House of All Nations (94 page)

‘Nothing,' said Jules.

‘But if they publish we will be on the list.'

‘Oh, Aristide! Let them publish, Aristide: I'd be only too glad. It'll bring business.'

‘But it's illegal,' cried Aristide.

‘Oh, Aristide!' He was irritated this time, then laughed, ‘Illegal! Oh, Aristide. Don't tell me you didn't know we had our clients' interest coupons cashed abroad! Where have you been?'

‘Yes, I knew, of course; it's the regular thing. But if they
publish
it! We might be ruined, Mr. Bertillon. They might shut the bank up.'

‘They won't shut me up! I'll buy off the inspector.'

‘But it will be flagrant; they'll say our foreign branches are only to collect interest abroad and avoid the taxes.'

‘So they are. Listen, Aristide! It isn't the government worrying about the eighteen per cent deducted at the source that our honorable clients are all evading; it's the pressure from the overrich, trying to shut up little banks like me, because I've got the Salon trade … we're getting too much of the private business. Look at the accounts I've got! A lot of people like little banks: secrecy they think, privacy. No clerks to blackmail, no postal clerks to see what's going abroad. Just big bear eat little bear, that's all, Aristide, and no ‘legality,' at all. They can't shut me up,' he said with bravado.

‘Some clerk here could blackmail us,' worried Aristide.

‘Nobody blackmails me!'

‘They could,' worried Raccamond.

‘Listen, Raccamond, I want to tell you one thing. The lists are kept abroad; foreign clerks don't care twopence for the French fisc or French newspapers. They won't blackmail. I pay them too good a salary. They won't blackmail. When clients prefer to keep their bonds themselves, or here in the bank, the coupons presented for dividends are
taken abroad by a clerk
. That clerk does not come to this bank. He meets the clients in a room rented in a hotel.'

‘An Englishman?' asked Aristide, involuntarily.

Jules did not hear. ‘I'd threaten to publish the lists myself of all the clients keeping bonds abroad and accounts abroad through my branches and thus defrauding the fisc themselves. If I'm guilty, aren't they?'

‘You couldn't … you'd lose every account, overnight! We'd be ruined.'

‘You are simple, Raccamond,' said Jules with dislike. ‘Would Carrière and his like
allow
such lists to be published? They'd back down at once. Let them. You'll see nothing will come of it.'

Aristide, with a sullen and sidelong look, walked out. Aristide did willingly what the law or its silences allowed, but to dare, to affront was not his line: he suspected it. What were the secret thoughts of a man like Jules so venturesome, so contemptuous of threats? Aristide had seen others in difficulties or faced with disgrace. Léon was cunning but ran; Claude fought and broke down. Marianne's relatives were evil and supple. But the rash Jules when desperate? In a moment of clairvoyance, Aristide saw that the clients, the bank itself meant nothing to Jules: Jules was a lone hand. He went in and tried to alarm Alphendéry about the proposed revelation.

‘If they do it,' said Alphendéry, ‘they'll make an Aunt Sally of one or two small banks that they're trying to abolish from the horizon, and that's all. But they wouldn't dare do more: are they going to bring mobs into the rich quarters? Is there anyone of them who keeps his accounts at home and pays taxes? A patriot, Aristide, is one who takes interest in other countries.'

He laughed. That was all? Surrounded by such recklessness and such incomprehension, Aristide suddenly found his stature: either he was the only real ‘banker' amongst them, or else the world he had been struggling to get into was chaos, or else he had once more landed on one of those rotten houses whose bottom would fall out overnight. Poor Aristide, sailing to prosperity on a death ship.

The following Saturday afternoon William stayed behind and fossicked in all the files and private drawers of the establishment. He had skeleton keys made long ago. In the evening he met Alphendéry and after some unusually slow and satiric remarks, he planted a fold of papers under Michel's nose, saying, ‘There's something to give you pleasant dreams.'

Alphendéry read the copy of the agreement that Jules had sent to Carrière long ago, promising to pay the drafts at a fixed sum in francs, and a copy of further letters covering various payments, one of which, the last, said, ‘Here's the money coming to you on the sterling drafts, according to our contract: stop court proceedings, for now you are paid up to date.'

Alphendéry said, ‘He admits that the contract has force, after denying it all along. The result of his win on K. & T. Well, now we are sunk. It certainly is hard to have to work for a Carrière.'

‘I thought Jules learned nothing at school,' mused William, ‘but I see he learned too much: how to write.'

‘A fatal gift!'

He also showed Alphendéry the list of Jules's losses in the past six months, and finally let him know that the bank had lost all its money
three times
during the Carrière press campaign, and only been replenished by fortunate accidents like the Paleologos account.

‘We had nothing, we owed Carrière, and also showed two millions loss in the stock-exchange account when the Kreuger windfall came! Let's take the hint and close up.'

The only political shadows were the first great Japanese attack on Manchuria and the terrifying rise of Hitlerism in the May, 1932, elections. All those who had been depending on German Social-Democracy, and on a return to liberalism or monarchy financed by Germany's creditor states, were bitterly disappointed; at this moment the wing of terror spread its shadow over Europe, and the governing classes, in despair since 1929, began to see that Fascism was not simply an expedient to be used on a lackadaisical southern people, but a real salvation for their property. At this time the socialist friends of Alphendéry began to tremble; the wisest predicted ten years of black reaction; the conservatives predicted a hundred years of domination. Jules even became captious and cruel and couldn't bear Alphendéry to mention socialism or to wish the comfort of all …

‘If the stock exchange is abolished,' said Jules, ‘men like me will always set up a black bourse: it will come back. What you dream of are opium-den dreams, and besides you're wasting time … You can make money … That's what I want you to do … none of your communist friends has ever made money, and so what brains have they? Forget them. You're working for me!'

Alphendéry laughed with contempt. ‘Jules, don't worry. You've got time. There are plenty of tricks they can and will pull yet: every measure designed not for economic recovery but to put up the market, as if that were the first reality of economics, not merely the mercury of the middle classes … This is the period of effrontery of capitalism and you think right, Jules, you've got the general line!'

‘Yes,' said Jules, cooling. ‘I know it won't last long, and I won't last long; my three sons will be engineers, don't fret! This is the day of the short-play heroes. No more Rhodeses and houses of Rothschild!'

* * *

Scene Eighty-two: The Factor X

T
he panic deepened in France despite all efforts, and by June, 1932, all values, however expressed, whether in paper or gold, were at the lowest point of the century. Recovery attempts had begun on a grand scale.

In the U.S.A. the fall of the Dawes Bank in Chicago foreshadowed the moratorium of March, 1933, but the panic was staved off in order to produce an election boom for Hoover: a campaign was worked up even before the Kreuger suicide and crash.

In England the government reversed the price of gilt-edged by conversion, and the English, in the hope of profit in the Empire, accepted the conversion, and paid their taxes as they were requested.

The world was really crumbling: all speculators hoped to make money out of the death and decrepitude of something or other.

Jules had a proposition from a poor author, for the constitution of a library of rare and antique books, bought from the libraries of financially decrepit nobles and landed proprietors, in order to ‘raise prices and sell high to foreign speculators.'

Carrière bought up mortgages on old houses in the new building quarters, hoping for a market rise; and Achitophelous at this moment announced that he had bought and was renovating the finest hotel on the Promenade des Etats-Unis at Nice. The hotel had gone bankrupt the previous winter.

Everyone had a last glimmer of hope and thought that with exceptional cunning they could get in before the rise in prices. Only Daniel Cambo, Dreyer, William Bertillon, and their partners went on steadily with their cheap-bazaar projects, convinced that today's money was in rubbish goods. ‘There are only two businesses today,' said William, in excuse to Jules. ‘Yours—selling to those who believe in substitute money; and mine, selling to those who believe in substitute goods.'

This was a world which Raccamond did not understand and in which he floundered. It was not a world to build a career in but a world in which crust, derring-do, luck, and lawlessness had the upper hand. Raccamond felt that someone had cheated him.

And at this time he received from his secret man, entered as accountant in the Brussels office, the following note,

Dear Mr. Raccamond,

I have made very serious, but none the less, expected discoveries. Come at once. For your own interest and for your clients', lose no time. You will be in a key position.

Yours,

P (Posset)

Raccamond admired the calm with which he received this intimation; but a few hours afterwards, seeing himself in a restaurant mirror, he found that he was pale as dough. He divined quite well what he was to learn. He put through a call to Brussels at lunchtime, from the Brasserie Universelle in the Avenue de l'Opéra, where he would not be likely to meet any of the bank's men, and there he got the guarded information from Posset,

‘I have found some private ledgers which will explain a great deal. A. manages very large accounts.' (A. was Alphendéry.)

Aristide went to the bank and for a few hours hung about the board room, a pallid bloated brooding thing, without saying a word to anyone. The word went round that he was neurotic because he had just discovered that he had syphilis. This was natural, for almost every man in the board room, from time to time, was suspected or known, or reported by his best friends, to have just contracted syphilis or gonorrhea. Now, some more imaginative and more learned declared that they had always suspected it, and that he was certainly now in the early dementia stage of general paresis; some thought he should take insulin and some thought milk should be injected; some inclined for salvarsan, and others thought a wound in one of the feet or hands would draw off the madness from his head.

Aristide sat in a chair near Jacques Manray's desk, unaware of these whispers, wretchedly intent on finding out what Manray was doing, whether he was marking orders in a special way, whether he really sent orders through to the telegraph room, through the pneumatic tube, and whether these orders were sent in complete, just as the client gave them. But Manray sent every order through the pneumatic tube. It suddenly occurred to Raccamond then that it was Alphendéry, sitting within, who was the secret agent; and he figured him sitting in the telegraph room, marking the order slips malevolently, pretending to execute the orders, never telegraphing them to the stock exchanges of the world, but making up the prices himself and presently sending down confirmations to trusting clients. The clients were now sitting at ease in Jules's fat green armchairs, in peaceful rows, in a contented daze, staring at the figures marked up by the board boys. Some few thin, fretful clients, habitual gamblers with small incomes or wasted patrimonies, walked up and down, starting every time the pneumatic tube whirred. These were the ones that bought and sold their tens and fifties of International Nickel, I.T.T., Mexican Eagle, and American Radiator, dealt in stop-loss orders, and spent their nights figuring out schemes of incredible complexity in which, by the manipulation of ten or twenty shares of a cheap stock, they would secure a handsome profit. Abernethy Gairdner, the most insensate of them all, now handed in a slip to Manray. Manray noted down the amounts, but before he sent it down the pneumatic tube, Aristide suddenly observed that the slip was covered with notations. He snatched it out of Manray's hand, thinking he had a clue, and read:

BUY 10 shares of Int. Nickel at 15: put in an order good this month to sell 20 shs. Int. Nickel at 20. Put in a stop-loss order to sell 10 shs. at 13; and if this is obtained, cancel the order to sell at 20.

Signature of client:

Abernethy Gairdner

Aristide stood up and rushed to Gairdner with the sheet in his hand, ‘Is this your order?'

Gairdner looked at him, outraged (he thought some question of margins had come up), looked at it, ‘Yes! Why, hasn't it gone up yet! It ought to be on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange by now!' Crestfallen, Aristide thrust the slip back at Manray, ‘Send it through, marked
Hurry
!' Manray looked at him insolently but said nothing, and sent the order through. Aristide was ill at ease. The solution was inside, in the telegraph room, where Alphendéry sat deviling the orders. He pushed open the door behind Manray and penetrated the inside corridor. The door to the cable room was locked: inside he heard the voices of Jules Bertillon and Alphendéry. Alphendéry could usually be heard all through the corridor: just now he was talking in a very low voice. Everything seemed to hang together, though, to confirm Aristide's suspicions.

He went to his own room, restlessly came out again, patrolled the inside corridors of the bank, and when Jules at last came out of the cable room, Aristide approached him and said nervously that he must have leave of absence at once, to go to Brussels. His son, he muttered, his son was in trouble: he had tried to obtain money by hocking radios obtained on time payment.