Agata looked at the paragraph. She read it twice. Then she looked across the table at Alvin, and he was not looking at her or at the paper or at Anselm. He was looking at the gray telephone on the table, the starfish, with its row of buttons and its little red light.
"I'm the fire safety director on this shift," he said.
"I know you are," Anselm said.
"I took the class in Windsor Locks. Twenty-two years ago. They told us a lot of things. One of them was that when a fire protection system is impaired, the director notifies the fire department. It's not a choice. It's in the code. It's in the binder at the desk with my name on the front." He unfolded his hands. "Is that system impaired, Mr. Voight?"
Anselm did not answer at once. Agata watched him. She thought that she had never seen a man look so much like himself and so much like a stranger at the same time; she saw the trooper in him, and the man who had taught her to read a log, and the man who had sat in a living room and said there was no indication of distress, and she could not have said, for the life of her, which of them was going to speak.
"Yes," Anselm said. "It is."
"Then I'm going to call it in."
"If you make that call," Anselm said, very quietly, "I can't protect your job, Alvin. I want to be honest with you about that. I won't be here to. The buyer won't know you. And whoever's upstairs is going to want to know why the director didn't come to them first."
"You never could protect it," Alvin said. "That's all right. I'm not asking you to." He reached across the table and turned the speakerphone toward himself, and picked up the handset, which was attached by a coiled cord, and held it, and did not dial. "I'm asking you what you're going to do."