Lang went toward the second vault while his mind whirled. It was the silver. All that silver, just sitting there. And he’d had expenses. And it wasn’t fair! The emperor was always late with the pay. Maria was expensive. A man liked to give things to his lady love and Maria was so grateful when he got her a new dress or shawl. Besides, his wife needed stuff too, even if she wasn’t so grateful. There were the children to think about.
It had seemed so simple. They never used the second vault. The first vault was mostly left open, so the bank could provide silver for people who had some reason to need it, mostly silversmiths. They brought in paper reichsthaler and bought silver to use in their craft. And, of course, when people brought in old silver coins to have them assayed, they went in to the first vault. It was only after they had been melted down, refined and made into silver bars that the silver went into the second vault. The second vault was just for storage.
Storage for stacks of silver bars that never got used for anything. And it was easy enough to stack the silver bars so that they looked like there were more of them than were actually there. For someone with the key to the second vault, it wasn’t that hard to make the switch now and then. Lang was almost sure that he wasn’t the only one doing it.
Those thoughts had taken him to the door of the second vault. He unlocked the vault, then stopped. He had only taken just a few bars from the second vault. There might not be a problem . . . but if this kept up it would be noticed and Lang was one of only three people who had keys to the second vault. He would be discovered. Karl Lang wasn’t a brave fellow and he didn’t like to gamble, not at all. It had taken six months of the second vault only being opened at the beginning and end of each business day before Karl had worked up the nerve to take his first bar.
Lang turned the key the other way and slipped out a side door of the bank. He managed to keep from running till he was a block away. It was the hardest thing he had ever done in his life, but he did it. Once he rounded the corner and was out of sight of the bank, he ran. And, at least in the figurative sense, Karl Lang would never stop running as long as he lived.
* * *
Franz Traugott was getting worried. Karl should be back by now, pulling a cart of silver bars. He motioned over a guard. The Royal Bank had a gracious plenty of those.
“Go to the second vault and see what’s keeping Herr Lang, please.”
The guard went back to ask and returned quickly. “He left out the side door,” the guard told Franz. “Georg saw him.”
“Why didn’t Georg stop him?” Franz hissed.
“Why the fig should he have? Herr Lang didn’t even open the second vault. He put the key in, then pulled it out again and went out the side like he had just remembered something. At least, that’s what Georg told me.”
Franz looked at the line of customers and at the shrinking pile of silver and was very tempted to make a run for it himself, in spite of the fact that he had done nothing wrong. But he was made of sterner stuff than Karl Lang. “Listen, send a runner to Herr Maurer’s house. Tell him that we need him and his key down here now. And you’d better send another to Liechtenstein house and tell Prince Gundaker von Liechtenstein that we need his key as well.”
“What’s going on?” the guard asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe Karl had a good reason to leave, but what I’m afraid of is that he had a very bad reason to leave. Whatever the reason, if we don’t get a key to the second vault here soon, we are going to have a run on the bank.”
The guard paled. There had been seven bank runs that had made the international press since the Ring of Fire. In five of them, someone had ended up executed. In one, twenty-three people involved with the bank had been executed.
By the end of the day there had been eight bank runs. Gundaker was at the palace and Herr Maurer was enjoying his day off at the water park at Race Track City. The bank ran out of silver hours before either of those worthies were found. Word spread like wildfire and the Royal Bank of Austria-Hungary had to close its doors. By the time Gundaker von Liechtenstein got there, the building was surrounded by guards and there was the next best thing to a riot out front. It wasn’t a riot of poor people. The upper crust of Vienna—burghers, masters, Hofbefreiten, and nobles—were up in arms. They had put their silver in the bank and they had been promised that they could get it back when they wanted it.
* * *
Gundaker von Liechtenstein, whatever else, was a brave man. He went out to face the rioters, pistols in hand, and backed by the bank guards.
He fired a pistol into the air to get the attention of the rioters. Once the shouting died down, he roared, “What is wrong with you people? Is this any way for the greatest nobility in the world to behave?”