Ames had the secretary distribute the letter in copies numbered for collection afterward, and he read, aloud, the department's covering paragraph, and then he said: "We will read the rest in silence, gentlemen. All of it. It will take forty minutes. I have taken the liberty of canceling lunch." And they read. Ames watched them read, because watching men read was, in the end, his profession's oldest instrument. He watched the young director from the private equity sponsor discover, somewhere around page nine, that his fund's investment memorandum had repeated the ninety-eight percent figure to its own investors, and he watched the color of that discovery cross the man's face and settle. He watched the audit committee's chairman, who had accepted the trustee's letters for six years in the serenity of the unexamined, take off his glasses at page fourteen and hold them for a long time without cleaning them, which Ames, who knew him, understood to be the man's equivalent of shouting. He watched Danvers read with the stillness of a man who had already read it, in a lawyer's office, and had been advised that his exposure was the kind that required the stillness. He watched Halvorsen read the paragraph about the confirmation letters — the eleven quarters, the attestation without computation — and reach, when he finished it, for the glass of water at his place, and hold it, and set it down again without drinking, with a care that belonged to some other occasion; and Ames, who had sat beside that glass at the signing meeting and heard what went into it, understood that Halvorsen was also reading, in the examiners' flat prose, a chronology in which his own laugh appeared, small and wet and swallowed, at the head of the whole procession, the moment the room had agreed — in the person of its chief executive, and with the assistance of its directors' averted eyes, his own among them — that the company's courtesies, like its numbers, would be distributed according to power and not according to truth.
No one spoke for some moments after the last page. Then the private equity director asked whether the department's adjustments could be negotiated, and the audit chairman asked whether the trustee had independent counsel, and the general counsel began a sentence about the company's strong disagreement with several characterizations, and Ames let the machinery of evasion turn over twice, out of respect for its antiquity, and then he stopped it.
"Gentlemen," he said, "I have sat on the boards of two banks that failed. I want to tell you what the failure of a bank looks like from inside the boardroom, because it does not look like this. It looks like men deciding which finding to contest. The findings you contest first are the ones you lose last, in the newspapers, after the examiners have published the ones you didn't contest. We are not going to contest the arithmetic, because the arithmetic is our own trustee's and our own reviewers', and it agrees. We are going to do three things. We are going to accept the examination's framework before the department imposes it, and we are going to do it in a consent order we negotiate this month, while negotiation is still a thing we are permitted. We are going to make the trust whole on a schedule, and we are going to say, in our own filing, where the money to make it whole comes from first. And the third thing" — he looked, at last, down the table, to the head of it, where Dunmore sat with the letter closed under his folded hands and his face arranged in the expression of a man who has been bored by experts before and survived it — "the third thing concerns the leadership of this company, and I propose to take it up with Wesley separately, as a courtesy, before this board takes it up as a motion."
Dunmore smiled then, the podium smile, and said, "Nick. You've been reading too much paper and not enough of this company." He said it genially, as a founder corrects a friend. "These are timing matters. Recognition matters. Every consolidator in the sector has the same conversations with its regulators. The trust assets are real, the homes are real, the families are served every day. You are describing weather as if it were climate."