The Riddle of the Yellow Zuri

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  “And so,” put in Carson bitterly, “you decided to stay with Black Dragon for a few hundred dollars more Monday morning — a thousand, perhaps, of the bank’s money — and then sit back and watch it tick off a fortune for you while it went to the top of the thermometer and burst the glass in the bargain?”

  Cary sighed a sigh that seemed to come from the depths of his soul.

  “That’s — that’s about it, Cliff. Oh, what’s the use of telling the rest of the story, except to let you know what happened to Licky and Greenburg.” He paused, swallowing hard. “Well, Monday morning I got to the bank early, and shot over to Licky my single Commonwealth Edison share and seven hundred dollars of the bank’s money. I called for telephonic reports on every two-point movement. And the first reports showed that Black Dragon had edged on down. But so slowly now, Cliff. Truly, it seemed as though it couldn’t work down another point by the combined effort of all the bears in America, particularly when you consider the long, long distance it had already traveled. I shot over fifteen hundred dollars more. I figured the crisis had passed, and I had won. But it drifted down. I shot over two thousand dollars, my brain bursting. Then another two thousand dollars. Then twenty-eight hundred dollars — no, twenty-six hundred dollars, to be exact. And then, to cap the climax, what happens but that Licky and Greenburg went under — for on my next frantic call, shortly after noontime, I found that a receiver was in the place, advising all clients that the firm was closed up and off the market, and — and I couldn’t even follow up the program I’d already started. According to the afternoon papers, Cliff, Licky and his partner have been playing a little too strong on the radio market — and International Radio Inc. closed ‘em out pronto when they couldn’t deliver a lot of stock they were supposed to have sold. But to go back to my story. While I was casting about wondering how I could dig up another broker somehow, and keep on with the agony that I’d stayed with all this time, Black Dragon suddenly developed another tumble and this time it went so fast that I didn’t have a chance. Why, Cliff, that first tumble was nothing compared to the one that took place this afternoon. If Licky and Greenburg hadn’t gone under, or if I’d had another broker, which I didn’t, and I’d stayed with that second tumble and kept on feeding the calls for margin I’d have been thirty or forty thousand dollars out. The courts would have given me twenty years in the pen. As it is — ” His face grew dark and troubled. “As it is — God — it’ll mean ten years. Oh Cliff, what shall I do? And what have I done to you?”

  Carson rose from his chair. His own head was buzzing now. He paced up and down for several minutes. At last he stopped in front of Cary and spoke. He was surprised at the calmness he was able to muster in this situation.

  “You have ruined me, Cary,” he said quietly. He stood looking down at Marcia’s brother. Then he laughed harshly, mirthlessly. “You know, Cary, I always had a hunch that this wonderful job was too good to be true. Indeed, there wasn’t a thing on earth that could have ousted me from it but malfeasance in office. For I had seniority to add to my highest rating. I was to get six thousand dollars salary next year, Cary, and a rising scale thereafter. All this was to mean happiness and luxury to your little sister. But now, my boy, I’ve succeeded in losing ten thousand dollars in assets entrusted to me. In the charter and code of operation drawn up for this office, I am personally responsible to the United States Government for all mining stocks left here for investigation by clients; and the Government, in the official receipt which I am empowered to give out and which I gave out to this Sicilian woman, makes itself responsible to these clients. Pending the full installation of these vaults, the one body in America who is superior to me — the Congressional Committee for Mining Stock Investigation — personally ordered me to hire a safety box in the name of this department and keep all stocks in it that might be valuable. Which I didn’t do! I got careless — and let you put the one valuable share that did come in, in your teller’s vault.” Carson shook his head, and sighed, “No, Cary, they won’t send me to prison. Your testimony at a hearing will absolve me from actual theft. That is, maybe — and maybe not, at that. I don’t know. They may figure it’s a put-up job with a convict — yes, Cary, as you say, you’ll be a convict by that time and in stripes — a put-up job to mulct the Government out of ten thousand dollars for the Desmond-Carson family. Whatever they think, I’ll be out. They won’t keep me here for a moment. A hearing on the facts — and I’m done for. And as for this Sicilian woman, she’ll have to bring suit against the Committee of Mining Investigation on my official receipt. She’ll get judgment after long expensive legal monkey-business for her. And she’ll get her money back some day.” He shook his head. “Gad, Cary, but you sure did make a mess of things. I’ll say that Matthias Smock didn’t do you any good if he was the cause for your chasing the will-of-the-wisp of stock-market riches just because he was mulcting you and Marcia out of what ought to be yours.”

  “It was his fault,” proclaimed Cary vehemently. “Outside of that terrible mistake I made on that Tex Helium Gas certificate which, after all, Cliff, is partly your fault for leaving it with me, I brooded about Smock a lot. I tell you I wanted to clean up some money — to put a fat wad on Sister’s lap, and — ”

  “And,” put in Carson wearily, “the fat wad wound up on somebody else’s lap instead. A wad including my appointment here — or that Sicilian woman’s certificate.” He shook his head slowly. “Great Scott, Cary, if only you could work as I have worked in this department of the Government, you would have known that any kind of a mine whose shares were zigzagging up and down sufficiently to allow playing it on a margin is likely incorporated for stock-juggling purposes. You would know that with the hundreds of mines which are almost fraudulent, even a slight investment in their stock is fraught with danger. I could take you into that next room and show you in five minutes by the geological map and the statistics concerning the copper output of Black Dragon that with its location its shares are only a wild speculation even when they are bought outright.” He shook his head. “No, Cary, the game of the elemental minerals is not for the unadvised or the unsophisticated.” He stared curiously down at his foster-brother. He marveled at his own composure in the face of the fact that his own little dream was over, but he did not perceive that this composure was engendered only by the dread thing that now hung over the head of Marcia’s brother. “Where did you start this crazy stuff?” he asked suddenly. “Where did you get that first hundred dollars you borrowed? And that later two hundred?”

  “From a loan shark.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Oh — just a shark.”

  “Matthias Smock, in other words. You trotted straight to Matthias Smock’s office to make your loan — to the man who is doing you and your sister a rank injustice. Confess, didn’t you? You went to the man who is going to give you and your sister a paltry thousand dollars apiece when you should have half the selling price of that Outer-Ravenswood tract.”

  Cary reddened. “Well — yes — I did make both loans in his offices. But what does it matter who I made ‘em from? The loan-sharks all charge three and one-half percent per month. And he — he was willing to advance the largest sum of any of ‘em. What difference does it make?”

  “None, I guess, Cary. None. As for myself, we’ll just forget me. I’m ruined. But there’s no use of my croaking in the face of what’s facing you — you’ll have to go to prison. All I have to do is to see myself dropped, and I can get a mining engineer’s job and — ” he laughed dismally “ — at any rate, I won’t have to work the rest of the year for the balance of a dollar salary. Oh, I’ll get by. Except, Cary, that this was the opportunity of the age. In time to come I’d have been senior officer over all the other agents that are to be appointed in other parts of the country — everything. But now another man will have it — some man who will have brains enough to follow simple instructions and put the assets of the bureau into a safety box. No, Cary, in the face of what faces you, we’ll
just forget me.”

  With which statement he rose from his chair and walked troubledly up and down the room. What a devilish complication was this thing that Cary Desmond had drawn down upon his own head as well as the heads of two others who were close to him. His accounts shy at the bank by a young fortune. Carson’s — or rather Mrs. Galioto’s — certificate, a thing as negotiable as money itself, vanished into the great bottomless and Cimmerian pool of stock trading, a pool that reached from here to Shanghai and back again, a dozen legitimate buyers now interposed between the recent conveyance of doubtful legality and its present unknown location, a location which would likely remain unknown till the next annual stock dividend date, nearly six months, as he recalled it, from now. And the only persons against whom he had any chance whatever under the law to bring a legal action: his own foster-brother, penniless, indicted for embezzlement; and Licky and Greenburg, bankrupt bucketeers! What a mess!

  As for Mr. Cary himself, he had done what thousands of others had done in the past and been openly punished for in the courts of law; and if he too had to pay the price he would not be paying, perhaps, any more than was coming to him considering the warnings given out almost daily by the press. And as for himself, Carson, in the last eight minutes he had tumbled more swiftly even than had Black Dragon copper — from the knowledge that he sat snug and tight in the scheme of things financial — to the realization that he was out on the streets seeking a job as mining engineer, for ten thousand dollars with which to recompense Mrs. Angelo Galioto for the loss of her stock certificate was just exactly about ninety-five hundred dollars more than he had in the world or could raise by any methods whatsoever. Yet all this, strangely, caused him little concern, and he knew only too well the reason why.

  Marcia!

  She was the reason. Poor little Marcia — disgraced when a little girl by having other little girls point to her scornfully and ask her, “Your daddy’s in jail, ain’t he?” — her young life spoiled until those later days when the Crooked Crayshaw revelations were to prove that that daddy had been but one more martyr to crooked politics. And now, at this stage, to become once more related to a prison inmate — the sister of a convicted embezzler!

  What a shame, what a beastly shame, Carson told himself over and over again, as he walked up and down, up and down, Cary watching him now in absolute silence. And that Cary’s ill-fated impulse to get rich — or at least comfortable — should have found its inception in his resentment at Matthias Smock’s taking unto himself that which belonged rightfully to both families was a bit of bitter irony, to say the least. Truly, it demonstrated in a way far too harsh the manner in which the facts and motives of life were hopelessly tangled together. Smock had pulled down a pretty kettle of fish when he openly proclaimed his intentions of lawfully seizing the old Rocky Ridge tract, once worth two thousand dollars, today worth one hundred thousand dollars, by having Henry Desmond declared dead. But it was no excuse for Cary to ruin his own life, and that of his sister and grandfather as well, not to mention the mud that he was splashing on his sister’s fiancé.

  At last Carson stopped in his pacing up and down and turned to Cary.

  “Exactly how much were you in the red when you stopped feeding the copper market? When you learned, that is, that Licky and Greenburg had blown up? I mean on the bank’s money — never mind counting that Sicilian woman’s Helium Gas certificate which has a par value of just a few dollars under ten thousand dollars?”

  “Ninety-six hundred dollars exactly,” said Cary wearily. “Of the bank’s money,” he added.

  “Hm. You say they’ve given you a vacation?”

  “Yes. Starting tonight. I’m supposed to have balanced up my books when I left, an hour ago.”

  “Do you think they suspect the truth?”

  A doleful nod. “Yes. I took a desperate chance and put one call through to Licky and Greenburg through the bank’s switchboard. The girl operator at the bank doesn’t like me. I’m certain she listened in. The conversation indicated, at the very least, that I was interested in the stock market. I’m certain she reported it to the president.”

  “You say tomorrow is the bank examiner’s day?”

  “Yes. I had a hot tip from an employe who heard the president phoning for one. I know full well whose books he will start on.”

  “Hm.” Carson bit his lips perturbedly. “Cary, you’ve gone and done us all up for fair. All of us, I say. For any legal action on my part, you know, to regain that Helium certificate has to be against you, or at the best Licky and Greenburg, or the two of you jointly, and even if Licky and Greenburg were still in the running, such action would drag on in the courts for two or three years. In the end, if a judgment were gotten against anyone, it would be against you — owning nothing — or against a few desks and potted rubber plants belonging to Licky and Greenburg. I know that outfit. Such an action would have dragged on so long, as a matter of fact, that Mrs. Galioto would long since have regained her loss against the Government.” He shook his head. “Lucky for you, maybe, that Licky and Greenburg are under, for if I ultimately got a judgment against them, they’d only turn around — you’d be in Joliet Pen by that time, of course — and clap an additional sentence onto your head — for another five or ten years. And through it all, nobody would actually get anything.” He shook his head decisively. “No, there’s no way out for me — and you’re done tomorrow. All I can do — and I shall do that, of course, is to stall off these Sicilians for a few weeks, while your goose is being cooked, and keep the family scandals down to one trial or one Congressional Hearing at one time. I’m sure sorry for Marcia. I — ”

  The sharp ringing of the phone bell on his desk interrupted Carson’s words. He stepped to the instrument and raised the receiver. He spoke.

  “Federal Bureau of Mining Stock Investigation. Yes. Mr. Carson speaking. Oh — Tony — Tony Galioto? Yes, Tony?”

  The words of a young Sicilian boy of twelve or thirteen came into the receiver.

  “Meester Carsone, I have wrote mom in Sicilione w’at you tella me, an’ mom she hava sen’ back dat receipt from Millawaukee, and she want dat I come in and get dat stifficate.”

  “Yes, but Tony, these offices are closed for the day. What’s more, the stock certificate is put away in safe keeping. I — well I couldn’t get it for you tonight.” He winced as he spoke. “In fact, Tony, I want to talk to your mother personally — with you present, of course, to interpret — about that certificate.”

  “Oh.” The boy was frankly puzzled.

  “When does your mother return from Milwaukee? In a few weeks? A week? When?”

  “Naw, Meester Carsone. She coma back Chicago Toorsday morning.”

  “Then have her come in personally and you be sure to come with her. I’ll — I’ll — well, I’ll explain a number of things.”

  “She say, Meester Carsone, I getta Joe Allenuzza, the lawyer, rightaway, if you no giva me back stifficate.”

  “Don’t be foolish, my boy. Have your mother come in Thursday when she gets back — and we’ll finish up this matter. Come with her yourself. Or have her bring this Allenuzza, if she wants to. Anybody, in fact, who can understand English.”

  “I write her, Meester Carsone.”

  “Do that.” And Carson hung up. He turned from the phone. He made a helpless gesture with his hands. “Thursday, then, Cary, I have to explain to Mrs. Galioto that I haven’t got her certificate, that I can’t pay her for it, and that, in fact, the only way she can get its value back is to bring a suit against the Committee of Mining Investigation. She’ll probably have her lawyer with her. He’ll act quick. By Saturday there’ll be an ouster order against me from Washington — and a new man in here.” He sighed. He looked about the little office. It was beginning to appear to him now like an enchanting palace.

  He resumed speaking to Cary exactly where he had left off when the phone bell had rung.

  “Well, Cary, by the end of the week we’ll both be in warm water. I’ll c
ome out without any prison sentences though. And Marcia and I will marry just the same. But it sure burns me up that you should bring disgrace on that little girl who has worked her fingers to the bone because you wouldn’t live at home and help carry the burden of that house out there. That’s the damnableness of it. But what’s the use of my lecturing? You’ll get yours from the judge and jury when the truth of this comes out at the bank.”

  “I’ll say I will,” murmured Cary. He sighed a long dolorous sigh. It was plain that he had given up the ship and was only waiting for it to go down with him.

  Carson resumed his pacing up and down. “If only we knew that your father were alive. If only we could have some sign — some clue — as to where to search him out. We are face to face with one other critical situation, as I explained fully to your sister today. If you and Marcia accept Smock’s two thousand dollars tomorrow morning in exchange for your father’s quitclaim, you have, to be sure, two thousand dollars with which to make partial restitution to the bank. For Marcia would demand this method of using the money, I am certain. That might moderate your punishment to a slight extent. But by the quitclaim Smock can turn over the entire Outer Ravenswood tract immediately and pocket a certified check for one hundred thousand dollars from Whitlock, Spayne, Critchley and Evans. I speak of all this for the reason that if your father were here and in a position to make good your defalcation at any time prior to your trial for embezzlement, he would do so without any hesitation.” Carson made an expressive gesture of his hands. “But if he is dead, Heaven knows we can’t afford to pass up that two thousand dollars now, of all times.”