It sounds like an impossibly sweet fairy story to tell about all that money wandering about hunting for somebody to accept it, but the Schindler bureau was commissioned to run down the heir, whose only guilt was his ignorance of the wealth that was calling for him.
It began as far back as 1885, when a certain young Señorita Sazarac from Cuba entered this Wall Street bank, and presented a letter of introduction from a Cuban bank. Her parents had recently died leaving her about $100,000 in cash and securities. She did not want to live longer in Cuba, and she asked the Wall Street bankers not merely to accept her fortune as a deposit but to invest it for her so as to bring her a living income.
This the bank did with such fidelity and intelligence that she had all the money she seemed to need. For nearly forty years she lived off her hundred thousand without diminishing it. In fact the sum kept on growing while keeping her fed and clothed. Her wants were simple, and she never married.
Early in the 1920’s Miss Sazarac decided to treat herself to a pilgrimage in Europe. She settled in Paris and lived in the South of France for nearly a score of years. Then World War II sent her back to New York and she took rooms in a hotel where she dwelt until she died.
When the bank learned of her death, it looked about for a swarm of heirs to appear and fight over her money. No will turned up and neither did a single, solitary heir. The officers who had accepted her deposit over fifty years before had gone wherever it is that good bankers go. Nobody in the bank knew anything about Miss Sazarac except her name and address. The hotel people knew no more. So long as tenants pay their bills regularly, hotels ask no questions.
So here was the bank with not even the hint of an heir to notify and with a white elephant on its hands. For the $100,000 that little Cuban spinster had left with them in 1885 had not only supported her in comfort but had grown to a total of no less than $280,000. It would have gone on growing to half a million by the accretions of compound interest.
All the Schindlers had to do was to ransack the world and find some one of the little woman’s kith and kin who did not even know enough about her or her money to send a message of polite condolence.
Since Ray was busy in California, the burden fell on Walter Schindler’s broad shoulders. He questioned the employees of the bank and finally found an ancient one who vaguely recalled that Miss Sazarac had lived in a family hotel near Gramercy Park before she left for her twenty-year stay in Europe. He also vaguely remembered that she had a number of women friends whom she saw often and telephoned to constantly. But he could not even vaguely remember any of their names.
This hotel was so conservative that it had not taken the trouble to throw away its old telephone slips. These had piled up in the cellar till there seemed to be tons of them. So one of the unfortunate Schindler operatives was assigned to the staggering task of sifting those dust-encrusted papers.
It took him only two weeks of toil to find several numbers charged to Miss Sazarac’s room. He took these to the telephone company’s office and called for the telephone books of those years. The books were still kept on file and as a reward for all this labor one of the numbers was found to belong to an elderly woman still living on Riverside Drive.
This was vastly encouraging, for the old lady remembered Miss Sazarac, and remembered that she had originally come from Cuba, where she had left a sister. The old woman knew that the sister was married but could not remember her name, or even whether or not she were still alive.
The pursuit had now narrowed down to Cuba. Since the population of Cuba was only a little over four million, the rest was easy for a man with the eyes of an Argus. So Walter called up California and found Ray there, and told him to fly to Havana and get busy.
Fortunately, not everybody in Cuba was named Sazarac. Ray found people in Havana who knew of a Miss Sazarac. She dwelt in the suburbs of Havana. She had married an American, and given him two girls and a boy. Contrary to foreign expectation, this American was very poor. In fact he and his wife had made many sacrifices to give their children a good education, and the boy spoke English well.
Ray learned that the family had long since lost touch with the Miss Sazarac who had gone to New York. They had not even heard of her death, and had no idea that she had had more than barely enough to live on.
Imagine, if you can, their pleasant stupefaction when the handsome stranger who introduced himself as Ray Schindler made the amazing statement:
“I have come to turn over to you the sum of two hundred and eighty thousand pesos.”
What that kindly old witch did for Cinderella when she turned a pumpkin into a coach and rats into horses and rags into silk and scorched shoes into crystal slippers was almost nothing compared to what those wizard bankers did for that poor but honest family of Americo-Cubans.
It was a pleasant change for Ray Schindler, too. Instead of running down his quarry and throwing it into jail or worse, he came down in that humble cottage the way Jupiter came down to Danaë, in a shower of gold.
22.
PRETEXTS AND THE PASSION PLAYERS
One of the most important accessories of the detective’s art is the Pretext. The best detectives rarely use disguises. They may have to employ fingerprint-lifting tapes and powders, cameras, chemicals, dictographs, lie detectors, and the devices of the handwriting expert.
But they must never appear anywhere without a good Pretext. At any moment someone may pop out with the questions, “Who are you? and what are you doing here?” An answer must be ready without hesitation.
When a strange man is seen loitering about a house at all hours of the night or during a blizzard; when he is found examining door-numbers or hotel registers; when he enters a strange town and barges into strange offices; when he spends days and nights, perhaps weeks and months, in a town where he has no apparent business and no visible means of support, he must be ever-ready with a quick explanation.
The story has already been told about how Ray’s operatives pretended that they were going to change the famous Board Walk in Atlantic City to a concrete pavement. This was a mere pretext, of course, for roping in the thievish city fathers. The railroad he built was only another pretext for intricate dealings with a crooked railroad president and his crooked staff.
On three separate occasions the Schindlers pretended they were about to build a golf course. Their actual purpose was to learn the real value of certain lands and their exact ownership. Once it was necessary to have the tract surveyed and a golf course mapped. Once, wide publicity was given alleged attempts to secure one of the leading golf champions as the professional teacher for the imaginary golf club. Ray actually signed up a famous man for one of his mythical clubs.
To secure certain important information for one of the big automobile companies in Detroit, the Schindler bureau leased and ran for a whole summer a huge hotel at Put-in Bay on Lake Erie.
The Schindlers once had to put up a pretence of conducting a commercial enterprise in Paris in order to carry on a very delicate investigation. They went into the corset business.
There was a preface to this activity at home. The advertising firm of Ruthrauff and Ryan had built up a vast business with a slenderizing device known as the Madame X Corset. It was heavily advertised and the enormous sales attracted numerous imitators. The firm engaged Ray to track down these copyists and put an end to their imitation.
When, later, a complicated case required a long stay in Paris, Ray used the Madame X Corset as a pretext for his underground work over there. He posed as the European representative of the Madame X company and opened an office, which he kept going for two years. One half of the year Ray was in charge; the other half of the year his brother Walter conducted affairs. They had also a branch office in Brussels, and business prospered so that Ray’s Parisian friends thought that his entire interest was in corsets, rather than in their contents. At the end of this disguised detective work the Schindlers sold their business to the local staff.
In Florida they went i
nto real estate development and helped build Davis Island in Tampa. Ray acted as sales manager in Miami and Saint Augustine. Incidentally, Ray made a sizable fortune, most of which he left in Florida when the boom collapsed. But the real estate business was only incidental as a cover for detective work.
The book and magazine publishers and a leading bookstore once engaged Ray to look into certain underground industries that were robbing them of large sums of money. They knew that certain dealers were securing a big supply of books and magazines outside the regular channels without paying for them.
Ray accomplished what he could by shadowing suspects; but he was finally driven to opening a bookstore on Madison Avenue as a subterfuge. By pretending an interest in the black market, he was able to discover that the thieves were securing their wares for almost nothing through crooked deals with crooks in shipping departments.
Magazines usually make use of the “return privilege.” They send a dealer a larger number of periodicals than he is sure of selling, and he has the right to return all the unsold copies. To save the expense of bulky shipments the dealer is permitted to clip the top of the front covers from each unsold magazine, return that and destroy the magazines.
But the thieves took these clipped copies, pasted on the covers a slip stating that the magazines were to be shipped overseas, and sold them abroad at a hundred percent profit since the magazines cost the dealers nothing but the freight.
Ray discovered the warehouses in Boston and Brooklyn where the stolen magazines were handled. As a result of his findings two of the dealers went to jail and their fraudulent work was stopped.
The bookstore Ray founded went out of business, after serving as a pretext for dealings with these dealers. It had not only achieved its purpose but had also returned a small profit to the clients.
On occasion Ray’s office sold metal shoe laces, and insurance; sent out book agents, operated filling stations on Long Island, and even pretended genealogical research.
But the strangest of all his strange pretexts and one that had the most far-reaching and unforeseen results concerned the Passion Players of Oberammergau.
Various reasons arose for Ray’s remaining in Europe over a prolonged period in 1922. He had a will case to investigate and also a political affair to clear up. It was partly a Governmental affair and involved certain foreign diplomats. After the defeat of Germany in World War I, the Passion Play at Oberammergau was not produced until 1922, thus breaking the decennial schedule that had been maintained for hundreds of years. In 1930 the Passion Play resumed its every tenth year appearance, but a second World War made impossible the 1940 production.
As most people know, the little village of Oberammergau has made the Passion Play its almost sacred and sole function. The children of the town are trained to take part in it as they grow up. The players earn their livings humbly and really live for the festival every ten years. They make their own scenery and costumes and are constantly in rehearsal. The actors are a kind of priesthood.
The belated revival of the Play in 1922 awakened the interest of Hollywood, and several producers visited the town with offers so glittering that they bedazzled the good citizens, who were promised not only the lure of wealth from a tour of the United States, but the ultimate glory of a motion picture immortality. To the amazement of the screen kings the humble players finally declined both the screen cash and the screen credit.
One of the agents for a big company told Ray of the hundreds of thousands of dollars he had dangled in vain before the pious actors. Ray went down to look things over, purely as a pretext for lingering around Bavaria.
He was put up at the home of the famous Anton Lang, who played the part of Christ in 1910, 1922, and finally in 1930. Lang’s wife spoke English perfectly, which was a help since Ray did not speak German at all. But he became well acquainted with everybody concerned in the Passion Play and all the other leading citizens of Oberammergau.
In the winter the main product of the valley was snow and the transportation was skis. Ray had learned to ski as a boy, and this served as a further excuse for dallying. He began to work out a deep dark plot.
At that time the German mark was doing a bit of skiing on its own. It took about a million marks to buy a newspaper. Oberammergau was in a state of unusual poverty even for Germany. The town’s one real industry was wood-carving and nobody was buying any wood-carving.
While piety had led the almost starving citizens to scorn the profane allurements of Hollywood, Ray began to instill in them the idea that it was their solemn duty to go on with the plans for the 1930 production of the Play. He solved the problem of how they were to keep alive till then by agreeing to furnish employment for all the wood-carvers in town. And he imported the wood for them to carve. He paid them, also, four times the daily pay they were asking. This amounted to but a few pennies apiece, yet it was princely to them.
All this while Ray was also preaching to them the idea that it was their missionary duty to carry their religious message to the United States and to make a tour of that benighted but begilded nation.
His winning ways overcame their last scruples and he collected a hundred of the principal people at a meeting and gave them a banquet of food imported from Munich and elsewhere. He even introduced them to the virtues of American whiskey. He had found several cases of it lying neglected in the hotel cellar for lack of purchasers. In fact, he bought out the entire cellar, including many bottles of twenty-year-old wine at less than ten cents a bottle—though ten cents in American coin translated into paper marks brought the price up to fabulous heights.
The punch was mixed in a bathtub.
The night of the party there was so much snow that the guests almost had to make their entrance on skis through the second windows. Ray says that he met the first couple to arrive and greeted them with the only German he knew, which was “Auf wiederseh’n!” So they went away at once. The second couple seemed to understand his intention and pushed in past him. That was probably one of the gayest nights ever experienced in Oberammergau. As Ray describes it: “It was a good thing that the hundred leading performers did not have to appear on the stage the next day. The Passion Play had finished its six-months’ run in September. It took Oberammergau two or three days to recover from the party given in celebration of the contract they had signed with me.”
In the meanwhile Ray had assembled a group of investors to pay for the tour and handle it. Fifty men and women Players were brought to America at good salaries, even in American money. They were also insured, and furnished with roundtrip tickets. According to the contract, the first hundred thousand dollars that came in was to go to the Players. After that, the profits were to be divided equally between the Players and the American syndicate.
Among the backers of the tour were John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Al Smith, George Gordon Battle, Keith and Proctor, the theater operators, and others of like prominence. The troupe reached America in the Spring of 1923 and was housed at the old Waldorf-Astoria. The opening performance was in Grand Central Palace and made a sensational success.
But first the Passion Players had to make acquaintance with the fine high spirit of American labor union bosses. The bosses forbade the use of the stage settings so piously made in Oberammergau and imported for the sake of authenticity. Under threats of calling a strike, the bosses demanded that union men be hired to paint a new set of sets at a cost of $20,000. As soon as this was paid over, the company was graciously permitted to throw away the American sets and make use of the originals from Oberammergau.
By the time the Players had appeared in eight American cities, all the backers had been repaid in full and there was a profit of nearly a hundred thousand dollars.
There were still six months to go when a brilliant idea occurred to Ray. The company was to begin a two weeks’ appearance in Baltimore. So he arranged to have the entire troupe taken to Washington the day before and formally received by President Coolidge, his Cabinet, the Supreme Court Justices,
and other high officials.
The Players were to stand in a semicircle on the White House lawn and there to be introduced by the eloquent lawyer, George Gordon Battle. Then the Players were to shake hands with the President while the cameras took pictures, and the newspaper men took notes.
At the last moment, a prominent millionaire, who had been born in Bavaria but had come to this country as a boy and grown rich, begged for the privilege of introducing his fellow countrymen to the President. This seemed to be a very happy idea at the time; and the request was granted. To the stupefaction of everyone, the plutocrat, instead of showing the expected courtesies, began a furious defense of Germany and her share in World War I. He grew so frenzied that he tore at his hair. He screamed at the President in such vicious terms that Coolidge turned his back on the fanatic and returned to the White House, followed by the other notables, leaving the speaker unheard and the Players unintroduced. The only important pictures obtained were of Coolidge’s shoulderblades.
The newspapers naturally made headlines of the outrage, and since the Players were all Germans they shared the obloquy the speaker had revived against the Kaiser and all his Huns.
Immediately, the sponsors of the Baltimore engagement, which was to have begun the following night, cancelled their contract. Other cities vied with one another in slamming their doors in the faces of the dazed and now homeless Players.
There was nothing for Ray and his syndicate to do but ship the company back to Oberammergau. With them they took nearly $96,000 in profits. But the church in Munich seized half of this and the German government seized the other half. All the Players had for their reward was what they may have saved from their weekly salaries. All that Ray got out of it was experience. He did not get back his own expenses.
The Complete Detective Page 28