The Bank Vault Mystery

by Louis F. Booth

  “Some job, huh!” Young Jerry’s eyes sparkled appreciatively. “Some hole in the ground!”

  The new building would occupy most of the block and was to have four basement levels below the street floor. The excavation had been carried fifty feet below the street and was progressing in solid rock.

  “Yeah, some job! Some different from the old days. Puts me in mind of when they built this.” With his thumb Old Jeremy indicated the Consolidated Building in which they then worked. “I was a brickie then; three dollars a day was big money. Everything was donkey engines and horses; none of these electric hoists and trucks. Took us three years to finish it. They say this’ll be done in a year and it’s five times as high.” He stroked his chin thoughtfully. “That was—let’s see—thirty years ago.”

  “Look,” Jerry interrupted. “They’re going to shoot.” He pointed to one side of the hole where a large mat of woven cable and logs was being let into place to cover the blast.

  One of the foremen scrambled up on the bottom layer of bracing and bellowed a warning to the men working near by. Dropping their tools they scurried from the spot in all directions, seeking shelter behind the bracing posts and wherever refuge offered. A moment after the warning cry the foreman was the only man Jerry could see completely, though there were enough heads peering cautiously and knees and shoulders projecting from behind every timber to account for most of the swarm that had so quickly dissolved.

  The foreman straightened up for a last glance around, then stepped into the lee of a pile of blasted rock, bent over and gave his dynamo handle a quick plunge. There was a deep, dull thud trailing off in a muffled roar. The platform upon which the Donegans stood jumped beneath their feet, then after a second of diminishing vibration resumed its dead stability. A sudden cloud of dust hovered over the entire ramp surface, then slowly settled back in place.

  In the bottom of the excavation Jerry saw the heavy blasting mat leap into the air, hang suspended, and fall heavily back to almost exactly where it had been before. A thin cloud of gray smoke and rock dust filtered from between the logs and drifted lazily upward and out over the street. As the roar of the explosion ended they heard a brief staccato, like distant musketry, swelling and dying as a quick shower of small stones and fragments which had escaped the smothering mat, rained on the job and rattled down through the bracing. No sooner had the hail of pebbles stopped than the men swarmed out of hiding and converged, like an army of beavers, on the blast location. In a twinkling the heavy mat was hoisted clear and the gangs set to work, by hand and with pick and shovel, loading the newly shattered rock into buckets and skips to take it away.

  “Gosh! That was some blast, wasn’t it?” Jerry exclaimed. “You could feel this platform tremble, all right.”

  “That was a damn’ good shot,” Old Jeremy explained. “You see, those deep shots that you feel but don’t hear so much are the ones that do the work. When you get one of those roarin’ kind that you hear all over town you generally won’t feel ‘em at all; an’ you can be pretty sure most of the force went out the drill holes.”

  “Yeah? Well, you could feel that one all right. I’ll bet they felt it in the bank, too. Did you know a lot of plaster fell down up on the fifth floor yesterday? And right up over my desk a couple of big cracks are opening up in the wall. Maybe the building’ll fall down. Only if it’s going to I hope it waits until the new one’s built.”

  “Don’t worry about that old building ever falling down,” Jeremy answered. “It’s wall-bearing, but it’s solid and’ll be there till they tear it down. I guess it’s settling, though, or shifting a little. The last couple of days I can hardly get my vault door open or shut, it binds so—”

  He was interrupted by the sudden notes from Trinity starting its mellow preamble to the stroke of nine.

  “Come on. We’d better get over to work,” he urged. Reluctantly Jerry assented and they went into the building.

  Old Jeremy was Custodian of the Central Vault. He had entered the employ of the Consolidated American Bank as a guard thirty years before when they moved into their then new building. Jeremy had been a bricklayer during its construction but he had gladly exchanged the uncertainties and vagaries of building work for the steadiness and security of a job with the “Big Bank.” Within a few years he had become captain of the guards, and, as the bank grew and the force expanded, he had developed and disciplined his little army until it had become an example for the rest of the financial district. As he had grown older his health had failed until finally he had retired, but after a short time he had found the retirement so irksome that he had returned and taken a post as Custodian of the Central Vault.

  Young Jeremy—Jerry, they called him—had started in the bank as a clerk and had gradually moved along until after five years he had become an assistant cashier—one of many. Most of the time Jerry liked the bank and was contented working there. He lived with his father but expected, as soon as he had saved enough money, to marry a girl to whom he had been engaged for a little more than a year. His future lay before him, well defined: a small raise each year, a house in the suburbs, a mortgage, babies at (he hoped) infrequent intervals. If he was lucky and tended to business he might get a larger raise some years; if he was unusually lucky he might some day even become an officer in the bank, but the chances in that direction were distinctly limited.

  Sometimes when Jerry was moody and looked ahead he pictured his life as a smooth groove stretching away down into the future without turn or deviation as far as the eye could see, and himself in it sliding solemnly along, glancing furtively to right and to left. There were other parallel grooves in which slid his friends and the people he worked with, but all of the grooves converged in a point on the horizon.

  Sometimes, especially in the spring, the metal lattice of the cage in which he worked seemed to shrink and close in about him until it left an impress in his flesh, and he could hardly wait until the end of the day brought liberation. But these moods were infrequent, usually accompanying slack spells and passing when he became busy again. Most of the time Jerry was quite content with his lot.

  On this particular late March morning Jerry’s duties were pretty well caught up. He went to his desk complacent in the knowledge that he had plenty of time. As he sat down he noticed with a start that the small irregular crack in the plaster that he had from day to day watched extend itself from the floor up through the wall to the ceiling cornice, had overnight opened up to a jagged, yawning crevice wide enough to thrust a pencil into and extending out over the ceiling half way across the room.

  Even as he sat there, astonished, he felt a quick tremor and heard the dull boom of another blast across the street. A thin sprinkle of plaster dust filtered out of the crack and settled swiftly to the floor. The luster of the mahogany desk top was dimmed with an even gray film; the papers on the desk were gritty with it.

  For a minute Jerry was alarmed in spite of his father’s opinion of a few moments before. Perhaps the building was “solid and’ll be there till they tear it down,” but just the same the plaster over his head looked suspiciously loose to Jerry. He telephoned the vault and told Old Jeremy about it.

  “Oh, well; a little plaster shaken down won’t do anyone no harm,” came the reassuring answer. “When they get through shooting they’ll patch it all up. But my door here is worse than ever this morning. I’ve got to have T. J. see about it and I’ll tell him about the cracks too.”

  “T. J.” (T. Jerome) Hanley was the bank’s manager. A short time later he came into Jerry’s cage. He looked at the cracked wall thoughtfully.

  “It’s gotten quite a little worse over night, hasn’t it, Donegan?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir; I believe it has. Yesterday the crack was much narrower and didn’t run into the ceiling at all.”

  “Hmm—There are some new ones upstairs, too. Well, the engineers are coming over this morning to have a look at the vault doors. We’ll get them to examine this at the same time. Some sort of
settlement, I presume; or maybe it’s on account of the vibration from their blasting. I’m told they’re almost through with that work now, so it won’t get much worse. I suppose there’s nothing to worry about, anyway.” With this dubious reassurance Hanley left and Jerry turned to his work.

  First there was a cash shipment for an uptown branch to be prepared, an unusual sum and in large denominations. Jerry assembled the amounts and packed the currency into one of the small canvas sacks the bank used for this purpose. He filled out and initialed the metal-rimmed fiber tag with the destination, amount, time, etc., and attached it to the sack. After packing up a number of smaller consignments, he rang for a boy to remove the sacks to the vault to await the afternoon armored-car pickup. Presently a boy trundled to a stop at Jerry’s cage a low platform truck similar to those used in freight stations and warehouses, except that it was smaller, neater, and rolled quietly on pneumatic tires. It was stacked three feet high with canvas bags similar to those Jerry had just packed, some containing securities, others currency. Jerry stacked his consignments on one end of the truck and handed the boy a copy of his check list. The boy glanced at it absently, slipped it into a clamp with a sheaf of others, and trundled his load away toward the vault.

  Jerry watched the truck roll to the door, idly musing.

  “Probably three or four million dollars’ worth of bonds and stocks and cold cash in the bags,” he reflected, “yet they cart them about like so many sacks of potatoes, or bolts and nuts, and think nothing of it. Of course it was all checked and tallied at every corner and turn, but even so—It was more money than most people ever saw in a lifetime. Why, probably any one of the bags contained enough to enable a man to live comfortably for years—and not in cages, either.”

  His speculations were cut short when the truck rounding the door corner bowled into a party of men entering the room. Mr. Hanley, leading the group, stepped nimbly aside but the three men following were not so quick and the truck collided with one of them none too gently.

  “Take it easy, son,” Hanley admonished curtly. “You’ll get there sooner if you’re more careful.”

  The boy stammered an apology and backed the truck out of the way to allow the group to pass. The three men came in behind Hanley. All examined the cracks in the wall and ceiling, discussed them from various angles, and asked Donegan questions as to when he had first noticed them and how fast they had developed. Then they launched into a technical discussion as to whether the cracks were the result of vibration or settlement and were still debating the point when they departed to go down, Jerry gathered from their talk, and inspect the vault door.

  2

  The doorman at the entrance to the Central Vault swung open the barred grille so the truck could roll in unimpeded.

  “Here’s some business for ye, Jeremy,” he called to the old man within.

  “Bring ‘er on, Pat. The more, the merrier!” Old Jeremy replied. He turned to the boy who had brought in the truck. “Take this empty out of my way, sonny,” he said, indicating a truck he had unloaded a short time before.

  With a cheerful “O. K., Pop!” the boy handed the check lists to Jeremy and maneuvered the empty truck out of the vault. Jeremy glanced over the lists quickly and noted with mild satisfaction that most of the bags were for the afternoon delivery and could be simply checked off the lists and left on the truck until the various armored-car crews picked up their consignments after lunch. A few bags were for temporary storage and would have to be racked. The bank had very much outgrown its vault space and Jeremy welcomed no additional crowding. He had started picking out the packets which were to remain in the vault when he was interrupted by the doorman’s buzzer.

  “Mr. Hanley and some gentlemen,” the man announced.

  Jeremy pushed the truck into a corner out of the way and went to the grille.

  “These gentlemen have come about the door, Jeremy,” Hanley said. Jeremy admitted the group. The manager turned toward the men behind him. “This is our vault superintendent, Mr. Donegan, gentlemen,” he said, and to Jeremy, “Mr. Morton, Mr. Dickson, and Mr.—uh—”

  “Borden, sir.” The last of the group, a younger man, supplied the forgotten name. Jeremy acknowledged the introductions and the men glanced around briefly. Borden placed on the floor a rectangular mahogany box and leaned a heavy tripod against the wall.

  Mr. Morton was the consulting engineer for the foundation work in connection with the bank’s new building; Mr. Dickson was chief engineer of the construction firm erecting it, and Borden was his assistant. They had come at Hanley’s request to examine the vault and determine the cause for the difficulty of operating the door, which had been troubling Jeremy, and to discuss means of preventing further settlement or damage.

  “Let’s try the door, Donegan,” Hanley suggested. “Then we can all see how bad the thing really is.”

  Jeremy and the doorman removed the small approach platform which sloped up from the outside to the higher vault floor level. They grasped the massive door and with very obvious effort started it slowly swinging. Once past the midpoint of its swing it required just as much effort to prevent it from slamming.

  “You see; she’s not balanced,” Jeremy explained, panting a little. “She ought to stand still in any position and be as easy to swing one way as the other.”

  “It looks as if the frame, or maybe the whole vault, has tilted back, doesn’t it?” Morton suggested. “Is there any way of checking up on that?”

  “We could try the floor for level,” Dickson replied. “That would tell us if the whole vault had moved—assuming, of course, that it was level before.” He turned to his assistant. “Set up your level. We’ll try the four corners of the floor,” he instructed.

  Borden kneeled down and, opening the wooden box, carefully lifted out the parts of his level; a small telescope and a bracket arrangement to sup-port it. He assembled the instrument and screwed it to the tripod, then set it up in the corner of the vault farthest removed from the door.

  “This instrument won’t focus at very short range,” he remarked, “but I guess I can make it from here.” He rolled the dispatch truck a little to one side so that he could get behind his level.

  “That truck in your way?” Jeremy asked, starting over to move it.

  “Not at all, now,” Borden replied. “I just needed room to get back here.”

  He leveled up his machine and read a rule held by Dickson at each of the four corners. The results indicated that the floor was lower at the back by a. half inch or so.

  “Well; that’s that! Small wonder that your door won’t swing,” Dickson exclaimed to Hanley.

  “Odd that the back part of the vault should have settled when the enormous weight of the door and its frame is all concentrated at the front,” interjected Morton dryly. “How do you account for that?”

  Dickson hesitated, puzzled for a moment. “I don’t know, of course; but I rather imagine that when they built this building they figured on that vault door and put a good heavy foundation under it, but probably less under the rest of the vault. Now with the vibration from the blasting the less-supported part goes down a little and the vault tips back. If I’m not mistaken, that cracking and settlement we noticed upstairs is just about over the rear portion of this vault.”

  “That’s possible—quite possible,” Morton agreed.

  “Assuming you’re right,” Hanley broke in, “the question is: What are we going to do about it? Aside from being hard to swing, the door binds a little when it’s closed. If the condition gets much worse it might not shut at all. Then there’d be hell to pay I”

  “It won’t be a difficult thing to correct,” Dickson assured him. “We can go under the back edge of the vault from the outside—dig out a small section at a time—and jack cylinders down to rock; then jack the vault up until it’s level again.”

  Hanley nodded understandingly.

  “How long would that take?” he asked.

  “Two or three weeks at
the outside,” Dickson replied.

  Morton cut in: “I certainly wouldn’t recommend attempting any shoring here while that shooting is going on. If you lost a little ground under the vault it would get worse with every blast.”

  “Oh, no; of course not,” Dickson agreed, “but the blasting will be all finished in a few days.” He turned to his assistant. “Borden, how much rock is left to come out of that cellar?”

  Borden was back in the corner tugging at his instrument bracket in an effort to disengage it from the tripod. He looked up, then thought for a moment.

  “I should say about four feet, on the average, over the lot, sir.”

  “That’ll take four or five days,” Dickson estimated. “We’ve been shooting there for two months; another week isn’t likely to make things much worse.”

  “I suppose not,” Hanley agreed a little doubtfully. “I hope not, anyway.”

  With the aid of pocket flashlights Morton and Dickson now began minutely inspecting the vault walls for cracks or other evidences of settlement. Borden had finally succeeded in getting his instrument dismantled and was packing it in the mahogany case.

  “I hope Mr. Dickson’s right about that,” Old Jeremy whispered in an anxious aside to Hanley. “It’s funny, though, that it should have got so much worse the last couple of days.”

  “Well, I guess they know what they’re talking about, Jeremy.”

  Morton, who had been examining the lower part of the wall over in the far corner by Borden, straightened up and called to Dickson.

  “There are quite a few cracks along here that appear to be new. Take a look at them, will you?”

  Dickson and Hanley went over to look and Jeremy stepped quickly across and rolled the truck out of their way. While they were thus engaged there came a sudden, well-defined tremor and then the deep, dull roar of a blast going off.

  “I’m glad they fired a charge while you were all here,” Hanley said. “Now you can feel for yourselves the shaking up this place is getting.”