"You should never sign what you have not recomputed," she said. "That is the technique, and any competent instructor can give it to you, and it is not what you came downstairs for. What you came for is this. You should never sign what you would not be willing to have read aloud, in this room, in twenty-seven years, to your own widow. That is the whole of the profession, Miss Fenn. The rest is arithmetic.
"Understand what a signature is. It is not an opinion, and it is not a courtesy, and it is not โ forgive the century โ a gesture of teamwork. It is a man or a woman saying, to strangers not yet born: *I was here, I saw this, it was so.* Paper outlives the people who sign it. That is its horror, and it is its entire use. The men who ruined my husband were not fools, and they were not, most of them, monsters. They were men who believed that the paper would keep their secret as faithfully as it kept their figures โ that ink was loyal. It is not. Ink is only *patient*. It waits in drawers and boxes and other banks' vaults, at eleven dollars a year, for a reader with the standing to be angry. Everything in this building that finally told the truth was a piece of paper that had been written truly by somebody who knew it would outlive him โ a memorandum, a routing slip a guilty man could not bring himself to burn, a notebook copied out at a farmhouse table by a boy who had just signed the false thing and already knew it. Emil understood that at twenty-two, carrying his books in a strap: you write the true thing on the paper *while you can*, because you will not always be there to say it, and the paper will be there when the saying is needed.
"So when the filing comes to you next month, Miss Fenn, and it is routine, and everyone is waiting, and the numbers were prepared by pleasant people senior to you โ you will do the arithmetic. All of it, even the parts that bore you, *especially* the parts that bore you; dishonesty in a bank does not live in the dramatic pages, it lives in the appendix, in the parcel nobody recomputes because the arena announcement is in everybody's newspaper and surely somebody has priced it in. And if the figures are true, you will sign, and your signature will be a stone in the building that your grandchildren can stand on. And if they are not true, you will write down what they should be, through channels, by the book, in full, with your name on the memorandum โ and you will keep your workpapers, lawful and complete, and you will not spend them in anger, and you will not surrender them for safekeeping to the people they describe." Her voice, which had been level as a plumb line, softened at the last into something almost gentle. "And then you will go home and eat your supper, and you will not be afraid. Because you will have done the only thing the dead can ask of the living in a place like this. You will have made the truth *findable*."
Alicia Fenn sat very still. "And if nobody finds it?" she said at last. "In my โ in my lifetime. If nobody ever asks?"
"Then nobody asks," said Vera Stadler, "and you will have lost nothing but a quiet I promise you is overrated, and somewhere in a drawer there will be one more true thing in the world than the world had before you signed it." She picked up her newspaper again, and unfolded it, and looked at the young auditor over the top of it with eyes that were, at eighty-two, as clear as anything in the building. "You are thinking of belief, Miss Fenn. Put it out of your calculations. The truth does not need to be believed in my lifetime, or in yours. It waited twenty-seven years in a box across the street for this bank to ask, and it was not diminished by the waiting, and neither โ I say this as the person who did the waiting โ was I. It does not need to be believed in your lifetime. It needs to be findable in somebody's. Now go upstairs and recompute your filing. And Miss Fenn โ when you pass the door with his name on it, you may tell it I said the office is in working order. He would have wanted the report in writing, but he will have to accept it as given. Some of us keep the book. Some of us, it turns out, *are* the book โ and the reading of us is not finished yet."