"Forty-six million," he said. "Give or take a clerk's honesty. That is what the number costs them. Four thousand households, Vera. Some of them are men I play pinochle with. Some of them are widows with four hundred dollars in a passbook that represents a husband's whole overtime life. Their share comes to perhaps eleven thousand dollars each, at the true figure — a roof, a furnace, a year of college. At the appraised figure it comes to a letter thanking them for their loyalty and a right to buy back, at a discount they cannot afford, a bank they already own outright. And the difference — " he touched the tape with one finger, lightly, the way you touch a sleeper's wrist — "the difference buys the Ames trust its controlling comfort, and buys every officer at that table a retirement with a boat in it. And in six weeks they will bring me the certificate, and they will expect my signature underneath, because my signature is the one that tells the members the number is honest. That is what the signature is *for*, do you see. It is the only product my office manufactures. One honest word: *certified*."
"What will you do?" she asked, and was ashamed of the question even as she asked it, because she had known this man since he was twenty-two and carried his books in a strap, and she knew precisely what he would do, and she was asking only to hear whether it would cost what she feared.
"I will write it all down," Emil said. "First the memorandum — through channels, by the book, every figure on the tape, so that no one can later say the board was not told. And I will decline to certify. And then, Vera—" He looked at her across the wreckage of five Sundays. "Then they will do what they will do. I want you to understand that I know what it will be. A man who refuses the one signature that matters becomes a problem of personnel. They will find my irregularities. There are always irregularities; I have eleven miles of someone else's mileage in my conscience already, I expect. They will keep my pension, because they are not thieves of the common kind, and they will take my name, because that is the currency they deal in." He folded the end of the tape once, exactly, and weighted it with his cup. "I am not a brave man. Your brother is a brave man; he jumped out of airplanes. I am a man with a religion of paper. And my religion says the signature is the sacrament and you do not perform it falsely, not for a bank, not for a boat, not for the quiet of your old age. If I sign the false thing, then everything I ever certified was theater, and four thousand people were robbed with my name as the lock on the door. I would rather be robbed of mine."
He wrote the memorandum over the following week, at the office, in office hours, through channels, by the book. He made Vera one promise and extracted one in return, at the same kitchen table, with the tape gone to the file and the garden dark. His promise: that he would keep his workpapers lawful and complete, and bring them home openly when the time came, and hide nothing from her or from any future reader, including the parts that made him look tired or afraid. Hers: that she would keep them, and not spend them in anger, and not let any man — including, he said, with the ghost of the driest humor either of them managed that autumn, *especially including any man named Ames* — persuade her to surrender them for safekeeping. "Paper outlives the people who sign it," he said. "That is its horror and its entire use. When I am gone, the tape will still say what it says. Men are persuadable. Widows, in my experience, are not. I am leaving my arithmetic in the custody of the least persuadable person in Iowa."
Eleven days after the memorandum went into the file, the external auditors arrived a month early, and the rest of it unfolded as he had foretold at the kitchen table, almost to the wording, as if the bank were reading from his script — which, in a way, was Emil Stadler's final professional satisfaction, and the one he mentioned, dry as dust, on the evening he came home with the letter: *They are right on schedule, Vera. Say what you like about this institution. Its operations are very sound.*