Chapter 9

Frear didn't move for three full seconds. Then he took the tablet out from under his arm and held it against his chest, the way a man holds a door.

"Constance. This is a personnel matter."

"It's a board matter," Mrs. Bayard said. "You've been running patron relations and vendor contracts for four years without a single audit, because you asked me not to bother, and I let you, and that's mine to answer for. Give me the tablet."

He gave her the tablet. He also, after a pause that everyone in the front rank saw, reached into his jacket pocket, took out the badge in its cracked plastic sleeve, and set it on the marble beside Imani's box - not quite handing it to anyone.

Then he said, "I'd like to make a call."

"You can make it from the west corridor," Mrs. Bayard said.

That was the end of Damon Frear at the Halloway Museum's centennial dinner. He walked out past the caterers with his pocket square still straight and his earpiece still in, through the loading corridor he had pointed at an hour earlier, and the door swung shut behind him without a sound.

Nobody watched him go for very long, because there was an old man on the red carpet.

Bennett Halloway came down the last two steps. He picked the badge up off the marble and held it out.

"Mr. Kimbrough."

Walt looked at it. The plastic had cracked across one corner. The photograph inside was of a man of thirty-four with dark hair and a straight nose, and the card behind it said NIGHT WATCHMAN, and the year at the bottom said 1979.

"That belongs to the museum," he said.

"It belonged to you for thirty years."

"It belonged to the museum while I was wearing it."

Bennett didn't lower his hand. "Then take it back for one night, and give it to us properly tomorrow, in daylight, with the paperwork. That's how we do things here." His voice cracked slightly on the last sentence, and he covered it by clearing his throat.

Walt took the badge.

Mrs. Bayard stepped forward then and spoke to the room the way she spoke at board meetings - no microphone, loud enough to carry, because she had never once in her life been unsure of a sentence.

"The board will meet on Monday. The first item is the east-wing gallery, which we restored last year with centennial funds and which currently has no name on it. It will have one. The second item is a full audit of vendor contracts going back four years, and I expect it to be unpleasant." She paused. "The third item is an apology. I'd like to make part of it now."

She turned to Walt.

"On behalf of the trustees of the Halloway Museum of Art: you were turned away at our door tonight by a man who worked for us, told to use the service entrance, and accused of theft, for the crime of bringing back something you had kept safe for forty-five years. I am sorry. We are all sorry. It will be in the minutes."

The room applauded, and it was not the polite kind. It went on long enough that Walt, who had never in his life been applauded, looked down at his shoes and then up at the chandelier, as if one of them might tell him what to do.

Bennett waited until it died down. Then he held out the letter.

"He wrote it to you."

"He wrote it to keep me quiet," Walt said, and then, seeing Bennett's face, he added, "He was a frightened man, Mr. Halloway. He wasn't a bad one. He was frightened for fourteen years, and then he was dying and still frightened, and frightened men do arithmetic they can't undo." He looked at the page. "But he was a good curator. He hung the Turner where the light comes in low at four in the afternoon, and he was right about it."

Bennett held the letter out again.

Walt took it. He folded it along the old creases and put it in the inside pocket where the envelope had been, and his hand stayed flat against his chest for a second afterward, the way Bennett's had all evening.

Imani came back forty minutes later with the badge in a new mount - a small black case with a brass plate, the plastic sleeve preserved inside it exactly as it was, crack and all. The case went into the restored east wing gallery, in the room with the Turner, on a low plinth by the door. The plate was short, because Mrs. Bayard had insisted on short.

It read: WALTER KIMBROUGH. NIGHT WATCHMAN, 1968-1998. ON THE NIGHT OF FEBRUARY 9, 1979, HE CARRIED 212 WORKS FROM THE FLOODED EAST-WING STOREROOMS, INCLUDING THIS PAINTING. HE WAS NOT ASKED. HE WAS NOT THANKED.

By ten o'clock the string quartet had packed up, the caterers were stacking chairs, and four hundred people had gone home with a story they would tell for the rest of their lives. Walt Kimbrough stood where he had been stopped, at the edge of the red carpet, in a borrowed coat that didn't fit him, and looked up at the painting he had carried up four flights of stairs with water at his waist.

The case light came on. In the glass, an old man looked back at him standing next to it.

He touched the letter once through his coat. Then he walked out into the late-October cold, which nobody had told him not to.