Chapter 4

Walt didn't leave.

He stood at the edge of the red carpet with his empty hand out and his shoes on the marble, and the room went on around him the way water goes around a stone. A couple passed on their way to the stairs, the woman's wrap trailing, the man saying something about the Turner. Neither looked down.

"You're making this harder," Frear said.

"I'm not making anything," Walt said. "I'm standing still."

Behind Frear, the caterer with the coupe glasses had stopped. So had two trustees near the column - a man in his sixties with a bad toupee, and a woman in navy who was watching with the particular attention of someone who had spent forty years reading rooms.

"Everything all right, Damon?" the woman called.

"Everything's fine, Mrs. Bayard."

"It doesn't look fine."

Frear turned his body to block the view, which was the wrong instinct and he knew it as soon as he did it. Constance Bayard was chair of the board. She had hired him. She had also, three years ago, asked him a question about a caterer's invoice that he had answered badly and then answered again, better, and she had let it go - but she had kept the invoice.

She crossed the marble now, unhurried, a glass of water in her hand.

"Who is this?"

"A vendor," Frear said. "Uninvited."

"I'm not a vendor," Walt said.

"He's in possession of museum property from the seventies and won't account for it."

Mrs. Bayard looked at Walt for a long moment. Then she looked at his coat, which did not fit him, and his shoes, which did, and his hand, which was still open and empty in the air.

"Sir," she said. "Are you here with a complaint?"

Walt considered the question. It was a fair one. He had a coat that didn't fit, a badge he no longer had, and a sealed cream envelope in his inside pocket that had been sitting over his heart since four o'clock that afternoon. Anyone would have read the envelope as a complaint. Anyone would have read the whole man as a complaint.

"No," he said.

"Then what are you here for?"

"To give something back."

"You gave it," Frear said. "To me. It's logged."

"It's in your pocket."

"Which is where logged property goes."

Mrs. Bayard's eyes moved between them. Around the rotunda more heads had turned - not many, but the kind that matter at a gala: a curator, two trustees, a man from the Inquirer with a notebook he wasn't supposed to have.

On the landing, the chairman lifted his head from the lectern and looked out over the crowd. He was seventy-one, silver and broad, and he had the face of a man who had rehearsed a speech about a hundred years and was finding, at the last minute, that he didn't want to give it.

The quartet finished. Nobody applauded. The silence that followed had a shape to it.

Frear felt it, did the math, and decided the fastest way to make the room normal again was to make it official. He raised his hand to his earpiece.

"Petty," he said. "Escort him out through the loading corridor. Quietly."

"No," Mrs. Bayard said.

The microphone on the landing clicked on.