At the end of a long afternoon, we left the lobby together, rode the elevator to the tenth floor, and gathered in our suite, where we collapsed into chairs and on to the sofa. Sam and I kicked off our shoes in grateful unison. For some time, we were all silent, sipping the Cokes and coffees we had brought up with us.
‘Well, I thought that went pretty well,’ I ventured tentatively. I wasn’t sure I entirely believed that. I had talked to so many people over the past few hours, trying so hard to sound positive to them all, that my head was spinning and my smile felt as though it was hard-wired in place on my face. I could easily have sat where I was without saying another word for the rest of the day. But we were all tired, and some encouragement was needed.
‘Thanks to Aunt Meg,’ Sam replied. ‘Wasn’t she great?’
‘She’s something,’ Arlene said, ‘that’s for sure, and she sure did get them energised. But y’all did great, too. Ain’t that right, Powalski?’
‘Absolutely,’ he replied. ‘I heard some great comments about you both. They liked you, and they liked what you had to say. You walked them up to the gangplank, and Aunt Meg made sure they came on board.’
‘Which is just where we need them,’ Arlene said.
She swigged her Diet Coke. She had made a quick diversion to the bar as we were winding up in the lobby, and I wouldn’t have put money on her drink being entirely unadulterated. But what the hell. She deserved it, and we were in New Orleans after all. And it was nice of her, and of Powalski, to say what they did, even if they felt as unsure as I did.
I smiled. ‘OK, but what do we have to show for it? How many do we actually have on board?’
There was no immediate reply.
‘Arlene?’
Arlene retrieved her briefcase, which she had thrown down beside her chair, reached into it, and extracted a file folder. She opened the folder and took her time thumbing through a pile of paper. Finally, her pencil moved up and down a list of some kind, indicating some mental arithmetic going on.
‘Actually, we’re doing pretty good. If my addition is right, I have forty-two signed up as plaintiffs, and a bunch more who say they will do it online, once they figure out how many children they have.’
We laughed, a bit too loudly, but it was good to release.
‘They don’t know how many children they have?’ Sam asked.
‘Well, that’s what it sounded like. Maybe they meant they had to talk to their kids or grandkids first before they signed up. I’m sure some of them were bullshitting me, but I figure we’ll get some more. And it’s early days; don’t forget that. We had people with us in the lobby most of the day, and the news is going to hit the street once the reunion’s over and they all go home to spread the word.’
‘I hope so,’ Sam said. ‘But I don’t think Mary Jane Perrins from Boston, Massachusetts, will be signing up any time soon, do you?’
Arlene snorted. ‘Jeez Louise, what a piece of work she is. I mean, I’m not exactly warm and fuzzy myself, but I’m telling you, you could freeze ice on that broad’s ass. Lord have mercy. But don’t lose any sleep over Mary Poppins, y’all. She’s not the kind that’s gonna make friends and influence people. I mean, would you want to spend time with that?’
‘She could make trouble, though,’ Powalski said, ‘all on her lonesome, if she wants to. I don’t think we’ve heard the last of her.’
‘She will be complaining as long as anyone will listen to her,’ I agreed. ‘But there’s nothing we can do about that for now. Did you learn anything from all those folks you talked to?’
‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘Matter of fact, I found out all about Jacob’s loan certificates.’
Needless to say, we were all jumping out of our seats on hearing that, and Powalski had to raise a hand to indicate that he was speaking in an ironic vein. We collapsed back again.
‘According to who you ask, the certificates: never existed; or did exist, but were lost by Jacob or by his family; or burned by the Brits in 1814; or were eaten by a dog; or were taken to France for safekeeping; or were taken to London for safekeeping; or were entrusted to someone in the family, and their descendants are hiding them away – there are several suspects around the country – or, well, you name it. There are almost as many stories as there are family members.’
It was as though the air had been sucked from the room. We were deflated, and the weariness descended again.
‘I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings,’ he said, and I think he really meant it. Powalski was on board himself by now. It wasn’t just another case for him, any more than it was for me. ‘But actually, I think I may have picked up on something.’
‘Go on,’ I said encouragingly.
‘Well, don’t read too much into this, OK?’
‘OK.’
‘OK. Well, as many stories as I heard, there was one that I heard any number of times. The dog that ate the certificates I only heard once, but this one I must have heard fifteen or twenty times. It has some variations, but basically the story is that Jacob took some of the certificates to a loan office to try to collect his money.’
‘That would have been the proper procedure,’ I said.
‘Right. But when he got there, he was told the government didn’t have the money –’
‘They didn’t,’ Sam confirmed.
‘Right. So the story goes that the loan officers told him they needed to take the loan certificates to the Department of the Treasury, to verify them and arrange payment. Now, depending on when this happened, he could have done that himself. The Treasury was in Philadelphia until 1800, because that’s where the seat of government was at that time; it didn’t move to Washington until 1800. But in any case, the Treasury never did arrange payment, and those certificates haven’t been seen since. One or two family members said they paid him something, a small sum to fob him off, but they never paid anything approaching what the certificates were worth, and after that, he had no evidence that he had ever loaned any money: end of story. But most of them said that after the first batch disappeared, Jacob gave the remaining certificates to someone he trusted to look after them in the event of this death, and as we know, he died in 1812.’
I suddenly felt cold, though it was rather too warm in the room. I stood and walked to the window and gazed down on to St. Charles Avenue for some time, my arms folded tightly across my chest, watching the cars drive slowly past the hotel. The story fifteen or twenty members of the family had told Powalski resonated with me. How could it not? I’d been there. I’d seen and heard part of it. But I couldn’t tell anyone that, and it didn’t bring us any nearer to solving the problem. I came back as Sam was in the middle of asking me something and I had to ask her to repeat it.
‘Kiah, if that’s true, the government may still have at least some of the certificates. It can’t be hard to find out where they would have stored documents once the loan offices had been closed. They had to take them somewhere for safekeeping, and from there – well, they would have been moved around from time to time, but once we had the National Archives, that’s where they would have wound up, wouldn’t they?’
Before I could answer, Arlene stood, walked behind Sam and gently put her arms around her neck.
‘I wish,’ she said, ‘but in your dreams, hun.’
‘Why do you say that?’ Sam asked. She sounded hurt.
‘Hun, if you worked for the government and you had loan certificates that might cost the government billions one day, what would you do with them? I know what I’d do, and it sure as hell wouldn’t be storing them in the National Archives, or anywhere else. I’d be feeding them straight into the shredder.’
Tears were forming in Sam’s eyes.
‘They didn’t have shredders in those days,’ she protested sullenly.
‘Maybe not,’ Arlene replied, not unkindly, ‘but they had discovered the secret of fire, and they probably used it – assuming the Brits hadn’t already done it for them.’ She bent down and kissed Sam on the top of her head. ‘Sorry, hun, but maybe we need to face the facts.’
I returned from the window.
‘It’s not necessarily that simple,’ I said. ‘For one thing, governments aren’t always as well organised as that. Governments depend on civil servants, and civil servants tend to hoard things. They say the Nazis hoarded enough paper to convict them all several times over. Besides, no one would have thought in terms of billions of dollars back then. That’s two hundred years later.’
‘Maybe so, but it was still a pretty large sum,’ Powalski said quietly. ‘Arlene’s right: it has to be possible that someone got rid of the certificates while they had the chance.’
‘It is a possibility,’ I agreed, ‘and if we never find them, maybe we will conclude that they did. But for now, we are going to work on the assumption that at least some of them survived. If we can find even one, it might be almost as good as finding them all.’
‘How do you figure that?’ Arlene asked.
‘If you don’t have a document, or a copy of it,’ I replied, ‘the next best thing is evidence to prove that someone destroyed the document – especially if that someone had a lot to lose if the document were ever to be produced to a court. If we only find one surviving loan certificate, the obvious question is: what happened to the rest of them? And if the answer to that is that the government may have destroyed them, a sympathetic judge might go with us.’
‘There’s something else, too,’ Powalski added. ‘Even if the government got rid of the certificates they had, there are still the ones Jacob gave to his friend for safekeeping.’
‘But how do we know who this friend was?’ Arlene asked. ‘Assuming it ever happened in the first place.’
‘We don’t, right now,’ Powalski conceded. ‘But Aunt Meg bent my ear for a good hour. She’s one of the main proponents of the theory that Jacob didn’t hand everything over to the government, and she says she has some evidence to back it up.’
I felt my heart race again.
‘What evidence?’
‘She wouldn’t say. She said the lobby was too public. She will show it to us when the time is right.’
‘When the time is right?’ Arlene protested. ‘What in the hell does she mean by that? How is this not the right time?’
‘I think she means, not during the reunion,’ Powalski replied. ‘Aunt Meg strikes me as the cautious type, and with people like Mary Jane Perrins around, I can’t say I blame her. I think she’ll be as good as her word. I don’t think she was bullshitting me.’
We were silent for some time.
‘The hell with it,’ Arlene said suddenly. ‘Come on, y’all. There ain’t no point sitting here moping about stuff we can’t fix, leastwise not today. Let’s get our asses out of here.’
‘Where to?’ Sam asked.
‘Where to?’ Arlene replied. ‘Hun, it’s Saturday night and we’re in the city of N’Orleans, the Big Easy. It’s time to party, girl.’
‘Are you going to show us the town?’ I asked.
‘I surely am.’
‘Are you going to lead us astray?’ Sam asked. She had perked up again, and was smiling.
‘I’m sure going to do my damndest, hun.’
‘I didn’t know you were an expert on New Orleans,’ I smiled.
‘Hun,’ Arlene replied, ‘if you live in Lubbock, Texas, you need a place to party, and it sure ain’t gonna be any place in Texas, and it sure as hell ain’t going to be Lubbock, Texas. No, ma’am. If you live in Lubbock, Texas, and it’s time to play, you head for the airport and you get yourself on a flight to N’Orleans. So, yeah, I’ve spent some time in this town, and I reckon by now I know my way around. Y’all coming, or what?’