Third, the insider lender. When the syndicate's facility collapsed and Dunmore had announced, from a podium, fully committed replacement financing from the Boyce Trust Company, the commitment had taken the form of a credit agreement, signed within the week, under which the trustee bank undertook to lend the company the money to refinance the debt that the trust shortfall had stranded. The examiners' view of this instrument occupied only three paragraphs of their preliminary findings, which was, in the examiners' dialect, a measure of its clarity. A trustee may not lend to the beneficiary of its own failure. A trustee may not profit from the refinancing of a shortfall in trusts it was its duty to verify. The commitment was, in the department's word, voidable at the election of the regulator, and the department elected, and the company's fully committed replacement financing ceased to exist on a Tuesday afternoon in a letter of eleven sentences, having been announced from a podium to applause eleven weeks earlier. It was the second time in the affair that a Fairhaven structure had been killed by being read carefully, and it would not be the last.
Nick Ames had been a banker for forty years before he became a director, and he had the banker's hierarchy of dreads, in which the worst thing was not a loss but a surprise, and the second worst thing was discovering that the surprise had been available, in writing, to anyone who had cared to look. He was sixty-six, the retired president of a regional bank whose name had been absorbed in a merger a decade earlier, and he had accepted the Fairhaven directorship, and the lead independent director's role with it, for the reasons men of his generation and standing accepted such things: the company was Georgian, the business was sound and unglamorous, the board met quarterly, and Wesley Dunmore, who had recruited him personally over a lunch that lasted three hours, had struck him as a builder, which in Ames's vocabulary was a term of respect that had nothing to do with charm.
He had sat, on the morning of the signing meeting, in his place at the table with the agenda before him, and he had watched the chief executive of the company he served come down the table distributing handshakes like honors, and he had watched him arrive at the anchor lender of the company's five-hundred-and-forty-million-dollar refinancing — a woman whose firm's commitment was, as every person in the room had cause to know, the keystone of the transaction and therefore of the company's next fifteen years — and he had watched Wesley Dunmore look at her extended hand and turn from it as a man turns from a painting he has decided not to buy.
Ames had said nothing. He thought about that silence afterward with the specificity of a man reviewing a loan file in which his own initials appear on the wrong page. He had heard Halvorsen's laugh go into the water glass beside him, that small, wet, swallowed sound, and he had understood it instantly and completely, and he had looked down at his agenda, because looking down at his agenda was what the room's choreography offered a man who did not intend to make a scene, and a scene, in the economy of boardrooms, is the one currency no one wishes to be first to spend. He had told himself, in the seconds available, the things that men at tables tell themselves in such seconds: that it might have been inadvertent, that Dunmore might not have seen the hand, that the meeting's business was larger than a courtesy, that the anchor lender herself, who had not flinched, who had sat down and opened her binder and presented her facility in a level voice, plainly did not require his rescue. Every one of those sentences had been available, and he had used them all, and they had purchased him exactly what such sentences purchase, which was the rest of the meeting in peace and the remainder of the year in the knowledge of what his peace had cost and what it had been worth.