Target Manhattan

Valkenburg

Your name?

Emmett O. Valkenburg.

Your title and position, Mr. Valkenburg? It’s for the record.

Executive Vice-President, Merchants Trust Bank Company, Incorporated. Chief cashier.

Do you have a prepared statement?

No.

At some point on May twenty-second you received an interoffice call from the president of your bank, Mr. Maitland. He apprised you of the situation in his office and asked you whether you could make arrangements to raise five million dollars in cash. Could you tell me what time you received that call?

It was about eleven thirty in the morning, give or take ten minutes.

I see. Then that was long before the FBI arrived on the scene.

I’m afraid I wouldn’t know that, Mr. Skinner.

Sorry. Talking to myself. Can you tell me what action you took?

Well, after I came down off the ceiling I called in my two chief assistants and we had a council of war. I told them what Paul Maitland had told me. There was a bughouse character threatening to spray bombs all over Manhattan if we didn’t come up with five million in unmarked bills, nothing larger than hundred-dollar denominations. I asked my assistants if they had any bright ideas. That’s what assistants are for. One of them had the only bright idea any of us came up with during the day.

What was that?

Get out of town.

(Laughter) I can quite understand that. But you did make concrete efforts toward raising the cash, didn’t you?

Well, sure we did. But we had to start from a depressing premise. There isn’t that much cash. I mean there simply isn’t. Oh, you could go out and canvass every biped in the five boroughs of New York and you might find an average of ten bucks a person. But you don’t find that kind of cash lying around in one institutional bundle. The biggest bank in the city might have a few hundred thousand in cash on hand at any one moment. But the only place where you’d find anything in the millions would be the Federal Reserve or maybe the safe-deposit boxes of a few Mafia dons.

What did you decide to do?

Hell, we did the only thing we could do. We got permission from Paul Maitland and we phoned the boys over at the Federal Reserve.