Finally he put them down, cleared his throat. This was the first test, coming up now. I knew there would be others, if I passed this one O. K. This was just the preliminary. I braced myself for it. “So you’re Lee Nugent?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Any identification on you?”
I fumbled around in my clothing haltingly, as though I hadn’t been expecting to be called on for documentary proof, was caught off-guard. I produced a carefully prepared scrap or two, just about as much as a fellow in my circumstances would have been likely to have on him. I wasn’t counting on it to be enough, I’d known it wouldn’t be. He shook his head. “Haven’t you got anything more than that? We can’t just turn over a sum of money to you, you know, on the strength of your word alone.”
“I know that, sir,” I said docilely.
He said: “Can you get anyone to vouch for you? Someone that’s known you for several years?”
I’d expected that. For that matter, I could hardly have gotten anyone to vouch for me as George Palmer. That gave me the right line to take. I said, promptly and unqualifiedly, “No, I can’t. Not one single person, as far as I know. You’ve got me there.”
He spread his hands. “Why not? What’s the matter?”
“I’ve been footloose, I’ve been drifting around. I’ve got acquaintances here and there, yes. They don’t know me by name. I’m ‘Slim’ to most of them.” I watched him. It was unsatisfactory in one respect, but I think it made a favorable impression, rather than otherwise. It sounded so plausible. It should have, it was true.
“Well, you’ve worked at times, haven’t you?” He could tell by looking at me that I wasn’t working right now, didn’t have to ask that.
“Sure, whenever I could, which wasn’t often.”
I mentioned two or three jobs I’d actually had, which I knew wouldn’t be any good to him. Hand-labor jobs in which my name hadn’t even been down on any pay-roll, just “Slim” to the foreman and paid off in line according to bulk; fruit-picking jobs in orchards on the West Coast and stuff like that.
He took up the file-cards again. “Answer a few questions, please. Your age?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Date of birth?”
“I can’t give you that,” I said unhesitatingly. “You see, I lost both parents and my older sister when I was nine. If my mother ever told me what my exact birth-date was — and I guess she must have — I’ve forgotten it long since.”
“Place of birth?”
“Right here.” That was an out-and-out guess. If it had backfired, I was going to give him the small stall as on the previous question. I must have hit it right, I noticed he didn’t pick me up on it.
“Mother’s given name?”
“Stella.”
“Can you give me her age at the time of her death?”
“She died in 1923 and she was 42 at the time.”
“You didn’t know of the existence of this account until now?”
“It’s the first I ever heard of it. She may have told me at the time, I can’t remember. If she did, I was just a kid, I didn’t even know what she meant.”
“No passbook, I suppose?”
“My mother lost her life in a fire. The passbook must have been destroyed along with all the rest of her belongings at the same time.”
He put the checked answers away. He brought out some other kind of a paper, said, “Sign this.”
I looked it over carefully. It was an application, a claim on the account. I wasn’t afraid of the handwriting angle any more. I wrote “Lee Nugent” unstudiedly, unselfconsciously, in my own script. I let it stream out. I saw him watching intently as I did, to see if I’d hesitate or think twice.
He blotted for me. “All right,” he said. “That’s all for now. We’ll notify you at—”
I gave him the name and address of a cheap lodging-house.
They were going to check. As far as they were able to, and that wasn’t going to be terribly far.
I said, “Thanks,” turned away. I hadn’t expected to walk out with it then and there. I didn’t. I hadn’t even learned what the amount was yet. I didn’t ask him; there was time enough for that. For the present, the main thing was to see if I was going to get it or not.
It came within three days after that. Came to the “desk” of this 30-cents-a-night flop-house where I’d been stopping for three days past as “Lee Nugent,” in order to have some place to receive it. That was even quicker than I’d expected. It worried me a little. It didn’t say one way or the other, when I’d tremblingly torn it open. Just a typed paragraph, neat and official looking.
Kindly call at the bank in reference to Unclaimed Account Number 24,612.
I went up at once. It was harder to force myself to go inside than the first time. This was the crucial time, now. I could feel moisture at the palms of my hands, and I dried them against my sides before I pushed the revolving doors around. A temptation to drop the whole thing, back out while there was still time, even flitted briefly through my mind. “Keep walking, don’t go in. You’re still out of trouble. Stay outside, keep walking.”
“To where?” I answered myself viciously. “A bench in the park again?” I flipped the door and went in.
I went straight over to him. He said, “Hello, Nugent,” non-committally.
I said to myself: “This looks like it, this looks like it. He’s accepted me under that name.”
He got out all the data again, with new data that had been added to it since the last time. It made quite a sheaf by now. He patted it all together, and then he said: “What do you want to do, leave it in?”
I was getting it! I swallowed twice before I could trust myself to make an answering sound. I managed to bring out in a studious monotone, “Then it’s O. K.?”
“We’re satisfied it’s rightfully yours. You want to withdraw it, that right?”
I sure did. The real Nugent might appear from one moment to the next. Even right while I was sitting there winding up the last of the transaction.
He said, “Sign this.” This time it was a blank withdrawal slip. I passed it back and he filled in the rest of it for me himself. The date, the account number, most important of all — the amount involved. He wrote it in script, not ciphers, and it was upside-down from where I was; I still couldn’t tell how much it was. He scrawled his official O. K. on it, sent it over to the teller by messenger. He said, “It’ll take a minute or two,” leaned back in his chair.
He kept looking at me. That added to my uneasiness. For a minute I was tempted to bolt and run, even at this late stage of the proceedings. It seemed to be taking a long time. Were they just using it for an excuse to hold me here while they sent out for the police?
Suddenly the runner was standing beside the desk again. He put down the file-card, with a sheaf of money clipped up against it. The card had been diagonally perforated “Canceled” to show that the account was closed out. The bank-official unclipped the money, separated it from the card, shifted it over to me. “There you are,” he said and watched my face.
I was looking down at a hundred-dollar bill. My heart started to pick up speed. Over $100 — gee, it had been worth going to all that — I thumbed it. The second one from the top was a $100 bill too. Over $200; this was even better than I’d dared think; the third was still another — I couldn’t go ahead separating them. My heart was rattling around in my chest like a loose bolt. I took a short-cut, reached out for the file-card, scanned it instead.