"I did."
"Then the record will be complete, and completeness is all I have ever asked of anyone. Drink your tea." For Nadia had arrived, unasked, with two mugs, having read the meeting from the third window with a teller's genius for the shape of a transaction, and Vera received hers with the usual ceremony and nodded at the second mug until Eugene Ostrander took it, and the two of them sat in the chairs by the second pillar drinking tea in the bank they had both, in their opposite ways, refused to stop believing could be made to tell the truth.
"Emil would have liked you," Vera said, finally, with the air of a woman settling an account. "He had a weakness for late evidence. He said a true figure that arrives late is like a relative who missed the funeral but shows up for the reading of the will. Inconvenient — " and the driest possible smile crossed her face — "and absolutely essential, if the estate is to be honest."
The board met on a Tuesday, in the room on the top floor that still bore, over its door, the brass plate of the bank's first boardroom, salvaged from the 1924 furnishing and rehung by every generation since as a charm against forgetting what the building was for. Eleven directors sat around the table that had accommodated their predecessors through a depression, two wars, a flood, and the conversion. Fred Ames sat at its head with a file in front of him that no one else at the table had yet seen entire, and he began, without the usual courtesies of the agenda, in a way that made the corporate secretary look up from her minutes with her pen uncapped.
"Before the bank's business, the bank's history. In 1998 this institution converted from a mutual to a stock company on the basis of an appraisal that was falsified before filing, in the office of the president, on my father's initials. The chief internal auditor reported the falsification in writing and refused to certify it. His department was examined within the month, irregularities were found that would embarrass a summer intern, and he retired with the word attached to him and died with it there. His memorandum survived. Our own draft appraisal survived — my father, God rest him, ordered the honest pages retained, and I will leave each of you to construct the man who does that, because I have been constructing him since October and he gets no simpler. The state examiner who recomputed the two largest parcels kept his field notes for twenty-seven years and has delivered them to me in person. And the auditor's widow has been sitting in our lobby every Monday since March, asking to tell me all of this, while the bank made notes on slips and put the slips in a tray." He let that stand in the room a moment. "She has offered us terms for her cooperation, and I have accepted them, subject to this board. I want the terms voted today."
The silence that followed was of several distinct kinds, and Laura Benson, seated along the wall in the counsel's chair, catalogued them as they settled: the silence of the two directors who had been on the board in 1998 and were doing arithmetic of a personal kind; the silence of the outside directors, who had read Deanna Krol's column and the follow-up coverage and were hearing the sound of their own fiduciary duties clearing their throats; and the largest silence, that of the bank itself, eleven boxes of it, waiting downstairs in its own archive to be believed.
It was Marjorie Lindqvist who spoke first. She was the board's longest-serving outside director, a retired insurance executive with a reputation for asking the question everyone had agreed, by eye contact, not to ask. "The limitations period alone—" she began.
"—is a cathedral," said Fred. "Counsel's word. We can shelter in it. Mrs. Stadler is eighty-one; time is our attorney, if we choose to retain him. I have had that advice and I am not taking it, and I want the minutes to show why, in words I am choosing now so that nobody has to choose them for me later: because the exposure the lawyers can defend is not the exposure the bank actually has. The bank's exposure is that it is a century old this autumn and its centennial story is that it stole forty-six million dollars from its own depositors and framed the man who counted it. We can win that case for thirty years and lose the bank in all of them."