the lucky man.”
“Oh. I see.”
“The investments do the work, George, our John J. takes the fees as administrator. However,” Mr. Budd continued with a trace of satisfaction in his voice, “it doesn’t look as if he’s going to do so much longer. You’ll see why in a moment. From what old Bob Moreton told me at the time, the position was originally this. Amelia’s father was named Hans Schneider. He was a German who’d immigrated in 1849. Bob Moreton and his partners were pretty well convinced in the end that, if there were anybody at all entitled to take the estate, it was one of the old man’s relatives back in Germany. But the whole thing was complicated by the representation question. Do you know anything about that, George?”
“Bregy, discussing the 1947 act, gives a very clear summary of the former rules.”
“That’s dandy.” Mr. Budd grinned. “Because, frankly, I don’t know a thing about it. Now, leaving out all the newspaper nonsense, here’s what happened to the case. In ’39 old Bob Moreton went off to Germany to check up on the other side of the Schneider family. Self-preservation, of course. He needed facts to go on if he was going to deal with all those phony claims. Then, when he got back, the damnedest thing happened. The damnedest things were always happening on that screwy case. It seemed that the Nazis had got wind of Bob’s inquiries. What they did was to take a quick look into the thing themselves and produce an old man named Rudolph Schneider. Then they claimed the whole estate on his behalf.”
“I remember that,” George said. “They hired McClure to act for them.”
“That’s right. This Rudolph was from Dresden or some such place and they said that he was a first cousin of Amelia Johnson. Moreton, Greener and Cleek fought the claim. Said the documents the Krauts produced were forged. Anyway, the case was still before the courts when we got into the war in ’41, and that finished it as far as they were concerned. The Alien Property Custodian in Washington moved in and filed a claim. Because of the German claim of course. The case froze. When he retired, Bob Moreton handed over all the documents to John J. There were over two tons of them and they’re down in our vaults right now, just where they were left when Moreton, Greener and Cleek delivered them in ’44. Nobody’s ever troubled to look them over. No reason to. Well, now there is a reason.”
George’s heart sank. “Oh, yes?”
By choosing this moment to fill his pipe Mr. Budd avoided George’s eyes as he went on. “This is the situation, George. It seems that with the appreciation of values and interest the estate is worth over four million now and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has decided to exercise its rights under the act and claim the lot. However, they’ve asked John J., as administrator, if he proposes to fight them on it, and, just for form’s sake, he feels we ought to check through the documents to make sure that there’s no reasonable claim outstanding. So that’s what I want you to do, George. Just check through for him. Make sure he’s not overlooking anything. O.K.?”
“Yes, sir. O.K.”
But he did not quite succeed in keeping a note of resignation out of his voice. Mr. Budd looked up with a sympathetic chuckle. “And if it’ll make you feel any better about the job, George,” he said, “I can tell you that we’ve been getting short of vault space for some time now. If you can get that load of junk out of the way you’ll be earning the heartfelt thanks of the entire office.”
George managed to smile.
2
He had no difficulty in finding the Schneider Johnson records. They were parcelled up in damp-proof wrappings and had a storage vault to themselves, which they filled from floor to ceiling. It was clear that Mr. Budd’s estimate of their total weight had not been exaggerated. Fortunately, all the parcels had been carefully labelled and arranged systematically. Having made sure that he understood the system which had been employed, George made a selection of the parcels and had them carried up to his office.
It was late in the afternoon when he started work and, with some idea of getting a general picture of the case before settling down to work seriously on the claims, he had brought up a bulky parcel labelled: “Schneider Johnson Press Clippings.” The label proved to be slightly misleading. What in fact the parcel contained was the record of Messrs. Moreton, Greener and Cleek’s hopeless battle with the press and their efforts to stem the flood of nonsensical claims that was overwhelming them. It made pathetic reading.
The record began two days after Mr. Moreton had been appointed administrator of the estate. A New York tabloid had discovered that Amelia’s father, Hans Schneider (“the Old Forty-niner,” as the paper called him), had married a New York girl named Mary Smith. This meant, the paper had contended excitedly, that the name of the missing heir could be Smith as well as Schneider.
Messrs. Moreton, Greener and Cleek, as attorneys for the administrator, had properly hastened to deny the contention; but instead of pointing out, more or less simply, that, as Amelia’s first cousins on her mother’s side had all been dead for years, the Smith family of New York did not qualify in law as heirs, they had stuffily contented themselves with quoting the act as saying that “there could be no representation admitted among collaterals after the grandchildren of brothers and sisters and children of aunts and uncles.” This unfortunate sentence, quoted derisively under the subheading “Double-Talk,” was the only part of the statement that had been printed.
Most of the partners’ subsequent statements had suffered the same kind of fate. From time to time some of the more responsible papers had made serious efforts to interpret the intestacy laws to their readers, but never, as far as George could see, had the partners attempted to assist them. The fact that, as Amelia had had no close relatives living, the only possible heirs were any nephews and nieces of the late Hans Schneider who had still been alive when Amelia died, was never explicitly stated by the partners. The nearest they had come to clarity had been in a statement suggesting that it was unlikely that there were any “first cousins of the intestate decedent who had survived the decedent” in America, and that if any did exist they would most probably be found in Germany.
They might have saved themselves the trouble. The suggestion that the legal heir to the estate might be in Europe instead of somewhere like Wisconsin had not been interesting to the newspapers of 1939; the possibility of his not existing at all they had preferred to ignore altogether. Besides, the enterprise of a Milwaukee paper had just then given the story yet another twist. With the help of the immigration authorities, this paper’s special investigator had been able to discover the number of families named Schneider who had emigrated from Germany in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The number was large. Was it too much to suppose, the paper had asked, that at least one of the Old Forty-niner’s younger brothers had followed his example in emigrating? No indeed! The hunt had been on again, and squads of special investigators had gone forth to pad hopefully through city records, land registers, and state archives in the footsteps of the immigrant Schneiders.
George repacked the parcel with a sigh. He knew already that he was not going to enjoy the next few weeks.
The total number of claims made was just over eight thousand and he found that there was a separate file for each. Most had only two or three letters in them, but many were quite thick, while some had parcels to themselves and bulged with affidavits, photostats of documents, tattered photographs, and genealogical tables. A few had old Bibles and other family souvenirs in them, and one, for some inexplicable reason, even contained a greasy fur cap.
George set to work. By the end of his first week he had been through seven hundred of the claims and was feeling sorry for Messrs. Moreton, Greener and Cleek. Many, of course, had come from lunatics and cranks. There was the angry man in North Dakota who said that his name was Martin Schneider, that he was not dead, and that Amelia Johnson had stolen the money from him while he lay sleeping. There was the woman who claimed the estate on behalf of a Californian society for the propagation of the Cataphrygian heresy, on the grounds that the spirit of the late Amelia had entered into Mrs. Schultz, the society’s honorary treasurer. And there was the man, writing in multi-coloured inks from a state hospital, who said that he was the legitimate son of Amelia by a secret first marriage to a coloured man. But the majority of the claimants seemed to be persons who, while not actually insane, had rudimentary notions of what constituted evidence. There was, for instance, a Chicago man named Higgins who had evolved an elaborate claim from the memory of having heard his father say that Cousin Amelia was a wicked old miser; and another man had pressed for a share of the estate on the strength of an old letter from a Danish relative named Schneider. Then there were those who warily declined to send evidence to support their
