Bryson spun his pen in his fingers as Terry showed Mrs. Vaneer out. Snap-whir, snap-whir. A last handshake at the door, and Terry closed it behind the departing branch manager.
“So,” Bryson said as Terry recrossed the conference room, “who’s next?”
Terry picked up her planner. “Mr. Sameer, from the Oakdale branch.”
“And?”
She scanned her notes. “The Oakdale branch, Bry. With the strange cash flow.”
His eyes lit up. “Oh, right. This should be interesting; bring him in, I’ll lay out the financials.”
As she rounded the conference table yet again, Bryson flipped through the file folder until he found the Oakdale branch financial statements. For the prior four meetings he had given each branch’s financials only a cursory view before laying them on the table, adhesive arrows pointing out features of pre-identified fiduciary interest like pinheads on a map.
The Oakdale financials had their arrows, but Bryson was still holding them, puzzling for the dozenth time, as Terry escorted the branch manager into the room. Bryson looked up and put on his smile.
“Mr. Sameer,” he said, rising and extending a hand, “good to see you again.”
Hassan Sameer was a thin young man of Ethiopian extraction, manager of his branch for only a year, but he had started as a teller seven years before that and his record spoke of hard work and dedication. His smile almost glowed against his dark skin.
“Mr. Grant. A pleasure.”
Sameer’s handshake was firm and he seemed untroubled as he seated himself in the chair opposite the auditors. Bryson had met a hundred men (and women) whose banks were in trouble, and their behavior gave it away the moment they entered the room. Sameer was not one of those.
Bryson had also met a half-dozen embezzlers. Only one of them had projected this sort of relaxed confidence.
Leaning forward, he riffled through the papers in his hand, then lay them on the table in front of him, facing the young branch manager. There were a dozen yellow arrows, but those were routine items. There was one large yellow Post-It note covered in text; all it really needed was the question mark at the end.
“I’ll get right to it,” Bryson said. “Your financials seem good, Mr. Sameer-“
“Please, call me Hassan.”
“-Hassan. But your branch is using one-third of the cash that our other branches are using. Now, your transaction volume is if anything larger than average. Please explain to me why your customers use so much less cash than customers in Escalon or Sonora.”
The young man looked confused. “Less cash? I… I don’t know this. We are very busy, Mr. Grant. We do good business in Oakdale. Our profits are good.”
“Yes, yes,” Bryson said, waving his hand dismissively. “But our armored car pickups from your bank are always much larger than from other branches. You’re not putting out cash into circulation. Do your customers not use your ATMs?”
Sameer shook his head. “No, no. Our ATMs are very busy.”
“Actually,” Terry interjected, reaching across to tap at one of the yellow arrows, “their ATM costs are almost twice those of the Escalon branch.”
Sameer nodded. “Yes, yes. We have many ATM customers. We use very much paper and ink.”
Bryson frowned. “Is it all deposits, then? And everyone requires a receipt?”
“Oh no, Mr. Grant. Mostly it is withdrawals. Fast cash.”
“How often do you refill the ATMs with cash, then?”
“Refill them with cash? What do you mean?”
“The money that your customers are… you said ‘paper and ink’. Your ATM machines are… printing money?”
Sameer nodded quickly. “Well yes sir. Should they not be?”
Bryson settled into the overstuffed chair in the lobby of the Best Western. He sipped the highball he’d gotten from the hotel bar; drinking while sitting on a stool had never held much appeal.
Terry sat down in the chair across the table. Her glass of 7-Up clinked down onto the glass tabletop.
“You know,” Bryson mused, “in the nineteenth century banks all printed their own money.”
“It’s illegal, Bry.”
He sighed. If only his job were only to find the problems. But no, he had to troubleshoot, and now a team of Treasury officials were flying out from D.C. to join up with their compatriots already driven out from Frisco and begin combing a small flat city for a year’s worth of counterfeit twenty dollar bills. Very good counterfeits, apparently, except for the crisp edges of the paper.
He hoped that Sameer didn’t get into too much trouble. Hell, he hoped he got his job back.
He took another drink. “I know,” he finally replied. “I’m just sayin’.”
- Sun Ra