The syndicate's demand changed the terms of the circle. It specified, with the pedantry that lawyers bring to the second asking of anything, that the confirmation be computed independently by the trustee from the trustee's own records, that the liability side be priced at current fulfillment cost by contract class, and that the letter be signed by a trust officer with personal knowledge of the computation. The demand was addressed to Fairhaven, as the term sheet required, but it was copied to the trustee, which the term sheet also required, and it landed on Leland Boyce's desk on a Wednesday with the particular weight that paper acquires when it is addressed to a man in two capacities at once and signed by people who lend five hundred and forty million dollars.
Boyce read it twice. He was not a stupid man, and he was not, in his own accounting of himself, a dishonest one, and both of those facts mattered to what followed, because the computation his bank now performed — performed in earnest, over four days, by two senior trust officers working from the bank's own records and a pricing survey of fulfillment costs the bank commissioned because it discovered, to its own discomfort, that it did not possess one — was the first time the fraction had ever been assembled by anyone whose duty ran to the beneficiaries rather than to the borrower. The trust officers were not told what number was expected. They were told to build both sides of the ratio and divide. One of them, a woman who had administered pre-need accounts for twenty-two years and had signed restatements for Fairhaven for a decade of that time, would say later, in a deposition she gave with great care, that she had known by the second day what the division was going to produce, and that she had checked her work three times, not because she doubted it but because she understood, as she put it, that the number was going to change the weather, and she wanted it to be the number that could stand in the rain.
On the fourth day the computation was complete, and it was brought to Boyce's office in a folder, and he sat with it alone a long time. The letter, as drafted by his own officers and reviewed by the bank's counsel — counsel the bank engaged for the purpose, from a firm with no other Fairhaven business, on Boyce's own instruction, which surprised his general counsel considerably — stated the position of the Georgia pre-need trust of the Fairhaven Memorial Group as of the most recent month-end, computed as the syndicate's term sheet required. Assets held. Contracts outstanding. Current cost of fulfillment. Ratio.
Seventy-one percent.
Boyce's first instinct, which he examined in himself with the honesty available to a man alone in a room with a folder, was to telephone Wesley Dunmore. Fifty years of friendship stood behind the instinct, and a wedding, and godchildren, and the entire architecture of two intertwined careers. He did not telephone. What stopped him was not virtue, exactly, and he would not have claimed it was. What stopped him was the letter's own arithmetic, which he had now seen assembled by his own officers from his own bank's records, and the knowledge — professional, inescapable, and about thirty years too late — that if the number was seventy-one, then every letter he had ever signed at ninety-eight had been signed in a voice he had borrowed, and that signing this one, the true one, was the last available method of distinguishing himself from the borrowing. He also understood, because he was a banker, that the demand had been copied to the syndicate, that the computation now existed in his bank's workpapers whether he signed it or not, and that a trustee who declines to sign his own officers' arithmetic has not suppressed the arithmetic. He has only chosen his position in its story.