The one document was not, in the event, quite the last of it, because the department's examination, widening as examinations do into the affairs of the trustee, had use for the closing-condition file: the term sheet, the three deferral letters, the demand, the trustee's computed confirmation, the notice — the complete paper spine of the collapse, in date order, as her firm kept everything. The examiners requested it through channels, and Loretta's firm produced it through counsel, formally, with a transmittal letter that stated the documents were produced voluntarily and completely and that the firm would authenticate them if required. It was the firm's only further act in the matter, and she supervised it personally, down to the ordering of the copies, because she intended the file to arrive the way it had been kept: complete, dated, and without commentary. The lead examiner, acknowledging receipt in a letter the firm kept, observed that the file's chronology had materially assisted the examination's reconstruction of the postponement history — a sentence Loretta read once and filed, in the Fairhaven binder, at the back, where courtesies in her system went to live behind the evidence.
The reporter came once more, in that season, and got further than the telephone. She obtained, through the paper's counsel and the court's file, everything that was public, which by then was nearly everything except the inside of the room on Lenox Road on a Tuesday morning the previous October; and she requested, through the firm's spokesman, an interview, and was refused, in the same nine words. But she was a reporter of the old school in one respect: she believed a refusal delivered in person was data a telephone refusal was not, and she attended a panel at a downtown club where Loretta spoke, on a subject of municipal lending, to an audience of bankers, and she waited afterward by the door with her notebook closed, which was her way of signaling that what she wanted was not a quotation. "I am not going to ask you about the meeting," she said. "Everyone in this city has a version, and yours is the only one that would be news, and you have made it very clear that it is never going to be news. I am going to ask you about the notice. I have read it eleven times. It is the only document in the whole affair that never mentions a human being's behavior. I want to know if that was a decision, or just how your firm writes."
Loretta looked at her for a moment. She was not in the habit of rewarding persistence, and she had decided, in the elevator of the Fairhaven building on the morning it happened, in the time it took the floors to descend, the whole policy of her conduct in the matter, and the policy had a single article. But the question, she judged, was not about the room. The question was about the paper, and the paper was public, and about the paper she had always been willing to be quoted, by anyone, at any length, because the paper was the work.
"It was a decision," she said. "A notice of failure of condition is an instrument. It states a condition, a failure, and a consequence. The day I let it state anything else — anything about the borrower as a man, or his table manners, or my opinion of either — it stops being an instrument and becomes an argument, and arguments can be argued with. Men like Mr. Dunmore are defeated by arguments every day of the week, in courts and newspapers, and it has never yet unbuilt a single thing they built. Instruments are harder." She picked up her bag. "The trust was short sixty-one million dollars. That sentence did all the work. It did not need my help, and it did not need my biography, and it certainly did not need his. Print that if you want a quotation. It is the only one the firm has."
The reporter printed it, in the anniversary piece the paper ran the following October, a long account of the affair's first year that was widely read and that treated the arithmetic as the protagonist it had been. Her account of the meeting, when it came, occupied one paragraph, sourced with the care of a woman who knew the libel laws of two states: multiple participants had confirmed, the paper said, that at the signing meeting the previous autumn, the chief executive had declined to shake the anchor lender's hand; the anchor lender had never referred to the incident, in any document or statement, then or since; and the facility had failed, days later, on a closing condition the company had three times delayed. The paragraph did its work in the city's drawing rooms for a season. In Loretta's office it was read once, by Fenn, who set the paper down and said: "A paragraph. Fifteen years of that company, and the whole thing fits in a paragraph, if you leave out every document. With the documents it takes a year and a consent order."