The Schirmer Inheritance

3

The house was a comfortable-looking place surrounded by several acres of well-kept garden, and it occurred to George that the financial fate of Messrs. Moreton, Greener and Cleek had not been quite as disastrous as Mr. Budd had implied. The second Mrs. Moreton proved to be a lean, neat woman in her late forties. She had a straight back, a brisk manner, and a patronizing smile. It seemed probable that she had been Mr. Moreton’s nurse.

“Mr. Carey is it? You won’t tire him, will you? He’s allowed to sit up in the mornings at present, but we have to be careful. Coronary thrombosis.” She led the way through to a glass-enclosed porch at the rear of the house.

Mr. Moreton was big and pink and flabby, like an athlete gone to seed. He had short white hair and very blue eyes, and there was still a trace of boyish good looks visible in the slack, puffy face. He was lying, propped up by cushions and swathed in a blanket, on a day-bed fitted with a book-rest. He greeted George eagerly, thrusting the book-rest aside and struggling into a sitting posture in order to shake hands. He had a soft, pleasant voice and smelled faintly of lavender water.

For a minute or two he asked after the people at George’s office whom he had known, and then about a number of men in Philadelphia of whom George had never even heard. At last he sat back with a smile.

“Don’t ever let anyone persuade you to retire, Mr. Carey,” he said. “You live in the past and become a bore. A dishonest bore, too. I ask you how Harry Budd is. You tell me he’s fine. What I really want to know is whether he’s gone bald.”

“He has,” George said.

“And whether, in spite of all that studied bonhomie, he’s got ulcers yet, or high blood-pressure.”

George laughed.

“Because if he has,” continued Mr. Moreton amiably, “that’s fine. He’s one son of a bitch I don’t have to envy.”

“Now, Bob!” his wife said reproachfully.

He spoke without looking at her. “Mr. Carey and I are going to talk a little business now, Kathy,” he said.

“Very well. Don’t overtire yourself.”

Mr. Moreton did not reply. When she had gone, he smiled. “Drink, my boy?”

“No, thank you, sir. I think Mr. Budd explained why I wanted to see you.”

“Sure. The Schneider Johnson matter. I could have guessed anyway.” He looked sideways at George. “So you found it, did you?”

“Found what, sir?”

“The diary and the photographs and all Hans Schneider’s stuff. You found it, eh?”

“It’s outside in the car, sir, with some of your personal belongings that got put in the box with it.”

Mr. Moreton nodded. “I know. I put them there myself-on top. I figured that, with any luck, a person opening the box would think that it was all just my personal junk.”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite follow you, sir.”

“Of course you don’t. I’ll explain. As administrator I was ethically bound to hand over everything, lock, stock, and barrel. Well, that confidential stuff was something I didn’t want to hand over. I wanted to destroy it, but Greener and Cleek wouldn’t let me. They said that if anything came up afterwards and John J. found out, I’d be in trouble.”

George said: “Oh.” He had not really believed in his suggestion that Moreton, Greener and Cleek had concealed important information. It had merely occurred to him as a means of beguiling Mr. Budd. Now he was a trifle shocked.

Mr. Moreton shrugged. “So all I could do was to try and camouflage it. Well, I didn’t succeed.” He stared out gloomily at the garden for a moment, then turned to George briskly as if to dismiss an ugly memory. “I suppose the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s after the loot again, eh?”

“Yes. They want to know if Mr. Sistrom’s going to fight them on it.”

“And Harry Budd, who doesn’t like soiling his dainty fingers with such things, can’t wait to get the thing out of the office, eh? No, you don’t have to answer that, my boy. Let’s get down to business.”

“Would you like me to get the papers out of the car, sir?”

“We won’t need them,” said Mr. Moreton. “I know what’s in that box as well as I know my own name. Did you read that little book Hans Schnieder wrote for his children?”

“Yes.”

“What did you think of it?”

George smiled. “After reading it I made a resolution. If I have children, I’m never going to tell them a thing about my war experiences.”

The old man chuckled. “They’ll get it out of you. The thing you want to watch out for is having a drip of a son like Hans who writes down what you say. That’s dangerous.”

“How do you mean?”

“I’ll tell you. I was administrator all right, but I went to Germany because my partners sent me. Tail wagging the dog. The case had been in our hair too long and they wanted to have done with it. My instructions were to confirm what we already believed-that there was no legitimate heir to the estate. Well, when I found that Hans was probably a son of Franz Schneider’s first marriage, I had to know about that marriage in order to complete the picture. As you know, I went to Potsdam to see if I could trace him through the regimental archives. To begin with, I failed.”

“But next day you went back for another check through.”

“Yes, but I’d had a night to think. And I’d thought again about what Hans had written. If there was any truth in the thing at all, Sergeant Schneider had become a casualty at the Battle of Eylau and been lost in the retreat. Surely the war diary would record that fact in a casualty list. So that next day, instead of going all over the nominal rolls again, I got the interpreter to translate the regimental account of the battle for me.” He sighed reminiscently. “There are some moments in life, my boy, that always feel good no matter how many times you go over them again in your mind. That was one of them. It was late in the morning and getting very warm. The interpreter was having trouble with that old writing and was stumbling over the translation of it. Then he began on the account of the long march from Eylau to Insterburg. I was only half listening. As a matter of fact, I was thinking about a bad march I’d done in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. And then something the interpreter had said made me jump right out of my skin.”

He paused.

“What was that?” George asked.

Mr. Moreton smiled. “I remember the words exactly. ‘During this night’-I quote from the war diary-‘Franz Schirmer, a Sergeant, left the detachment under his command, saying that he was going to succour a Dragoon who had lagged behind because of a lame horse. When morning came, Sergeant Schirmer had not rejoined his detachment. There was found to be no other man missing from it, nor any who had lagged behind. Accordingly, the name of Franz Schirmer was posted in the list of deserters.’ ”

For a moment or two there was silence. “Well?” added Mr. Moreton. “What do you think of that?”

“Schirmer, did you say?”

“That’s right. Sergeant Franz Schirmer, S-c-h-i-r-m-e-r.”

George laughed. “The old bastard,” he said.

“Exactly.”

“So all that stuff he told his son Hans about the cowardly Prussians leaving him for dead was-”

“Bull,” said Mr. Moreton dryly. “But you see the implications.”

“Yes. What did you do?” George asked.

“The first thing I did was to take security precautions. We’d already had trouble enough with the newspapers’ finding out stuff about the case and printing it, and before I went to Germany I’d agreed on a policy with my partners. I was to keep what I was doing as secret as possible; and to make sure that I didn’t get an interpreter with German newspaper contacts, I was to engage him in Paris. The other thing we’d agreed on was a cipher for confidential matters. It may sound funny to you, but if you’ve ever had experience of-”

“I know,” George said. “I saw the newspaper clippings.”

“Ah. Well, I’d been sending my partners progress reports in diary form. When I found out about Schirmer, I began to use the cipher. It was a simple key-word affair, but good enough for our purpose. You see, I had visions of the newspapers’ getting hold of the Schirmer name and starting another flood of claims from Schirmers, Shermans, and the rest. The final thing I did was to fire the interpreter. I said I was abandoning the inquiry and paid him off.”

“Why was that?”

“Because I was going on with it and I didn’t want anyone outside the firm to have a complete picture. It was just as well I did fire him, too, because later on, when the Nazis were after the estate and France was occupied, the Gestapo pulled in the second man I used, for questioning. If he’d known what the first one knew, we’d have been in a spot. I got the second one through our Paris Embassy. By the time he arrived, I’d had the war-diary entry photographed-you’ll find it in the file-and was ready to move on.”

“To Ansbach?”

“Yes. There I found the record of Franz Schirmer’s baptism. Back in Mühlhausen again, I found the register entries for the marriage of Franz and Maria Dutka, the births of Karl and Hans, and the death of Maria. But the really important thing I found was when I went back to Münster. The boy Karl was down in the recruits’ muster-roll for 1824 as Karl Schirmer. Franz had changed his own name but not his eldest boy’s.”

George thought quickly. “I suppose Franz changed his name when Mühlhausen was ceded to Prussia.”

“That’s what I thought. As far as the Prussians were concerned, he’d be a deserter. But I guess he just didn’t trouble about Karl.”

“He changed Hans’s name.”

“But Hans was a baby then. He’d naturally grow up a Schneider. Anyway, whatever the reason, there it was. Hans had had six brothers and five sisters. All were surnamed Schneider except one, Karl. His surname was Schirmer. All I had to do was to find out which of those persons had had children-cousins of Amelia-and whether any one of those children was alive.”

“That must have been quite a job.”

Mr. Moreton shrugged. “Well, it wasn’t quite as bad as it sounds. Death rates were higher in the last century. Out of the eleven brothers and sisters, two boys and two girls died in a typhoid epidemic before they were twelve, and another of the girls was killed by a runaway horse when she was fifteen. That meant I had only six to worry about. Four of them I handed over to a private inquiry agent specializing in that kind of thing. The other two I looked after.”

“Karl Schirmer was one of your two?”

“He was. And by the middle of July I had finished with the Schneiders. There had been children all right, but none of them had survived Amelia. So there was still no heir. The only one left to check on was Karl Schirmer.”

“Did he have any children?”

“Six. He’d been apprenticed to a printer in Coblenz and married the boss’s daughter. I spent from mid-July on, chasing around the towns and villages of the Rhineland. By mid-August I’d traced all but one of the six, and there was still no heir. The missing child was a son, Friedrich, born in 1863. All I knew about him was that he’d married in Dortmund in 1887, and that he was a bookkeeper. And then I had trouble with the Nazis.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“Well, in the summer of 1939 any foreigner who traveled about the Rhineland asking questions, checking official records, and sending cables in cipher was bound to become suspect, but, like a dope, I hadn’t thought of that. In Essen I was interviewed by the police and asked to give an account of myself. I explained as best I could and they went away, but the next day they came again. This time they had a couple of Gestapo boys with them.” Mr. Moreton smiled ruefully. “I don’t mind telling you, my boy, I was glad I had an American passport. Still, I made them believe me in the end. The fact that I was trying to prevent the papers’ knowing what I was doing helped, I think. They didn’t like newspapers either. The main thing was that I managed to keep the name of Schirmer out of it. But they made trouble all the same. Within two weeks I had a cable from my partners to say that the German Embassy in Washington had notified the State Department that in future the German government would represent any German national claiming the Schneider Johnson estate, and had requested complete information about the present state of the administrator’s inquiries in the matter.”

“You mean the Gestapo had reported what you were doing to their Foreign Office?”

“They certainly had. That’s how that phony Rudolph Schneider claim of theirs started. You have no idea how difficult it is, politically and in every other way, to challenge the validity of documents produced and attested by the government of a friendly power-I mean a power enjoying normal diplomatic relations with your own government. It’s like accusing them of forging their own bank-notes.”

“And what about the Schirmer side of the family, sir? Did the Nazis ever get on to that?”

“No, they didn’t. You see, they didn’t have Amelia’s documents to help them as we did. They didn’t even have the right Schneider family, but it was difficult to prove.”

“And Friedrich Schirmer, Karl’s son? Did you trace him?”

“Yes, my boy, I traced him all right, but I had hell’s own job doing it. I got on his trail at last through a clerical employment agency in Karlsruhe. They found out for me that there had been an elderly bookkeeper named Friedrich Schirmer on their files five years previously. They’d found a job for him in a button factory at Freiburg-im-Breisgau. So I went to the button factory. There they told me that he had retired three years earlier at the age of seventy and gone into a clinic at Bad Schwennheim. Bladder trouble, they said. They thought he’d probably be dead.”

“And was he?”

“Yes, he was dead.” Mr. Moreton looked out at the garden as if he hated it. “I don’t mind telling you, my boy,” he said, “that I was feeling pretty old and tired myself by then. It was the last week in August and there wasn’t very much doubt, from what the radio was saying, that Europe was going to be at war within the week. I wanted to go home. I’ve never been the sort of man who likes being in the thick of things. Besides, I was having trouble with the interpreter. He was a Lorrainer, France was mobilizing, and he was afraid he wouldn’t have time to see his wife before he was called to his regiment. It was getting difficult to buy gasoline for the car, too. I was tempted to forget about Friedrich Schirmer and get out. And yet I couldn’t quite bring myself to go without just making a final check-up. Twenty-four hours more, that was all I needed.”

“And so you did check up.” Now that he had the facts he wanted, George was getting impatient with Mr. Moreton’s reminiscences.

“Yes, I checked up. But without the interpreter. He was so darned scared that I told him to take the car, drive it to Strasbourg, and wait for me there. That was a lucky thing, too. When the Gestapo got hold of him later, he knew no more than that I’d gone to Bad Schwennheim. Real luck. I went there by train. Do you know it? It’s near Triburg in Baden.”

“I never got down that way.”

“It’s one of those scattered little resort towns-pensions, family hotels, and small villas on the edge of the fir forest. I’d found that the best person to make for on those inquiries was the priest, so I set out to find him. I could see the church-like a cuckoo clock it was, on the side of the hill-and I had just about enough German to find out from a passer-by that the priest’s house was beyond it. Well, I sweated up there and saw the priest. Luckily, he spoke good English. I told him the usual lies, of course-”

“Lies?”

“About its being a trifling matter, a small legacy, all that stuff. You have to play it down. If you go telling the truth on a job like that you’re a dead duck. Greed! You’d be surprised what happens to perfectly sane people when they start thinking in millions. So I told the usual lies and asked the usual questions.”

“And the priest said Friedrich Schirmer was dead?”

“Yes.” Mr. Moreton smiled slyly. “But he also said what a pity it was that I’d come too late.”

“Too late for what?”

“For the funeral.”

“You mean he’d survived Amelia?”

“By over ten months.”

“Had he a wife?”

“She’d been dead for sixteen years.”

“Children?”

“A son named Johann. That’s his photograph in the box you have. Ilse was the son’s wife. Johann would be in his fifties now.”

“You mean he’s alive?”

“I haven’t any idea, my boy,” said Mr. Moreton cheerfully. “But if he is, he’s certainly the Schneider Johnson heir.”

George smiled. “Was the heir you mean, don’t you, sir? As a German, he could never receive the estate. The Alien Property Custodian would vest himself with the claim.”

Mr. Moreton chuckled and shook his head. “Don’t be so certain, my boy. According to the priest, Friedrich spent over twenty years of his life working for a German electrical manufacturer with a plant near Schaffhausen in Switzerland. Johann was born there. Technically, he’d be Swiss.”

George sat back in his chair. For a moment or two he was too confused to think clearly. Mr. Moreton’s pink, puffy jowls quivered with amusement. He was pleased with the effect of his statement. George felt himself getting indignant.

“But where did he live?” he asked. “Where does he live?”

“I don’t know that either. Neither did the priest. As far as I could make out, the family returned to Germany in the early twenties. But Friedrich Schirmer hadn’t seen or heard from his son and daughter-in-law in years. What’s more, there was nothing in the papers he left to show that they’d ever existed, barring the photograph and some things he’d said to the priest.”

“Did Friedrich make a will?”

“No. He had nothing to leave worth troubling about. He had lived on a small annuity. There was scarcely enough money to bury him properly.”

“But surely you made an effort to find this Johann?”

“There wasn’t much I could do right then. I asked Father Weichs-that was the priest-to let me know immediately if anything was heard of or from Johann, but the war broke out three days later. I never heard any more about it.”

“But when the German government claimed the estate, didn’t you tell them the situation and ask them to produce Johann Schirmer?”

The old man shrugged impatiently. “Of course, if it had got to the point where they had a real chance of substantiating their Schneider claim, we’d have had to. But, as it was, it was better not to show our hand. They’d already produced a phony Schneider. What was to stop them producing a phony Johann Schirmer? Supposing they’d discovered that Johann and Ilse were dead and without heirs! Do you think they’d have admitted it? Besides, we didn’t expect the war to last more than a month or two; we were thinking all the time that at any moment one of us would be able to go back to Germany and clear the whole matter up in a proper way and to our own satisfaction. Then, of course, Pearl Harbor came and that was the end of the thing as far as we were concerned.”

Mr. Moreton sank back on his cushions and closed his eyes. He had had his fun. Now he was tired.

George was silent. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the second Mrs. Moreton hovering in the background. He got to his feet. “There’s only one thing I’m not clear about, sir,” he said hesitantly.

“Yes, my boy?”

“You said that when you handed over to Mr. Sistrom in ’44 you didn’t want these facts to come to his attention. Why was that?”

Slowly Mr. Moreton opened his eyes. “Early in ’44,” he said, “my son was murdered by the S.S. after escaping from a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. My wife wasn’t too well at the time and the shock killed her. When the time came to hand the administration over, I guess I just couldn’t accept the idea of a German getting anything out of this country as a result of my efforts.”

“I see.”

“Not professional,” the old man added disapprovingly. “Not ethical. But that’s the way I felt. Now-” he shrugged and his eyes were suddenly amused again-“now all I’m wondering is what Harry Budd’s going to say when you tell him the news.”

“I’ve been wondering the same thing myself,” said George.

Mr. Budd said: “Oh my God!” with great force and asked his secretary to see if Mr. Sistrom was available for consultation.

John J. Sistrom was the most senior partner in the firm (Lavater and Powell had been dead for years) and had been well thought of by the elder J. P. Morgan. A remote, portentous figure who entered and left his office by a private door, he was rarely seen except by other senior partners. George had been presented to him on joining the firm and received a perfunctory handshake. He was very old, much older than Mr. Moreton, but skinny and spry-an energetic bag of bones. He fidgeted with a gold pencil while he listened to Mr. Budd’s disgusted explanation of the position.

“I see,” he said at last. “Well, Harry, what do you want me to do? Retain someone else, I suppose.”

“Yes, John J. I thought that someone like Lieberman might be interested.”

“Maybe he would. What’s the exact value of the estate now?”

Mr. Budd looked at George.

“Four million three hundred thousand, sir,” George said.

Mr. Sistrom pursed his lips. “Let’s see. Federal tax will account for quite a bit. Then, the thing has been held up for over seven years, so the 1943 legislation applies. That means eighty per cent of what’s left to the Commonwealth.”

“If a claimant were to get half a million out of it, he’d be lucky,” said Mr. Budd.

“Half a million free of tax is a lot of money these days, Harry.”

Mr. Budd laughed. Mr. Sistrom turned to George. “What’s your opinion of this Johann Schirmer’s claim, young man?” he asked.

“On the face of it, sir, the claim looks sound to me. A big point in its favour would seem to be the fact that although the intestacy itself comes under the 1917 act, this Schirmer claim would satisfy the tougher provisions of the ’47 act. There’s no question of representation. Friedrich Schirmer was a first cousin and he survived the old lady.”

Mr. Sistrom nodded. “You agree with that, Harry?”

“Oh, sure. I think Lieberman will be glad to act.”

“Funny things, some of these old inheritances cases,” mused Mr. Sistrom absently. “They make perspectives. A German Dragoon of Napoleon’s time deserts after a battle and has to change his name. Now here we sit, over a hundred years later and four thousand miles away, wondering how to deal with a situation arising out of that old fact.” He smiled vaguely. “It’s an interesting case. You see, we could argue that Friedrich inherited the estate prior to the appointment of the Alien Property Custodian and that it should therefore have descended to Johann Schirmer under the German law. There have been one or two cases of German-Swiss claims against the Custodian which have succeeded. There are all sorts of possibilities.”

“And won’t the papers have fun when they get hold of them!” said Mr. Budd.

“Well, they don’t have to get hold of them, do they? Not for the present anyway.” Mr. Sistrom seemed to have come to a decision. “I don’t think you ought to be too hasty about this business, Harry,” he said. “Naturally, we’re not going to get involved in any newspaper nonsense, but we’re in the possession of certain information that nobody else has access to. We’re in a strong position. I think that before we come to any decision about who’s going to act we ought at least to send someone quietly to Germany to see if this Johann Schirmer can be traced. I don’t like the idea of just letting the Commonwealth take all this money because we can’t be bothered to fight them. If he’s dead and without issue or heir, or we can’t find him, then we can think again. Maybe I’ll just tell the Commonwealth the facts and leave it to them in that case. But if there is some chance that the man may be alive, no matter how slight, we should bend our effort to find him. There is no need to hand over a substantial fee to another firm for doing so. Our charge for services is made irrespective of whether we are successful or not. I see no reason for turning down the opportunity.”

“But, my God, John J.-”

“It’s perfectly ethical for the administrator’s attorneys to endeavour to find the heir and be paid for their efforts.”

“I know it’s ethical, John J., but jeepers-”

“In this kind of office one can get too narrow,” said Mr. Sistrom firmly. “I don’t think, either, that just because we’re afraid of being annoyed by a little newspaper publicity we should let the business go out of the family.”

There was a silence. Mr. Budd heaved a sigh. “Well, if you put it that way, John J. But suppose this man’s in the Russian zone of Germany or in jail as a war criminal?”

“Then we can think again. Now, whom will you send?”

Mr. Budd shrugged. “I’d say a good, reliable, private inquiry agent was what we needed.”

“Inquiry agent!” Mr. Sistrom dropped his gold pencil. “Look, Harry, we’re not going to make a million dollars out of it. Competent private inquiry-agents are far too expensive for a gamble like this. No. I think I have a better idea.” He turned in his chair and looked at George.

George waited with a sinking heart.

The blow came.

Mr. Sistrom smiled benevolently. “How would you like a trip to Europe, Mr. Carey?” he said.