“Fine,” he said. “I’ll have the note drawn up. Six percent all right?”
“Sure. And ninety days.”
He nodded and held out his hand for the stock certificate. I gave it to him. He turned it over, saw that Hilda had signed it, but looked doubtful. “I’m sure you’ll understand,” he said then, “but on a loan of this size, we have to be very careful. Is this Hilda Carstairs, to whom the stock is registered, your wife?”
“Yes.”
“And she’s willing to pledge her stock for this loan?”
“She endorsed the certificate, didn’t she? It’s negotiable.”
“True. But we can’t be sure she endorsed it willingly, can we?”
I pretended indignation. “You know I’m Chester Carstairs.”
“Not for sure,” he interrupted apologetically.
“Call your teller, Mr. Hogarth. He knows me. He knows I’m married too.”
Mr. Norbit, without embarrassment, did exactly that. Hogarth identified me at once and vouched for me.
After all, a member of the Bankers’ Association—
When Hogarth left, I said to Norbit, “You want me to get Hilda to sign a specific permission form for you?”
I was still pretending hurt at his lack of confidence in me. But I could have got Hilda to sign one if he’d wanted it. She wouldn’t know it from a laundry receipt.
“That won’t be necessary,” he said with dignity. “How do you want the money?”
“I’ll open a checking account with you, and you can pay the sixty-five thousand into it. O.K.?”
“Good. Then we’ll just charge your account with the monthly interest on the loan.”
And so it was arranged. I signed the note for the loan, left Hilda’s stock certificate with Norbit, and opened a new account with the Farmer’s Bank, into which the sixty-five thousand was to be paid next day.
A week later, I went down into the safe deposit vault in my own bank on my lunch hour. I signed the admission card, gave my box key to Charlie, the custodian, and went with him to my box location. While he was withdrawing my box from the metallic ranks of others in section C, I ostentatiously lighted a cigarette and said, “I guess I’ll use a booth this time, Charlie. I’ve got to go through my box.”
“O.K., Mr. Carstairs,” said Charlie. “How about booth four here?”
“Swell,” I said, blowing cigarette smoke. I entered the booth with my safety deposit box. “Thanks, Charlie.” He closed the door of the booth behind me and left me to myself.
I put my cigarette down on the edge of the booth table, flipped both ends of my deposit box open and rummaged its entire contents out on the table top. There was nothing of much importance there. I had no stocks or bonds, no cash stashed away. There was the house lease, a small insurance policy (lapsed), birth certificates for Hilda and me, the passports we’d used on our Caribbean honeymoon (expired), a silver medal I’d won in the high jump at a high school track meet, and a ragged bundle of old income-tax records that went back to our first joint return.
I set the bundle of income-tax records near the edge of the table, right up against the end of my neglected cigarette. Then I patiently blew on the cigarette coal until the papers caught a spark from it, glowed briefly, then emitted a tongue of flame. I let the income-tax papers get well alight, fanning smoke over the booth’s half door into the vault outside.
I dumped my other papers on top of the burning tax records, waiting until they were flaming merrily, then cursed at the top of my voice and yelled, “Charlie! Hey, Charlie! Fire!” I began beating at the burning papers with my hands.
Charlie had seen the smoke because, just as I yelled, he arrived with a small fire-extinguisher. I had the fire out by then, and was regarding the charred remains of my valuable papers with dismay when he pulled the half door open.
“What happened?” he asked in a flustered voice.
“Cigarette caught the stuff on fire.” A rueful glance at my slightly burned hands seemed indicated here.
“That’s tough,” Charlie said. “But I’m glad you weren’t burned seriously, Mr. Carstairs.” He took in the charred papers. “Did anything valuable burn up?”
“Nothing I can’t replace. Nothing even very important, except for a stock certificate that belongs to my wife. It serves me right for being careless. I’m glad I didn’t set the bank on fire. Whew! I was scared there for a minute!”
“Me too,” agreed Charlie with emphasis.
That night, between reluctant mouthfuls of Hilda’s macaroni casserole, I told her about my accidental fire.
“Oh, Chester darling!” she cried with characteristic disregard of the really important issue. “You might have been badly burned!”
“True,” I said, “but I wasn’t. A couple of little blisters. What did get burned up was that stock your uncle left you.”
“That’s too bad,” said Hilda, clicking her tongue. “But we can get along without it all right. We did before.”
I broke the news to her. “We didn’t actually lose the money, of course. We can get a new stock certificate to replace the burned one, Hilda. There’ll be a lot of red tape to go through, that’s all.”
“What will we have to do?”
“You’ll have to write Intercontinental and tell them your certificate has been destroyed by fire and you want a new one. They’ll send you a form to fill out, applying for an indemnity bond. You submit the form, with a statement of the facts as to how the original certificate was destroyed, to a surety company. For a price, the surety company will issue you a bond of indemnity covering the face amount of your original stock certificate. Then you’ll get a new stock certificate to replace the old one.”
“Goodness!” Hilda said, bewildered. “What’s a bond of indemnity?”
See what I mean about Hilda? A complete blank about money matters.
In the following weeks, however, she went through all the red tape I’d described, and finally was qualified to be issued a new certificate for her thousand shares of Intercontinental. I had to guide her every step of the way, of course. Luckily, she was very incurious about the whole thing.
She never even questioned where I’d found the six-thousand-dollar premium to pay for her bond of indemnity. Actually it was the first check I’d drawn on my new sixty-five-thousand-dollar account at the Farmers’ Bank.
Well, when Hilda’s new stock certificate arrived I pulled my fountain pen out of my pocket once more and said, “Has to be signed, Hilda. Remember?”
“Oh, yes. My receipt signature. Isn’t that what you said?” She scrawled her name carelessly on the endorsement line.
The next morning, as soon as the market opened, I sold Hilda’s thousand shares of Intercontinental through the brokerage office in my own bank building where I was known, turning over her new certificate to the broker. The stock brought 105 dollars a share. This, less brokerage fees and commissions, meant a net profit to me of over a hundred thousand dollars. I told the broker to deliver his check for the amount to me at my office.
I got the check on Monday morning, April second. I remember the date very well. I used my lunch hour to drive out to the Farmer’s Bank branch where I had my new account. I told Mr. Norbit, the manager, that I was going to deposit my broker’s check in my account there, that I had liquidated some other holdings of mine in order to add to my capital for the investment venture I’d described to him.
“What I’d like is a cashier’s check for the whole thing, Mr. Norbit — this hundred thousand and the total of my account here — as evidence of absolutely certified funds to use as a bargaining factor in my negotiations with my future colleagues. I’d leave enough in my account to cover my interest payments on your loan, of course.”