THE SKY’S THE LIMIT
MERCURE
He telephoned his mother and Claire-Josèphe and told them to call for him in the Rue Pillet-Will at five that afternoon. He stayed until four-forty-five, giving orders, running things as usual, and then sauntered downstairs. It was Saturday afternoon. There were only the inveterates in the board room watching the figures jump; the rest of the bank was beautifully dark and quiet. In the great circular lobby he found Daniel Cambo writing a letter while he waited for him.
‘Are you going to the bouts tonight?’ asked Cambo.
‘No. I’m driving down to Lourdes for the week end. You know how old women are—as my old lady gets older she gets more superstitious. I thought I’d give her a treat and show her the Basilica.’
‘It’s nice weather,’ said Cambo. ‘Don’t know what I’m going to do. Mme. Gerson is out of town. Just get drunk, I suppose.’
William stuck his head in at the board-room door. ‘Well, will you close up, Jacques?’
‘Yes.’
William looked up at the glass pane still sparkling on the first floor, outside Jules’s room. The luster was always on in that room while the bank was open, whether Jules was there or not. William nodded upstairs. ‘I forgot to turn off my brother’s light. Do you mind turning it out, Jacques?’ He freshened and said good-humoredly, ‘Well, never mind. I’ll do it myself.’ He disappeared by the private staircase and in a minute the light had gone off. Thus Cambo saw him coming down the main staircase again.
‘Can’t we get rid of you, eh?’
‘Sure,’ amiably responded William.
Daniel Cambo accompanied him to the footpath and found the car waiting there, an unusual thing, for William usually rejoined his car at one of the gates of Paris, to avoid the city traffic. William casually remarked, ‘The old lady wanted to drive down and pick me up, so I let her. Well, tootle-oo: see you Monday.’ His white teeth appeared in a charming smile.
An affectionate smile appeared on the merchant’s face, and he mimicked the nancy-boys with a wave of his hand, ‘Tootle-oo!’
They drove off.
When the police found that all the Bertillons were absent for three days, they came in and closed the bank, supposing it had failed; but as they were in the dark and were afraid of moving too fast, they simply put up a notice: Closed by Tax Authorities for Inspection of Books. Will Reopen on Friday.
* * *
Scene One Hundred and One: Post-mortem
No one knew anything, and the poor employees stood around in consternation like a family of fowls when an airplane passes overhead. It was discovered that no one knew anything about the bank. What was its name? Everyone called it the Banque Bertillon. It had a plate which said Bertillon Frères, but it was really the Banque Mercure, S.A. Some said the general manager was William Bertillon, some said Alphendéry, some Aristide Raccamond, some Jacques Manray, and one even said Urbain Voulou. As to the money behind the bank, some said it was Claire-Josèphe’s, some said Jules’s, and others thought that there was big anonymous money behind it, while others inclined to the idea that it was nothing but a branch of Legris and Company of Amsterdam.
This difference of opinion existed about every question of office and interest in the bank. This was what had excited Aristide Raccamond to his ‘reorganization,’ and this was what now roused the magistrates to admired frenzy. ‘How could you possibly work in a bank and not know who was the manager?’ they asked Jacques Manray. ‘You were there thirteen years.’
Manray respectfully but manfully replied, ‘Mr. Jules Bertillon was everything: he decided everything, everything was his. When he was away the bank seemed asleep, at least above stairs. What did it matter who we were? We had our jobs and we did them and we were paid for them. Everyone seemed to be in some secret, in Mr. Jules’s secret. We each had our secret. We all thought we were important: that’s why we were satisfied and asked no questions. Besides, it was his money, and that was how he ran things.’
‘What secrets are you jabbering about?’ asked the little, rude magistrate Dame.
Jacques flushed, and this pleased Dame and disposed him more favorably to Jacques. Jacques explained: ‘For example, Brossier, the young man who went abroad, was allowed to look after the gold safe, and only the Bertillons and Brossier knew what was in it. Only the Bertillons and I knew about certain arrangements with clients; only Mlle. Gentil and the Bertillons knew whose were the anonymous numbered accounts. In this way we all trusted Mr. Bertillon, because we knew one or other of his secrets. But he is all secrets; he has plenty and to spare. I am sure even his brother does not know them all.’
‘What were the secret functions of some of the others, for example?’
‘I don’t know. I only know they all had some secret up their sleeve and they thought they were intimate with the bank. We gossiped a little between ourselves, but we were all loyal to our job. What did it pay us in the end?’
The client-creditors gave bewildering testimony. They all had set ideas, all quite different about the functions of different officers of the bank, about where their accounts were really held, about the promises made by Bertillon to them and by them to Bertillon. They only all agreed that Jules Bertillon was the bank and that the rest was make-weight, except for two possible backers, Richard Plowman, the retired banker, and Alphendéry, said to represent banking interests.
The accountants gave complicated and conflicting statements about the accounts. Jacques Manray dumped some hundredweights of paper in Jules’s great room and gave the examiners the freedom of the files. Jules had never been stingy in the matter of records and had already deluged the courts with thousands of papers from different countries in the Parouart and Carrière cases. These were all partial records which appeared to be complete records, and the examiners had got foxier and foxier and then paler and paler, but at last they had come to no conclusion of any sort. They, after all, had a restricted knowledge of French financial business and almost no knowledge of business done on foreign exchanges. Thus, finding one of Jules’s companies incorporated in the State of Delaware, U.S.A., the judge said severely to Manray, ‘But you tell me Mr. Bertillon incorporated this company, of which you were an officer, in the U.S.A., and now I find it was incorporated in De-la-Ware. How do you explain that error?’
‘But Delaware is one of the U.S.A.!’
The judge scowled. ‘I will confirm that.’ He consulted a gazetteer, raised a surprised hand. ‘Tiens, tiens, tiens! So it is. I never heard of anything so extraordinary. Yes, you are quite right. To think of that!’ He laughed with contentment, thinking of the apéritif hour. ‘I must tell my friends that there is a state in the U.S.A. called De-la-Ware. Tiens!’
This convinced the magistrate that Jacques was telling the truth, and after that his sessions were agreeable.
Some of the clients tried to sue the employees for knowing the state of affairs and not immediately reporting it to the police; but this, it was explained, would only result in the world being turned upside down, and the complaints were dismissed.
As soon as a preliminary study of the papers was made, an immense peace settled on the accountants and liquidators. None of them had the least idea of the business, and they would certainly be still studying it in 1940. Besides, it began to resemble a treasure hunt. It appeared that Jules was not bankrupt. He had plenty of money. There was all the gold he had shown Aristide. He had often said to Campoverde, ‘I have gold here, there, and everywhere. I don’t know what to do with the stuff.’ Richard Plowman had himself seen gold in four different countries. Then apparently he had money sunk in and not withdrawn from his London, Amsterdam, Delaware, Luxemburg, and other affiliated corporations. They drew up a partial list:
Amstel Starr Corp.— 100,000 guilders fully paid up.
Anglo-Belgian Billbroking Co.—5,000,000 francs paid up.
Amsterdam Foreign Investments Co.�
��100,000 guilders paid up.
Edinburgh Nominees, Ltd.—£20,000 paid up.
Five Brothers Simla (Luxemburg) Holding Co.—5,000,000 francs.
Geneva International Economic Research Foundation—5,000,000 francs.
German Bondholders’ Overseas Insurance, S.A.—2,000,000 francs.
Leman Trust Co., Geneva—1,000,000 Swiss francs.
Lollard & Co., Amsterdam—200,000 guilders.
Leadenhall & Co., London—£20,000.
London Bank Deposits Insurance Co.—£20,000.
London Reinvestment Guarantee Banking Corp.—£20,000.
Delaware Blue Dome Holding Co.—$250,000.
There was no earthly reason why Jules should have run away. The above companies were solvent and, as far as they had ever been, in life.
As soon as this list was drawn up, each one of the creditors, who had been angry and discouraged, suddenly found himself to be a Hercules of retribution, a Tantalus of need. The lawyers swarmed round and everyone settled down to a splendid feast. They had a great deal of information by now.
Aristide’s badly drawn complaint against the bank was dismissed with the opening of the courts but the flight of Jules created still graver charges. Alphendéry was not a communist and the bank was not the agent of Red Russia. No widows and orphans had been ruined.
A pitiful story was told of a young girl awaiting marriage whose portion was lost, but that was Henrietta Lorée. Paleologos, who tried to sue Mlle. Bernard for not running to the police with her boss’s iniquities, was discovered to have bought himself two of Jules’s Swiss corporations to conceal his assets. Dr. Carrière, who was considered the nemesis of the bank, had an account in the bank, had never paid any serious consideration for his sterling contract, fraudulently kept a great quantity of capital and bonds abroad to avoid paying taxes, and kept his accounts in Amsterdam. He was the account Brussels A1, which thrilled the accountants every month when the statements were sent out: he paid nothing for this service. Aristide Raccamond himself had a corporation formed in London, inoperative and with small capital, from which he pretended to pay himself half his salary every month, in order to avoid income tax. Arturito MacMahon before his death regularly received ten thousand francs a month from Jules for sending his Argentine friends to the bank. Comtesse de Voigrand sent her coupons to Switzerland by the bank’s messenger, in order to receive payment there and avoid French taxes.
But these were only a few of the discoveries. Beyond them lay a sea of mysteries that they had little hope or desire ever to solve.
The reason for the mystery lay not only in the incapacity of the judges, or in the bounty of evidence, but also in a few little touches added by rational members of the bank’s staff.
Newchurch, the loyal London accountant, at William’s request a few days before the debacle, took the fifty odd books remaining in the London contre-partie account and deposited them for five years, rent paid in advance, in a great London warehouse, under the name of ‘John Murray.’ Newchurch then threw away the key and the receipt into the Thames, ‘so that I won’t be tempted to remember anything about it,’ he explained to William, ‘or anything else improper. In five years they’ll take them out, find them indecipherable, not know to whom they belong, as the name is a fiction, advertise them, and burn them. It’s easier.’
As soon as Theodor Bomba heard that Jules had been away from the bank five days and that William was not to be found and that the William Bertillon plane was missing from its hangar, he judiciously took home and burned every paper, book, and receipt, every calendar, blotting paper, scribbling block, and check stub in the London office. He left nothing there but the certificate of incorporation, showing that fifty thousand pounds had been paid up.
Jules, in a week-end trip to Amsterdam, made two weeks before he left, had taken the account slips, showing the buying and selling of gold by the bank through Van Eyk of Amsterdam, and taken out and destroyed all the slips which showed the sale of gold; so that when the accountants came to look at that, it appeared as if the bank had millions in gold in vaults somewhere in the world.
Mlle. Gentil, of her own accord, destroyed the cards referring to the account held fraudulently abroad by the Comtesses de Voigrand and de Chaise, Mesdames de Sluys-Forêt, Eloth, and Margaret Weyman, and Messieurs Dreyer, Cambo, Plowman, and others.
Jacques Manray, on the advice of his wife, threw away a number of letters complaining of the late delivery of stocks and others insinuating that the bank had had to buy back these same stocks, and other things of the sort.
William took away the books of nearly all the private corporations set up by the brothers for their own family and private purposes. Those two he left showed deposits of nearly five million dollars in the Delaware Blue Dome and the Geneva Research Foundation.
Jules destroyed a number of letters that no one had ever seen, not even William. Alphendéry, at the news, tore into little pieces and gave to Léon’s office manager to burn at home his own personal analyses of the bank’s short positions, over a series of years.
Fifteen millions of francs were on the books of the airplane company just formed by Jules, Jean de Guipatin, Maître Olympe, and others. This was intended to unite the few pitiful obscure French airplane companies then existing into one large company which was to supplemen the inadequate capacity of the larger producers and eventually sell out to the French War Department—and hold them up, of course! Five of these millions had actually been paid in by Jules, from the bank, not merely by a ‘transfer on the books.’ The Spanish oil company was actually under way at the time the bank closed, with a capital of fifteen million francs.
How to believe that with all this money lying round, the bank was bankrupt, Jules really in flight, and the creditors really out of pocket when they paid their lawyers?
Madame de Sluys-Forêt insisted on the judge calling in Ras Berri, the seer, as a witness; he was now doing a rushing business ‘and must know something about a thing so sympathetic to the spiritual world as gold.’ The chambers were now thronged with both credulous and creditor. Mountains of gold gleamed in the dreams of this moneyed rag, tag, and bobtail by day and by night. By night they thought up new persons mysteriously connected with Jules, and by day they pursued them.
Thus, Daniel Cambo was interrupted while he was congratulating himself that he had never put a centime in Jules’s bank and marched off to the magistrate, for the Princesse Bérésina had had a vision, in which Cambo appeared as the secret villain and Bertillon’s agent. Richard Plowman had to dry his morbid tears and try to convince the magistrate that in his last visit to England to visit his daughters, he had not also taken the opportunity to conceal Jules’s assets for him. Some highborn and cultured ladies came down to scream against Jacques Manray for his complicity, and some very statesmanlike gentlemen pilloried Mlles. Dalbi and Bernard, for the sake of their lost money. Now everyone whispered that Jacques Carrière had made Jules lose his nerve and that if he would withdraw his claim, Jules would return and pay them off; again, some argued that Jules’s later conduct showed Carrière to have been perfectly justified and as innocent as the poor young girl who had lost her dowry in the bank.
But soon, since there was no one responsible to question and the facts of the lawsuits against Jules and the details of all that preceded the closing of the bank began to run together and were woven into one dirty mass of conjecture, anxiety, doubt, self-excuse, greed, and recrimination, the supposed guilt of the Bertillons faded relatively, and the fierce well-fed hatreds of the clients began to turn against each other.
The Belgian clients hated the French clients who had an unfair advantage; the French clients were indignant that the Dutch clients had been paid off one hundred per cent; the English clients pursued the Belgian clients for trying to sue in two countries at the same time; the Swiss clients complained that no one listened to them, until it was found out that the
‘Swiss’ clients were an assortment of the French, Belgian, and Dutch clients who kept their money abroad.
All the clients banded themselves together in national protective associations, and thus the next European war began in little.
When one day someone had the new hypothesis that Legris and Company were the real criminals, and Jules was only a cover for their operations, the national protective associations began to make complaints against Legris. Most of them got hopelessly trapped in some incompatibility of claim or procedure in the tangle of countries and interests.
Within a few days, the news came that the family in its entirety was in Constantinople and moving east. The employees, poor things, taken unawares, believing in Jules to the last, despite the many rumors and the scandal created by Carrière and Raccamond, were still more cruelly harassed by the bullying examining and committing magistrates and police officials. Their salaries, jobs, and the work of their years in the bank were all gone. The news, after Jules’s sensational and daring gambling, his speculations, his splendid show, his lone-hand game, his ineffable dudery, the lavishness of his domestic and business establishments, created a great stir. The police lighted on another nest of documents, avowing and mystifying, which they saw would keep them going for three years. The managers of two of the branches (London and Brussels) refused to close their offices or to allow it to be said they were bankrupt, for they had money to cover all their debts. Jacques Manray stayed downstairs to see the crash through, in hope of getting the six months’ salary due to him from the liquidators: Urbain Voulou fled the first morning when he came to work and found a policeman guarding the door. All the other employees bestowed themselves as best they could, with relatives, some abroad, to avoid questioning, not because they had anything to tell but because they feared the miseries of the boring and interminable procedure of examination and the rough airs of the police officers.
House of All Nations Page 88
