Chapter 7
He stood, walked back behind his desk, opened the lowest drawer, and took something out. He carried it over and placed it on the carpet in front of her.
It was an old thermos. Its steel exterior scratched, one side slightly dented, its plastic handle faded with age.
He said he had kept it ever since that night, and that he hadn’t brought it out to move her — but so that she would know he hadn’t mistaken her for someone else.
Mave looked at the thermos. She reached for it and lifted it slowly with both hands. Then she turned it upside down.
In the center of the bottom, carved with the tip of a knife in shallow, clumsy strokes, were two capital letters.
She didn’t tell him what the two letters were. She only held the thermos against her chest. And from the way she held it, Enzo understood that something had just happened that he wasn’t permitted to ask about. At least, not now.
He left it alone. He sat down again.
And after a while, he pointed to the notebook still lying on the desk and asked whether he could look at it. She nodded.
He picked it up, turned the pages, and read for far longer than it should have taken to read only a few sheets of paper. He studied the rectangular table she had drawn, the six seats marked by distinguishing features instead of names, the times crowded into the margins. And on the pages that followed were the things she had written down over three nights without understanding why she was writing them.
The light in the printer room on the thirty-third floor had been on after midnight, twice. Someone had still been on the thirty-fourth floor when she went up to collect the trays at nearly eleven at night. And on all three nights, a strange payment had appeared in her account on Thursday, labeled overdue insurance compensation — though she had never filed an insurance claim of any kind.
Enzo called Sal into the room. He handed him the notebook, pointed to the final three pages, and said that the woman everyone in that building treated like a piece of furniture that happened to move had just shown them exactly where they needed to dig.
He told Sal to obtain the corridor footage from the thirty-third floor and the printer logs for the exact times recorded in the notebook — no broader than that, because asking for more would expose what they were doing.
May you like
Sal took the notebook, gave Mave one quick look, then left.
Only after the door closed did Enzo turn back to her.
