Colby looked at Ostrander again, and this time what he was looking for was a door of his own, some side exit in the conversation where a manager could step out and return with a better version of the morning. Ostrander gave him nothing. Ostrander, who had sat in the glass office and listened to a carpenter describe the lobby like a failed inspection, had spent his own night awake, and it showed.
"The supplement," Colby said at last, quietly, "is a local initiative. It's within my discretion as branch manager to manage flow. The region has seen our numbers and not complained." He gathered himself. "Danielle, I understand yesterday was uncomfortable. These situations — visualization, client segmentation, every major institution — "
"One more question," Dani said. "The letters. The relationship review letters. I've handed them to people at that door for two months, people holding them like parking tickets on their own money. Whose signature is on them? Because people ask me, and I say the bank, and I have started to think that word might be doing more work than it's entitled to."
Colby set his travel mug down on the curved desk, precisely, in the center of a coaster, and in that small exact gesture Dani watched him understand, fully and finally, what she was really asking. She was not asking about policy. She was building a record, in front of a witness, the way a client of forty years built one out of a pencil and the back of a term sheet. The student was learning the deeper lesson of the building, and it was not the one in the binder.
"We'll discuss this in my office," he said.
"No," Dani said. "I don't think we will. I think we'll discuss it wherever the region wants to discuss it, when they ask, and they are going to ask, because Mr. Briggs's conditions are in writing now, and my answer is going to be the same in every room." She picked up her tablet. Her hands were steady enough to surprise her. "I'll be at the door. There's a lady coming at nine about a letter she doesn't understand. I'm going to seat her, and get her coffee, and find her a person. If that's outside my discretion, you can put it in writing too."
Alison Greer read Floyd Briggs's five conditions on a Thursday morning in an office on the eleventh floor of the bank's headquarters, with the river doing its gray work far below the glass, and she read them twice, which was her habit with documents that were going to cost her a quarter.
She was fifty-two and had come up through credit, which meant she had been trained to find the soft spot in a set of numbers the way other people find the stud in a wall, by knocking. She had known Floyd Briggs twenty years, not warmly, not socially, but in the way of two people who had sat across from each other in downturns and both behaved. She knew he did not bluff. She knew he did not threaten what he would not do, and did not do what he had not first written down. The term sheet with the pencil lines had been scanned and sent up as an attachment, and she found, looking at the carpenter's capitals, that she believed every word of it the way she believed weather reports from people who work outdoors.
Her first act was not to call Colby Strand. Her first act, and she would think about the order of these acts later, was to ask for the ombuds line's raw feed.
The bank's client ombuds office took the calls and messages that clients made when the branch had finished being helpful. Its records flowed, by design, through a review queue, and the review queue had been, for a year, partly administered by the branches themselves, a modernization that had been described in rollout meetings as trust. Alison had approved that modernization. She remembered approving it, in this office, with this view, for reasons of efficiency that had sounded, at the time, like the opposite of a warning.
The raw feed for Riverside did not match the branch's reported complaint log. She laid them side by side on her desk with a ruler, the way her mother had taught her to compare price lists, and read down the columns.
The reported log for two quarters showed nine complaints. The raw feed showed forty-seven messages that any honest clerk would have filed as complaints, wearing, in the branch's coding, a costume. Directional inquiry. Wayfinding. Client sought location information. Alison read the messages themselves, all forty-seven, with her door shut and her assistant instructed, in a voice that brooked no footnotes, to hold everything.