"The east side's schedule," Nadia said, "was built by a woman who knows what the tea is for. It can spare me twenty minutes on Mondays." She had her mother's plain way of finishing a subject. "Besides. I trained two new tellers this month, and do you know what the training manual says now, on the first page, before the cash handling? *Bring them tea while they wait. Ask what they came for before you decide what they are.* I told the class it wasn't a metaphor and they laughed, and then I told them the whole story, the tray and all, and they stopped laughing around the part with the contact sheets. One of them cried. I gave her the desk by the door for her first week โ she has the temperament for it, she asks people questions โ and do you know, Mrs. Stadler, she has already found one. A man of eighty, in last Tuesday, with a passbook from *1962*, come to ask if it was still good. It was still good. It is always still good, if somebody kept the book."
"Somebody always kept the book," Vera said. "That was never the difficulty. The difficulty was finding a building that would read it." She took the tea in both hands. "Go and manage your branch, Nadia. Spare me twenty minutes and not a minute more. I am training this institution to be left alone with its own honesty, and it does not help if its best people keep driving across town to supervise it."
The young auditor came down the executive stairs on the Monday following, in the middle of the morning, with a file under her arm and a question she had been carrying, by her own later account, since her first day.
Her name was Alicia Fenn. She was twenty-six, hired that autumn into the Office of Internal Audit under the reformed charter โ the office with the gilt name on the door upstairs, which she passed each morning on her way in and which had rearranged, quietly and completely, her understanding of what she had been hired to do. She had been trained, in her first weeks, on the bank's new standards, and the trainer had told the Stadler story the way institutions tell their founding stories, flattened into lesson. But she had also, on her own time and with the archivist's blessing โ Garrett Lindholm had given it with the gravity of a man admitting a reader to a chapel โ read the actual file: the memorandum's forty-two pages, the two appendices under their glass, Ostrander's notebook in its archival sleeve, Emil Stadler's paper tape figures reproduced in the report. And she had arrived, as the young do, at the conviction that the story's living remainder sat in a chair in the lobby on Monday mornings, and that there were things the file could not teach her, and that she had exactly one source for them and no guarantee of the source's patience.
She crossed the lobby with her file held like a shield and stopped at the chair by the second pillar, and Vera Stadler lowered the newspaper an inch and looked at her over it with an expression that was not unkind but was certainly an audit.
"Mrs. Stadler. I'm Alicia Fenn. I work in internal audit โ I started in October. I'm sorry to interrupt your paper. I was told โ I was told you might answer one question, if it was the right one."
"That depends entirely on the question," Vera said. "The bank has spent a century learning to ask me the wrong ones at great expense. Sit down, Miss Fenn. The chair is free, and I observe that you have been rehearsing in the corridor, which puts you ahead of most of my visitors. Ask."
Alicia sat. She did not open the file. "In training," she said, "they tell us the standards, and the charter, and the dissent procedure, and I've read all of it, and I believe in all of it, and it's all โ it's all procedure. It tells me what the office does. It doesn't tell meโ" She stopped, and found, to her credit, the honest version. "Next month I certify my first filing. A small one. My name goes on work that other people prepared, the way his did, and everyone keeps telling me it's routine, and I keep thinking about the door upstairs, and I would rather hear it from you than from the manual. What should I never sign, Mrs. Stadler?"
The lobby went on around them โ the Monday business, the queue, the light. Vera folded the newspaper once, exactly, and laid it aside, and gave the young woman the whole of her attention, which those who had received it described afterward as an experience like being read by a kind examiner: nothing missed, nothing hurried, no mercy asked or offered on the subject of arithmetic.