Marble Floors

At 2:20 in the afternoon, the doors of Lakeshore Savings & Trust opened for me with a sigh.

It was a heavy, polished, double set of brass-framed glass, and the air that came out of them was a different climate altogether. Warm, dry, faintly scented with floor wax and old paper and the clean metallic smell of money that has been handled by many hands. I stepped across the threshold, and the sounds of Euclid Avenue, the buses, the wind, the jackhammer on the corner, folded away behind me like a closing book.

"Slowly," murmured the policewoman at my left elbow. "You're a customer. You've got nowhere to be."

"I know."

"Then stop walking like you're on a ledge."

I loosened my shoulders. I made my feet go slower. I was, I reminded myself, a thirty-eight-year-old copyeditor in a borrowed navy blazer and flat shoes, carrying a leather purse that had been lent me by a stranger, and I was here on an ordinary Wednesday to visit my late mother's safe-deposit box. There was nothing remarkable about it. Dozens of people did it every day. They looked at their watches and thought about lunch.

My two escorts walked a half-step behind me. They were the same two women who had dressed us as maids that morning, the tall one with the braid and the short one with the gum, but they had changed, and I would not have recognized them. The tall one wore a camel coat and a silk scarf and carried a briefcase. The short one had traded her windbreaker for a puffy parka and a knit hat and looked like somebody's aunt. They went through the doors a few steps apart, and did not look at each other, and drifted to opposite sides of the lobby with a casual, practiced uncoordination that made my skin crawl.

Inside my collar, taped to the skin just beneath the notch of my collarbone, was a lens the size of a shirt button. Behind my left ear was a flesh-colored plug no larger than a grain of rice. I could feel the weight of them. I could feel, or imagined I could, the wires of an invisible web running from my body out through the glass doors, across the street, to a gray van parked at the curb with a girl in it.

June, I thought. Don't look. Don't look at me. Look at everything else.

…

I want to describe the lobby, because I have never forgotten it.

It was the whitest room I have ever stood in. The floor was marble, a pale, veined, high-gloss slab, polished to such a degree that the lights overhead lay in it as in a lake. Tall ranks of fluted columns rose to a coffered ceiling, painted a cold creamy white and lit by rows of recessed lamps that gave no shadow. A row of teller windows ran down one wall, each in its own brass cage, with a little marble ledge and a pen on a chain. At the far end stood a pair of chairs, upholstered in pale leather, and a table with a vase of white lilies. A huge old clock hung over the vault door.

It was clean. That was the thing. It was so clean it did not seem to belong to the world. There was not a footprint on the floor. There was not a leaf by the door. A man with a mop and a yellow bucket was working in the far corner, moving in slow even strokes, and as he passed I watched the marble behind him shine like wet glass, and I thought: a room like this is built to make you feel watched.

I thought of the black sedan. I thought of a voice on a telephone. And then I thought, with the clear detached irony that comes sometimes in the worst moments, that if you wanted to lay a trap in an American city for a woman with a key, you could not have asked for a better room.

"Ms. Ostrander," said the earplug, in a voice so low and so close that it seemed to come from inside my own skull. It was Dunleavy. "You're looking good. We have you in the lobby. Four exits. Two inside, two out. You'll go to the desk on your right. They're waiting for you."

I moved my chin a quarter-inch. Yes.

"Good. Don't talk back. Don't touch your ear. You're doing fine."

I crossed the floor. My heels clicked, and the sound bounced from the columns and returned a half-second later, ticking, like a second woman following me.

…

The vault desk was at the end of the row, under a little brass sign that said SAFE DEPOSIT SERVICES, beside an open archway and a tall steel door painted the dull green of an old battleship. A man sat behind it. He was about fifty, slight and pale, with a long gentle mournful face and a gray suit a size too big for him. A name plate on the blotter said MR. ADEYEMI. He rose as I approached, and gave me a small tired bow.

"Good afternoon, madam."

"Good afternoon. I'd like to access a box."

"Of course. Name, please?"

"Maren Ostrander. The box is in my mother's name. Ida. I'm a co-signer."

"Ostrander." He sat, tapped a key, and studied his screen. His eyebrows rose a fraction. "Yes. I see it. Number 1317, a large. Last accessed in April, two years ago. Quite some time." He glanced at me. "Is there a reason for your visit today?"

"Personal."

"Of course. Forgive me. I'm obliged to ask." He pushed a form across the desk with the tips of two fingers. "If you'd be kind enough to sign here, and here, and give me your identification."

I took out my passport. I laid it on the marble. My hand, I was proud to see, did not shake.

Don't hold your breath, I told myself. Don't look around. Remember what he said: you've got nowhere to be. I signed. I watched my own signature spill across the line in blue ink, small and neat and slanting, the signature of a woman who has signed ten thousand forms and been afraid of none of them. Mr. Adeyemi took the passport and held it up to the light, turned a page, bent it, studied the photograph and then my face. He did it with a slow unhurried thoroughness that I would have admired in any other circumstance.

"Thank you," he said, and handed it back. "And the second key?"

"I'm sorry?"

"There are two keys for a box of this size. Yours, and the bank's. Mine will go in with yours." He smiled apologetically. "I regret that I'll need to see yours."

"Of course." I opened the purse. I took out the small brass key, flat and old, on a loop of faded blue ribbon, and I set it on the marble beside the passport. It lay there, tiny and dull. I had carried it for two years in a drawer. It was the only thing my mother had left me that I had never examined.

It was the key to a box that held a key.

…

"Third desk," said a voice in my ear.

It was not Dunleavy. It was higher, clearer, thinner, and for a moment I did not know it, because I had never heard it speak from inside my own head. It was June. I felt the blood leave my face. The earplug had been designed for one voice, I had thought, but someone had passed her the microphone.

"The one with the plant," she said. Very low, very fast, in her careful tone. "On the left. By the lilies. Look at the chair."

I did not move my head. I let my eyes slide, with the idle drift of a woman waiting for a clerk, along the row of desks to the left of the archway. There were four of them, in a shallow arc, beneath a row of potted ferns. Three were occupied by customers and clerks, bent over papers, murmuring. The fourth was empty.

It was a small tidy desk, with a brass name plate on the front, a photograph in a frame turned half away, a mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST AUNT, and a green plant in a pot, one of those drooping trailing ones with a little dried tip on every leaf. A gray cardigan hung over the back of the chair. A cup of tea sat on the blotter, a bag still floating in it, steam long since gone.

I read the plate.

R. TILLIS. VAULT SERVICES.

My stomach turned over, slowly, like a heavy fish.

"That's her desk," June whispered. "She came in this morning. Her sweater's there. The tea's still full. She went out and didn't come back."

"I thought she called in sick," I thought, so loudly that I almost said it.

"She did," said Dunleavy, in his low dry voice, cutting in over June. "At seven this morning. Her phone's been off since eight. I've got a man on her apartment. It's empty." A pause. "The tea is new. Somebody poured it an hour ago. Somebody sat there. Keep your eyes on the vault, Ms. Ostrander. Keep walking."

Somebody poured a cup of tea.

I looked back at the empty chair. I stared at it, at the gray cardigan, the slack sleeves hanging from the chair-back like the arms of a woman who has died in her sleep. I imagined a hand on the cup. I imagined someone, a woman I had never met, with a tired intelligent face, sitting at that desk in the cold shadowless light and looking up the name of Ostrander on a computer screen, three months ago. Reading my mother's file. Reading my address. Weighing it. A human being with a mother and a mug and a plant, making a small private decision in an hour of the afternoon, and walking out of it, into whatever came next.

"Ms. Ostrander?" said Mr. Adeyemi.

I turned. He was looking at me with a kind concern, the key to the vault already in his hand, a long steel one on a coil of chain.

"Forgive me. You seem unwell."

"I'm fine," I said. "A little tired."

"We've all had those days." He rose, and gathered my key and the form into a folder, and drew a card from a tray. "If you'll follow me. It's this way."

…

The vault door was open, and it was the most beautiful machine I had ever seen.

It stood in the archway like a sleeping animal, four feet thick, a great round slab of burnished steel set in a frame of brass, with gears the size of dinner plates and a locking wheel in the center that gleamed like a ship's helm. It had been built in 1927, Mr. Adeyemi told me, in a quiet voice, with a sort of pride. It weighed twenty tons. It had stood through a bank run and a bombing and two floods. A child could close it with a fingertip.

We went through it together, he first and I behind, and I felt, as I crossed the threshold, a drop in the temperature, a dry mineral chill, and then a second, quieter silence, as though the sounds of the lobby had been taken from the air by a magician. The corridor beyond was narrow and lined with steel. Steel walls. Steel floor. A line of recessed lamps. At the end, a gate, a tall grille of crossed black bars, with a lock the size of a fist.

He took out his key. He fitted it in the lock and turned it, and the gate swung open with a deep slow clank, like a knock on the door of my heart.

"After you."

Another corridor. Another gate. This one was newer, gray, with a keypad, and he stood a moment with his back to me and pressed a code, and it opened with a hiss. Behind it was a third. At each one, I heard the policewomen come after, one step behind, the clip of heels and the tiny crinkle of a coat. At each one, a lock turned, and a bar slid, and the sound echoed down the steel tunnel like a bell. Clank. I counted them. Clank. I counted my footsteps. Clank. I thought: this is what it is to go into a bank at the end of your life.

"Maren," said the voice in my ear. It was June. "Mom. It's okay."

I did not answer.

"I'm here. I can see you. There's a van and it's cold and Officer Tran gave me a candy, and I'm watching you on the screen. Don't be scared. It's just a room." A tiny hesitation. "I'll tell you if something's wrong."

She's thirteen, I thought. She's thirteen years old, and she's sitting in a van with a candy, telling me it's just a room.

At the end of the last corridor stood a wall of little doors.

They ran from floor to ceiling in neat ranks, each a flat steel square, each stamped with a brass number. Hundreds of them. I looked up the rows, and down, and I could see my own reflection in the metal, a small shape in a blue jacket, repeated in each one, a hundred Marens, ten thousand. Mr. Adeyemi walked along the wall, trailing a finger over the brass numerals, and stopped.

1317.

He fitted the bank's key to the left of the small door. He fitted mine to the right. He nodded at me.

"Together, please."

We turned them. There was a click, a small and perfect click, the sound of a thing that has been waiting a long time to be asked a question. The little door swung open an inch on its own. Behind it was darkness, and a steel drawer, and a handle.

Mr. Adeyemi drew it out.

It was a long gray metal box, perhaps eighteen inches deep, with a hinged lid, and it slid into the light on its rails with a soft whisper. He carried it to a small table at the side of the corridor, and set it down, and gave a courteous little bow. "I'll leave you in privacy, madam. There's a button on the wall if you need me."

He withdrew. The gate clanged behind him.

I was alone with my box.

The tall policewoman was somewhere at my back, a shape in the corner of my eye. The short one stood by the gate. I knew they were there, and I knew the lens at my throat was looking at a gray steel lid, and that in a gray van across the street my daughter was looking at it too, with a mint in her cheek and her hand on the edge of a monitor. I knew all that. I knew it with my head.

I stood in front of it with my hands at my sides. I looked at the hasp, the keyhole, the faint dust on the lid, and I could not lift a finger.