The Wonderful Scheme of Mr. Christopher Thorne, page 4
There were none. He turned to the president. “I will wait outside, Mr. Gilfoil, so as to give the gentlemen a chance talk it over.”
Gilfoil, like a man in a daze, conducted Marceau through an adjoining room and into an empty office, where he motioned to a comfortable visitor’s chair. Then he disappeared. Marceau bit off the end of a cigar, and lighting it, puffed leisurely at it and smiled as he gazed ruminatively out of the window. He tapped one well-polished toe rhythmically on the floor in utter confidence of the outcome. Once or twice voices raised in violent discussion came to his ears, but words themselves were unintelligible. Finally the discussion calmed down. Not a word of it had filtered through, however. Gilfoil appeared in the doorway.
“Mr. Marceau, we think you are literally holding us up on the price, but we want that patent, and we will pay the price for it. But on account of the nature of the transaction, some of the directors would like to satisfy themselves in the manner you suggested as to all the details of the transfer which has put it in your name. Now will you step back to the directors’ room. I will ring our company lawyer, Mr. Ruggles, across the street and arrange for an immediate reply wire from Washington on the present title. I will have him then come over at once. Now, you have the deed with you, you say? Good. And could you summon those two employees of yours here who witnessed the transfer? Also Mr. Lane, whom I remember offhand. I’m sorry to trouble you on all this, but—”
Marceau waved a deprecatory hand. He raised the receiver of the phone which stood on the desk near him. He called Amos Lane, found him in, exactly as the latter had said he would be, and summoned him over to the Bankers’ Trust Building at once. Then he rang his own offices and to the young man who answered the instrument he gave one terse order.
“Mr. Conway, get a taxicab right away and bring yourself and Miss Brown to the directors’ room of the Northern Fir Paper Company, room 2500, Bankers’ Trust Company Building, Wall and Nassau Streets. Got it? All right. Come at once.”
Exactly fifteen minutes later, Mr. Marceau, Mr. Lane, Mr. Ruggles, a tall angular individual who radiated law books, young Mr. Conway and Miss Brown, and a keen-faced man by the name of Hayes, who appeared to be a handwriting expert from a lower floor in the building, were all in the directors’ room. The deed of transfer was duly examined and pronounced iron-bound in every respect, particularly after Mr. Hayes, with but one comparison of it with several letters brought in from the company correspondence files, pronounced the signatures indisputably the same. Several of the directors sourly read the paper over, and then repaired to the tall windows where with backs dignifiedly turned on the humiliating procedure they gazed dismally out over the sea of skyscraper roofs, white under the sleet that drizzled down. Lane, young Conway and Miss Brown duly attested their signatures as notary and witnesses respectively, and a stenographer was called in to whom Ruggles dictated a second transfer of U.S. patent 1,749,263, this time for $75,000 instead of $31,750, and this time bearing Marceau’s name instead of Kwan Yung’s as transferor. The speed of big business which did not risk any last-minute changes of mind was testified to by a girl who, summoned from the outer offices, brought in a huge check book containing checks four to a sheet, and a check protector. The check was made out with undue celerity by Gilfoil, signed by himself and one of the directors who bore a most pained look in the operation, countersigned by a bald-headed chief auditor from the outer offices, sent out to the bank by a red-headed clerk who carried a surprised look on his own face, and brought back covered with the red certification stamp of the bank exactly as a small clock on the mantel of the directors’ room struck the hour of two-thirty. Hardly had the check arrived than a yellow telegram was also sent in from the adjoining offices. Gilfoil, check still in hand, ripped it open. He read it and turned to Marceau. “All right, Marceau. Sign, if you will, on the dotted line.” He laid the check reverentially on the table, and Marceau, appending his signature to the new transfer, nonchalantly folded up the salmon-colored oblong of paper and stuffed it into his pocket. Exactly five minutes later, eight directors were irritably resuming their seats to continue a meeting which had been sadly interrupted, and Marceau was parting with Amos Lane in the entrance of the Bankers’ Trust Building.
“Pretty nice profit I made for Kwan, eh, Amos?”
Lane, the ever unsuccessful, shook his head in hopeless admiration. “Oliver, you’re a wonder. How—how do you do it?”
“Rushed ’em,” said Marceau, briefly. “Rushed ’em so fast, they didn’t have a chance to think. And then, too, Kwan’s patent is really a good one. I had a good trump card in my fist you see.” He glanced at his watch and then started. “Well, I must be rushing along, Amos. Now, if you’re going to be in your office a little later on this afternoon, I’ll be over to start you out on some of the different work I’m going to give you. Will you be there?”
“I’ll be there,” said the lawyer, rubbing his lean hands. “I’ll be there, Oliver, because I’ve got to work on the brief of a very important case—ver-ee important, Oliver.”
“All right. See you later.” And Marceau turned abruptly off up the street.
He retraced his steps as soon as Lane’s gaunt figure had turned the comer, and proceeded straight back into the Bankers’ Trust Company. There he went to the cashier’s cage and presented the check he had just received upstairs. The big clock at the end of the lobby showed the time to be ten minutes before the closing hour.
“Your check,” he said. “I’ll take it in cash.”
The cashier looked up from the check. “Who could identify you, Mr. Marceau?”
“Mr. Gilfoil of the Northern Fir Paper Company upstairs,” Marceau replied promptly. “However, let me think. Have you a Mr. Crevy here—came to work in your bond department about three years ago?”
“Oh, Mr. Crevy? Yes, indeed. Mr. Crevy is now assistant to the head of the bond department. Just a minute.”
He pressed a button. A boy was dispatched through the labyrinth of clicking adding machines, and a prematurely bald young man arrived in the cage and nodded to Marceau. “O.K.” he said, glancing at the check in the cashier’s fingers and thence to Marceau standing outside. He shook hands from under the half-raised wicket. “How are you, Mr. Marceau?”
A few words of greeting with Marceau, who once, for two weeks, in a ten-by-twelve office, had employed this young man as a general Cerberus and had seen the latter pass from an atmosphere of somewhat highly colored stocks to this realm where substantial bonds reigned supreme, and Marceau stood alone again in front of the wicket with the teller moistening his thumb, and the blue-coated guards putting up the evening barriers at the front door of the bank.
“How will you have it, Mr. Marceau? And by the way, aren’t you afraid to carry so much money on you?”
“Well,” replied Marceau pleasantly, “in the first place nobody knows I’m carrying it, and in the second place, I’m locking it in a safety deposit vault.” And he added: “Make it five-hundreds with about twenty fifties for small change.”
The teller counted out a long series of crisp bills, and Marceau counted them in return. He opened his vest and stowed the packet vertically upright in the pocket next his silk striped shirt, and then buttoned the vest tightly down upon it again. He nodded, and thrusting a cigar across the marble ledge of the teller’s window, he once more buttoned himself in his overcoat and repaired back to the street.
Now, he summoned a taxicab and went straight to his apartment up on 154th Street, a neat little parlor and bedroom affair situated on the third floor of a court building of orange-colored pressed brick. Here, quite alone, for a Polish woman came in mornings only to take care of his domestic requirements, he packed up a number of toilet articles and garments in a huge black gripsack, and with a last look around the little place which had grown somewhat familiar to him, and on which he had just paid the rent for the entire month of March, he sighed deeply and hastened back to his waiting taxicab.
He went neither to his place of business nor to any other place that he had been that day, but drove straight to Amos Lane’s office in a dingy, dark looking barn of a building that, in the heart of the city, was yet off the track of all life and activity. He ordered his cab to wait at a nearby cabstand, and he left his gripsack in it while he went upstairs. Lane was in, posed in front of an impressive array of opened legal volumes, but playing away at a childish puzzle consisting of a silver key linked to several odd-shaped wire triangles. An old battered typewriter stood on a dismantled sewing-machine frame, and the absence of any telephone testified mutely to the fact that the occupant received his calls from across the hall. He hastily dropped his puzzle in an open drawer and drew up a rickety chair to his desk for his visitor. Marceau took it. There was just a bit of amused interest in his attitude as his eyes roamed around the dilapidated office. He settled back.
“Well, Amos, now to bother you for a few minutes.” He paused. “Did you ever hear of the Marceau estate of London, England?”
“Why, no,” replied the lawyer, dazedly. “But I gather that you have some connection with it. An heir, perhaps?”
“Happily, yes,” replied Marceau. He paused a moment. “The Marceau estate, Lane, was built up by one of my grandfathers, Theóphile Marceau, a Frenchman who got into trouble in France and went to London to live. It has been in litigation for many years—quarrels among the heirs and misinterpretations of his will—particularly with respect to one of his beneficiaries, St. Boniface’s Church, in East Chapel Street there—and I received a notice about two months back that the litigation has been finally sufficiently compromised all around—that it has been adjudicated. Ten of us distant relatives in the Marceau train of descendants are to receive 200 pounds sterling apiece per year for the next twenty years, the first payment to be made next month, and one in March each year thereafter. André Marceau, my grandfather’s son by another wife than my paternal grandmother—though none the less, therefore, an uncle of mine!—and incidentally, if you don’t object to my being quite frank, a prime son-of-a-bitch to boot!—and now living in London, will receive exactly ten times this amount per year. The balance remaining after the 20-years’ disbursements, due to interest accrual in the meantime, from the investment of the estate’s funds in bloomin’, bloody British 4 per cent bonds, blarst my ’ide, goes to this St. Boniface’s Church—which church if—you ask me, Lane, was the party that raised all the stink in the beginning; the whole monkey wrench, in fact, in the settlement machinery. But, be that as it may, thus ends a long court battle which has enriched more than one English barrister.”
“Well, I congratulate you, Mr. Marceau—Oliver. Two hundred English pounds per year is a mighty neat little annuity to receive for twenty years. At $4.86615 the pound—that is, giving the pound its par value, to be very precise—it’s just about close on to a thousand dollars a year. I—I wish somebody would leave me that!”
“Thanks,” was Marceau’s only comment. He sat back thinking. Then he spoke again. “Well, the situation is this, Lane: I have neither wife nor child, as you know, and if I die, it simply means that my annuity will continue to go on to some relative or heir of mine of whom I’ve never heard. For that’s the manner in which the Marceau estate was adjudicated, you see. That is, these 200-pound annuities are inheritable. But they are also transferable too, see? Yes, sellable. And I have just that chance at hand to cash in on mine in advance. Yes, to sell it. Now do you happen to know a man in New York by the name of Christopher Thorne—Christopher L. Thorne?”
Lane reflected. “Chris-to-pher Thorne?” He shook his head. “No, I can’t say I do. Though what made you think, Oliver, that I might know him? New York, after all, has some 5,000,000 people in it!”
“To be sure,” nodded Marceau. “But I was thinking of the great interest you always had in chess and chess affairs. For outside of his business, this fellow Thorne is something of a chess player, I understand. I have it on good authority—from the party, that is, through whom I contacted him—that he can play two chess games at one and the same time. Which, to me, seems rather well-gifted, since I can’t, by God, master the rules enough to play one game at a time!”
Lane smiled. “Well, it can be done. I—er—I can do it myself given time enough to re-study each board before I play. In fact,” he added, a bit deprecatingly, “there are a number of people in New York who can play simultaneous chess.”
“I see. Well, I have it also from this mutual contact that Thorne beat no less a person than some hunchbacked guy called Zib—Zib—”
“Zybszewski?” breathed Lane, now decidedly impressed, “Szapsia Zybszewski, the Polish hunchback, is the most expert chess player in the world, if not the most famous. And so your friend Thorne,” he intoned, “actually beat him?”
“Unofficially—yes. In a chess club—or gathering somewhere, but not of record, because of its not being a tournament—or official contest.”
“That,” commented Lane, shaking his head, “is like a prizefight contender knocking out a world champion on the outside of their dressing rooms!” He paused. “What business, however, is Thorne in?”
“He’s a financial man of some sort,” Marceau replied. “Has considerable elastic cash, it seems, and he buys up estates and legacies at discounts, and also loans money out on various propositions. He has his office and home up on 69th Street—555 West 69th Street, and has—or is now establishing—a branch office of his business in Chicago. With the idea, I believe, of moving there later—to get the benefit of the cooler summers. Or perhaps to set up as champeen chess player of America’s medieval cow-camp—as our friend Mencken calls Chicago! Well, anyway, I happened to get hold of his name, and I took up with him the matter of selling my annuity as soon as I received notice from the London courts that the thing was settled in the manner I described. He has examined my papers and investigated fully the status of the Marceau estate, and is willing to buy the entire twenty payments providing that each one is discounted so that, when it arrives in his hands, it will have earned seven per cent per year on the amount paid for it.” He paused while the lawyer nodded slowly. Then he went on.
“I am, to be candid, Lane, a bit short of cash in my business operations, and insofar as I am not getting anything out of the Kwan Yung transaction for myself, I need what I can get from other sources to help float a few deals. So what I want you to do is to draw up for me a legal transfer to this man Thorne of all my annuities in this estate, which will be satisfactory to him. Now here is the data which you will have to incorporate in it. His name is Christopher L. Thorne. Address, 555 West 69th Street, this city. He operates not as a corporation but as an individual. The estate is known as the Marceau Estate of London, W. C., England, heirs of Theóphile Marceau, deceased 1920. The decree allotting the bequests is Court of Chancery decree, London, No. 249,162.”
He tossed on the lawyer’s desk a numbered slip. He fumbled in his pocket and withdrew the sheets on which he had made so many laborious calculations earlier in the day. “And here are the calculations on the discounting of the payments. For convenience’s sake in figuring, I have taken the value of the English pound at the round figure of $4.85—any small margin above that he can use to buy toothpaste with! On that basis, each annuity, as Thorne collects it, is worth $970 in American money. $970 of today’s money, that is. For the arrangement is, as we mutually see it, perfectly and automatically self-adjustable as to shifts in the value—of the pound. If the pound goes up after the sale—in a few years, that is—he collects more dollars to be sure: but they’re cheaper dollars in direct proportion to the rise in the pound. If the pound goes down, he collects fewer dollars—but each dollar then buys an exact proportionate greater amount of carrots, lambsteaks and bottles of sweet pickles! If not hand-carved chessmen! If you get the beautiful economic principle back of all that, Amos! So—figuring the value of each pound at $4.85 round figures today—and presuming it to remain there—that will make each annuity, as Thorne would collect it, worth $970 in American money. On which basis I have worked out the figures backward so that each $970 annuity will represent the original cost of that annuity to him—plus 7 per cent per year! For instance, Amos, the first amount, due next month, March 26th, would—yes, at $4.85 the pound—bring me today from Thorne, $964.37. The twentieth one, due nineteen years and a month from today, will bring me, today, from him, only $403.18. The total of all these amounts as you see on this slip is $12,705.52. That, in short, is the sum which Thorne, under his verbal agreement to me, would have to pay me today—in today’s money. Now, I think you have all the data to incorporate in the paper. And date it today, as I’m going up there as soon as I leave here, for he and I are ready to close the deal completely—providing the figures, of course, are correct.”
Lane studied the slips of paper for a moment, and then turned to his typewriter. Running into it two sheets of paper, with a carbon lying between, he wrote on the topmost sheet assiduously for several minutes, once or twice stopping the fraction of a minute to work out mentally his legal phrases very precisely; at last, coming to the end of his short document, he drew the sheets from his typewriter; studying the topmost original a moment, he handed the duo of sheets to the man who was bestowing upon him the largess of his legal work.
“I think, Oliver,” he said deferentially, “that this should satisfy your man in a legal sense: one for him; one to go on file abroad since the Marceau executors in England will naturally want one to be of record in English chancery. And as for your figures, I am presuming, of course, that your man Thorne himself will check up on them.”
Marceau read slowly the topmost sheet, bearing the date of that very day—February 23rd, and the year, as well—at its top; it ran:
