by Howard Fast
“Oh?”
“ ‘Fuck you, Christopher.’ No. I should have been explicit. I should have said, ‘Take the hotel and shove it up your ass.’ You’re absolutely right, old sport. We dean house. And don’t write off the planes. We’ll cut every expense to the bone, reschedule the ships, and concentrate on the airline and the store. We’re not licked yet, old buddy. Hell, for two grubby kids from Fisherman’s Wharf, we haven’t done too badly. We’re two interesting citizens, Levy and Lavette. Don’t underestimate us.”
“We’ve had our moments,” Mark agreed, managing a smile.
Stephan Cassala played with his son, Ralph. The little boy, in his woolly Dr. Dentons, with his black curly hair and huge black eyes, was almost too perfect to be true. Stephan always regarded him with amazement, as if he were seeing him for the first time. At six o’clock in the morning, the child would crawl into his bed and awaken him. It was a wonderful way to wake up. “Raphalo,” Stephan would growl softly. The little boy would dissolve in laughter. Then the two of them would crawl around the bedroom floor, growling and laughing at each other, while Guinea watched happily. For the past six months, life had been good to her. She was a giving soul and had accepted Stephan’s terrible grief at the death of Martha Levy. They had been childhood friends, and he had the right to grieve. Then, when his grief was over, he had been kinder to her than ever before. She had married a good man, she told her mother.
Now, on this day, Stephan played with Ralph, was late for breakfast, and had only a cup of coffee with Maria, who was lamenting the fact that he should leave the house without nourishment, without the strength to take him through the day. His father brooded over the morning paper, oblivious to the world. At half past seven, they were in the car, driving north to San Francisco. It was a morning like any other morning.
In the car, without looking up from his paper, Anthony said, “Over five hundred banks.”
“What?”
“Closed. Destroyed.”
“It happens.”
“It could happen to us,” Anthony said.
“Not likely.”
More or less, it was the same conversation they had every morning; the difference this morning lay in the crowd that had gathered in front of the Bank of Sonoma on Montgomery Street. It was only nine o’clock, still a half-hour before opening, yet there were more than a hundred quiet, worried looking men and women in front of the bank, and the crowd was increasing. Anthony and Stephan pushed through into the bank, where Frank Massetti, Anthony’s son-in-law and the manager, greeted them unhappily.
“It looks like a run,” he said.
“Why?” demanded Anthony. “Name of God, why?”
“Didn’t you see the paper?”
“So two banks close on the Peninsula? What it has to do with us?”
Stephan said, “Stop arguing. There’s a panic, pop, and that’s that. Do you want to pay?”
“I die before I stop paying,” Anthony said dramatically. “Is the money mine? We are a bank, and I will pay every penny.”
“Pop, think about it. We’re in no condition to pay every penny. No bank is. We have total deposits that amount to about sixty million. We have close to forty five million in loans, and we can’t call those loans today–or tomorrow–or the next day.”
“Why not?”
“My God, pop, don’t ask me why not. You know. We got eight hundred thousand with Consuelo Oil. There’s no better or more honest man than Sol Consuelo, but he hasn’t got twenty cents in cash. And that’s only one case. This whole damn country is hanging on a shoestring. You can’t call a mortgage today. You just can’t.”
“How much cash we got on hand?” Anthony asked Massetti.
“Sixty thousand.”
“And in the account at Crocker?”
“One hundred and fifty thousand.”
“And with Giannini?”
“Seventy-five thousand.”
“All right. We got ten thousand with the First National in Chicago and fifteen thousand at the National City in New York. You wire them immediately, now. Stephan,” he said to his son, “you go to Crocker and get the hundred fifty thousand and then take the seventy-five thousand from Giannini. We have over three hundred thousand cash. Nine-thirty, Frank, you open the doors and start paying.”
“Pop, please,” Stephan begged him, “think. There’s no way Crocker will give us a hundred and fifty thousand this morning.”
“It’s our money on deposit there. They got to pay.”
“No, they don’t!”
“Are you crazy?” Anthony shouted.
“Pop, please, will you think this thing through. It’s almost nine-thirty. Crocker’s a big bank, but how much cash do you think they have to open with? Maybe a hundred and fifty thousand, maybe two hundred thousand. They don’t have to pay it out to me. If they give me fifty thousand, I’ll be lucky.”
“No, sir. They give you what we got on deposit there.”
“Papa, papa, you know better. We don’t have to open at nine-thirty. We can post a sign saying we’re opening at noon today.”
“No! No! Is this how I built a name? A reputation? Is this what I am, Anthony Cassala? I take the sweat and blood of a poor working man, and now I say to him, ‘Go to hell! You can’t have the money you work for’!”
“For God’s sake, give me three or four hours.”
“No! Frank,” he said to Massetti, “it is half-past nine. Open the doors. We make payment in full.”
At the Crocker Bank, the manager told Stephan, “We know what you’re up against, Steve, but this damn thing is a disease, a contagion. It’s ten o’clock and we’ve put out fifty thousand dollars. Not a run–yet. But if I give you a hundred and fifty thousand–considering that we still have that, I’ll start a run. All we need is one customer told that we’re out of cash.”
“You’ve been out of cash before. Every bank has.”
“Yes, but not in nineteen thirty. Look, I’ll let you have twenty-five thousand.”
“Oh, no. No. That’s like signing a death warrant.”
“For God’s sake, why doesn’t your father close his doors?”
“Because he’s crazy. Because he’s a man of honor. How the hell do I know? The point is, he won’t close his doors. Now what do I have to do, get down on my knees and plead with you? Take it for granted. I’m on my knees and pleading. Right down the street, something that I gave my life to is being destroyed. I’m begging for help.”
“Thirty thousand.”
“It’s not enough.”
“Steve, give me two or three hours and come back. I promise you I’ll find some cash.”
“Now. It’s got to be now.”
“All right I’ll give you forty thousand, and sweet God, I hope it doesn’t cost me my job.”
“O.K., I’ll take it. But in three hours, I want a hundred and ten thousand more.”
“Steve, don’t force me to the wall. In three hours, everyone in San Francisco will know what is happening at your bank, and every bank in this city is going to hang onto its cash like Scrooge himself. I’ll get what I can.” As an afterthought, he added, “We have fifty thousand on deposit in your bank. We’re not going to call it–for whatever that helps.”
“Fat lot of good. Well, get the money, small bills. You’ve never seen my father in a rage.”
With a briefcase bulging with money, Stephan raced back to the bank. If anything, the crowd in front was even larger, and now there were four policemen, trying to keep some kind of order among the nervous, pushing depositors. “I work here! Let me through!” Stephan shouted, fighting and shoving to make his way, clinging to his bag of money. Inside the bank, he found his father.
“Forty thousand from Crocker. That’s all they’ll give me, and I had to get down on my knees and plead for it.”
“They must honor our deposit,” Anthony cried angrily.
“No law says so. There are a lot of deposits they have to honor. I’m going to Giannini.”
&nbs
p; He returned with thirty thousand dollars. They were still paying in full, but the cash bins were almost empty.
“Close the doors,” he begged his father.
Stony-faced, Anthony stared at him and shook his head.
“You’ve got to stop it,” Stephan pleaded.
“Frank’s cashing in our government bonds. We’ll pay everyone.”
“We can’t pay everyone. It’s eleven-fifteen, and that crowd outside is growing.”
“By two o’clock, we’ll have two million dollars.”
“And then? What then?”
Anthony Cassala shook his head. “We pay.”
“And we destroy ourselves.”
“No. They will take confidence. The run will stop.”
At noontime, Stephan was in Dan’s office, pleading with him and Mark. “Here’s a hundred thousand in government bonds. The city’s dried up. The run’s on us, but every bank in the city has a case of the jitters, and they’re hanging onto their cash as if it were blood. We can’t even move our treasuries for cash. If you can give me cash for these bonds–”
“The hell with the bonds,” Dan said. “We don’t carry cash, Steve. You know that.”
“But the store does. You got to take in forty, fifty thousand in a day. Mark, if you can let me have it for just twenty-four hours–or take the bonds for collateral. Either way. But I got to have it now–”
“What about that?” Dan asked.
“Whatever we got, Steve. There’s about ten thousand in the safe out of yesterday’s receipts–we’ll clean out the registers. Maybe thirty, forty thousand.”
“God bless you both.”
Again, Stephan raced back to the bank with a briefcase stuffed with money, but it was like trying to stem the tide with a single outstretched hand. At three o’clock, the Cassala bank closed its doors. At nine-thirty in the morning, it opened them again. At two o’clock, it closed its doors again–its total reserves washed out. It was never to reopen. On the third day after the run began, Anthony Cassala suffered a major coronary infarction while sitting in his office at the Bank of Sonoma. By the time the ambulance reached the hospital, he was dead.
After the funeral, standing with Dan and Mark in the house at San Mateo, Stephan said to them: “It was the morning of the second day of the run, and there must have been four hundred people in front of the bank. We were pushing our way through, pop and me, and this man says, ‘Hey, please, Mr. Cassala,’ to pop, you understand, not loud but painful, like the voice of a man with a knife cutting him, and he’s talking in Italian. I know him slightly, a Sicilian, a laborer, hod carrier in construction or something like that, and pop stops, and he says to pop, not angry, but just soft, ‘Mr. Cassala, I don’t want to trouble you. You have problems. I have problems. No work for three months. I have a wife and five children. Little ones. Each week I take ten dollars out of the bank. So we live. I got seven hundred and sixty-two dollars in the bank, Mr. Cassala, savings from the day I got married. That’s all I have in the world. Without it, we will starve.’ Just like that. He wasn’t angry. You know, I was never hungry. It’s hard for me to understand hunger with my lousy stomach. Pop looked at the man. His name was John Galeno. Then pop took him by the arm and led him into the bank. ‘Pay him first, Stephan,’ he said to me. Then he said to Galeno, ‘You don’t take that money home and hide it, you understand? You take it to Giannini’s bank, you understand? Put it there. It’s safe.’ That’s not a banker. God Almighty, why did he ever decide to be a banker? The last damn thing in the world he should have been is a banker.”
Cold in San Francisco can be as cold as anyplace on earth. It’s a wet, damp cold that rides in on eddies of fog and thin rain and eats into the marrow of the bone. It was like that today, and Dan wrapped his coat around him and thrust his hands into its pockets while he stood on the corner of California Street on Nob Hill watching the wreckers take the Seldon mansion apart, stone by stone, brick by brick, beam by beam. The big dining room, where he had sat the first time so long ago, his own Mount Olympus where he had first tasted the food of the gods, stood naked and exposed, the wallpaper peeling away, all the ghosts of the past unsheltered and whimpering in the wind.
There he stood and watched, gripped by the sight, held by some magnet out of a past that was without sense or meaning. Finally he tore himself away and walked down the steep hill toward Montgomery Street, passing the apple vendors and the panhandlers–there but for the grace of God goes Dan Lavette–and emptying his pockets. He was an easy touch. Once, years ago, Jean had said to him with some asperity, “Why must you give money to every bum who approaches you?” But he had always been the other person, a fact which he understood only vaguely. His sense of himself had always been ill defined; only now that things were coming to an end did he begin to feel and sense and touch the person who was Daniel Lavette.
The department store was almost empty. Business had been falling off steadily through 1930, and on a cold, wet morning such as this, the people who still had money to buy stayed at home. He took the elevator up to the offices and heard a bright, cheerful good morning from his secretary. She was a new girl, very young. Her name was Marion something or other. He had always been rotten with names. “Mr. Levy is waiting for you. In his office,” she said brightly. “You had a call from New York, from Mr. Anderson. He’ll call back. I couldn’t say what was keeping you.”
Martin Clancy, from the Seldon Bank, rose to his feet as Dan entered Mark’s office. “Good to see you, Dan. You’re looking fit.” Mark, staring out of the window, turned as Dan entered. “A filthy day,” he said. Dan apologized for being late. He had stopped to look at the Seldon house.
“A sorry thing to see the old houses go, one by one,” Clancy agreed. “But that’s progress. You can’t stop it.”
“Yes, they’re selling apples on California Street,” Dan agreed. “That’s progress too.”
“We’ve been talking about the credit line,” Mark put in quickly. “Mr. Clancy’s troubled by our delinquency.”
“It’s only eighteen days,” Dan said. “In this best of all possible worlds, Martin, eighteen days are not anything to lose sleep over.”
“That’s a gratifying thought, Dan. I assure you that the past eighteen days caused me no sleeplessness. What about the next eighteen days?”
“We’re talking about a half a million dollars’ interest. If you’re asking me flat out, do we have it? the answer is no. We don’t.”
“And when will you have it?”
Dan looked at Mark, who sat down at his desk and stared at Clancy. “Mr. Clancy,” he began–
“Yes.”
Mark cleared his throat. “We’ve decided to ask you for a moratorium. We didn’t come to this decision lightly. You know our condition as well as we do. Even at today’s depressed prices, we have a net worth of twenty-five million dollars. I’m not talking about our stock, but about our assets. We have one of the best-run and best-situated airlines in the country. We have twelve magnificent new planes on order. We have a fleet of ships, a department store, and some of the best land around this city. Two years ago, that net worth would have been thirty-five million, so when I say twenty-five million, I’m putting the lowest figure possible on our capital. However, we’re a part of what has happened to the country. Dan and I spent our lives building this thing, and we think we can see it through this crisis. That should be in your interest as well as ours. In a sense, the Seldon Bank is our partner.”
“Hardly. The Seldon Bank is your lender.”
Dan realized that Mark had rehearsed his speech carefully. Clancy was cold and untouched, and Dan felt that he would have given five years of his life to be able to say, “You cold, lousy little bastard. Get out of here before I throw you out.” Instead, he heard himself saying, “Martin, Martin–we’ve known each other a long time. Certainly, you’re our lender. And the bank means something to me, a damn sight more than you might imagine. It goes to my kids. What Mark and I want and propose is best for the
bank.”
“How do you see that, Dan? You want a moratorium. The bank surrenders a million a year in interest for the dubious pleasure of tying up sixteen million dollars of its capital. Or are you suggesting that the interest become cumulative?”
“That would be unreal,” Mark put in. “Unreal and impossible. You know that as well as we do.”
“If we can sell our land holdings,” Dan said, “we can reduce the debt considerably.”
“Why haven’t you sold the land?”
“You know why. Martin, we’re fighting for our lives. We know what we have. We created it If you call our loans, what happens to this enterprise?”
“We haven’t discussed that. But even if we liquidated, it might be a better situation. The essence of banking is money. I’m sure you know that, and I expect you also know that no bank is exempt from what is happening today. If we declare a moratorium on your loan, the plain fact of the matter is that sixteen million dollars of our money ceases to exist.”
“No, no,” Mark said. “You can’t take that position, Mr. Clancy.”
“But I must. You ask for a gift of a million dollars a year. I don’t want to appear heartless or cruel, but gifts have no place in banking.”
“I’m not appealing to your generosity, Martin. I’m appealing to your common sense. We’ve lived with this company.”
“You’ve lived too high on the hog, Dan. If you had been content to grow within the bounds of reason, you wouldn’t be in this situation today. Well, I’ll take it up with the board. It’s not my decision in any case.”
After he had left, Dan said to Mark, “You know, old sport, if Tony were alive, if there hadn’t been that run on his bank–well, Tony’s dead. And sure as hell, there’s no one else going to give us half a million on our statement.”
“What if you went to Jean?”
“That’s an interesting notion, isn’t it? After I moved out, I served her with notice of intent.”
