Lieutenant Desjardins wrote for a long time on her clipboard. Then she tore off a yellow copy and handed it to Anselm, not to the chief engineer, as if she had already worked out who in the room it belonged to.
"Notice of violation," she said. "Impairment of a required fire protection system. Thirty days to correct the release function on the panel interface, and I'll be back to witness the test myself. Until it's corrected, hourly fire watch in every stairwell, top to bottom, documented, around the clock, and those fifteen doors stay unlocked, and I mean unlocked, not unlocked during business hours. If I come in at three in the morning and one of them's locked I'll close the building." She looked at Alvin. "Who's the director on this shift?"
"I am, ma'am."
"You called it in yourself?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"From inside?"
"From the room right off the lobby."
She looked at him over the top of her clipboard for a moment, a long, measuring look, and then wrote something else, and Agata never found out what it was. "Most of the time," the lieutenant said, "I hear about this from the guy who got fired, six months later, from his lawyer." She did not look at Agata when she said it. Perhaps she did not know. Perhaps she did. "Thank you, Mr. Varnum."
By four o'clock in the afternoon the news had gone up the building the way news always did, in the elevators, with the voices lowered. Agata heard later that the CFO had stood in the doorway of Anselm's office for twenty minutes saying the words closing date. She heard nothing at all about what would happen to Alvin Varnum, and when she asked Gwendolyn, Gwendolyn said she didn't know, which Agata believed, and then said that she had personally put a note in his file that he had followed the fire safety plan to the letter, which Agata also believed.