. She's on an infusion every six months that costs more than my car, and the company plan pays it." He said it with no self-pity at all, the way a man reads a list of supplies. "And they're selling the building in December. You know what happens to the in-house guys when a REIT buys a building? Contract security. Allied, Securitas, your friends at Ardent. They'll keep me if they're smart, because I know where everything is. But they don't have to. So that's where I'm sitting. On these stairs."
"I know," she said. "I mean—I didn't know about Florine. I know about the rest."
"So I want you to understand something." He folded the printout one more fold and put it in his breast pocket, behind the flap, with the card. "Whatever happens next, I'm not doing it to make you feel better. I'm not doing it for you at all."
"I understand."
"I don't know yet what I'm doing."
"I understand that too."
He stood up. It took him two tries; the first time his knee caught and he put a hand on the yellow rail and waited it out. Then he went down to thirteen, a re-entry floor, and pressed the lever, and it went a quarter inch and stopped. He did not read the time. He went down. Twelve, eleven, ten. She stopped hearing the clicks. She heard only their feet and their breathing and the long hollow fold of the stairs.
On nine he stopped on the landing and stood with his back to the door and looked at the wall across from it. It was the same gray-beige as all the other walls. There was nothing on it. There was a small scuff at about the height of a seated man's shoulder that might have been anything, a hand truck, a careless mover, fifty years of anything. Alvin looked at it for a long time without moving and Agata stood two steps up and did not come any closer, and she did not know how long it was, a minute, three minutes. The fluorescent tube over the landing had a faint flicker in it that she had never noticed and would never be able to stop noticing again.