She closed the wallet. It was the wrong thing to do and she did it anyway, a reflex, the way you put your hand over a cut.
"Ma'am."
"Not here," she said. "Please. Not in the lobby."
"Open it."
"Mr. Varnum—"
"Open it." Not loud. He did not have to be loud. The man in the camel coat had stopped at the elevators and turned around. Danita had half risen behind the desk.
Agata opened the wallet. With two numb fingers she worked the license out of the window, and then the card behind it, which was stuck a little after seven years, the edge of the sticker clinging to the vinyl, and she held the card out to him on her flat palm the way you would offer something to a horse.
He did not take it at once. He looked at her face for the first time, actually looked, and she understood that he was seeing the fuzz on her head and the missing eyebrows she had penciled back in that morning and the way the blazer hung on her, and that none of it was changing what he was about to do, and she respected him for that, a little, even then.
He took the card. He turned it over. On the back, in ballpoint, in a hand that slanted hard to the right, someone had written a name and a phone number, the way a mother writes them inside a child's coat. The number had a 860 area code. The name was ALVIN.
"This was destroyed," he said. "They told me this was destroyed."