The Schirmer Inheritance

by Eric Ambler

  “That’s dandy.” Mr. Budd grinned. “Because, frankly, I don’t know a thing about it. Now, leaving out all the newspaper nonsense, here’s what happened to the case. In ’39 old Bob Moreton went off to Germany to check up on the other side of the Schneider family. Self-preservation, of course. He needed facts to go on if he was going to deal with all those phony claims. Then, when he got back, the damnedest thing happened. The damnedest things were always happening on that screwy case. It seemed that the Nazis had got wind of Bob’s inquiries. What they did was to take a quick look into the thing themselves and produce an old man named Rudolph Schneider. Then they claimed the whole estate on his behalf.”

  “I remember that,” George said. “They hired McClure to act for them.”

  “That’s right. This Rudolph was from Dresden or some such place and they said that he was a first cousin of Amelia Johnson. Moreton, Greener and Cleek fought the claim. Said the documents the Krauts produced were forged. Anyway, the case was still before the courts when we got into the war in ’41, and that finished it as far as they were concerned. The Alien Property Custodian in Washington moved in and filed a claim. Because of the German claim of course. The case froze. When he retired, Bob Moreton handed over all the documents to John J. There were over two tons of them and they’re down in our vaults right now, just where they were left when Moreton, Greener and Cleek delivered them in ’44. Nobody’s ever troubled to look them over. No reason to. Well, now there is a reason.”

  George’s heart sank. “Oh, yes?”

  By choosing this moment to fill his pipe Mr. Budd avoided George’s eyes as he went on. “This is the situation, George. It seems that with the appreciation of values and interest the estate is worth over four million now and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has decided to exercise its rights under the act and claim the lot. However, they’ve asked John J., as administrator, if he proposes to fight them on it, and, just for form’s sake, he feels we ought to check through the documents to make sure that there’s no reasonable claim outstanding. So that’s what I want you to do, George. Just check through for him. Make sure he’s not overlooking anything. O.K.?”

  “Yes, sir. O.K.”

  But he did not quite succeed in keeping a note of resignation out of his voice. Mr. Budd looked up with a sympathetic chuckle. “And if it’ll make you feel any better about the job, George,” he said, “I can tell you that we’ve been getting short of vault space for some time now. If you can get that load of junk out of the way you’ll be earning the heartfelt thanks of the entire office.”

  George managed to smile.

  2

  He had no difficulty in finding the Schneider Johnson records. They were parcelled up in damp-proof wrappings and had a storage vault to themselves, which they filled from floor to ceiling. It was clear that Mr. Budd’s estimate of their total weight had not been exaggerated. Fortunately, all the parcels had been carefully labelled and arranged systematically. Having made sure that he understood the system which had been employed, George made a selection of the parcels and had them carried up to his office.

  It was late in the afternoon when he started work and, with some idea of getting a general picture of the case before settling down to work seriously on the claims, he had brought up a bulky parcel labelled: “Schneider Johnson Press Clippings.” The label proved to be slightly misleading. What in fact the parcel contained was the record of Messrs. Moreton, Greener and Cleek’s hopeless battle with the press and their efforts to stem the flood of nonsensical claims that was overwhelming them. It made pathetic reading.

  The record began two days after Mr. Moreton had been appointed administrator of the estate. A New York tabloid had discovered that Amelia’s father, Hans Schneider (“the Old Forty-niner,” as the paper called him), had married a New York girl named Mary Smith. This meant, the paper had contended excitedly, that the name of the missing heir could be Smith as well as Schneider.

  Messrs. Moreton, Greener and Cleek, as attorneys for the administrator, had properly hastened to deny the contention; but instead of pointing out, more or less simply, that, as Amelia’s first cousins on her mother’s side had all been dead for years, the Smith family of New York did not qualify in law as heirs, they had stuffily contented themselves with quoting the act as saying that “there could be no representation admitted among collaterals after the grandchildren of brothers and sisters and children of aunts and uncles.” This unfortunate sentence, quoted derisively under the subheading “Double-Talk,” was the only part of the statement that had been printed.

  Most of the partners’ subsequent statements had suffered the same kind of fate. From time to time some of the more responsible papers had made serious efforts to interpret the intestacy laws to their readers, but never, as far as George could see, had the partners attempted to assist them. The fact that, as Amelia had had no close relatives living, the only possible heirs were any nephews and nieces of the late Hans Schneider who had still been alive when Amelia died, was never explicitly stated by the partners. The nearest they had come to clarity had been in a statement suggesting that it was unlikely that there were any “first cousins of the intestate decedent who had survived the decedent” in America, and that if any did exist they would most probably be found in Germany.

  They might have saved themselves the trouble. The suggestion that the legal heir to the estate might be in Europe instead of somewhere like Wisconsin had not been interesting to the newspapers of 1939; the possibility of his not existing at all they had preferred to ignore altogether. Besides, the enterprise of a Milwaukee paper had just then given the story yet another twist. With the help of the immigration authorities, this paper’s special investigator had been able to discover the number of families named Schneider who had emigrated from Germany in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The number was large. Was it too much to suppose, the paper had asked, that at least one of the Old Forty-niner’s younger brothers had followed his example in emigrating? No indeed! The hunt had been on again, and squads of special investigators had gone forth to pad hopefully through city records, land registers, and state archives in the footsteps of the immigrant Schneiders.

  George repacked the parcel with a sigh. He knew already that he was not going to enjoy the next few weeks.

  The total number of claims made was just over eight thousand and he found that there was a separate file for each. Most had only two or three letters in them, but many were quite thick, while some had parcels to themselves and bulged with affidavits, photostats of documents, tattered photographs, and genealogical tables. A few had old Bibles and other family souvenirs in them, and one, for some inexplicable reason, even contained a greasy fur cap.

  George set to work. By the end of his first week he had been through seven hundred of the claims and was feeling sorry for Messrs. Moreton, Greener and Cleek. Many, of course, had come from lunatics and cranks. There was the angry man in North Dakota who said that his name was Martin Schneider, that he was not dead, and that Amelia Johnson had stolen the money from him while he lay sleeping. There was the woman who claimed the estate on behalf of a Californian society for the propagation of the Cataphrygian heresy, on the grounds that the spirit of the late Amelia had entered into Mrs. Schultz, the society’s honorary treasurer. And there was the man, writing in multi-coloured inks from a state hospital, who said that he was the legitimate son of Amelia by a secret first marriage to a coloured man. But the majority of the claimants seemed to be persons who, while not actually insane, had rudimentary notions of what constituted evidence. There was, for instance, a Chicago man named Higgins who had evolved an elaborate claim from the memory of having heard his father say that Cousin Amelia was a wicked old miser; and another man had pressed for a share of the estate on the strength of an old letter from a Danish relative named Schneider. Then there were those who warily declined to send evidence to support their claims lest it should be stolen and used to prove the case of another claimant, and others who demanded
travelling expenses in order that they might present their cases in person to the administrator. Above all, there were the lawyers.

  Only thirty-four out of the first seven hundred claims which George examined had been handled by attorneys, but it took him over two days to get through those particular files. The claims in question were mostly of doubtful validity, and one or two were patently dishonest. In George’s view, no reputable lawyer would have touched any of them. But these had been disreputable lawyers; they had both touched and held on. They had quoted non-existent precedents and photographed useless documents. They had hired dishonest inquiry agents to conduct pointless investigations, and quack genealogists to draw up faked family trees. They had written portentous letters and uttered obscure threats. The only thing, apparently, that none of them had ever done was to advise his client to withdraw a claim. In one of these files there was a letter to the administrator from an old woman named Snyder, regretting that she had no more money left to pay her attorney to act for her, and asking that her claim should not on this account be overlooked.

  In his second week on the records, George managed, in spite of a severe cold in the head, to push his score of examined claims up to nineteen hundred. In the third week he topped three thousand. By the end of the fourth week he was at the halfway mark. He was also feeling very depressed. The boring nature of the work and the cumulative effect of so much evidence of human stupidity were lowering in themselves. The amused commiseration of his new colleagues and the knowledge that he was beginning his career in Lavater, Powell and Sistrom at the wrong end of an office joke had done nothing to improve matters. Mr. Budd, when last encountered in the elevator on his way back from lunch, had talked cheerfully about baseball and had not even troubled to ask for a progress report. On the Monday morning of the fifth week George surveyed with loathing the stacks of records that still remained to be examined.

  “Finish the O’s, Mr. Carey?” The speaker was the janitor who looked after the vaults, cleaned up the parcels, and carried them to and from George’s office.

  “No, I’d better start on the P’s now.”

  “I can ease the rest of the O’s out if you like, Mr. Carey.”

  “All right, Charlie. If you can do it without bringing the lot down.” The inroads he had already made on the towering stacks of parcels had gradually reduced the stability of the remainder.

  “Sure, Mr. Carey,” said Charlie. He took hold of a section near the floor and pulled. There was a slithering noise and a crash as an avalanche of parcels engulfed him. In the cloud of dust that followed the subsidence, he stumbled to his feet coughing and swearing, his hand held to his head. Blood began to pour from a long cut over his eye.

  “For God’s sake, Charlie, how did that happen?”

  The janitor kicked something solid under the heap of parcels about him. “This damned thing caught me on the head, Mr. Carey,” he explained. “Must have been stacked up in the middle somewhere.”

  “Do you feel all right?”

  “Oh, sure. It’s only a scratch. Sorry, Mr. Carey.”

  “You’d better get it fixed anyway.”

  When he had handed the janitor over to the care of one of the elevator men and the dust in the vault had settled again, George went in and examined the confusion. Both the O’s and the P’s had vanished under a rubble of S’s and W’s. He pushed several of the parcels aside and saw the reason for the janitor’s cut eye. It was a large, black, japanned deed box of the kind that used to line the walls of old family lawyers. Stencilled on it in white paint

  were the words: “ SCHNEIDER-CONFIDENTIAL.”

  George dragged the box clear of the parcels and tried to open it. It was locked and there was no key attached to either of the handles. He hesitated. His business in this case was with the claims files, and it was foolish to waste time satisfying his curiosity about the contents of an old deed box. On the other hand, it would take an hour to straighten out the mess at his feet. There was little point in his covering himself with dust and cobwebs in order to hasten the process, and Charlie would be back in a few minutes. He went into the janitor’s room, took a cold chisel and a hammer from the tool rack, and returned to the box. A few blows cut through the thin metal around the tongue of the lock, and he was able to wrench the lid open.

  At first sight, the contents seemed to be simply some personal belongings from Mr. Moreton’s office. There was a calf-bound appointment book with his initials stamped on it in gold, an onyx desk set, a carved teak cigar box, a tooled leather blotting pad, and a pair of leather-covered letter trays to match it. In one of the trays there was a hand towel, some aspirin tablets, and a bottle of vitamin capsules. George lifted the tray. Beneath it was a thick loose-leaf binder labelled: “ GERMAN INQUIRY RE SCHNEIDER BY ROBERT L. MORETON, 1939.” He glanced through a page or two, saw that it was in diary form, and put it aside for later reading. Underneath was a Manila folder containing a mass of photographs, mostly, it appeared, of German legal documents of some sort. The only other things in the box were a sealed package and a sealed envelope. On the package was written: “Correspondence between Hans Schneider and his wife, with other documents found by Hilton G. Greener and Robert L. Moreton among effects of late Amelia Schneider Johnson, Sept. 1938.” On the envelope was written: “Photograph handed to R. L. M. by Father Weichs at Bad Schwennheim.”

  George put Mr. Moreton’s personal things back in the deed box and took the rest of the contents up to his office. There the first thing he did was to open the sealed parcel.

  The letters in it had been carefully numbered and initialled by Mr. Greener and Mr. Moreton. There were seventy-eight of them, all tied up in small packets with silk ribbon and with a pressed flower in each. George undid one of the packets. The letters in it belonged to the courtship period of Amelia’s parents, Hans Schneider and Mary Smith. They showed that Hans had been working in a warehouse at the time and learning English, and that Mary had been learning German. George thought them formal, graceless, and dull. However, their value to Mr. Moreton must have been considerable, for they had probably made possible the speedy tracing of the Smith family concerned, and led to its elimination from the list of claimants.

  George tied the packet up again and turned to an album of old photographs. In it there were photographs of Amelia and Martin as children, of their brother Frederick, who had died at the age of twelve, and, of course, of Hans and Mary. More interesting, because it was even older, was a daguerreotype portrait of an old man with a vast beard.

  He sat erect and very stern, his big hands grasping the arms of the photographer’s chair, his head pressed hard against the back of it. The lips were full and determined. There was a heavy, strong face beneath the beard. The silvered copper plate on which the portrait had been made was glued to a red velvet mount. Beneath it Hans had written: “Mein geliebt Vater, Franz Schneider. 1782–1850.”

  The only other document was a thin, leather-bound notebook filled with Hans’s spidery writing. It was written in English. On the first page, elaborately decorated with ornamental pen-strokes, was a description of the book’s contents: “An Account of My Beloved Father’s Heroic Part in the Battle of Preussisch-Eylau, fought in the year 1807, of His Wounding, and of His Meeting with My Beloved Mother, who Saved His Life. Set down by Hans Schneider for His Children in June 1867, that They may be Proud of the Name They Bear.”

  The Account began with the events leading up to Eylau and went on with descriptions of the various actions in which the Ansbach Dragoons had engaged the enemy, and of spectacular incidents in the battle: a Russian cavalry charge, the capture of a battery of guns, the decapitation of a French officer. Obviously, what Hans had written down was a legend learned at his father’s knee. Parts of it still had the artless quality of a fairy tale; but as the account progressed, the middle-aged Hans could be seen perplexedly trying to reconcile his boyhood memories with his adult sense of reality. The writing of the Account, George thought, must have been a strange experience
for him.

  After his description of the battle, however, Hans’s touch had become surer. The emotions of the wounded hero, his certainty that God was with him, his determination to do his duty until the end-these things were described with practised unction. And when the terrible moment of treachery came, when the cowardly Prussians had abandoned the wounded hero while he was helping a stricken comrade, Hans had let loose a torrent of Biblical denunciation. If God had not guided the hoofs of the hero’s horse to the farmhouse of the gentle Maria Dutka, all would certainly have been over. As it was, Maria had been understandably suspicious of the Prussian uniform, and (as she had later confessed to the hero) her humane instincts had been all but overcome by her fears for her virtue and for her ailing father. In the end, of course, all had been well. When his wound was healed, the hero had brought his rescuer home in triumph. In the following year Hans’s elder brother, Karl, had been born.

  The Account concluded with a sanctimonious homily on the subjects of prayer-saying and the obtaining of forgiveness for sins. George skipped it and turned to Mr. Moreton’s diary.

  Mr. Moreton and an interpreter whom he had engaged in Paris had arrived in Germany towards the end of March 1939.

  His plan had been simple; simple in intention, at all events. First he would retrace Hans Schneider’s steps. Then, when he had found out where the Schneider family had lived, he would set about discovering what had happened to all Hans’s brothers and sisters.

  The first part of the plan had proved simple of execution. Hans had come from somewhere in Westphalia; and in 1849 a man of military age had had to have a permit to leave it. In Munster, the old state capital, Mr. Moreton had been able to find the record of Hans’s departure. Hans had come from Muhlhausen and gone to Bremen.

  In Bremen, a search in the port authority files of old ships’ manifests had revealed that Hans Schneider of Muhlhausen had sailed in the Abigail, an English ship of six hundred tons, on May 10, 1849. This had checked with a reference, in one of Hans’s letters to Mary Smith, to his voyage from Germany. Mr. Moreton had now concluded that he was tracing the right Hans Schneider. He had gone next to Muhlhausen.