Chapter 5

The chairman's voice came down the stairs.

"One hundred years ago this month, four Philadelphians signed a charter they had no money to fund..."

The room turned toward it. Shoulders opened. Glasses came down to hip level. The staff along the walls held their positions, hands folded, faces pleasant.

At the edge of the red carpet, Frear leaned in until his shoulder was between Walt and the room.

"What's in the envelope?"

Walt didn't answer.

"I saw the corner of it when you moved your arm. Cream. Sealed. That's either a demand letter or a lawsuit, and I've had both this year."

"It's mine."

"Everything inside these doors is my business tonight."

Mrs. Bayard had not gone back to her table. She stood a few feet away with her glass of water, listening the way a woman listens when she has already decided to hear the whole thing.

"Damon," she said. "Who is he?"

"A vendor with a grievance," Frear said. "Or a former employee who thinks the museum owes him something. I've had three this month. One of them did the flowers in 1996 and wanted a plaque."

"Is that what this is?" she asked Walt.

"No."

"Then say what it is."

Walt looked at the stairs. The chairman was mid-sentence about the 1920s, about a wing added during the Depression, about the women who raised the money for it by selling their own jewelry. It was a good speech. Somebody had worked on it for months.

He thought about the promise. It had been a small sentence in a small room in 1993, and he had carried it the way a man carries a coin in his shoe - always there, never mentioned.

"I'd like my badge put back in the personnel file," he said. "Where it belongs. That's all."

"And the envelope?"

"That goes home with me."

It was the wrong answer and he knew it as he said it. In a room like this, a sealed envelope that goes home with you is a threat. It is a lawyer's letter, or a photograph, or a list of names. It is never just paper.

Frear's face did the thing it did when he found a lever. "So there's something in it you don't want read."

"There's something in it that isn't yours."

The trustee in the bad toupee had drifted close enough to hear the last exchange. He said, to nobody in particular, "Should someone call the police?"

Frear held up a hand. "Not during the toast."

Which was, Walt understood, a sentence with two halves: not during the toast, and then yes.

The photographer in the black vest had come around the column and stood watching with her camera down at her hip. Petty's radio whispered. Up on the landing, the chairman paused at the end of a paragraph and looked out over the room, and for a moment his gaze came down the stairs and rested on the small cluster of people standing on the carpet where no one was supposed to be standing.

"You'll wait in the west corridor," Frear said quietly, "until this is over. Then we'll open that envelope together."

Walt said nothing. He had spent forty years saying nothing, and it had never cost him anything like this.

He was two steps toward the corridor when a woman's voice, flat and certain, came from behind him.

"Mr. Kimbrough?"