Femke Oosterhuis

Femke Oosterhuis is 34 and spends her nights in front of a wall of screens, watching over forty Rotterdam buildings that sleep while she stays awake. Born in Delft, the daughter of an electrician and a nurse, she studied computing at a technical institute and joined the security firm at 24, on the small-hours shift nobody wanted. Ten years later she still prefers it: she says the city is more honest when it is dark.

She lives in a small apartment on the seventh floor of a brick building in Kralingen, with blackout curtains, a bicycle leaning in the hallway and an electric kettle always full. She sleeps by day, with earplugs and an eye mask, and wakes in the middle of the afternoon to cycle to the riverside. She has a plant that never dies, of which she is prouder than she should be.

She is tall and thin, with fair, freckled skin on her nose, straw-blond hair in a hasty ponytail and the dark circles of a night shift. She wears the firm's dark blue polo shirt, with a plain badge clipped to the pocket, and a headset with a microphone around her neck that seems part of her body. She is precise, defensive, speaks in times and panel codes and takes offense when anyone doubts the control room.

About the gallery, she says it is one of the screens on her wall: it rings, she sees, she calls the police. She explains that zone 4, the west wing emergency door, had been under maintenance since 5:58 p.m., isolated at the request of the installation crew, by phone, with the carrier's password, and that only the hall sensor sounded, at 3:02. According to the interior cameras, at 10:40 p.m. two people were strolling with flashlights through the hall, and the alarm was only armed at 11:40, with the curator's code.

Femke knows the operator who saw the alarm go off is the one asked whether she saw it fast enough. When the detective says she let the thieves in and delayed the police, she adjusts the headset at her neck and answers that she got the patrol car there in five minutes, and tells him to look for whoever opened that door. The hurt of a professional who followed protocol, or a schedule repeated so nobody looks around: the headset at her neck does not explain.