I finished the drink and went in search of the bank, which turned out to be a branch of Wells Fargo. One of its minor officers, a young man with a handlebar mustache, seemed busily idle so I told him I wanted to open a checking account. The mustache jiggled a little at that and I assumed that the jiggle was a smile of welcome or at least acquiescence. A nameplate on his desk said that he was C. D. Littrell and I tried to remember whether I had ever seen a bank official with a handlebar mustache before and decided that I hadn’t except in some old Westerns and then he had usually turned out to be a crook. But this was Wells Fargo and perhaps its traditions encouraged handlebar mustaches.
After I sat down Littrell produced some forms and the forms contained questions to which I would have to think up some answers. I decided to tell the truth when convenient and to lie when it wasn’t.
“Your full name?” Littrell said.
“Dye, D-y-e. Lucifer C. Dye.” The C stood for Clarence but I saw no sense in mentioning that. Lucifer was bad enough.
“Your address?”
Another good question. “Temporarily the Sir Francis Drake.”
The mustache twitched slightly and this time I knew it wasn’t a smile. Littrell looked up from his writing and stared at me. I returned his gaze, gravely, I hoped.
“How long do you plan to stay there?” he said, coming down hard on the “there” as if he felt that anyone who stayed at a hotel for an extended period of time was either profligate or flighty. Perhaps both.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“You should let us know as soon as you get a permanent address.”
“I’ll let you know.”
“Your previous address?”
“Hong Kong. You want the street number?”
Littrell shook his head, a little sadly, I thought, and wrote down Hong Kong. He would have been happier had J said Boise or Denver or even East St. Louis.
“Your previous bank?”
“Barclays,” I said. “Also in Hong Kong.”
“I mean in the States.”
“None.”
“None at all — ever?” He seemed a little shocked.
“None at all.”
This time Littrell did shake his head. I couldn’t decide whether it was a gesture of disapproval or commiseration. “Where are you employed, Mr. Dye?” he said, and from his tone I knew he expected the worst.
“Self-employed.”
“Your place of business.”
“The Sir Francis Drake.”
Littrell had given up. He was scribbling hastily now. “What kind of business, Mr. Dye?”
“Export-import.”
“The name of your firm?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“I see,” Littrell said, a little glumly, and wrote down unemployed. “How much would you like to deposit?”
I could tell that if I said fifty dollars, he would be pleasantly surprised. If I said a hundred, he would be ecstatic.
“Twenty thousand,” I said. “No, better make it nineteen thousand, five hundred.”
Littrell muttered something to himself which I didn’t catch and then pushed two cards over to me. “These are the signature cards. Would you sign them the way that you’ll be signing your checks?”
I signed the cards and handed them back along with the certified check for $20,000. Littrell examined the check carefully and for a moment I thought he might even sniff it for some telltale odor. But he went on examining it, knowing it was good and, I thought, hating the fact that it was. He turned it over and looked for the endorsement. There was none. “Would you endorse it, please, Mr. Dye?” I wrote my name for the third time.
“Do you have some identification?”
“Yes,” I said. “I have some.”
We waited. He was going to have to ask for it. After fifteen seconds or so he sighed and said, “May I see it, please?”
I produced the passport, newly issued, never used, which said that my hair was brown, that my eyes were hazel, that I had been born in 1933 in a place called Moncrief, Montana, and if anyone still cared, I was a businessman. It didn’t mention that my slightly crooked teeth had just been cleaned by an Army dentist, a major who wanted desperately to get back into civilian practice.
Littrell accepted the passport, glanced at it, gathered up the forms, and excused himself. He headed for a glass and wood enclosed office a few feet away which barricaded an older man from those who dropped by wanting to borrow money. The older man’s head was pinkly bald and his eyes were colored a suspicious blue.
Littrell didn’t try to keep his voice down and I easily overheard the conversation, “A hot shot with a certified twenty thousand,” he said. “Regular checking.”
The older man looked at the check first, riffled through the forms, and then examined the passport. Carefully. He pursed his lips for a long moment and finally initialed the papers. “It’s only money,” he said, and I had the feeling that he was saying it for the four-hundredth time that year.
Littrell took the check and the forms, disappeared behind the tellers’ cages, and then came back to his desk where, still standing, he counted $500 on to its surface and then counted them again into my hand. He sat down after that, reached into a desk drawer, and produced a checkbook and some deposit forms, which he handed me.
“These checks are only temporary as are the deposit slips,” he said. “We’ll mail you a supply with your name and address printed on them, if you get a permanent address.”
I ignored the “if” and put the checks and deposit slips in my inside jacket pocket. The $500 I folded and casually stuck in my right-hand trouser pocket, which seemed to irritate Littrell. That’s probably why I did it — that and because I had no billfold or wallet or anything to put in one other than the $500. No driver’s license or credit cards. No snapshots or old letters, not even a pocket calendar from the corner liquor store. The only proof that I was who I said I was rested with my new passport that, with a few exceptions, allowed me to journey to any spot in the world that struck my fancy, providing I could think of one that did which, as a matter of fact, I couldn’t.
I said goodbye to Littrell who gave me a final twitch of his mustache. Once outside the bank, I turned right up Sutter Street. I was looking for a jewelry store so that I could buy a watch and it was at least ten minutes before I found one and five minutes before I spotted the man in the brown suit who was tailing me and seven minutes before I came to the pleasant realization that I really didn’t give a damn if he followed me to the ends of the earth — which some thoughtful San Franciscans claimed lay just across the bridge in Oakland.
Chapter 2
It had all begun, the entire mess, or my fall from grace, I suppose it could be called, when they overheaded the instructions by commercial rate from the home office of Minneapolis Mutual, which was located, for some unfathomable reason, in Las Vegas. The message arrived in Hong Kong on May 20th. It was in an antiquated, one-time code that was keyed that week to page 356 of the thirteenth edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations which turned out to be excerpts from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village. It took me a good half hour to break it down and I felt that any reasonably bright computer could have made it in seconds and, for all I knew, might already have done so. Decoded, the message was still childishly cryptic, as if whoever had sent it clung to a wistful hope that it would be meaningless to anyone but me. Its four words read: Cipher the Village Statesman.