Even though his roommate couldn’t appreciate the beauty of calculus or the genius of a good algorithm, Steven liked Mark immensely; the two had shared an apartment ever since Steven had returned to Idaho Springs. To Steven, Mark Jenkins was the perfect history teacher: he possessed an enormous body of knowledge and had a razor-sharp wit. He thought Mark was the most knowledgeable and quick-thinking person he knew – not that he would ever admit that to Mark.
Jeff Simmons, on the other hand, fully understood the joy of a complex equation: the mathematician often sent Steven problems to consider and solve in an infuriatingly uncomfortable deductive paradigm. This morning’s message was no exception. It read: ‘You use them both every day but probably have never considered why the numbers on your cellular telephone and your calculator are organised differently.’ Steven was about to pull a calculator from his desk drawer when he heard the bell above the lobby door chime as someone entered the bank.
‘Stevie?’ Howard Griffin, at only 8.10 a.m.? He was early this morning, which meant he hadn’t taken time to exercise on his Stairmaster before leaving for work. Steven smiled at the irony of anyone owning a stair machine while living in Idaho Springs: the entire city was constructed on an incline at 7,500 feet above sea level, with mountains on either side of Clear Creek Canyon rising to over 12,000 feet. He liked to think Griffin had lost some sort of bet with the Devil and had to climb his eternal stairway, a corpulent, baby-boom Sisyphus, rather than just go outside for a walk each morning, but he knew better. Griffin had moved to Boulder from New Jersey in the 1960s. When he discovered the decade would not last for ever, he enrolled in the University of Colorado, completed his degree and moved to Idaho Springs to become manager of the small town’s bank.
Now, at fifty-five, Griffin was bald and had a burgeoning paunch that he battled every morning as he climbed Colorado’s highest peak, the Mount Griffin Stairmaster. His commitment to exercise was admirable, but he had a weakness that regularly bested his determination to regain the thinness of his youth: Howard Griffin loved beer, and most afternoons would find him propping up the bar at Owen’s Pub on Miner Street. Steven sometimes accompanied him, and Mark would join them for a few beers or the occasional dinner.
‘Stevie?’ the bank manager called again, and Steven moved into the lobby to greet his boss.
‘Good morning, Howard. How are you?’
‘Never mind that. I’m fine, thanks, but never mind that,’ Griffin often thought faster than he could speak. ‘Myrna called last night and can’t be in today. She’s sick or something. So I’ve had to come and cover. How’s the audit coming?’
‘It’s fine. I have all the active accounts pulled. There are thousands of them, by the way. I’ll get through many of the oldest today, because most of those haven’t had much in the way of transactions since they were opened. They’ve made enough interest to cover the monthly fees, so the cash just sits there.’
‘Great. Stay on it. I’ll work the window and we can check in over lunch later. How’s Owen’s for you?’
‘That’ll be fine, Howard. I’ll appreciate the break.’ Steven returned to his office, retrieved the keys to the basement and braced himself for a long, tedious morning.
‘Take a look at these.’ Steven had brought several pages of notes to lunch. ‘We have twenty-nine accounts that haven’t had a single transaction in the past twenty-five years. Most of them are forgotten accounts, people who have died. Thankfully, I have information on next of kin from the original applications. But eight of them appear to be accounts for single men killed in the Second World War, and, get this, five accounts date back to the late 1800s – one of which had one deposit and no additional transactions.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ Griffin said between long draws on an enormous draught beer. ‘It was probably some miner who went back to work and got himself killed, got his claim jumped or something. It was a rough time back then. But those assets are among the reasons this bank survived the depression – those and the molybdenum mines.’
‘That’s not the worst of it, Howard,’ Steven interrupted. ‘This account had only one deposit, but it was a deposit of more than $17,000. That was nine hundred pounds of refined silver. The bank made a bundle on the silver sale alone, because they screwed the guy for over ten cents an ounce off the market price.’ Steven paused to take a bite of a thick Reuben sandwich. Continuing with his mouth full, he added, ‘This is the part that doesn’t make sense. What mining company sends a guy in with nine hundred pounds of silver, lets him take a loss of ten cents an ounce, and then never comes back for the cash? To top it off, he wasn’t even from the Springs. This guy was from Oro City. I don’t even know where that is.’
‘Was, Stevie, was. Oro City was Leadville, but they changed the name in 1877. You’re right, though, something’s crooked. There were banks in Oro City then, so what was this guy doing over here?’ Griffin finished his beer and motioned for Gerry, the bartender, to draw him another. ‘You want one more?’
‘Jeez, no, Howard. It’s only 12.20; I have to go back to work.’
‘Well, I often question my own behaviour, but I’m still having one more before we go. Anyway, this account, what’s the big deal? Some miner hits it big – huge – drops off most of his haul at the bank, takes a handful of silver with him to the pub, flashes it around, drinks too much hooch and gets himself killed. It happened all the time, I would guess.’ Griffin rubbed a French fry around his plate, sopping up hamburger grease.
‘The big deal, Howard, is that a $17,000 deposit made in our bank in October of 1870 is now worth more than 6.3 million dollars. It’s just sitting there, and the guy didn’t list any family or next of kin. So I can’t call anyone to say their ship has just come in and docked here in the Rocky Mountain foothills.’ He was about to continue when he was distracted for a moment by an attractive young woman who entered the pub and joined a group of friends in a booth near the back. He shook his head wryly and turned back to his boss. ‘Anyway, the thing I have to ask you is that this guy, this William Higgins, well, he-’
As Steven lost track of his question, Griffin interrupted, ‘Go say something to her. You don’t get out enough. She’s a pretty girl and you aren’t getting any younger. How old are you now, twenty-seven? Twenty-eight? Soon you’ll be old and ugly like me, and I’ll be fried and eaten before I see you get old and ugly like me.’
‘No, maybe another time.’ Steven paused. He hadn’t been seriously involved with a woman since university. He dated from time to time, but had never found anyone he felt was the right match for him. He grinned at his boss. ‘Well, anyway, this guy had a safe deposit box, number 17C, in the old safe. I was thinking, if we looked in his drawer, we might find some clue as to who his family is or was and we could let them know this account exists.’
‘No way.’
‘Why not? It may be the only way to get this resolved.’
‘No. It’s bank policy. They put it in there. They pay the rent on the drawer. We leave it alone until they get back.’
‘Yeah, I understand, but think about this for a minute. What do you put into a safe deposit box?’ Steven asked rhetorically. ‘Something you expect to retrieve in your lifetime. You certainly don’t put anything in there that you don’t plan on your grandchildren or even your great-grandchildren ever having. This guy meant to come back for this stuff, whatever it is. Anything we don’t plan on retrieving for a hundred and thirty-five years, we throw in the trash. We don’t ensure its safety in a bank.’
‘No way. They put it in there in good faith. We take the $12.95 a month from his account. The drawer stays locked in good faith. It’s good business practice, Stevie. Our customers have to trust us.’
‘Trust us? This guy is deader than disco, and if he has any family they might want to know that they’re worth a fortune in accumulated interest.’