Excerpts from
The Silent Partner
By Anders Bodelsen
December 1964
Borck was the last to leave the bank. He walked round the premises tidying up things which strictly speaking could have been left to the cleaning staff in the morning.
After placing the seven wastepaper baskets in a group by the back door he walked through the main room and stopped by the big window. At the other side of the shopping square, in front of the wing that was a cinema, a Christmas tree rose up above the roofs of the cars. In the window in front of Borck sat the bank´s Christmas pixie, a cornucopia between its widespread legs. A stream of golden coins were pouring out of the mouth of this horn of plenty. As long as the bank was open a little electric motor inside the pixie´s body kept up a whirring noise and made the head nod with satisfaction. The pixie had been in the bank longer than Borck.
There were still a few things to do. He gained time for the next day by changing the plastic cards in the wall calendar and putting out fresh supplies of the bank´s matchbooks on the counter. On the low table in the front part of the main room, where customers sat down to fill in forms or wait, he found a terrible mess. The travel brochures on display here lay higgledy-piggledy amongst forms that were supposed to be in their respective transparent plastic holders. He sat down at the table and started to put things in order.
The front pages of the brochures featured colour photos of sunburnt people bathing or sunbathing - pale, golden sands, an incredibly blue sky, palms, little refreshment tents, a colossal Mediterranean sun about to set. He stacked the brochures in a neat heap and extracted the unused forms from among them. Most of them were in good enough condition to be replaced in their holders: DEPOSIT, WITHDRAWAL, special forms to be used for various kinds of account. But some were too crumpled at the edges and had to be thrown away. The new type of form meant that you no longer had to put a piece of carbon paper in between first. The carbon was concealed - built-in, so to speak - in the underside of the top half of the form. In the course of the day Borck inevitably got hold of one where the copy was illegible because somebody had used a form as a pad while writing something completely different. There was often nothing to be seen on the slip which ended up in his own cash desk; but on the copy, which was stamped and handed back to the customer, there might be scribbled the most extraordinary figures and calculations, and then customers would complain they couldn´t read their own handwriting. Borck had made a habit of nosing out these spoilt counterfoils and removing them.
He had just caught sight of one, lying across a suntanned girl in a white terry-towelling sunsuit. The paper showed signs of having been used by somebody who had pressed unusually hard when writing. Not, as usually the case, figures; but letters, a couple of sentences.
He was just about to crumple up the counterfoil but, as so often before, was unable to restrain his curiosity to see what somebody had written and perhaps not intended other people to read. He unfolded the form absent-mindedly and looked at the thin blue writing that stretched diagonally across Name of customer, Reg. No. and A /c No. It was a little while before he realized what he was reading.
The words had been printed in block capitals. Big, careful, childish (or perhaps just completely impersonal) block capitals. At an angle, across the dotted lines where the customer was supposed to have written his name and the number of his cheque account, Borck read:
THE THING IN MY POCKET IS A REVOLVER. HAND OVER ALL THE CASH YOU´VE GOT IMMEDIATELY WITHOUT AROUSING ATTENTION
Without at once attaching any clear meaning to the words, Borck read the two sentences a couple of times. The unknown writer had carefully put a full stop between the two sentences but none at the end. He had apparently taken plenty of time over each individual letter; each of the three G´s, for instance, had been carefully finished with a little downward stroke. It looked as though he had been practising the letters first.
From: The Silent Partner, Pengiun Books 1978
Translated by David Hohnen
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