They take us down to the basement level, past the crate room, into the corridor where the old boiler used to be before the museum switched to gas heat. There is a bench bolted to the wall there, meant for deliverymen waiting on a signature, and this is where they sit us, backs against the pipe casing, wrists tied to each other through a gap in the bench legs.
Above us, through two floors of plaster and joists, I can hear what might be a dolly wheel on marble, might be a ladder being moved, might be nothing at all, my ears inventing sound to fill a silence I can't stand. Leon's shoulder is against mine. His breathing is slow and even in a way I decide to copy, because it is the only instruction available to me.
'Tell me something you haven't told me before,' he says, low, like we're on a normal break and not tied to a boiler pipe. 'Anything.'
I think about it longer than the question deserves. 'I used to want to restore paintings,' I say. 'Not guard them. Fix them. I took one semester of it before the money ran out.'
'Which painting would you fix first, if you could fix anything up there right now.'
'None of them,' I say, and something that isn't quite a laugh moves through both of us at once. 'I'd fix the back door lock. It's been sticking since August.'
We go on like that for what might be forty minutes, might be ninety, trading small true things, because the alternative is listening to the ceiling and guessing, and guessing is a door that doesn't close once you open it. At some point the sounds above stop. At some point after that, the basement door at the top of the stairs clicks shut, and a car, or two cars, pull away from the loading dock with their lights off, which I know only because Leon says he can see the window strip near the ceiling go dark then darker, no beam sweeping across it.
'They're gone,' he says, and for a while neither of us tests whether he's right.
It's Leon who works the tie loose, not me. My wrists are bound tighter, or my hands have gone softer, I can't tell which, but his come free first, a slow twist of plastic against pipe rust that takes the skin off two knuckles and that he does not mention until days later. He gets to his feet unsteady, blood coming back into legs that have been folded under him too long, and he half-walks, half-drags himself to the wall phone by the crate room, the internal line that only rings in the front office and the guard station.
No one answers at the guard station, because there is no one left to answer it. He dials the front desk extension instead, the one that rolls over to Celia Voss's home line after hours, a number I did not know existed until this morning.
It takes four rings. Then her voice, thick with sleep, then sharp awake inside of one sentence once Leon says the word restrained.
I sit on the cold floor with my wrists finally loose, rubbing circulation back into fingers that don't feel like mine yet, and I look up at the ceiling I'd been listening to for however long we were down here, and I understand that I have no idea what is missing up there, none, only that something is, and that not knowing is going to be the shape of the next several hours of my life.
Leon comes back and sits beside me again, not because he has to anymore but because neither of us wants to stand up yet. 'We're all right,' he says, which is true and is also not an answer to anything.
Above us, I hear, for the first time since the car doors, an ordinary sound: a siren, still blocks away, getting closer.