Mount Pleasant

by Don Gillmor

  And still we line up to be hustled. Harry remembered the amusement park he went to as a child, an itinerant midway set up in a small town near their cottage. There were rides and rigged games run by northern Ontario hillbillies, their lean rural faces and natural suspicion, bad teeth hidden by tight, thin-lipped smiles. One summer, a ride malfunctioned and a girl was crushed when the giant teacup she was sitting in spun off its moorings and flew twenty feet and landed on its side. Harry couldn’t remember if she was killed or not. The next year, when the hillbillies set up their rides, almost no one came, and Harry remembered looking at the deserted fairground and those workers staring at him with a look of what he knew to be hatred.

  The sun broke through in optimistic bursts, but winter lurked. Whatever solidarity existed here would leak away as the cold set in. There were some who would stay, and that would create hierarchies—the hardy and faithful sharing their disdain around oil lamps at night in the tents. Those who had left bringing them food and flannel shirts with a feeling of guilt.

  He walked up to a yurt that housed a library, but it was barricaded against the eviction order. A Native tent with a sacred fire was also barricaded. The eviction notices had been handed out politely, and the police were on record as saying they would enforce them, the first hint of steel from the city. Harry noticed police cruisers lining the street. A few cops in yellow jackets walked through the scene.

  Harry stopped to talk to a group who were roughly the age of his students, and asked them about leadership: Did they have a spokesperson?

  “We’re not into hierarchy,” one of them said.

  “We’re all free to speak our minds.”

  “Does that make for a fractured message?” Harry asked.

  “Leadership makes for a fractured message, because it doesn’t represent the people—it represents the leader and his interpretation of what the people want.”

  “What do the people want?” Harry was genuinely curious.

  “What they’ve always wanted,” one of them said cryptically.

  “And what is that?”

  “Justice,” said one of the girls. She was very pretty, pale in a black wool hat, the kind of girl Harry would have fallen for as an undergrad.

  Are you enjoying yourselves? Harry wanted to ask. Instead, he said, “Could you burn Rosedale down? Burn it to the ground?”

  They looked at him like he was a police plant, then shuffled away from him suspiciously.

  His cellphone rang and Harry picked up.

  “Harry.” It was Dixie, calling to threaten exposure or offer sex or inquire about money.

  “Dixie.”

  “Harry, I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. I mean, I know you aren’t trying to cheat me out of anything.”

  Harry nodded. Why was she changing her tack? Perhaps her lawyer had given up. If she’d actually had a lawyer.

  “We should work together, Harry. I mean, it makes sense. Pool our resources.”

  Harry wondered what resources Dixie had. If they were useful, she wouldn’t have called him. She had her unnamed source, she had a rumour. But maybe she now grasped the hermeticism of old money. Trying to gain entry to it was like re-entering the earth’s atmosphere; you had to approach at precisely the right angle. If you didn’t, you’d either bounce back into space or burn up. Dixie, with her harsh tan and suburban highlights, didn’t know what that angle was. So she’d come back to Harry.

  “I mean, it had to be someone he worked with, don’t you think, Harry?”

  “That would be my guess.”

  Dixie mentioned a few names. Harry imagined she had a list of suspects that she was crossing off, the way a television detective might. Her voice had dropped slightly, a forced huskiness, a phone sex voice.

  If it did turn out that there was $3 million in Dale’s estate, and it was all recovered, this relative stranger would be receiving more than half of it while Harry settled for roughly a million. This bothered him, he realized. It hadn’t bothered him when there was only a few thousand at stake, but a few million was another story. It also bothered him that one of the reasons Erin hadn’t been much help in all this was that she, as the wife of a quasi-investment banker (and with a successful design business of her own, she would add), would rather that nothing was found. Because it would kill her to see Dixie receive a fortune, even if it meant Harry would receive one as well. Erin didn’t need the money and would probably contest the will in court and spend the next three years tying it up and severely reducing the total through ongoing outrageous legal fees. There might even be legitimate grounds: Harry had thought it was odd that Dale had chosen such arbitrary, non-rounded percentages, and perhaps it could be argued that this in itself was evidence of an unsound mind.

  After working through some uninformed conspiracy theories, Dixie finally said, “We need to hire someone, Harry.”

  “Didn’t you already hire someone? What about your lawyer?”

  “Oh, him,” Dixie said. “I mean someone who knows about these things. A detective or something.”

  Harry didn’t want to let her know he had already hired Tommy Bladdock, even if it meant Dixie might offer to split the cost. She would start calling for daily progress reports. She might even sleep with Bladdock in an effort to gain the advantage. He wanted to keep contact with her to a minimum and resented that he was bound to her by that arbitrary fuck.

  “Do you know of anyone?” Dixie asked. “Some kind of … money detective who specializes in this stuff. Harry?”

  “I’ll look into it, Dixie.”

  “You must know someone who would know—”

  “I’ll look into it.”

  Having established in her mind that the two of them were now partners, and that Harry was losing patience, Dixie began to chat aimlessly about how a new cloud had been invented. Something she’d seen on the news. Harry looked past the eat the rich signs, past the woman with a clown nose wearing a pup tent for a dress who was doing a soft shoe dance, and thought he saw Ben. It looked like him, slightly hunched, that furtive air he’d developed.

  “Not invented, I guess.” Dixie rambled on. “Discovered. It has something to do with pollution. It looks like a thundercloud, except it isn’t. Where the hell are you, Harry? It sounds like a circus or something.”

  “It is. I’m downtown, doing research in the park.”

  Harry walked toward the young man who looked like Ben. When Gladys was pregnant, she suggested that Harry read to the fetus. He’d lain awkwardly across the bed and read hesitantly from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, Book VII—“Indeed, what is there that does not appear marvellous when it comes to our knowledge for the first time?”—as Gladys ran her hands through his hair, a sensual moment of familial connection. But he never repeated it; Ben only got the one excerpt.

  As his son grew into adolescence, Harry wouldn’t admit to being afraid of him. In Ben, he began to see his own impatience and natural unease distorted as in a funhouse mirror, looming large and curved. As an adolescent, Ben grew taller than Harry, a fact Gladys pointed out to every visitor. When called upon, Ben obediently shuffled over to prove his mother’s point, standing mutely beside Harry, the awkward prince waiting to kill the king.

  Now Dixie was asking him just what kind of research happened in a park, but Harry cut her off. “I have to let you go, Dixie. I’m right in the middle of things here.”

  “Oh. Well, then, okay. I’m glad we’ve cleared things up, Harry.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Okay, then, so you’ll call when you’ve had a chance—”

  Harry was close enough to see that it was Ben. “Gotta go, Dixie.” He pressed End and put his cell away.

  He moved quickly through the crowd, aware that he looked like someone’s desperate father searching for a child who had joined a cult.

  “Ben,” he called, when he was twelve feet away.

  Ben was talking to a girl who was wearing mime makeup. He said something to her and she gave him a Marcel
Marceau wave and walked away.

  “Ben, hi, what brings you here?”

  “Dad. You know, it’s the place to be. Sarah was here, but she had a class. Why are you here?”

  “I’m teaching. I brought all the students down to see a revolution first-hand.”

  There was a brief silence. Harry was grateful for the ambient noise, the swirl of slogans and Native drumming. Dale had looked at Harry and seen little of himself, which would have been dismaying; Harry looked at Ben and saw too much of himself, even more dismaying. The debts passed down through the blood, condemning offspring to the same struggle.

  “Any thoughts about when you two are going to get married?” he asked Ben.

  “We don’t know. It might be one of those things where it just … I mean, we aren’t, like, ‘making plans’ people.” His hands were in the air, articulating quotation marks, a habit that had become a tic.

  “If there’s anything I can do,” Harry said.

  “Well, it isn’t going to be a ‘ceremony’ ceremony or anything, Dad. You don’t have to book the ballroom at the Holiday Inn.”

  “You’re going to write your own vows?”

  “The other ones are totally sexist.”

  Ben would procrastinate, then eventually abandon the task. The job would be left to Sarah, who would produce a manifesto. Harry stared at Ben’s unruly head and wondered if he had failed to be a “parent” parent.

  “There’s so much bullshit in the world, we don’t want to add to it,” Ben said.

  “No.”

  A young man in jeans and a puffy parka came up and shook Ben’s hand in a complicated way, and Harry moved off a little so the two of them could catch up.

  All families were geometry, Harry thought. His was a triangle, one that formed and reformed over the years, mostly as a scalene, with no equal sides, one line sloping away obtusely; sometimes as an isosceles, with two equal sides, the last side stranded between them; and occasionally, gloriously, as an equilateral triangle, all sides the same length. At first, mothering had been paramount, and Harry hovered over the mother and infant, a useless appendage. Several years later, there was a period of masculine bonding, and Gladys found herself an outsider, a tourist who didn’t know the language. On holidays, they sometimes found symmetry and balance, equilateral at last! Now Ben was poised for flight. He hadn’t been anyone’s ally for a while. They were inescapably scalene. What would remain when one side of the triangle was suddenly gone? What geometry lurked?

  Harry looked at Ben chatting with his friend, both of them lit by the joy of being part of something that incorporated rebellion and partying. They lived on a blissful socialist plane. The concept of money wouldn’t make an impression on Ben until Harry and Gladys were dead and both Ben’s bank account and refrigerator were empty.

  Harry remembered a Christmas when Ben was a baby. He and Gladys had gone to Florida, partly to escape a brutal winter and partly as a corny idea they were going to embrace. They’d rented a house that belonged to a friend of a friend, a modest bungalow with a pool. Harry went to the Liquor Barn and found a promising Sancerre for a fraction of what he’d have to pay at home and bought six bottles. They exchanged gifts on Christmas morning, and in the afternoon they picked up takeout and drove to the beach and drank two bottles of the Sancerre, pouring it into plastic cups. Ben sat in his car seat under a beach umbrella, and they stared at him like he was the baby Jesus.

  He had brought Ben to see Dale when he lay dying in the hospital. Ben had little curiosity about his grandfather, had spent little time with him. And Dale’s dementia made conversation either impossible or strange. Talk of the markets (a safe starting point) could abruptly veer into talk of hemlines, an abrupt sentence on building materials, insights into the Nixon administration, golf tips. Ben didn’t seem to make the connection that someday it would be him lying on the bed, wrinkled and addled. When you’re fifty, you can see sixty, sense seventy. But twenty only sees itself, an everlasting present tense.

  Ben said goodbye to his friend and turned to his father. “So, I should be heading back, Dad. You going to hang?”

  “For a bit. Until the shooting starts.”

  A crowd gathered by the yurt, where the grounds had been flattened into mud. Police approached from King Street, a wall of yellow jackets. A man in black, wearing a balaclava, jumped onto a picnic table and began leading a litany.

  “Our demands …” he began.

  “Our demands,” the crowd repeated.

  “Were not met …”

  “Were not met.”

  “But we are not over …”

  “BUT WE ARE NOT OVER.”

  The police approached in a line, intending to dismantle the yurt. A woman sang, “Everyone here is a hero of the people.”

  This was democracy at its messiest, Harry thought. At this level it looked like anarchy, an unwieldy affiliation aligned against the robber barons: elderly hippies, students, Natives, economists, the homeless, the generic partiers, seekers of crowds in any form. They had megaphones and endless negotiations among themselves. They posted non-hierarchical political guidelines on the Internet, and their message was fractured and diluted, and now all that inchoate emotion and sense of injustice was being channelled into a final stand. It was the last week of November, and they were past their eviction date. Winter was approaching. The public was losing interest. And now the police were here, organized and single-minded, veterans of sensitivity seminars and violence.

  The cameramen moved in, sensing, finally, the clash that the camera loves. Forty days of peaceful protest had been trying. Forty days of John Lennon songs and earnest interviews.

  Harry saw Verma shooting the scene with her phone. A Native man approached the line of police and invited them, through his megaphone, to “Come and join the circle.” The cops remained impassive. Harry spied Briscow and the dread-locked woman swaying on the edge of the crowd.

  Several different chants went up, competing for space, none of them able to gain traction. Harry felt the moment build, that instant when the air was charged and something could happen, when pent-up anger was finally released, when rocks were thrown, shots fired. But this only lasted a moment. Harry felt it subside.

  He lingered for another twenty minutes. People were still waiting for something to happen, but it was over. Within a week, the park would be deserted, the garbage collected; perhaps there would be a dusting of snow that would cover any physical trace. The collectivity and energy and anger and hope that had been here for forty days would disappear into the historical fabric of the city, with its gift for progress and amnesia.

  TWENTY-ONE

  ON THE EVENING NEWS THAT NIGHT, Harry glimpsed August Sampson’s corpse in a grainy cellphone photograph. The trunk of the 1993 Honda had been popped by a helpful city worker who was readying impounded cars for auction. And there was August, his skin yellow with disease and purple with cold, the colours of Easter preserved by winter in a dead fetal curl. Citing an unnamed source, the newscaster speculated that a deal between Sampson and some organized crime element had gone sour and he had been murdered. He had stage four cancer of the liver and was dehydrated. An autopsy was pending.

  The car was registered to Andrew Wortham, who had a nondescript, small-time criminal record, and whose license had been suspended for drunk driving, and who appeared to be long gone. There wasn’t anything resembling a coherent narrative. August would have turned eighty-one in July, the newscaster said. There was nothing that connected Wortham to August Sampson.

  Harry called Bladdock. “You saw about August Sampson?”

  “Poor bastard.”

  “This must be connected somehow.”

  “It’s getting a bit ugly.” Tommy paused. “Look, I wouldn’t read too much into it at this point, but there may have been something else going on with BRG.”

  “Like what.”

  “Like another scam.”

  “Two Ponzis?”

  “I don’t think Señor Ponzi is
involved. I’m guessing the fund was dirty.”

  “What fund?”

  “BRG got into a hedge fund—Spectre Island. Claimed gains of five hundred percent, which by itself should have maybe rung a few alarms. Securities is taking it apart. Most of Spectre was in a company that was towing icebergs to shore to melt for bottled water. Allegedly.”

  Harry had put $10,000 of his own retirement fund into Spectre Island. That money, he recognized instantly, and with an awful familiarity, was gone.

  “So BRG has some kind of scam going on inside, but they’re also involved in Spectre Island?”

  “At this point it looks like they were a victim of Spectre Island.”

  “You think they got taken by this fund, and they started stealing from their clients to make payments?”

  “Possible. Or the other way around. They looked to the fund as a way to make up a shortfall. An odd investment for BRG, but the modified Ponzi didn’t make sense either. The thing with a Ponzi is, once it starts, it’s usually just a matter of time. The scammer lives with that. It can end two ways: you leave your entire life behind and find an island. Or you go to jail.”

  “So wouldn’t it be odd for a guy in his eighties who is already dying to start something like this? They can’t be looking at August.”

  “Maybe it’s the dying part we should be looking at. I mean, that’s the third way out.”

  “But August—what, he goes to an island and lives out the last two months of his life on the beach? He doesn’t need twenty million for that.”

  “He wasn’t the only person dying.”

  Harry took a moment to register. “You think my father …”

  “I don’t think anything. But I have seen everything. And I just want to prepare you for the possibility, no matter how remote …”

  “That he took the money.”

  Bladdock was silent for a few seconds. Harry visualized him taking off his glasses and cleaning them on a polo shirt that advertised a corporate golf tournament. Harry calculated the cost of this gesture to be roughly two dollars.