Chapter 9

It took Officer Pryor about ninety seconds to get up the rolling stairs, and by then Roland Tritt was already holding the invoice portfolio.

He had it because Cross had handed it to him at the start of the evening, the way contractors hand chairmen portfolios - so the chairman could see the final payment schedule and feel good about the money. Tritt opened it at the marble rail with two board members leaning in.

Behind the payment schedule was a purchase order.

Calderon Imaging, Passaic, New Jersey. Forty-two printed vinyl panels, archival substrate, UV clear coat. Delivered June.

Two point four million dollars, billed as hand restoration.

Tritt looked up at the ceiling and then at the man he had hired, and his face did something old.

Cross started talking fast. There had been a subcontractor. There had been a mix-up in the specification. He had directed the work - that was the word he kept using, directed - he had curated it, he had made it possible, the concept was his, the vision was his, and whoever had been in that basement had sabotaged a nationally significant project.

"Who's been in the basement?" he said, to the room, to nobody.

Nobody answered him, because Pryor came down the rolling stairs and said the corner panel at eye level had two old initials and one fresh one, and the fresh one was still tacky, and the fresh one read E.D.

And then, because it needed saying out loud in front of three hundred people, Pryor said it.

"The panels currently installed in this ceiling are not the panels Mr. Cross installed in June. Those are in the basement, in forty-two crates. These are the originals. Somebody restored them by hand and put them back up."

Emmett, still by the doors, said it in the flat voice he used to report a boiler pressure.

"They were in the crates. They said they were too far gone. Two panels a month. I built a rolling scaffold off the freight elevator and I did it at night so nobody would have to look at me doing it."

Somebody in the back of the room began to cry, and it wasn't clear who.

The donors turned on Cross the way a room turns - slowly, and then all the way. A reporter near the coat check had her phone out and had had it out for ten minutes. Board members were standing. And Cross, who had never once in his life been unable to describe his own work, could not describe a single brushstroke of the thing above his head.

Tritt set the portfolio down on the marble and walked to the scaffolding in the southeast corner.

He picked up the donor microphone, held it up toward the platform, and asked Emmett Doyle what he wanted.

Emmett didn't answer. He picked up his brush, put his hand on the rail, and started to climb.