by Don Gillmor
Harry drove to the campus in the sharp light. He parked his car and walked to the classroom, where he was greeted by the spectacle of Briscow playing a game on his phone, his body tilting as he tried to evade the aliens or jump from the exploding planets in time. Briscow, you vacant stump, will you find love? Will a woman reveal depths you never discovered on your own? Will you wander like a cloud and find that youth has flown and wisdom has failed to alight? Then return to that small town and measure out finishing nails in paper bags at the hardware store and retell your stories of the big city? “It warn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
“Who would like a revolution?” Harry asked. “A show of hands.”
Verma’s hand edged upward. Briscow turned and saw it and put his own up. A few others followed suit.
“Verma the revolutionary. Could you burn Rosedale?”
“Metaphorically,” she said.
“Maybe metaphor isn’t enough. Look at William Lyon Mackenzie. He couldn’t burn it. Maybe he should have. He was a folk hero. He ran for mayor and won. But he realized that politics wasn’t where the power was, or at least he couldn’t get hold of enough of it. So he looked to revolution. The revolutionaries met at Montgomery’s Tavern to decide how to liberate the city, then went out looking to destroy the property of the one percent.”
Harry’s own ancestors were part of the ruling Tories that Mackenzie wanted to oust. Daguerreotypes of them had hung in his parents’ house, mouths like zippers, etched straight across, closed and unyielding, people who may have felt communication was a sin. As a boy, Harry imagined those mouths unzipping to admit a piece of charred roast, like coal into a furnace.
“Mackenzie’s ragged army was routed. The soldiers burned Montgomery’s Tavern to the ground, and the revolutionaries were hanged or went to Buffalo or Australia. Mackenzie lived in the U.S. for a decade. But when he returned, some of the reforms he fought for had been implemented. Question: Will this be the case with the Occupy movement?”
“Maybe,” Verma said.
“What went wrong with the movement, in your view?”
“Lack of focus. That’s what you’re going to say, isn’t it, Professor Salter?”
“One of the problems with revolution,” Harry said, “is that at the beginning, it’s fun. It’s invigorating. Walking on King Street, the Occupy movement felt empowered; they felt like Mackenzie’s revolutionaries on Yonge Street. They stopped traffic. The police chatted with them instead of shooting them. The media took notice. They were the centre of attention. They were powerful. They had the power of numbers. They had the power of an idea whose time had come. Standard issue with most revolutions.”
“But …” Verma said, leading Harry along.
“But they only had the power the state ceded to them. And at this stage of the revolution, you have to move fast, because your worst enemy is going to come from within.”
“If you mean the handful of nutbars—” Verma said.
“The cranks, the anti-Semites, the conspiracists, the hangers-on. It wasn’t just them. The focus dissipated rather than concentrated. The longer you leave a crowd, the less focused it becomes. The most effective people drift away, drift back to work. The indigent, the restless, the unemployed, the squatters and the opportunists keep arriving, waiting for something. When you are demanding action, is it a good strategy to publicly do nothing for two months? Or were they all just waiting for the violent to show up and work their magic?”
“Those people were really dedicated,” Briscow ventured. Harry recalled Briscow sharing a joint with the woman in the pinstriped suit.
“Dedication is admirable. But the question here may be: Can you have a revolution without a leader? In the age of social media, can Twitter and Facebook replace Che Guevara or Mackenzie or Gandhi? Was the Arab Spring a new trend or a blip? In a way it comes down to physics—how to create and sustain revolutionary energy. Usually, there is a charismatic, galvanizing leader. But can we do it through sheer connectivity? When those people dispersed, what did they leave?”
“It’s a first step,” Verma volunteered. “This was Mackenzie marching. The problem has been identified. Support has been rallied. The next stage will be implementation, but this time as a political party, or a plank in someone’s platform.”
Harry looked out the window. A new building was going up, workers climbing around it like ants. Perhaps Verma was right; it was a first step. What was the next step? Do an audit of Prescott Lunden’s reptile brain, of August Sampson’s computer; find a trail that led to Dale’s money and explained how BRG managed to bring themselves and others to ruin. Old money’s greatest strength was to realize how ephemeral money is, how vulnerable. You could spend two generations amassing it through hard work and thrift, and it could be gone in a heartbeat. This they recognized. So they were cautious. And that’s why the current market, with its short-term gains and inexplicable new tools was so offensive to them. These were the tools of destruction, not what you built with. One brick at a time. In the end, a solid building. The essence of shelter in a world where the very climate was in doubt.
August Sampson had been entrusted with the money of hundreds of people. Some of them, Harry knew, were unpleasant. More than a few were dishonest. The majority were probably decent people. As his cancer dug in, did August begin to see the world in its reductionist despair? At parties where people approached him in small groups to proffer their sympathies on his impending death, then scurried off in search of a drink, did he calculate the cost of the Scotch being poured, of the shoes and cars and waterfront property, the addictions, gardeners and implants? August had a facility for numbers, found joy in simple math and its enduring logic—and perhaps he translated those numbers into AIDS vaccines and African water wells.
Harry remembered seeing him at one of the parties where he had bartended as a teenager, lingering at the edge of conversations, nursing a Scotch and jingling the change in his pocket. The unsung mole who laboured below ground, a private, fussy man who lived through the numbers that crashed across his desk. August’s life was one of fraternity, Harry guessed, but effectively loveless. There was no family or sparkling mistress. He was all work.
Maybe August welcomed his death, though he could have arranged a more peaceful end. He was tired of his own suffering, of the suffering on this earth, hadn’t made peace with his loveless life. The aesthetic charm of the world was lost on him: glorious sunsets, autumn colours, the damp, sexual smell of spring, nature’s unreliable majesty. He was unable to see anything uplifting in the human spirit, especially his own. He gave up on God and wanted out. But August wasn’t here to support any of Harry’s theories.
Perhaps August was the only one who knew where the money had gone. Press had looked defeated and bewildered. What had he been thinking? Harry wondered. Trying to trace the money? Or perhaps Press had moved beyond that and was recalling a long-lost love, a woman he met in the afternoons, admiring her Modigliani form as she lay in the tangled sheets. A tall, neglected woman with a fabulous laugh who came emphatically and captured his heart. And as Press drove home through the ravine in his Alfa Romeo, he tasted her on his fingers and knew that this was love.
Harry was part of the Occupy Dale movement, doing a little but not enough, hoping that wealth would somehow arrive. He wanted his students to feel anger for the oppressed of the nineteenth century: the Catholics and Methodists and Scots. Forget about the blacks, the women, the immigrants; their turn would come in the next century. But his students lived in the zippy declinations of the present.
Perhaps he had been no better at their age. Revolution had been in the air then (though only in the air). The smell of joints smouldering. Neil Young’s tremulous voice. Sitting in small circles on the warm grass of the quad, pondering the pretty girls in all their imagined complexity. A yearning that usually reached a keening pitch sometime in early October. By then he was in love with an unapproachable girl, and the initial promise of the classes chosen in August had been betray
ed. He’d taken the class Revolutionary Toronto, 1826–1841, a course that had not attracted the delicate Klimt beauties, tall and slim and disturbingly self-possessed. Instead, it was filled with the crowd that was raising money for Mexican fruit pickers, those who wore army fatigues, the unwashed, the zealous. They turned to one another for sex instinctively, politically, and Harry stood stranded on the sidelines. And now he was teaching the course.
Harry looked at the class. Had he been talking? Or had he been standing in front of them, lost in thought. Which was worse? Looking at Briscow, his lasting vacancy, it was impossible to tell. What will you taste on your fingers, Briscow?
Harry glanced at the clock and then at his students, their confused, expectant faces. His debt sounded like the keening at a Serbian funeral. “That’s it,” he said over that private din. The students filed out and resumed their ahistorical lives. Harry gathered his papers and followed.
TWENTY-THREE
IT WAS AFTER ELEVEN, and Harry sat in the December gloom of his third-floor study. The phone rang, and he looked at the display and saw Bladdock’s number and tried to divine whether it was good or bad news. He picked up. Bladdock’s voice had the tenor of a child who can’t wait to tell on someone.
“Sorry to call so late, but you should hear this. My guy at Securities says they actually started to take Spectre Island apart six months ago. Thing of beauty. Truly. Hedge was put together by a guy named Grimes. Richard Grimes. He had two partners, Bill Hubbard and Sylvia Dench. Short version: three years ago, they sell units by way of successive offering memoranda by a capital management firm and other firms pursuant to prospectus exemptions in the Securities Act, blah, blah. This nets $31 million. Basically local investors. So they go international by way of successive confidential private placement memoranda. Pick up another, I don’t know, looks like maybe $40 million. They’re giving themselves advisory and performance fees up the yingyang. Three percent of net asset value. And Grimes is the guy setting the NAV, which is based on four-fifths of fuck all. Basically, the strategy is taking long positions in equity-related securities, hedged by short positions in commodities. At least, that’s how they sell it.”
“Who’s Grimes?” Harry asked.
“So far, he’s a ghost. But he appears to be local.”
“They’re looking for him?”
“They’re looking for the money.”
“And how did this get to BRG?”
“That I can’t tell you. Securities is looking into it at the moment. And I have to say, it’s kind of a masterpiece. Grimes sets up two funds in the Caymans—Spectre Island and Ethical Ice—and then he puts the money into a company he controls—Glacial Pace—which is incorporated in Luxembourg and is supposed to be towing icebergs to Maine, where he got the state government to kick in the money to retool a former root beer factory. He’s got at least two other shells set up in town, probably more, and he’s basically playing chess with himself. But this pitch—I tell you, Michel-fucking-angelo. World’s running out of fresh water, pollution, global warming, panic in the streets, yadda, yadda.”
This all sounded sickeningly familiar. “So what happens if they catch him?”
“Well, the thing is, probably not much.”
“Stealing $71 million is no longer a crime?”
“It depends on who’s doing the stealing and who’s getting robbed. Securities isn’t exactly Eliot Ness. They nail Grimes, and what they’ll likely charge him with is non-criminal fraud.”
“What the hell is ‘non-criminal fraud?’ We have fraud that isn’t a crime?”
“Yeah, I know. The optics aren’t brilliant. But what it means, basically, is they can’t prove mens rea.”
Harry recalled his private-school Latin, long gone from the curriculum, he guessed. “Guilty mind? We all have guilty minds, Tommy. Difficult to prove, but universal, no?”
“It’s the difficult-to-prove part that’s key. What they’re saying is Grimes didn’t set out to screw everyone; he’s a fuck-up, not a thief. The reason they say this is, apparently there is a deal memo with some sheik in Dubai and that bottling factory in Maine.”
“And that’s enough.”
“Pretty much. It’s weak, I know.”
“What about the institutions involved. Are they culpable?”
“Well, the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority appointed controllers, but they’re essentially covering their own asses.”
“What about here—everything ultimately came out of Toronto, didn’t it?”
“Yeah, but here’s the thing, Harry. The reason no one ever really gets busted for this shit is that basically the Family Compact is still alive and well. I mean, the judges on this are playing tennis with the lawyers who are litigating—they came out of the same firm half the time—who are intermarried with the bankers, who have cottages on the same lake as the regulators, and there is one big happy inbred clusterfuck. So essentially, no one is going to take a fall. Not at BRG, anyway. Grimes, if they find him, will get banned; that might be it. If it wasn’t for Sampson getting killed, this whole thing would never have gone public at all. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Lunden walk on this. There’ll be a few civil suits. They’ll exclude him from the pack, but they won’t bury him. His phone calls won’t get returned. Maybe he gets a fine—hundred grand, something to put on the record.”
“What if he’s responsible for August’s death—do we have ‘non-criminal murder’ now?”
“You get plutocrats killing each other, the peasants aren’t out in the streets with torches. Who knows what’ll happen with Lunden. My guess is those two kids will take the fall—eight years, out in five if they don’t stab someone in the shower.”
“If they find Grimes, how much do you think they’ll recover?”
“Well, usually most of the money is gone with these things. It’s like water—an ancient sea becomes a desert. Sometimes you get ten, twenty cents on the dollar. If they get him and there’s some money left. They sell his assets—the Ferrari, the beach house, etc., but mostly it’s Houdini time. We might get something from some of the enablers, but you’re looking at six years of litigation.”
Harry looked out the window. Branches from the huge maple swayed slightly. The maples had been planted during the 1930s as a government make-work project for the legions of unemployed. The park was filled with them; they lined the streets. Some of them were getting brittle with age, and after a wind storm, huge branches lay in the park like missing limbs. Fresh wounds in the trees.
“Tommy, ask your Securities guy who brought the hedge fund to BRG. Ask him if it was Dick Ebbetts.”
Harry woke with a deep sense of loss. He plotted the financial arc of three generations. His grandfather amassing a fortune, partly through luck, then giving most of it away; his father building his own significant wealth and watching it get taken away, his brain firing in dull echoes. And now Harry looking for ghosts.
He felt a sudden need to do something measurable and concrete. He decided to build a fence. They would sell the house, and this new fence would add value to it.
It was far too late in the season to be building a fence. But winter had failed to arrive with any force, and Harry stared at the grey, listing cedar fence they had lived with for more than twenty years and wondered how he’d been able to bear it. He wanted a sleek, stained cedar fence made of narrow horizontal boards, a clean Japanese look that would induce a Zen calm and ignite prospective buyers. It was too cold to stain, and the new cedar would grey slightly in the remaining winter months, but that might add a certain character, he thought. He got dressed and had a coffee and knocked on Mrs. Dackworth’s door, hoping that it wasn’t too early, though she lived alone and seemed to be up by six every morning, judging by the noises through the party wall. She opened the door and Harry examined her sweet, confused, retired face and gave her a pitch about replacing their mutual fence as she looked at him curiously. He was glad that he had helped carry things in for her and cleaned her eaves; for these re
asons, she liked Harry and went along with his fence-building plan.
He had less luck with his other neighbours, a quarrelsome family of five. Phil, the father, was a gruff, unhappy man who fixed his car himself. Harry had had only a handful of cursory exchanges with him over the course of two years. A tired and likely hungover Phil came to the door in an unfortunate bathrobe and told Harry that it was the wrong time of year, that he wasn’t going to have a goddamn fence shoved down his throat, that he had better things to do with his money and that the existing fence, which listed in two directions and buckled at every post, was just fine as far as he was concerned. He held a pugnacious expression after he delivered this speech, the kind that invited you to punch him.
Harry decided to build anyway. He’d leave the fence between his and Phil’s yard as it was and build another one right against it, forfeiting six inches or so of his property (a forfeiture of roughly $15,000, he estimated, that thin strip of useless land).
He drove to the lumberyard, rented a post hole digger and ordered twelve ten-foot pressure-treated four-by-fours, twenty-two two-by-fours and four hundred one-by-two cedar boards that he spent an hour sorting through, discarding the ones that had too many knots or were too grey or were miscut. They’d arrive by two p.m., the man said. Harry also ordered eight bags of quick-drying cement, then left with a bag of galvanized nails, two bags of crushed limestone and the digger, and stood for a moment, trying to think of anything he’d forgotten. It had been decades since he’d built a fence.
When he got back, Gladys was sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee and reading a novel.
“Where were you?” she asked.
“Lumber store. I’m building a fence.”