"And now," Agata said. It came out harder than she had intended. "Tell him about now. Tell him about 4471."
Anselm turned his head and looked at her for a moment, and something in his face acknowledged the thing he had taught her, that you always ask for the whole log, not just the part they hand you.
"Kiran brought me 4471 in June," he said. "Ardent told me there was a secondary path, through the panel, and that in a real alarm the doors would release. I believed them in June. By August I didn't. I asked for the documentation and they couldn't produce it for this building. By then the sale was in diligence. The property condition report was done; it was clean. Our CFO told me that a fire marshal's notice of violation on a life-safety system would reopen the report and could push the closing past year end, and that the cost of that was a number with a lot of zeroes. The retrofit is in the buyer's capital plan for the first quarter. I wrote a memo recommending interim measures. The memo went upstairs. Nothing came back down. And I didn't push it." He took a breath. "I'm retiring on the fifteenth of December, the day the building closes. I told myself it was eight weeks. I told myself the odds were small. The odds of a person being alone in a stairwell, at night, in trouble, needing a door. I told myself the same thing I told myself in 2019. That the odds were small."
"The odds were small in 2019," Agata said.
"Yes," he said. "I know."
Nobody spoke. Outside the frosted glass the lobby went on with its Monday, the chirp of the turnstiles, the elevator chimes, someone's heels on marble. On the wall the horses in 1910 stood harnessed in front of the old building, waiting to go somewhere.
Then Gwendolyn Tremblay cleared her throat and said, in a small, very precise voice, "Paragraph fourteen."
They all looked at her.
"Of the agreement. Agata's. Paragraph fourteen." She opened the blue folder on her lap and turned pages until she found it, and laid the folder open on the table and put her finger on the place. "Nothing in this agreement prohibits Employee from reporting possible violations of law or regulation to any governmental agency or entity, or from making other disclosures protected under whistleblower provisions of law, or from participating in any investigation or proceeding conducted by such agency." She took her finger off the paper. "It's required. It's in every one. Legal fought me on the wording in March and I won. I wanted you to know it's there. Before you decide anything. Because I think you were going to sign it and not say a word, and I think that's what everybody upstairs was counting on, and I didn't—I don't—" She stopped and pressed her lips together. "I just wanted you to know it's there."