Mount Pleasant Page 3

  Harry walked past the university gates to his bank for the appointment with Ms. Remnick. Harry and the bank were partners in his decaying house, which was being reclaimed slowly by nature. Water had seeped into the basement, spawning mildew and fungi. There were mice in the walls, and what looked like lichen on the shingles. An elm tree root had worked its way into the old clay pipes under the front yard, the pipes that carried their effluent to join the rivers of shit that bound the city. To balance this encroaching boreal world, there was lead in his soil, the residue of a toothpaste factory that had been torn down years ago. Harry wondered if that soil, with its quota of styrene, benzene, lead and mercury, was the only thing that kept nature from taking over his house entirely.

  A month earlier, a terse letter had arrived telling him that his line of credit would not be extended. His line of credit had quickly become a kind of friend, someone who’d lend him money anytime for any reason and wasn’t worried about when he’d repay it. When Harry’s inheritance arrived, he’d planned to happily pay this friend back. Except that his inheritance didn’t arrive.

  The events leading up to what he only half ironically called his genteel poverty were unremarkable. Harry had worked as a journalist and political commentator for the public broadcaster, where he enjoyed a degree of success, a measure of prestige and a smaller salary than he would have had with a private broadcaster. When the government putsch arrived and funding was cut, he was surprised to find himself out of a job; he could have supplied a two-page list of deadwood colleagues who should have been axed years ago. Instead, it was him. After a discouraging interval, he found work as a sessional instructor at the university, initially teaching media studies, then catching a break and a full-time position teaching media and a course in civic politics. And now he sat, tentatively, untenured (having come late to the party), a white male at the one moment in history when this wasn’t an advantage.

  Harry arrived at the bank and was ushered into Ms. Remnick’s small office, blinds drawn against the southern exposure, a certificate of merit framed behind her. He had opened his first account at a downtown bank, one of the pillared nineteenth-century buildings with thirty-foot ceilings. He kept his passbook in his desk in his bedroom and would regularly take it out and examine it, basking in the accumulated cash given to him by relatives on his birthday. His father had deliberately taken him to one of the downtown branches in order to instill a sense of awe. The surfaces were marble and gleaming wood, and the light was from another century, golden and hushed. Harry felt a reverence when he stepped up to the teller, as if he were about to receive communion.

  Money had once sat in Harry’s account and collected a dignified interest. Now it sluiced around the globe like bilge water. It was vast and abstract, unanchored by gold. A single drunken trader in London could send the global markets lurching with the push of a button.

  Sitting in the diluted corporate mood of Ms. Remnick’s office, Harry wondered how much of his life he had lived in the expectation of his father’s money. He sat like a schoolchild waiting for the teacher to correct his test, a sick dread in his stomach. He had a combined credit card balance of $24,300, and now his line of credit, that amoral friend who had cheerfully lent him $79,000, was abandoning him. His mortgage remained a monster from a children’s book, looming large in the shadows, hiding under his bed.

  Ms. Remnick wore a tailored suit, and her hair was pinned up. She was an attractive woman in her forties. A few strands of hair hung down, as if they had begun an intimacy and she had started taking the pins out.

  “I’m afraid …” she began, looking up from his file, her brown eyes filling with professional sympathy.

  We all live in fear, Harry thought.

  When Harry left the bank, and news of his frozen line of credit, he went south past the cheap, student-filled restaurants of Chinatown, lit like operating theatres and filled with undergraduates in front of steaming bowls. It occurred to him that most of them were in a better financial state than he was. He turned west, walking past the Victorian jumble, a line of tattoo parlours and used books and falafel spots, the street claimed by pierced and illustrated youth.

  Gladys had ordered a cake, and Harry had said he would pick it up, a dark chocolate and fig production that would cost, she warned, roughly $50. The cake was for a birthday dinner Gladys and four other women were hosting for a mutual friend. Each of them was supposed to bring a dish that had significance in the life of the birthday girl. The cake had something to do with a trip to France the woman had taken when she was young.

  He arrived at the bakery, which was small and cheerful and warm, and waited in line as others claimed their absurdly priced orders. The woman at the cash was French, with the girlish slimness the French managed even in middle age. She turned and plucked a smallish dark cake from the shelf, delicately placed it in a box, closed and taped the box, then put a ribbon around it and deftly tied an elegant bow. She handed Harry his cake and smiled. He handed her a $50 bill with genuine regret, and left carrying the box by the ribbon, then worried that the cake would slide around inside and get damaged, so he put one hand underneath the box and cradled it like a baby.

  He walked east for half an hour, past a cloud of Asian smells, churches offering yoga classes, window displays of bondage gear. He suddenly realized how hungry he was and approached a sausage cart, the vendor with his dismal toupée and homely wife, their faces a map of Eastern European grief and a boredom that had centuries of peasant solitude behind it. The woman opened her gap-toothed mouth, an unspoken query.

  “Sausage,” Harry said, holding up one finger.

  Some of these people, he had heard, were rich. They started with one cart, then bought another, then another, and eventually they enslaved other immigrants. Maybe this couple was rich, Harry thought. This was their cautious public life, designed to throw off the tax people, to deflect envy and discourage thieves.

  The woman quickly made sharp diagonal cuts along the sausage, then flipped it onto the grill. She worried it and prodded it in fluid movements, then finally picked it up with the tongs and placed it in a bun. Harry smothered it with hot peppers and added a dab of mustard, then took his sausage and sat on a cement planter and watched the traffic go by.

  He was just finishing his lunch when a man came by and asked him for change. “Can’t help you, brother,” Harry said in what he meant to be a tone of solidarity.

  The man stalked half a dozen steps, then returned. “Buy me a hot dog, asshole,” he said. He was maybe Harry’s age, his swollen face the colour of a rugby ball, with a full head of longish black hair. His raincoat was greasy, and beneath it Harry glimpsed layers of discarded fashions: a green sweater, a grey shirt, a black T-shirt with gothic lettering. His dirty white loafers, the shoes of a racetrack tout, looked to be two sizes too big.

  “What?”

  “Buy me a fucking hot dog, you Ralph Lauren dick.”

  Harry stared at him.

  “You don’t,” the man said, pointing to the cart, “I’ll put my hand in that mustard and smear it all over your jacket. I’ll piss on your shoes.”

  Adrenaline hummed. Harry reached into his pants and came out with a $2 coin. “Knock yourself out,” he said, flipping it toward the man, as if for a coin toss. The man made no attempt to catch it. It landed on the concrete, rolled briefly and stopped.

  “You buy it,” the man said. He was leaning slightly, coiled.

  “Fuck you,” Harry said sharply, and stood up, fearful of a sucker punch. They both waited in that small, charged vacuum that precedes violence, then the man bent over, picked up the coin and walked over to the cart. He bought a hot dog and Harry watched as he piled an absurd amount of mustard and relish onto it.

  As the man walked back toward him, he took a huge bite of the hot dog and started talking before he had swallowed it all. “You worried I’m going to give you that speech, the one where none of you assholes even see guys like me. We’re invisible.” Small bits of wet bun spilled ou
t of his mouth and lingered in his beard. “That horseshit speech.”

  Everyone was invisible, Harry thought. He was invisible.

  The man pushed the second half of the hot dog into his mouth. He made as if to shake Harry’s hand, then wiped both his grimy, stained hands on the lapels of Harry’s sports jacket, the Calvin Klein he’d bought on sale.

  “Racquetball on Monday, Bud,” the man said. “We still on?”

  Parts of his hot dog came out as a meteor shower of pink and yellow and green. He laughed, a glottal sound that became a tubercular cough, then turned and walked west, his natural hunch propelling him forward, this Fagin with his greasy black hair swaying slightly.

  “Christ,” Harry said. He went to the sausage cart and bought a bottle of water and took a handful of napkins and very gently dabbed at his lapels. The stain was dark with sick yellow streaks. The water made it worse, smearing it into the fabric.

  He walked for several blocks, waiting for the adrenaline to subside, before he realized, with a stab of nausea, that he’d left the cake back at the hot dog vendor. He turned and ran back as fast as he could, winded after the first block.

  When Harry got there, the cake was gone. He asked the gap-toothed sausage woman, but she simply shrugged. Forty-nine dollars and twenty-eight cents. Harry was suddenly aware of how much he was sweating, a steady runoff that soaked his shirt and overflowed his brow. He examined passersby for clues, then looked north and saw a form curved over a subway grate as if protecting something. Harry wiped his forehead with his hand and walked closer and saw it was a woman, greyish black hair running wild, sitting in a stained orange parka held together with geometric lines of duct tape, hunched over the cake, eating with one hand, shovelling it into her dark cave-like mouth like a child.

  “What do you mean, someone stole it, Harry? Someone stole the cake?”

  “A homeless woman.”

  Harry had started back to the bakery but realized that the cake had been specially baked to order. There was no point in buying a replacement because it wouldn’t fit the theme of Gladys’s party.

  “She just walked up and grabbed it?”

  “Gladys, it doesn’t matter how she stole it. It’s gone. A mentally ill woman in an orange parka ate your cake over a sewer grate. There is no fucking cake.”

  They stood in angry silence, he and Gladys. There had been, he noted, an increasing number of silences like this one, charged and dangerous, precipitated by something large or small. A place where something awful could suddenly flower, like a toxic mushroom cloud in a fifties documentary.

  Gladys took her coat and left, cakeless and resentful, for her party.

  FOUR

  THE LOGICAL PLACE to start looking for his father’s money was Dale’s office. Harry had toyed with the number three million for long enough that it had assumed the status of fact, a rumour repeated until it was truth. While his father may have been worth less, he could also have been worth more (as he occasionally was in Harry’s head). But a $13,000 legacy was inconceivable. Perhaps there would be clues to his ruin in his personal files.

  Harry intended to go to the BRG offices to collect Dale’s things and talk to Prescott Lunden. But he didn’t want to go in empty-handed. He wanted a little context—on the office, on his father, on his investments. So he first called Dick Ebbetts, who had worked with Dale at BRG, and Dick agreed to meet him for lunch. Dick was a stubby, coarse man—Harry’s mother’s description, though an accurate one. He was crude and poorly tailored, but he was considered a value savant and that was why he was tolerated at BRG, a money management firm that specialized in preserving Old Money. Ebbetts had never been part of the social world at BRG and was retiring, and for that reason Harry thought he might be the most discreet place to start in trying to find out what had happened to his father’s money.

  It was inconceivable that Dale had the net worth of an undergraduate. There had been the two divorces, of course, both of them expensive. But his tastes were surprisingly modest, although he had all his clothes made, even his shoes. And he spent a fortune at Scaramouche, where he ate at least twice a week, walking there and back regardless of the weather. But that was it. He didn’t like to travel and had no interest in collecting art or wine. He’d sold the family cottage years earlier. He hadn’t bought a new car in more than a decade and rarely drove the one he had. Harry guessed that, as he got older, his father’s investments would have gotten even more conservative. Surely he would have avoided most of the carnage of ’08.

  When Harry got to the restaurant, Ebbetts was already there, parked in front of an anachronistic martini. Harry shook hands and sat down, and they chatted listlessly about civic politics until Harry got to the point.

  “My father’s estate, Dick,” he said. “I’m wondering if you can help fill in some gaps.”

  “Happy to help if I can.”

  “Do you have any sense of what his financial situation was like near the end?”

  Ebbetts considered for a moment, then said, “Well, that divorce from Tess was a ball-breaker. And the divorce from your mother probably was a kick in the nuts too. It was different back then. Two kids. The courts frowned. Felicia got the house, for starters. Free and clear. But Tess was a piece of work. I mean she was laying the groundwork from day one, and she had the Prince of Darkness for a lawyer. Dale was still using Ted Moffat, with his white hair and that crinkly smile—he looked like the fucking queen by the time he quit practising. Her lawyer got in there with Ted, and it was like a pit bull with a ballerina. So Dale came out of that one with a few feathers missing.”

  Dick took a breath and then attacked his drink. “The thing is, he talked about Tess all the time. Which for Dale … I think he was really gone on her. Anyway.”

  “You don’t think it affected his work?”

  “Love,” Ebbetts said, as if that was an answer. “Dale was one of those guys who was all instinct. He was conservative, but he felt those rhythms, he listened to them. He called Nortel. That falling fucking knife.”

  “What kind of investments did he get his clients into?”

  “Old school: banks, dividend stuff, railways, utilities. To get into junior oils for him was like stepping off a cliff. But after he was eviscerated by the whole Tess thing, he loosened up. He put money into the oil sands, figures that’s the future, world’s running out, blah blah—puts it into this company, Pathos, a junior oil that lucked into a lease right on the Athabasca River. They don’t have any capital, but they’re sitting on this gold mine and they’re going for, like, eighty cents a share on the Venture Exchange, and Dale figures three things.”

  Dick held up his stubby left hand and counted off the fingers with the right. “One: West Texas Intermediate is going to hit $150. Two: the Chinese need a stable energy supply for a billion people who suddenly want Lincoln Navigators after ten centuries of raising pigs in their living rooms. And three: Pathos is going to get listed on one of the major exchanges and the institutional money is going to get on it like teenage sex. He starts buying this thing, and it starts to move, and I’ll tell you the feeling, you don’t get it often—some guys never. But you back something and you’re watching it like it’s your kid learning how to walk and it picks up speed, lurching a bit, and then it takes off, and when that happens, it’s like you just figured out the key to the universe and you’d be accepting the Nobel Prize but you’re too busy fucking a supermodel. Pathos gets north of twenty bucks. West Texas hits $147. Dale’s got I don’t know how much in this. But he’s shitting gold. And he unwinds the position a bit, starts thinking like an investor instead of a lottery winner. The Chinese are crawling around the oil patch, looking for a deal. It’s like the Red fucking Army—hundreds of them, I’m not kidding. And the smart money figures Pathos and maybe Husky are the takeout targets, which will drive up the price, though you have to figure that most of this is already built in. Then one night the entire Red Army checks out of their hotel and heads back to Beijing. I mean they all leave. Not a
fucking word. A week later they buy a $100 billion stake in a Saudi play. You know the rest.”

  Harry nods, but Ebbetts continues. “Oil drifts down to thirty-five bucks. There isn’t any credit out there to build a $23 billion upgrader. The environmentalists are all over the oil sands. Pathos goes to twenty-four cents and gets delisted, and Dale can’t unload this shit—there’s no one out there buying—and by the time they’ve bagged all the bodies, he doesn’t have much left.”

  But surely he was taking money off the table before that, Harry thought. It was in his DNA—preserve. He would have taken half, at the very least. Where was that money? He didn’t want to grill Dick on this point, though, because he didn’t entirely trust him.

  A waiter hovered and Harry glanced at the menu, its essayish descriptions, the nod to provenance and odd couplings—vodka and dark chocolate with lingonberry accents. Harry ordered quickly and randomly. Ebbetts took his time.

  His mother didn’t like any of the men Dale had worked with, but held a special contempt for Ebbetts. Felicia had a witchy intuition about people. Harry wondered if she was right about Ebbetts.

  “What’s your take on Press?” Harry asked bluntly. Prescott Lunden was president of the company, and Harry had always assumed that he and Dale were close. They were certainly cut from the same cloth.

  Ebbetts downed the dregs of his martini and set the empty glass carefully beside his water glass. “Press likes to come across as the kind of guy who can hold his own, a tough guy, someone who knows someone at the track, et cetera. If he loses that look, the look of a guy who knows gold is being jerked around by three South Africans he knows on a first-name basis, the guy who’s got an ear on the ground in Saudi—he loses that look, he’s gone. People think Press knows someone who’s in a mud hut talking to Nigerian warlords about whether they’re going to blow the pipeline and oil’s going to spike. And they like the excitement, they like the information. People have something on the inside, it gives them a hard-on. They walk around all day like they have a little piece of sunshine up their ass, and they can’t wait to tell someone because information is how you determine your place at the trough. Press is supposed to be the connection between the WASPs and the real world. Except Press has never stepped foot in the real world. What does he know? He knows the banks will go up four percent a year until the sun dies. That oil will go up then go down. That people will believe in equities because they believe there is belief. You take away that infrastructure, that brilliant vacuum that people walk into, and there in the centre is Jesus with his wallet out, then the whole religion is ready to take a leap.” Ebbetts stared at his empty glass. “And that is one scenario that benefits no one.”