"Agata," he said. He came toward her and stopped and for a moment she thought he would hug her, and then he seemed to remember that he could not, and put out his hand instead. She took it. His hand was dry and cold. "You look—I'm glad you're through it. I'm glad to see you upright."
"Thank you."
"Gwendolyn came to see me about a ticket." He glanced at the security desk, at the people coming through the turnstiles, at the chandelier. "Could we sit down somewhere."
"The Bushnell Room," Alvin said.
So they sat in the Bushnell Room again, under the print of the old building with the horses, and this time there were four of them, and this time Alvin sat too, across the table from Anselm, with his hands folded on the wood in front of him. Gwendolyn sat beside Agata with the folder in her lap and did not open it.
Anselm took off his overcoat and folded it over the back of his chair, and sat, and put his glasses on, and took them off again.
"I'll say this first, Alvin," he said. "Before anything else. I'm the one who gave her the card. Seven years ago. I'm the one who told her to destroy it. If she didn't, that's on me for asking someone like her to do it."
"I know who gave her the card," Alvin said.
"I'm going to tell you some things," Anselm said, "and I want you to know that I know none of them make it better. I'm not telling you so you'll think better of me. I gave that up a long time ago." He put both hands flat on the table. "When Agata brought me that printout I took it upstairs to the General Counsel. Not to my boss, to the General Counsel, because I knew what it was. I told him the relay had been disconnected for seven weeks and that a young man had died in a stairwell trying doors that should have opened. Not in an alarm, I told him, there wasn't any alarm, but the doors were part of the same failure, the same decision to lock them, and the relay was the only thing that made locking them legal, and it wasn't connected. He listened. He was a careful man. He said the medical examiner had found that Quentin died of an acute asthma attack. He said that was the cause of death and it would remain the cause of death. He said the family had not asked for the access records and that we were not obliged to volunteer an internal security log that was, in his words, subject to interpretation. He said that if the company volunteered it, there would be a wrongful death suit with eight figures on it and an OSHA investigation and the Hartford Fire Marshal in every one of our buildings for a year, and that none of it would bring your son back. And he said the doors would be fixed by Friday."