She photographed nothing. She took no copies. She closed box four, signed the center's register in a hand that was almost her own, and drove back to Locust Street with the bank's own gray volume on the passenger seat beside her like a passenger, and she considered — through four traffic lights, with the discipline of eleven years of practice — the question that would occupy the middle of her life for some months to come: whether her client was this bank as it wished to be described, or this bank as it was written down.
She put the gray volume on his desk at six o'clock, when the building had emptied down to its cleaners and its chairman, and she told him all of it without preamble, the way she would want it told to her: the draft appendix, the filed appendix, the arena parcels carried at a third of their value, this building written down to a demolition liability, and the routing slip, with his father's initials, instructing the substitution and the retention of the honest pages.
"Retain the superseded pages," Fred said. He had the slip under his fingers, not holding it, exactly; touching it, the way you touch a scar to confirm it is yours. "He kept them. Why would he keep them?"
"I have considered that question for four traffic lights and most of an afternoon," Laura said. "The charitable answer is conscience — that some part of him wanted the truth preserved somewhere in the building he was robbing. The professional answer is leverage or carelessness. The true answer is unknowable, and I advise you to notice something, Fred: it does not matter. The slip proves knowledge and direction. Whoever's conscience it was, the office of the president ordered the swap, and the swap is the fraud, and everything downstream of it — the vote, the allocations, the trust's position, the stock this bank trades on today — descends from those substituted pages. Mrs. Stadler's memorandum is, in its substance, correct. I have spent the day hoping to be able to tell you otherwise, and I cannot."
"How much of her forty-six million can our own paper verify?"
"Approximately forty-one of it, from the appraisal differences alone. The rest would be in the loan-book discounting, which the widow's papers likely document and ours — " she lifted the gray volume a half inch and let it settle, "— ours hint at. Her husband was right, Fred. To within the width of his profession's pride, the man was simply right, and the bank called it irregularities and put him on the street with his pension and his ruined name, and then this institution hung his successors' portraits in a corridor and held a prayer breakfast."
Fred was quiet for a while. The office had gone the color of late October, the river light leaving the windows. "Tell me my options," he said at last. "All of them. Including the ones you expect me to refuse. Especially those."
She had prepared them the way litigators do, as a landscape. "One: the cathedral. Limitations, laches, the finality of a closed regulatory proceeding, twenty-seven years of settled expectations. We say nothing; we shred nothing — I will not be party to shredding, and you should hear me say that plainly — but we answer nothing, we volunteer nothing, and we bury an eighty-one-year-old woman in process until the centennial is over and the news cycle is somebody else's. It would probably work, in the narrow sense. Institutions survive worse than this every year, by exactly this method. Two: quiet remediation. We approach Mrs. Stadler, we settle with her privately — her husband's name cleared by a confidential instrument, a payment structured as respect — and we let the members' claim die unborn, on the theory that forty-one hundred households who never knew will never know. It would be cheaper. It would also be a second fraud laid over the first like a cloth over a table, and you would feel the shape of it every time you sat down to eat, for the rest of your life, and so would I. Three—"
"Three," Fred said.