Claire looked surprised. "Cleaning, security, some building operations, catering for late events. Hundreds, depending on the shift. Why?"
Natalie looked at the service report again. "Find out how their skills are recorded and whether we have a process for internal positions to be offered to them. And don't assume we do just because someone can show us a policy. I want to know whether it actually happens."
Claire made a note, then asked whether this was about the man in the maintenance incident. Natalie nodded. "He saw something four engineers couldn't get to in several hours," she said. "That doesn't make him a miracle worker, and it doesn't mean the engineers were fools."
But it means we had someone in this building with useful knowledge, and neither our systems nor our managers knew it. She paused. "I want to understand why."
Marcus knew nothing of that conversation. At 2:14 he was on the nineteenth floor, kneeling beneath a conference table to remove a paper cup that had rolled against a power strip. At 3:02 he was wiping fingerprints from a set of glass doors on fourteen. By 4:30 his hands were dry from disinfectant, his knees were aching, and the excitement of the maintenance problem had faded into a nagging anxiety about whether the school presentation required parents to arrive at eight-thirty or nine.
He went to the staff room and checked the folded flyer tucked behind his phone case. The presentation began at nine, but the doors opened at eight-thirty, and Emma had asked him to be there early enough to see her set up. He did the arithmetic of subway delays and sleep in his head and concluded that he could make it if he did not get caught in another late-night conversation. It was not a glamorous calculation, but it was the one that mattered to him.
At six he signed out, changed into the dark jacket he kept in his locker, and walked past the front desk. Samuel Price, the overnight security supervisor, was finishing his report beneath the fluorescent lights. "Heard you fixed the big people's air conditioning," Samuel said without looking up. Marcus smiled. "I pointed at a sensor. Peter's team fixed it."
"That's not the way they're telling it upstairs," Samuel replied, checking a badge against the sign-out record. "A man hears a noise nobody else hears, and now somebody's got a story to tell at breakfast." Marcus shrugged. "Well, tell them I still need someone to fix the wheel on my cart." Samuel grinned and promised to add the request to the maintenance log again.
Outside, the rain had stopped, leaving a faint steam rising from the road in the early light. Marcus drove his old blue Honda through streets that seemed smaller than the glass corridors he had left. He stopped at a grocery store that opened before dawn, bought a carton of milk, a bunch of bananas, and the cheapest small bouquet of yellow daisies in a bucket near the counter. Emma liked flowers at important events, and he had learned that something costing four dollars could mean more than a gift with an extra zero.