Then he turned around, and put his hand on the lever of the door on nine—a re-entry floor, with her white sign above it—and pressed down, and it went a quarter inch and clicked, and stopped.
He took his own badge off his belt. He held it to the reader. The LED went green and the lock released with a sound like a knuckle cracking, and the door opened outward onto the bright carpeted corridor of the ninth floor, onto a water fountain and a bulletin board with a flyer for a United Way chili cook-off. He held it open with his hand, and stood in it, half in the stairwell and half out, and looked at that bright corridor for a long time, as if he were looking at it for somebody else.
Then he let it close, and they walked down the last eight floors to the street.
The door at the bottom of stairwell C let out into a service alley off Allyn Street, between the tower's loading dock and the blank brick back of a parking garage, and when Alvin pushed the bar the cold came in at them like a dog that had been waiting. A horn on the door frame began to whoop. He let it. They stood in the alley with the door wide open behind them, and the whoop went on, and Agata knew that on the monitor at the lobby desk a red box was blinking that said STAIR C EXIT 1 — DOOR HELD OPEN, and that the young woman with the braid was reaching for her radio.
It was ten minutes to nine, the sky a clean, hard October blue, the wind coming down Allyn Street off the river with leaves in it. Alvin's radio came alive on his belt now that there was nothing between it and the sky. "Varnum, desk. Varnum, desk, you there? I've got a held-open on C-one."
He unclipped it. "Desk, Varnum. That's me. I'm on it. Tell Mr. Voight I'm bringing Ms. Brzezicki around the front."
A pause. "Mr. Voight's already here, Alvin. He's in the lobby. He's asking for you."
Alvin looked at Agata. Then he let the stair door swing closed, and the whooping stopped, and the alley went quiet except for the wind.
Anselm Voight was standing by the turnstiles when they came in through the revolving door on Trumbull. He had his overcoat on, as if he had just arrived or was about to leave, a gray herringbone coat, and his reading glasses on their cord, and his beard had gone fully white since Agata had last seen him in May. He had the look of a man who had not slept well for some time and had stopped expecting to. Gwendolyn Tremblay was beside him with her blue folder, looking as though she had walked into the wrong meeting and could not find the door.