The Mouse on Wall Street

by Leonard Wibberley

  “I think they’d have paid quite a bit to get it back again,” he said. “But then, as Your Lordship says, money isn’t really worth anything.”

  “I don’t quite say that, Will,” said Mountjoy. “But it is worth bearing in mind that money is most valuable when there is little of it and least valuable when it is available in quantity.”

  “They wear their dresses pretty short over here,” said Will, who still had the eye of a soldier. “Long-stemmed American beauties. And good luck to ’em, says I.”

  Installed at the Greystoke, Mountjoy, following that procedure of delay which he believed the first essential of diplomacy, first did a little shopping on Fifth Avenue and obtained seats for himself and Will at the ballet and seats at the new home of the Philharmonic where he luxuriated in Haydn’s “Oxford” and roundly denounced an offering of Tansman and another of Falla.

  He spent an afternoon riding around Central Park in one of the landaus and could not resist visiting the Stock Exchange where, from the area reserved for visitors, he smiled down on the bustling, crowded floor, thinking what panic he could produce if anyone there recognized him and discovered the object of his mission.

  Leaving the exchange, he dropped quite by chance into Hans’s Bar, for he did not know of the place or its unique position in American finance. Hans, standing at the back bar as usual, did not know Mountjoy but recognized from his bearing that he was a man of importance and from his umbrella, tightly furled in contrast to his tie, which was rather loosely knotted, that he was a European. He served him a Pilsner lager; but these two great figures of finance met and parted without knowledge of each other, and the secret of the Duchy’s decision to liquidate, which might have produced a panic, was preserved.

  For the rest, Mountjoy called Mr. Balche and arranged for that gentleman to visit him in his rooms at the Grey-stoke. There he unfolded to the astounded financial agent the plans to liquidate all American holdings.

  “This is to be done with complete secrecy,” said Mountjoy. “Not a scrap of paper on the subject is to pass between us. Your instructions are to liquidate and there is attached to those instructions only this condition—not a word of what is going on is to be allowed out.”

  “And the price?” said Mr. Balche. “Surely you will want a floor?”

  “Price is of no concern,” said Mountjoy. “But the money realized is to be sent in actual American paper currency to Grand Fenwick.”

  “You mean in actual bank notes—not a transfer of credit?” said Balche.

  “Yes,” said Mountjoy. “I do not wish to be pressed here. You may use whatever machinery you wish, but the money must wind up in Grand Fenwick as actual paper currency. Not bonds. Not credits. Paper currency.”

  “Good heavens/’ said Balche, “this is without precedent. We’d have to use a fleet of armored cars to take the money to the airport. And I doubt that there are in Europe, outside of Army payrolls, one thousand million American dollars as dollars. However are we to get the money to you? We can’t send bales of thousand-dollar notes through the mail.”

  “You are not a student of history, Mr. Balche?” said Mountjoy.

  “To some limited extent,” said Balche. “But what have you in mind?”

  “The sending of great riches through the mail—third class —is not without precedent, you know,” said the Count. “When the Transvaal decided to send the Cullinan diamond to the British royal family as a gift—a diamond, mind you, as big as a man’s clenched fist—Scotland Yard was consulted as to how this could best be done without jewel thieves immediately seizing it. They advised sending two packages of about the same size from the post office at Johannesburg. One was to be heavily insured and go by first-class mail. The other was to be carelessly wrapped and sent by the lowest rate. The heavily insured package disappeared within an hour of being mailed. The other, actually a cigarette tin containing the diamond and sent third class, safely reached England.

  “No, my good fellow, send us the money, not in a military plane or by diplomatic pouch, but in plain brown parcels bound with string and looking as though they contained old magazines. I will guarantee that every one of them will arrive safely.”

  “Are you really prepared to take such a risk?” asked Balche. “I assure you,” said Mountjoy, “that if they were all stolen, not a soul in Grand Fenwick would turn a hair.”

  That evening, his mission completed, Mountjoy decided that instead of dining at Sardi’s or Twenty-One or one of the other more fashionable restaurants, he would like to try a typical American menu. He mentioned this to Will, who said, '‘What we ought to do, my lord, is go to Times Square and have a couple of hot dogs at a stand they have there called Nedick’s. Real good hot dogs, they are, with four kinds of relish. I’ve been thinking of one of them for fifteen years.” “You were at this place before?” said the Count.

  “Yes, my lord. That’s where I met Rosie. She thought I was a man from Mars in chain mail, but I told her not to be scared and she fixed me some coffee and one of them hot dogs.”

  “I doubt she’ll still be there,” said Mountjoy.

  “Wouldn’t like to come this far and not find out,” said Will, blushing to the roots of his hair.

  “Quite right,” said Mountjoy. “ ‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast/Man never is, but always to be blest. . . .’ You don’t know Pope, I suppose.”

  “Born and raised a Baptist and I’ll die that way,” said Will doggedly.

  They were disappointed when they got to Nedick’s hot-dog stand in Times Square. A rather pimply young man with a paper cap served them their hot dogs. He was very busy and a trifle snappish; and when Will asked what had become of Rosie, he said he didn’t know any Rosie and he had been there five years. Even Mountjoy felt saddened.

  They stayed around awhile, but after half an hour it began to appear that they should leave, for others were waiting for their stools. They rose to go and Will found, standing behind him, a plumpish, good-looking woman, of middle years, reading a fashion magazine and holding the hand of a small boy. Mountjoy, in getting off his stool, jostled her and said, “I beg your pardon, madam.”

  Something in the way she turned her head set Will’s heart beating faster. “Rosie,” he cried.

  She stared at him and said, “The man from Mars—I can’t believe it. I’ve been coming back here ever since. . . .”

  They stared at each other and Will glanced at the child.

  Rosie blushed. “It’s my sister’s,” she said and then blurted out, “I’m not married.”

  “I think I’ll go for a little stroll, Will,” Mountjoy said. “That hot dog will take a little digesting. See you back at the hotel.”

  “Yes, milord,” said Will. “Shall we be leaving soon—I mean for Grand Fenwick?”

  “I will,” replied the Count. “But I fancy it could be arranged for you to stay on a day or two if you have any personal—ahem—business to attend to. Good evening, miss.” He raised his hat to Rosie and was soon lost in the crowd.

  “Who is he?” asked Rosie. “Looks a bit like that feller that sells southern fried chicken.”

  “That’s the Count of Mountjoy—the cleverest man in the world,” said Will happily.

  Mountjoy returned to Grand Fenwick a day later, his mission completed. Balche was to start offering the Grand Fenwick holdings on all the stock exchanges in the country, using whatever agencies and devices he thought would best preserve the secret of their ownership. The stocks found a ready market. Such an enormous number of shares, however offered, tended to depress prices, and to combat this Holleck and his syndicate started buying. The total holdings of Grand Fenwick were liquidated in three weeks, and shortly thereafter Mr. Balche faced the task of turning the billion-dollar bank credit of Grand Fenwick into actual dollars.

  It was here that he met with an almost insoluble problem, which Mountjoy had quite casually dismissed. The Count had airily told him to just send the money in bales wrapped in ordinary paper. But the fact re
mained that no one bank had such an amount of currency in its vaults, and the request that it obtain that amount of currency from the Treasury or whatever was the proper source of supply would immediately start inquiries which would destroy the secrecy of the whole arrangement.

  Balche had, of course, not made the deposit in one bank. He had deposited a million dollars in each of one thousand banks and he had been hard put to find a thousand banks to make the deposit in.

  He could now go to each bank in turn and demand a million dollars in currency—a very large withdrawal in cash which would certainly lead to questions. Or he could subdivide the deposits still further until he had, say, one thousand dollars deposited in one million banks and branches of banks throughout the nation.

  Mr. Balche wasn’t quite sure that there were one million banks or branches of banks throughout the United States. But even if there were, he realized, after a little thought, that to put one thousand dollars in one million banks would be to complicate the problem enormously. Visiting ten banks a day and cashing a check for one thousand dollars in each of them would take him something over three years to collect all the money—allowing for weekends and holidays. And he was by no means ready to spend three years standing at cashier’s desks in banks from Nome to New Orleans, cashing checks for a thousand dollars one after another.

  Even with the deposit as it was—one million dollars in one thousand banks—it would require about five months of hard work at the rate of ten banks a day to send the whole deposit in cash to Grand Fenwick. And no banker was going to give him one million dollars in currency in five minutes. He would probably take a day or a day and a half and insist that the money be conveyed to its destination in an armored car.

  So what was he to do? He decided that he must notify each of the banks in advance of the withdrawal, ensure that they had the currency available, and set up an appointment when he would be there with his check and his credentials to receive the money. He would ask for the currency to be made available in the largest possible bills, and wondered whether there was such a thing as a thousand-dollar bank note.

  He found that this scheme worked reasonably well. He sent the letters to the bankers by registered mail marked confidential. He stressed in each letter that no word of the withdrawal of the deposit was to be allowed to leak out. In this he actually had the aid of the bankers themselves who were by no means ready to let others know that a depositor had withdrawn a million dollars in cash.

  Gradually, but at an increasing pace, the cash began to collect. Mr. Balche picked it up in suitcases and to save travel, whenever a suitcase was full, sent it back to his New Jersey office by air express, having informed his staff to expect its arrival and to put it in his own office when it came.

  He borrowed a page from Mountjoy’s book and did not insure any of the suitcases except to the extent demanded by the air express company. Some of them contained as much as four and five million dollars in currency, and after rounding up a grand total of something over a hundred million dollars in this manner, Mr. Balche returned to New Jersey to find his office strewn with suitcases somewhere among which were his own clothes, sent in error.

  He stayed behind when his staff left on the day of his return; and, having secured several large rolls of brown wrapping paper from a nearby five-and-ten, he started to bundle the currency up into suitable sizes which he wrapped in brown paper and secured with twine. He took these down to the post office on the following day only to receive the depressing news that he had to redo them because the clerk said they were the wrong shape. They could not exceed a total of forty-eight inches, adding the dimension of the four sides in one direction, nor a total of sixty inches adding the dimension of the four sides in the other direction. (Postal Regulations, United States, Government of, Parcels Section IV—VI subsection I, Paragraph 4, Overseas mail by surface only—Applicable to all countries but those abutting the Persian Gulf—See Notes Near East, pages 1196-1198.)

  The next day he brought them back and this time got them off by surface mail, having convinced the clerk that Grand Fenwick did not abut on the Persian Gulf. The value he gave was nil. He stated that the contents were printed matter and took out no insurance.

  “Old magazines, eh?” said the clerk. “You could send them cheaper just by bundling them up with the ends open.” He glanced at the address. “Count of Mountjoy,” he said. “Must be quite a reader.”

  “They’re old comics,” said Mr. Balche. “He likes Batman.” All might have gone well, and complete secrecy been preserved and financial disaster on Wall Street avoided, but for Salat, the French bus driver. He was angry because, although Paris had at last been selected as the site of the peace conference between the United States and Northern Afghanistan, he had read that the Afghanistan delegates insisted upon being supplied with live goats and sheep, which were to be slaughtered, butchered and cooked in their own fashion.

  “Cochons ” he cried. “Pigs. French food is not good enough for these animals.” He brooded over the studied insult to the great cooking of France by these barbaric foreigners. His temper was further inflamed by having to take up half his bus with a mass of tatty-looking paper parcels, much the worse for wear, addressed to the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, a foreign country, which he, a Frenchman, was obliged to serve.

  All the way to the Grand Fenwick border he discoursed to his passengers on the shortcomings of foreigners when viewed from the French point of view. And when he pulled up at the guard post at Grand Fenwick he seized the parcels and started to fling them contemptuously into the road.

  “For you,” he shouted at the guard. “Tell them not to send any more. I refuse to have my bus littered with this trash.” The parcels had taken much abuse on their journey so far, but this final tossing around by Salat proved too much for the string with which they were bound. Two of them burst open and spewed across the road a cascade of thousand-dollar bills.

  All examined these in amazement and silence, broken at length by Salat. “Great heavens,” he cried, his eyes bulging. “Money!” In a moment he and every passenger aboard were scrabbling in the road for the bills. They got a few, but the border guards retrieved them together with the broken parcels and the rest of the loose notes. Salat went roaring off, bursting with news of a vast treasure in American currency which he had delivered to the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, and so the secret was out.

  18

  THE news that Grand Fenwick had sold out its vast holdings in American stocks and had insisted upon payment in currency reached the world then as a result of the bad temper of a French bus driver. The shock to the stock market was immense. It dropped an average of three points within an hour of the report reaching Wall Street—transmitted by wire service from France, where it first appeared in an evening newspaper in Marseilles. The market continued down.

  Many, before the Grand Fenwick story broke, had held that the market was too high and was due for a decline. That so great a financial wizard as the Duchess Gloriana should have sold out now confirmed that view and that she should have sold everything added a tinge of panic.

  There was a rush to sell and that rush brought prices tumbling and panicked others. Perhaps some stability might have been restored and the panic stopped if there had been big buyers standing by ready to pick up the shares which were now being dumped. But the big buyers—Holleck notable among them—and the various mutual investment funds had already loaded up when Grand Fenwick was selling and they were already cautious.

  Holleck held his holdings, but the mutual funds first refused to buy and then themselves started unloading shares in the hope of saving at least a margin of profit for their clients. Down the market tumbled further, in a cataract that was not to be checked by reason. Statements by bankers, by financiers, by respected members of the government, given on television and through the press, that the nation was solid and stocks were not overvalued, failed even to slow the deluge of selling. Finally, on the pretext that so much selling had taken place that the records
were now hopelessly out of date, the New York Stock Exchange was closed for a week and other exchanges throughout the nation followed suit gratefully.

  But during that week another terrible rumor got about. This was to the effect that Grand Fenwick intended to demand payment in gold for its dollar holdings. At the rate of $35 an ounce, the Grand Fenwick holdings in American currency amounted to close to a thousand tons of gold, give or take a couple of hundred tons.

  A thousand tons of gold, it was said, was being readied at Fort Knox for shipment to the Duchy of Grand Fenwick. Every army truck seen in the vicinity of the famous Kentucky fort was rumored to be part of the convoy building up to take the gold shipment, which would require at least ten trucks to carry, to the port of departure. There, so the story went, a freighter whose crew would be heavily salted with G-men waited to convey the gold to Europe for eventual transmission to Grand Fenwick, where it was to rest in the dungeon of the castle.

  Why was Grand Fenwick demanding gold instead of paper currency? The answer to that was simple. Because the Duchy, with its deep financial insight, had decided that the United States was about to devalue the price of gold in order to bolster its flagging paper currency. Rumors of such changes in the price of gold had been current for months, particularly after the United States had set its paper currency free of any metallic base in its domestic use.

  The prospect that the same move might be followed in its overseas trading—that the nation might repudiate the gold basis of its currency in the hands of other nations—had haunted international financiers for months. So, when Grand Fenwick was rumored to be importing gold, others with American dollar credits began to follow suit. They were not, of course, following suit in actual fact, for the Duchy had no intention whatever of demanding gold for its bales of dollars. Those intentions had been imputed to the Duchy and reason amply supplied together with the details already touched upon. But the demand of other nations for gold in return for their dollar holdings was real.