"The trustee's number, Wesley," Ames said. "Not the department's. Ours. Yours. Seventy-one."
"The trustee's number computed under a lender's definition, at the bottom of a bond market—"
"I have the bond market's numbers too," Ames said. "The board's reviewers priced them. Market movement accounts for four points of it, Wesley. I will show you the page. It is page nineteen of our own review, which you have had for six weeks." He let that stand. "I am not going to argue the remaining twenty-three points across this table, because they are not an argument. They are a biography. Loans against the corpus. Receipts taken as revenue. A schedule laid over guaranteed contracts, at desks, in this state, two hundred times. The biography has your signature in it more often than anyone's, because this is your company. That is the courtesy I am paying you, and it is the last item on the agenda: I am going to come to your office tomorrow at nine, alone, with the department's letter and our reviewers' chronology, and you and I are going to discuss the terms on which a founder resigns from the company he built, in a way that lets the company survive the resignation. The alternative is that this board discusses it without you on Thursday, and the department discusses it without all of us in the spring. Those are the three calendars. I have been in this room for six years and I have never once wasted the company's time dramatizing. I am not dramatizing now."
The meeting adjourned without a vote, in the manner Ames had arranged, because there was nothing yet to vote on that a vote would improve. The directors filed out in the unnatural quiet of men carrying numbered copies to be collected. Halvorsen was the last to leave but one. At the door he stopped, and turned, and said to Ames, in a voice pitched for the room's two remaining occupants and no further: "I laughed." Ames looked at him. "At the signing," Halvorsen said. "Into the glass. She offered her hand and I laughed into the glass. I have been on boards for thirty years and I want the record of this one to show — I don't know what I want it to show. I am resigning, Nick. Not Thursday. Today. My letter is with the secretary. It gives my health, which is a lie, but it is the conventional lie, and I find I have used up my supply of unconventional truth in rooms where it might have done some good by not using it at all." He held out his hand. "I would like to be out of the building before Wesley's nine o'clock," he said, "because I have discovered, rather late, that I do not trust myself in his weather." Ames shook his hand, and held the door for him, and watched him go down the corridor past the portraits of the acquired homes' founders that the company hung in its headquarters like ancestors it had adopted, forty-one faces in frames, among them, at the corridor's end, in a smaller frame than the others, a photograph of Elias Booker's father, standing in the door of the white house in Perry with his hat in his hands.
Ames came to Dunmore's office at nine the next morning, alone, as promised, with two folders and no witnesses, which was the courtesy, and he closed the door behind him, which was also the courtesy, and he sat down in the chair across the desk that had been positioned, over fifteen years, at the exact distance of supplication, and he set the folders on the desk between them and pushed neither of them forward, because Ames had conducted this interview, in its variants, with bank presidents and borrowers and once with a governor, and he knew that the folder a man opens himself is the one he has agreed to read.