The old woman in the wheelchair was Angela Russo. I had not seen her since the autumn of 1980, when she stood in a black veil at her husband service, holding the hand of a small boy. Now she was eighty eight, white haired, thin as paper, with the same dark, steady eyes. The young man beside her, in the long coat, was Marco, her grandson. I walked across the hotel lobby with my heart pounding, past the front desk, past the wedding guests in their finery, and I knelt in front of her chair like a boy. “Mrs. Russo,” I said. “I kept it. I kept the key.”
She put her thin hand on my cheek. “Leonard, Dominic said you would,” she whispered. “He said you were the only honest man in Des Moines.” Mike had followed me across the lobby, with his tie loose and his face white. Marco shook my hand and said, in a low voice, that his grandfather had left instructions in a will, a letter and a safe deposit box that Angela had kept for forty five years. They had waited for the bank building to be condemned. Now it would be torn down in nine days, and the sub basement would be crushed with it, unless somebody opened it first.
We drove to Fourth Street at midnight, the four of us, in Marco rented van, Angela in the passenger seat with a blanket over her knees. The old Iowa Savings Bank building stood dark against the sky, boarded and tagged with graffiti, with a chain link fence around it. A friend of Marco, a foreman for the demolition company, unlocked the gate. We went in through the loading dock with flashlights. In the old lobby, behind the teller cages, stood the freight elevator I had installed in 1979. It was dusty, but the brass plate still read, Voss Elevator Company, Des Moines.
A brass key on a chain, an elevator to nowhere, and an old mechanic who finally rode all the way down.
I stepped into the car. The cable was sound. I know my work, and I had greased every sheave. Mike stood in the door with his mouth open as I took the brass key from around my neck and slid it into the lock beside the lowest button, the one marked with nothing at all. I turned it. Somewhere deep in the shaft, a motor hummed, and for a moment I was afraid it would not start. Then the car dropped, smooth as oil, past the basement and past the foundation, down into a dark that I had built and never seen. It took forty seconds. Nobody breathed.
The doors opened on a round steel vault, twelve feet across, lined with oak shelves. Mike raised his flashlight, and the beam picked out rows of small bronze bars stacked neatly, each stamped with the mark of a Chicago assay office. There were two hundred and sixty of them. Beside them stood a wooden chest and a rolled map. Angela, in her wheelchair, which Marco had lowered by the freight lift, gave a long breath. “Dominic was a banker,” she said. “In 1979 he learned that the men who ran the city were stealing from the depositors. So he took the reserves and hid them where nobody would think to look.”
She told it plainly. The bank president, Dominic, had known that three officials were quietly looting the savings of widows and farmers for their own pleasure. He could not prove it in court, because the books were forged. So he took the bullion, nine million dollars in 1979 money, and had me build him a stop that did not exist. He meant to bring it out when the thieves were jailed. But he suffered a stroke in 1980, and he left a letter and a promise to his wife. “He wrote that the man who built the elevator would know what to do,” Angela said. “He said Leonard Voss never cheated a customer in his life.”
I stood in that vault for a long time, with my hands on the cold bars. I thought of Judy at the kitchen table, taking calls, and of the chain around my neck, which she gave me on our fortieth anniversary and which I had worn for seven years without understanding. She had known. Dominic must have told her, somehow, before he passed. And she had kept it, quietly, until she gave it to our son. Mike stood beside me, and I felt him swallow. “Dad, I did not know what I was asking for,” he said. “I thought it was money.”
It was money, and a good deal more. The state attorney general, informed within the day, reached the old depositors through the bank records Dominic had hidden in the chest. Over fourteen hundred families, most of them gone now, had their heirs found and paid. Angela Russo lived to see the first check delivered in the lobby of the Iowa State Capitol. And in the will she left behind, there was a short paragraph for the elevator man, with a sum that I did not want and gave away: it became the Voss Fund for Apprentice Elevator Mechanics, which sends twenty young people to trade school each year.
Mike moved nothing into his house that I owned. He came to see me on Grand Avenue a week after the wedding, with a bag of groceries and a bruised look, and he stood in my kitchen for a while before he spoke. “Dad, I mocked you in front of sixty people,” he said. “I took it for granted that you were weak.” I said I had never been weak. I had only been quiet, like his mother. He laughed. He cried. We cooked pork chops together, and he asked me to teach him how to read a machine room.
On the day the old bank came down, we all stood across Fourth Street, Mike and Marco and a hundred old depositors with signs. The dust rose in a great gray cloud, and the building folded into itself with a groan. I felt Judy beside me. I took the brass key from around my neck and turned it over in my fingers. Then I gave it to Mike. “It does not open anything now,” I said. “But it is the best thing I ever owned. Never use it unless you have to.” And my son closed his hand around it, and nodded.
