The Chair by the Second Pillar

"It is not about an account. I closed my account in this bank in 2001, Mrs. Halden, in this room, at that desk." She pointed, precisely, at the third teller window, where a young man was counting twenties. "I bank across the street now. I have banked across the street for twenty-four years. I come here on Mondays for one reason, and the reason is sitting in the big office. Ten minutes. I am not asking for his morning. I am asking for ten minutes of it, and I will keep asking until the building comes down, and then I will ask in the plaza, on a folding chair I bring myself. I have priced the chair. It is not expensive."

Anton Rybak looked at the marble with great interest. Betsy Halden's smile held, which was its professional function, but something behind it recalculated. In her folder, under the heading *Stadler, V. — lobby*, there were options: a meeting with community relations (offered, declined, weekly, since April), a letter from the bank's ombudsman (sent, unanswered), a visit from the chaplain the bank kept on retainer for difficult anniversaries (declined, with thanks and a note in Vera's hand that the chaplain should save himself for people in trouble). Betsy had one option left, and it was the one Garrett had asked for: a comfortable room, a senior officer, tea that did not come in a mug.

"Would you at least come up and sit somewhere more comfortable while I make some calls?" she said. "There's a lounge on the second floor. Quieter. I can reach out to the chairman's office directly, from there, while you wait."

"No," Vera said, pleasantly. "This chair is where I wait. It was here before the tower was a drawing, and I intend it to be here after. But you may make your calls from anywhere you like, Mrs. Halden. And since you are going upstairs—" She opened the handbag in her lap. "—you may take him this."

What she took out first was an envelope, heavy stock, cream, of the kind that arrives announcing an occasion. She drew out the card inside and held it so that both of them could read it, though she looked at neither of them while they did. THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF HEARTLAND BANCSHARES, the card said, REQUESTS THE HONOR OF YOUR COMPANY AT THE CELEBRATION OF ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF HEARTLAND BANKING. Below, engraved, in the space the bank's printers left for names: *Mrs. Emil Stadler, and the families of the founding depositors.*

"You see," Vera said, "I am not a squatter in your photographs, and I am not a member of the public who has wandered in off Locust Street. I am on your list. Your bank wrote to my house and asked for the honor of my company." She put the card back in the envelope with care. "I accepted. This is me, accepting. I am early for the celebration, that is all. I am early by some weeks, in a chair, being polite. When your chairman keeps an appointment his own bank mailed out, I will go home and not trouble the photographers again."

"And the ten minutes," Betsy said faintly. "What are the ten minutes for, Mrs. Stadler? If I take a request upstairs, I have to say what it's for."

"Then say this." From the handbag she took a second sheet — a photocopy, gray at the edges, of a page that had been typed on a machine with a ribbon. At the top it bore a file stamp in faded violet ink: HEARTLAND MUTUAL SAVINGS — OFFICE OF INTERNAL AUDIT — and a date in October of 1998, and a word that had been old-fashioned even then: MEMORANDUM. Beneath, in the formal arrangement of such documents, the heading lines: TO: The Board of Directors. FROM: E. Stadler, Chief Internal Auditor. RE: The Conversion Appraisal — Irregularities in the Valuation of Member Assets. And below that, the first line of the body, which Betsy Halden read standing in the middle of the lobby with the bank's noon traffic beginning to move around her, and which she would remember later in the review room, reading it into a microphone, as the moment the bank's century changed its subject:

*It is my duty to report that the appraisal upon which the members of this mutual are being asked to surrender their ownership does not describe the bank they own.*

"That is the first page," Vera said. "There are forty-one more. They are not in my handbag and they are not in this building. Take the copy upstairs, Mrs. Halden. Show the chairman the stamp. He will know the hand that typed it — his father's office filed it, once. And tell him Mrs. Stadler is in the chair by the second pillar, and that Mondays are my husband's audit days, and that I am prepared to be patient exactly until the centennial — after which I will read all forty-two pages aloud, in this room, to anyone the bank invites."