"Across the street." For the first time since she had come upstairs, Vera Stadler smiled, and it was not a gentle smile, though it was not a cruel one either; it was the smile of a woman who has kept a secret well and enjoyed the keeping exactly as much as it deserved. "In a safe-deposit box at the Prairie Trust, in my own name, rented in 1999 for eleven dollars a year, which I have paid every year since, in cash, at a window, because I like the receipt. My husband's evidence has sat for twenty-six years in the vault of your competitor, Mr. Ames, fifty yards from this window, earning its keep by existing. I visit it twice a year. I check the seals. Auditors' habits are contagious, like everything else in a long marriage."
Fred Ames stood up, slowly, and went to the window. The Prairie Trust's limestone cornice was visible across Locust Street, solid as a proverb. He had walked past its vault his whole career without once wondering what it held for him.
"You said the building hasn't asked," he said. "You've waited twenty-six years for the building to ask. And now you're in my office, and the centennial is in seven weeks, and you have given me โ us โ a deadline. Why now, Mrs. Stadler? Why is now the asking?"
"Because now the building is going to be *destroyed*, Mr. Ames." She said it without heat, as a fact of engineering. "Emil said wait until it asks. A demolition is a kind of asking. When this lobby comes down, the members who built it will be finally and completely forgotten โ there will be a plaque in a basement, as I believe the renderings promise, and plaques are where institutions keep the people they have finished with. I will not have it. So I have set the terms, and they are these, and they are not negotiable, because I have had twenty-six years to negotiate them with myself and the bargaining is done. Before the centennial, the bank opens its own archive โ its copy, the file your father's office kept โ and reads what it did with my husband's memorandum. If the archive tells the truth, I will know the building can be trusted to hear the rest, and I will put the forty-two pages and the ledger on the table myself, gladly, in this room or in the lobby, wherever serves. If the bank will not open its own file โ " she rose, and gathered the handbag over her forearm, and was once more the small, upright, unhurried figure of the chair by the second pillar, "โ then I will read the memorandum aloud at your celebration, in the lobby the members built, on a Monday, into whatever microphones your century provides. And Mr. Ames โ " she paused at the door, and looked back at him, and her voice when it came was almost kind โ "I do not think you are your father. I have watched you in the newspapers for six years deciding it. But a name over a door is not a portrait, Mr. Ames. It is a signature. And sooner or later, somebody brings the paper back to be read."
Laura Benson had been general counsel of Heartland Bancshares for four years, and she had taken the job, after eleven years at a Chicago firm, for a reason she stated at her interview and had repeated to no one since: she was tired of representing institutions whose first question was always *what can we say*, and she wanted to work for one old enough, and dull enough, to ask *what is true*. The board had liked the answer enormously. She thought of it often, in the years after, the way you think of a line in a letter you wrote to someone who has since become a stranger.
Fred Ames called her at seven the next morning, before the bank opened, and asked her to come in early, and when she arrived he was already at his desk with the photocopied page squared in front of him and the look of a man who has been reading it, on and off, all night.
"I'm going to tell you something that is privileged in every sense I can make it," he said, "and then I'm going to ask you to do something the chairman of this bank should have asked somebody to do in 1998. The conversion file. The complete conversion file โ the appraisal, the plan, the board minutes, the correspondence with the regulators. It exists?"
"It exists," Laura said. "It's in the records center, off-site. Conversion records are permanent retention. I can have it up by Thursday."