TromboneAl
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
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- Jun 30, 2006
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I'm back again, asking for help with my current book. If you'd enjoy doing it, please let me know if the following is reasonable, in terms of the redemption of paper stock certificates.
In the book, Viviana is a Romanian jewel thief who traveled in a time machine from 1980 to 2020. The book takes place in 2020.
In this scene she and a private detective, Eric Beckman (the narrator) are trying to find her uncle who also traveled forward in time. She and the uncle had both cached money and stock certificates in burial urns (thanks for the idea, ArtTinkerer!), retrieving the contents after their jump.
Peggy is Eric's assistant.
One question is whether one can redeem certificates anonymously or whether the sale information must be made public.
I've included the gratuitous sex and romance.
This is a rough first draft.
Thanks!
In the book, Viviana is a Romanian jewel thief who traveled in a time machine from 1980 to 2020. The book takes place in 2020.
In this scene she and a private detective, Eric Beckman (the narrator) are trying to find her uncle who also traveled forward in time. She and the uncle had both cached money and stock certificates in burial urns (thanks for the idea, ArtTinkerer!), retrieving the contents after their jump.
Peggy is Eric's assistant.
One question is whether one can redeem certificates anonymously or whether the sale information must be made public.
I've included the gratuitous sex and romance.
This is a rough first draft.
Thanks!
--------------------
Viviana and I spent all of the next day, a cozy Sunday, getting to know one another. We left her house only to retrieve my car. To be honest, we spent a lot of time in the bedroom.
Early Monday morning, sunlight streamed onto our bed’s purple comforter, and the scent of woodsmoke drifted in the open window. A pair of blue jays made a racket, but Viviana slept on.
I started to get up, but she held me tighter. Not asleep, apparently. Her body fit mine as if designed for nothing else.
With her head buried against my neck, I stared at the ceiling. What were my priorities? One, keep Viviana hidden, for now, at least. Two, find her uncle, if he was alive. Three, get Uncle Zaharia to present his device to the world. Right. Eric Beckman saves the world. I chuckled.
“What funny?” Her voice was deeper in the morning.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do today.”
No response. Had she fallen back to sleep? She rubbed her nose against my shoulder. “Coffee first.”
“I think it’s your turn to make coffee today.”
Another pause. “Make stronger today.” She was also more demanding in the morning.
After forty minutes of what I hoped would become our normal morning routine, we cleared away the breakfast dishes, and sat side-by-side with our computers.
I brought up my browser. “Okay. First, we’re going to follow the money.”
“All the President’s Men.”
“What?”
“‘Follow the money,’ comes from movie. Before your time?”
I Googled it. A 1976 movie. Four years before I was born. Would I ever get used to this? I’d just had sex with a woman born seventy years ago.
“Okay, what are the stocks Zaharia purchased?” All of Viviana’s certificates had turned out to be worthless. From memory, she listed the ten stocks and amounts her uncle had selected. I shouldn’t have been surprised at her intellect. After all, she shared genes with the physicist who’d invented a time machine. I entered each stock into my computer. All worthless.
“So much for that.” I ran my fingers through my hair. “He had gold and diamonds in his urn?”
She shook her head. “Some. Not like me. I couldn’t give him mine. He didn’t know I was thief.”
“The smartest man in the world, and he didn’t know?”
She turned to me, frowning, her jaw clenched. Uh oh. Then she softened. “Maybe he knew. He never said.”
“So he didn’t have your ill-gotten—”
I stopped when her eyes flashed again.
“He was rich. He put gold in urn … wait. Stocks worthless, when?”
“What do you mean?”
“His stocks are worthless now, yes?”
“Yes. I entered in the symbols, and the companies don’t exist anymore.” I pointed to my screen. “You’d have to be lucky—”
“Worthless now. But maybe not when he arrived.”
I nodded slowly. Of course. He could have jumped back to the real world any time after 1980. I plotted the stock prices of all the companies. All had done well, for a while. They went bankrupt in years between 1984 and 2010. The last one to fold was the most interesting. The Boxten Holding Company had purchased a video rental company in 1991, making incredible gains before crashing.
If Zaharia had cashed out at its peak, he would have made—whoa—several hundred million dollars.
We worked for hours, looking for anything unusual. Peggy called my cell, asking “where the hell” I was. I’d have to deal with that later. I told her I was working on a hot lead. She sounded skeptical.
After our lunch break, we found what we were looking for. A news article from 2001:
San Francisco Chronicle Archives
March 9, 2001: 150 Million Dollars Worth of “Lost” Stock Redeemed
Do you dream of finding old stock certificates in the attic and turning them in for a fortune? That’s exactly what happened to a San Mateo resident on Wednesday.
The article went on to describe a man with a marked European accent, around fifty years old, who’d cashed in the certificates. They’d been issued in 1979. He said he found them found hidden in the walls of his house.
Viviana took my hand. “Oh, Eric, Iubită, that’s him. I know it.” Iubită was a new word I’d learned. It meant darling.
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