Chapter 2

They put Emmett in the coat-check alcove because it was six feet wide, out of sight of the program, and close to the doors where the officers would come in.

He went without being pushed. At the counter he did something that made the coat-check attendant, Marta, stop mid-reach for a hanger: he wiped his brush on the rag from his back pocket, twice, carefully, and laid it down on the brass tray beside the umbrellas. Handle parallel to the counter edge. Not tossed. Placed.

Then he sat on the bench and put his hands on his knees.

Out in the lobby, Fabian Cross was doing what he did best. He had the microphone back and he was using it gently now, the way a man uses a knife to butter bread in front of guests. I'm not angry. I'm heartsick. He said the word vandal once more and then never again, which was worse. Priya Raman, his assistant, moved through the crowd with a headset on, touching elbows, murmuring. Two board members were already nodding.

Roland Tritt stood by the coat check with his phone face-down in his hand, watching the doors.

Iris Falk came into the alcove at 8:51 with her folder under her arm and stood in front of Emmett without saying anything for a while. She had been the archivist at the Aurelia for nineteen years. She had catalogued the 1927 blueprints, the 1962 marquee permits, the 1984 restoration photographs. She knew the building's paper better than she knew most people.

She looked at his hands on his knees. The pigment. The scar. Then she looked at the brush on the tray - a sable round worn down past the ferrule, the kind of wear that takes years and never happens by accident.

"Who taught you to lay a glaze like that?" she said.

Emmett's eyes came up. He seemed to consider whether the question was a trap. Then he answered it honestly, because it was the only kind of answer he had.

"Dutch Mueller."

Iris went still. Behind her, Tritt turned around with the phone still in his hand.

"Dutch Mueller's been dead twenty-two years," Tritt said. "He was our master carpenter."

Emmett nodded once, as if that were simply a fact about the weather.

Iris heard the sound of her own breathing in the little room. She looked past Tritt, out through the arch, to where three hundred people were standing under a ceiling that had been applauded forty minutes ago by everyone in the building.

"Then who," she said slowly, "has been up on that ceiling?"