Upstairs, in an office whose window was too high to see the lobby floor, Garrett Lindholm was looking at the centennial contact sheets. Garrett was forty-five, the bank's executive vice president and chief administrative officer, a man whose competence was a kind of weather: even, thorough, impossible to argue with. He had run the merger integration in the year of the floods. He had run the systems conversion that had not lost a single account. The centennial had been given to him because everything difficult was given to him, and he had embraced it the way he embraced everything, as a problem of standards. The tower would be excellent. The celebration would be excellent. The photographs would be excellent.
The photographs were the problem. The bank had hired a firm to produce the centennial campaign — the lobby as it was, the lobby as it would be — and the creative director had sent down contact sheets from the previous Monday's shoot, and in eleven of the best frames, in the chair by the second pillar, sat a small, upright, unmistakably permanent old woman in a navy dress.
Garrett turned the sheets over one at a time. He was not a cruel man. He wanted it understood, later, that he had not been a cruel man, though he did not yet know there would be a later, or what it would require of him. He was a man who believed that institutions were judged by their surfaces because surfaces were all the public was given to judge, and that a bank which could not keep its own lobby in order would be forgiven nothing by anyone. He had already, in April, had the chairs by the pillars reviewed — facilities had suggested removing them entirely, the way airports remove benches to discourage lingering — and he had refused, because a bank lobby with nowhere to sit was a confession. He had refused the cheap solution. He was proud of having refused it. It did not occur to him that there might be solutions costlier than any he had yet imagined.
He picked up the phone and called down to corporate affairs. "The lady in the lobby," he said. "Mrs. Stadler. She's in the centennial frames again."
"We've spoken to her, Mr. Lindholm. She's very polite."
"I know she's polite. That's the difficulty. If she were making a scene we could—" He stopped. He disliked the shape of the sentence. "The board's photographers come back Thursday. The chairman does not need a squatter in his own centennial. I want her helped. Kindly, quietly, and finally. Whatever she wants, find out what it is and route it properly — an appointment with community relations, a meeting with the trust department, whatever fits. But by Thursday I want the chair empty, and I want it empty because she chose to leave it."
He set the receiver down, satisfied, as a man is satisfied when he has been firm and humane in the same instruction. Downstairs, the light moved on the marble. Nadia Kowalski, whose line had thinned, poured hot water into a bank mug and dropped in a tea bag, and carried it across the lobby to the chair by the second pillar, where Vera Stadler received it with both hands, as she always did, as if it were the first courtesy ever invented.
The machinery came downstairs at eleven o'clock, and it was, as Garrett Lindholm had specified, kind. It consisted of Betsy Halden, the director of community relations, who had a smile calibrated over twenty years of ribbon cuttings and complaint letters, and Anton Rybak, the head of building security, a broad, soft-spoken man who had been instructed — in Garrett's own phrase, relayed down the chain — that under no circumstances was this to look like an eviction.
"Mrs. Stadler," Betsy said, taking the chair beside her without being invited, which was part of the training, "we've noticed you've been joining us on Mondays, and we realized we've never properly asked — is there something the bank can help you with? Something that maybe hasn't found the right desk?"
"There is," Vera said. "I would like ten minutes with the chairman. I ask every week. The desk makes a note."
"Of course. And the note comes to us. The thing is, the chairman's calendar is managed months out, and for most requests there's a team that can help much faster. If it's a trust matter, our trust department—"
"It is not a trust matter."
"If it's about an account—"