The box from japan, p.2
The Box from Japan, page 2
An opportunity of your viewing this accomplishment happens to be at hand, and I want you to have the privilege of being one of fifty fortunate spectators at a special exhibition of it. These fifty spectators will be newspapermen, specially invited, stockholders of the American Projectiscope Company, and a few officials of the Consolidated Projection Corporation, and preceding the exhibition there will be a complete demonstration by our company engineer as to how the Consolidated Projection Corporation has, and will, broadcast and receive life-size colored images, followed by a supplemental demonstration of how this little company here transforms their process into the most important triumph in the field of modern recreation, the theater and the news. The entire demonstration will be elemental enough that any modern high-school boy can understand every word of it.
The demands on these tickets, as you may surmise, are somewhat heavy, but I have retained Ticket No. 50—the last one—for you, and if you will call at my office at 9 o’clock Wednesday morning, Sol 18th, I will present it to you in person. The exhibition demonstration will be produced the evening of the day after you get this letter—Thursday evening, Sol 19th, at 8 o’clock, to he precise—being specially performed for this test-exhibit by Sir Alfred Leets at London at 2 o’clock Friday morning, London time. One might, in a sense, say we will view the performance almost before it is actually produced. Chiefly, Carr, what I am trying to do is to decoy you down here to see me, because, frankly, I need your advice on a serious crisis in the affairs of this company here in which you and I happen to hold shares—quite useless shares, aren’t they, Carr, in these modern days when it is possible to sell our educational magic lanterns only to a few backwoods schools for, chiefly, language studies, and to the trading posts in the Brazilian jungles and Africa; and our one source of income, the Cebrey shutter for motion picture projectors, expires completely this year as a patent, and likewise as our one exclusive manufacturing concession? At any rate this crisis threatens the forthcoming transfer, for one million dollars cold cash, to the Consolidated Projection Corporation, of the patents to our unique Zell Process. And this, too, in spite of the fact that the sale has gone sufficiently far that they hold our option, and their million dollars in turn lies in escrow waiting the transfer! But now there’s a cow on the track—that’s an old expression of early railroad days, Carr, that may not be intelligible to you. It means we are in a predicament. And there is now the possibility that within less than one week you will find yourself the proud owner of some $90,000 which you are to receive as your share of this luscious million-dollar melon, or—and don’t be shocked—the sum of one dime! That is surprising, is it not? But whether or no, you will admit there is a considerable difference between the two sums!
In view of the fact that your slice of this impending melon is the only patrimony you will ever have, since this poor old decrepit company with its magic lanterns and its expiring Cebrey patent will never slice another, it behooves you to see that it is larger than a dime. This Zell Process is our one ace in the hole for a killing, and after that transaction is closed the American Projectiscope Company may either fold up its wings gracefully, or continue on, selling here and there a few magic lanterns and slides to such untutored people as the pigmies of Africa, and thus presenting as it were a gesture connecting the mauve decade with the marvelous ’40’s.
Cancellation of all foreign debts under our President Allan Sayre, coupled with the firm continued 10-percent reduction of the British and German doles scale each year to a point where the dole has practically ceased entirely to exist, has brought both America and its foreign sister countries, by the complicated and not fully understood interaction of such things, a truly great wave of prosperity—the greatest prosperity America, the British Isles, and Europe have ever known, yet unless some quick method can be found to solve a certain ugly puzzle now facing this company, you and I and some others of our stockholders, many of them old-timers and acquaintances of your father before you, lose the one greatest chance in the history of our company to make a killing worth many, many, many times the par value of our stock. I, dear boy, who hold so much more stock than you, will literally lose a young fortune.
Thus far I have not gone to the extent of writing to you and worrying you about it, because I know how you detest business and all that pertains to business, and you once informed me, too, you know, that you religiously threw all bulletins and business communications into your wastebasket unread! Also, as a matter of fact, when it became evident to me a few months ago that you had somehow missed the newspaper story which touched on the prospective sale of the Zell Process, I decided it would be pleasant to surprise you eventually with a check larger than any check you will ever receive in your life. But this check, alas, is now badly threatened. And it occurs to me today that perhaps you, as a young man with certain journalistic experience, might be able to devise or suggest a way out of this puzzle. From my reference to “journalistic experience,” you may gather that I read with interest your daily column in the Morning Sun entitled “Talks on Sports” and signed “Sportfellow,” dealing with the grand old arts of fisticuffs, fly-casting, fencing, golf, etc., which in spite of our rapidly advancing civilization will always be man’s real recreation. Indeed, Carr, I find it more and more difficult to fathom how the Halsey family, business men and manufacturers all, ever produced a combined sportsman and literary man. However, I suggest most emphatically that you come into the office and see me at 9 tomorrow morning, if for no other reason than to get that valuable ticket which will bring you face to face, literally, with a very noted English thespian, and moreover show you exactly how the trick is done. The American Projectiscope Company, by the way, is now situated in the Lindbergh Building, 23rd floor, just three blocks north of the old quarters. Just come directly to my private suite, Room 2323, and tell Babson, if he insists on the customary formalities, that you’re expected.
Your uncle,
ROGER HALSEY.
“Well—that’s that,” said Carr Halsey, face serious. “Nine it is—and the Lindbergh Building it is.” He gazed back of him longingly at that placard in the window. “Well, I suppose $90,000 is worth more than a mummified toad from Cheops’ pyramid—yet if it’s to be only a thin dime, hang me if I wouldn’t go inside and try my luck. Maybe I can do both this morning. Who knows? Well, Uncle’s it is first. And we shall hear what we shall hear!”
He signaled a gigantic taxicab that was crawling by, and one minute later was dismounting in front of the Lindbergh Building on Madison and Clark Streets, built in 1935 in commemoration of a pioneer flyer, and even now becoming a bit archaic, rococo in fact. His little 2-block jump, it is true, cost him a red 25-cent coupon out of his book of perforated taximeter “pay” tickets, but saved him perhaps some ten minutes of elbowing his way along a thoroughfare which now, in Chicago, connecting as it did the busiest stations of the venerable old State Street subway and the new Clark Street subway, was hopelessly crowded at this hour of the morning. And still a quarter minute later he was dismounting from a rocket-like express elevator on the cubistically tiled 23rd floor of the Lindbergh Building. He made his way down past the many curiously tinted archways, which, with their double-swinging gray doors, each with a zigzag streak of color across its face, constituted the entrances of the offices in the Lindbergh Building, in turn past the one which carried on it in black porcelain Gothic letters the words AMERICAN PROJECTISCOPE COMPANY, INC., and finally stopped in front of Number 2323, whose similar letters read simply: ROGER T. HALSEY, PRESIDENT. This one he pushed inward, and entered. He was now inside the threshold of a square room with tall windows of slightly tinted glass reaching to the floor, and whose coarse-grained plastered walls, with their huge rugosities, held a dozen hues curiously merging rainbowlike one with the other by some new technical trick of interior decoration developed in the early 1930’s. Near the door however—and Carr Halsey smiled in spite of himself—was a movable polished wooden railing as venerable as those others like it which adorned all offices when he had been but a small boy, and he knew at least that he was in the right place, for this was but one of the many relics which his uncle lovingly transported from office to office as the American Projectiscope Company every few years changed its quarters; in a wall back of the railing was a gray panelless door, with square black porcelain knob, leading evidently to a private interior office.
And guarding the one opening in the antique wooden railing, moreover, sat Babson, more venerable appendage of the American Projectiscope Company than any single piece of office furniture it might own! Elderly, with rapidly thinning gray hair, he was, beyond all doubt, even more like that wooden railing than the railing itself! He was clad, as he always had been, in a rusty black suit of old-fashioned cut of fully three decades back. He wore the same high celluloid collar, which no doubt had been washed these many years with the same sponge, and the cuffs that thrust themselves forth from the short tight sleeves of his shiny coat had been economically trimmed with a scissors where the frayed edges had formed. The sour look on his face and the pad chained to a gold pencil which stood at his elbow, the movable square of onyx at the other elbow with its pair of pushbuttons which obviously threw outside telephone communication from the phone on his desk to a phone in that adjoining room, proclaimed indisputably that he was not only a chief clerk and factotum of some sort, and perhaps even office boy, too, in this private suite, but an official Cerberus; a buffer between the occupant of the inner office adjoining that room, and the ever-intruding public who were wont to stand on the outside of the railing where Carr Halsey now undecidedly paused.
“Good morning, Babson,” said the younger man pleasantly. “I see you don’t remember me.”
The older man squinted at him through short-sighted eyes. “Well,” he ejaculated slowly, “if it isn’t Mr. Halsey’s nephew. You have changed, sir, in the last few years.”
Carr smiled. He glanced at the triangular gunmetal watch affixed to his wrist by a broad tweed strap which exactly matched the goods in his suit, as all style dictates this year demanded. “I’ve an appointment with Uncle for 9 a.m. It’s now ten minutes to 9. Is it all right for me to go right in?”
Babson shook his head. “Sorry, Mr. Halsey, but your uncle just had unexpected visitors. Two stockholders from Detroit, the Popolos brothers, who’ve gotten wind of the queer jam we’re in here. And—” Babson paused apologetically. “I’m talking freely to you, Mr. Halsey, you being a stockholder yourself.” He motioned out of the tall tinted window nearest Carr Halsey to an interior courtway roof of the huge building, whose level was but a half story beneath that of the 23rd floor; covered entirely with flat soft rubber tiles, supplied with a hangar and customary mechanic, its broad intersecting bands of bright color visible from miles in the air and marking its location and identity by the standard aero-chart, and last but not least the single elegantly upholstered white-and-silver autogyro plane with lone pilot tinkering at the engine while he apparently waited for its absent occupants, it marked itself plainly as Lindbergh Landing Station. “They’re in there with him now, and want to be in New Orleans late this afternoon. He told me to tell anyone who called with an appointment—and he specifically mentioned you—that they’d have to wait a half-hour or else come back at 9:30. Will you wait? Are you on foot?”
Halsey wrinkled up his forehead. He looked at the gloomy office—gloomy, indisputably, in spite of its variegated tints, the gloomy Babson, and the forbidding row of hardwood chairs which ran along the outside of the railing. Then he turned to the door.
“Very well, Babson. Uncle must have a special version for me alone, I guess! I’ll come back later. Yes, I’m afoot. I’d prefer to meander around in the sunshine till nine-thirty—perhaps buy a mummified toad!” With which cryptic announcement he left the office.
Outside in front of the Lindbergh Building, he turned back east toward the Associated Express Companies. He had an even half-hour now before his uncle should be at leisure, and the opportunity was at hand to buy—something for nothing—even if it might turn out to be—nothing for something!
“Might as well get a $1,000 diamond sunburst for a dollar and a quarter,” he ruminated to himself. “Might even get a mummified toad, at that, or a chart to King Midas’ fortune at Delhi. Lord knows if there’s anything to Uncle’s alarming words, I’ll need a few charts.”
And thus it came about that Carr Halsey, journalist and sportsman with an even half-hour to spend, came face to face with the “jinx” of the Associated Express Companies, the sealed wooden box which for four years had not tempted a single purchaser to invest even the accrued express charges on it.
A Pandora’s box of the 20th century.
A box of trouble—a box of bewilderment, indeed, for the individual who, on this sunny day of Sol 18th, 1942, was destined to purchase it and raise its lid!
CHAPTER II
“What Am I Bid?”
A tall negro porter in the foyer of the Associated Egress Companies, in answer to his query, informed Carr Halsey that the unclaimed-package auction took place in the storerooms on the second floor. He made his way back past a long cordon of desks and grated windows to the escalator, and dismounted at the second floor. A short distance from the head of the escalator, in a large bare room whose walls were lined from floor to ceiling with heavy boxes and crates, all labeled and ticketed, a light wooden platform had been erected. Back of a flimsy counter on the platform, consisting of a single plank nailed to two uprights, a lean dyspeptic-looking man, with bald head and hooked nose, stood with a wooden mallet in his hand watching a telechron clock on the wall nearest his pulpit, and back of him, heaped in a great pyramid, was a huge pile of packages of all sorts and descriptions, including not only suitcases but even a couple of well-strapped trunks. Some of the packages were wrapped in kraft paper, some in manila, some in newspaper and some in strawboard. Some were encased in neat little boxes. There were thin packages, thick ones, colored ones, and even a small keg which, holding back the base of the pyramid from spreading, suggested the possible presence of some rare and highly fortified wine, except that at this particular stage of the peculiar Dry-Wet tug of war still going merrily on in America, it was a certainty that the keg contained anything but liquor! Ranged around the base of the auction block was a motley crowd which presented as wide a divergence of types as the packages which were shortly to go under the hammer. Fat men jostled thin ones, colored men shoved against white men, and there was even one individual whose ample rotund stomach seemed quite in keeping with the keg on the platform.
With the sonorous ninth strike of the big clock on which he was focussing his attention, the hook-nosed auctioneer rapped loudly on his wooden shelf.
“Gentlemen,” he announced genially, yet businesslike, “the annual auction sale of unclaimed packages, held by the Chicago branch of the Associated Express Companies, under authority of Decree of Sale No. 42311 of the Circuit Court, is now declared officially opened. As you no doubt know, it’s the bad fortune of express companies, the world over, to secure for delivery, or to be held subject to call, a certain number of packages which fail to reach the consignees on account of misdirections—or because they never call!—and the shippers of which also can’t be located for various similar reasons. Take Chicago, for instance. Chicago had, ten years ago, 4,000,000 people in it; today it has 5,000,000, and with its suburbs contains nearly 6,000,000. The city alone covers an area of 500 square miles, packed with streets and houses. You can readily wonder why we succeed as well as we do in tracing people who move, hop, skip, and jump from place to place. Where we positively cannot locate the consignee, we make an invariable practice in that case of exerting every effort to find the shipper, but it frequently happens that the shipper himself is located in a big city, and that he too has done some moving about, or may even have died, in which case our registered notice to him comes back to us marked ‘undeliverable.’ Take, for instance, this little branded and labeled keg of good certified malt vinegar behind me; it was shipped to a Ravenswood man who died, while it was in transit, by a Hammond, Indiana, vinegar factory that went bankrupt and blew up before the goods could be sent back to ’em. So we get the goods. See? All you fellows do is name your price for ’em.
“The way in which we fulfill all legal requirements is this way: In any kind of non-delivery of a package, it’s held for one year awaiting some claim from either party. If we get no claims, the package naturally stays where it is. Once a year we advertise all the accumulated packages that have been here at least the legal 365 days, and after fifteen days obtain an order from the Circuit Court to sell them. This annual auction is held a week later. Our charter gives us the right to sell any package, but at not less than a minimum bid amounting to at least a nominal storage tax of 25 cents per year, plus shipping charges if not prepaid. The law demands, of course, that we take the name and address of each buyer so that the original consignee, if he ever shows up, may negotiate for the return of his goods, but—” He winked one eye meaningfully at the crowd. “—but we don’t know that the name and address you give us is real, y’ know! Now please remember, gentlemen, as the auction starts, that a Hyde Park man last year secured a thousand dollar diamond sunburst which was never claimed; smuggled, perhaps. Or stolen. Who knows? An Evanston woman secured a sacred toad, the shipper of which, an explorer, had died leaving no relatives; she got $70 for it with ease. A boy in our own ghetto here—right on Maxwell Street—three years ago—you all read of it in the papers—got a parchment chart which located the long-lost treasure buried in Wales by King Edward II. That boy, Izzy Goldstein, was offered $5000 for that chart by a historian who had known the shipper who was also a historian and who by the way had died in the meantime, but England herself paid Izzy Goldstein £2000 or $10,000 for it and recovered the treasure, of which the King got his 10 per cent. I tell you these things so that you will know the possibilities that lie in unclaimed packages. That’s all, I think, gentlemen. The auction is now on.”
