by Don Gillmor
Harry wondered if his father had been happy when he’d had money. When Harry visited him in the hospital for the last time, the day before his breathing mercifully stopped, he talked to Dale about the mercurial stock market, seeking common ground, though there was no sign that Dale understood anything. Harry had anticipated his father’s death with impatience. He couldn’t keep that thought away, even as he stared into that tightened face, into Dale’s inscrutable eyes. What had made his father happy? Dick Ebbetts thought Dale had been in love with Tess. Harry had seen her in a restaurant a few months ago. Not a beautiful woman, though she carried herself with extraordinary grace and had a confidence that drew people toward her. Perhaps that was her only interesting quality. But it was enough. And Dale still felt that loss even as his flesh was being eaten.
“Relieved, perhaps. I don’t know about happy.”
“What happened, Harry?”
It wasn’t clear whether Gladys was asking about the money or about them—what had happened to their marriage.
“I think Press and August were running a scam to deal with all the defections,” Harry said. “They’d made a few bad bets and lost some clients, and they needed a way to keep the company solvent. Maybe Dad was their first victim. They realized he was ailing and found a way to take his money. But it wasn’t enough. They needed more.”
“But murder. That’s a leap, Harry. They were all such friends.”
“I think Press was worried August would make some kind of deathbed confession. He had called me. I think he was getting ready to spill.”
“And Press had him killed? My god.”
“I don’t know for sure. Press would have rationalized it—August is a few weeks from the end. Bladdock said that BRG then got taken themselves by a hedge fund—a scam that was based on hauling icebergs to shore, then melting them, bottling the water and selling it to Dubai. My father got taken by his friends, then they got taken themselves. I wish I could appreciate the poetic justice.”
“Please don’t tell me how much we owe Bladdock.”
They sat in the quiet of early evening, sipping wine. Outside there was a light snowfall. Snows had come and gone, never cold enough to stay.
“Ben and Sarah have decided to split up,” Gladys finally said.
It saddened Harry slightly that Ben would confide in Gladys rather than him. Though perhaps it was the decisive Sarah who had told Gladys.
“They’re awfully young.”
“She was good for him in a way. But perhaps it’s best they split up before it becomes destructive, before her natural dominance begins to diminish him, to damage him.”
“You have a clinical view of relationships, Gladys.”
“I didn’t used to.”
“Are you sure?”
Gladys shrugged. She had probably thought there would be, if nothing else, security. That Harry’s family would provide that.
“You heard about Dean?” she said.
“No.”
“He has one of those awful undefined ailments. Epstein-Barr, maybe. Anyway, he’s exhausted all the time. Has difficulty dressing, apparently. Can’t work.”
Harry recalled Dean’s mating dance with Gladys.
“Satori is devoting herself to him. Paige told me. She’s taken a leave from work.”
“The art world has lost a great scrap dealer.”
“Harry.”
“What if I had Epstein-Barr? What if I sat in my stained pyjamas, staring at frost patterns on the window for eleven hours a day?”
Gladys poured more of the wine into both glasses.
“Would you devote your time to caring for me?”
“You feel Epstein-Barr coming on, Harry?” Gladys asked.
“A touch. In my throat.”
Gladys laughed. “How did we get to palliative care so quickly? Didn’t we skip a step?”
That glowing moment you saw in Ralph Lauren ads. All the handsome generations and their golden retrievers. Harry remembered the man who had assaulted him at the sausage stand. What would three generations of his family look like? A police lineup.
They were sitting in the living room. Harry looked at the fireplace and wished there was a roaring fire. He couldn’t remember the last time they’d used the fireplace. When they bought the house, they hired a company to clean the chimney, and to Harry’s surprise, a Dickensian urchin showed up. He might have been sixteen. He walked upstairs and went onto the roof through the bathroom window, leaving a trail of soot. His face was actually blackened, like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. They made fires that winter, but somehow the ritual died.
They’d almost finished a bottle of wine and it was only eight o’clock. They wouldn’t last until midnight, and there was no point in going to a New Year’s party and leaving at 10:30.
“I think we should sell the house, Gladys.”
“For our sins,” she said.
“I talked to Del, that real estate agent. She thinks we might get $850,000.”
“You talked to an agent already?”
“I just wanted a ballpark figure. We could pay off debt and buy a condo downtown. Everyone’s doing it.”
“Admitting defeat?”
He could see Gladys calculating their life, houseless. The sudden loss of this symbol. No longer rooted to the land. He suspected she had been secretly edging toward this cliff as well.
“A new beginning,” Harry said.
“Is that what we’re calling it?”
TWENTY-SIX
THE ODD THING WAS, in the new year Harry got a call from Ebbetts.
“You know, Harry,” Dick said, “you work with this stuff for thirty-one years, but you never actually see it. It exists in the fevered minds of a million peasants praying for a miracle. It sits in our hard drives. We watch it grow. Sometimes we watch it die.
“The world comes to us. A fourteen-year-old tapes six sticks of dynamite to a pipeline in Uzbekistan. A hurricane murders three million Florida oranges. A kid invents a cure for oil. Every crisis is an opportunity. There is a clinical trial, a drought, a war, an outbreak. We find comfort in misery. We short happiness, find solace in whatever. We survived the killing instincts of the herd; that was our accomplishment. That is nature’s point. But every step of human progress brings us closer to the abyss. I leave you with this, Harry: our mothers gave us life, but it is money, and money alone, that preserves it.”
The police asked Harry if those were Ebbetts’s exact words—“money alone preserves it.”
“To the best of my recollection,” Harry said.
“Preserves life.”
“Yes.”
Bladdock’s last gift, which came with his towering invoice, was that Richard Grimes, the architect of the water scheme, and Richard Ebbetts were the same person. Grimes was his real name. He’d changed his last name years ago.
When Ebbetts reflected on his work, Harry thought, he must have seen something immaculate. It was holy in its perfection. To create something out of nothing was more than a talent. Even God needed clay to create Adam. But Ebbetts had willed nothingness into existence, had given an absence life. Was this not the greater miracle?
The first step had been to identify the obvious: all life depends on water. And water had everything the market loved: it was elemental in its simplicity; it was necessary and transparent and familiar and increasingly politicized. He chose Dubai, that artificial playground, with its one-note economy as the canary in the mine. Creating a critical water shortage in the desert wasn’t a leap. There would be one sooner or later anyway.
Ebbetts’s initial prospectus stated that American aquifers were being depleted to alarming levels. In his quietly alarmist literature he demonstrated how this wouldn’t be a slow transition but a sudden, horrifying drought. What would a single year of failed crops look like? The rainforest was going. More than 120 million litres of oil was reported as spilling into waterways annually on average (with some spectacular spikes upward). It was held by certain environmentalists tha
t this figure represented roughly ten percent of actual leaks and spillage. There were gas pipelines still made of wood. The world was returning to desert, and its nations would revert to tribalism; dozens were already there. Ebbetts had compiled hundreds of stats, had downloaded the most dramatic images of drought from the Internet. He argued that it was water, not oil, that would trigger the apocalypse. All of this was either true or plausible, or at least not easily disproved.
He convinced the Maine government to subsidize the purchase and retrofit of an abandoned root beer factory and announced that a Dutch architect had been hired. When the crisis hit, the literature stated, certain countries would be left behind. There would be nominal humanitarian aid, but as desert claimed parts of Africa (where 250 million were already at risk), the resulting turmoil would be catastrophic.
A global crisis loomed; the only question was of degree. Ebbetts grounded his fund in humanitarian principles, stating that one percent of profits went to an NGO that dug water wells in Ghana and the Sudan. They had already brought water to forty-seven villages, the prospectus happily declared. His website was imaginative and apocalyptic. His company had a rich history of profit and humanitarian spirit.
No one guessed that, in fact, it had no assets and no employees and was not operational. Perhaps, Harry thought, there was a moment when Ebbetts considered actually starting a water bottling enterprise that took advantage of icebergs in non-territorial waters. It might be viable. But it would interfere with the purity of his empire, which was vast and complex and contained almost entirely in his head. An actual company would involve lawyers, employees and unions. There would be payroll and taxes and company picnics. He’d need boats, international agreements, accountants, sick days, office flings and engineers. That was capitalism at its messiest. His own version was sleek and profitable; it was the beautiful physics that capitalism had been moving toward since Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple. In his first statement, Ebbetts claimed a 494 percent return on Ethical Ice.
The funds increased due to the inflated value of the two iceberg stocks. Ebbetts would have seen the shadow of something at BRG. He realized that August and Press had their hands full, and their minds were distracted by their own theft. Mens rea. He was winding down, plotting his escape. Almost all of his energy had gone to setting up the fraudulent funds. His two partners were in charge of selling the units; they were considerably more charming than Ebbetts and spent lavishly on entertainment. Ebbetts would have known about the redemptions at BRG, quiet family fortunes that had left in the night. There was a tension in the company that hadn’t been there before. And Dale was losing his mind and August Sampson was dying.
Ebbetts waited until the desperation was at a keening pitch. On that front, he was like a dog, hearing noises that humans can’t. He could hear the tension, and it was into that wonderful moment—a moment, if it was audible, that would have sounded like cats being murdered—that he pitched Spectre Island to Press and August. He gave them the water argument, the Dubai layout, and fed them documents that he’d spent weeks on. This wasn’t anything BRG would get behind under normal circumstances, but these weren’t normal circumstances. Sitting in Press’s office, folded into his leather club chair, his feet on the thin, ancient carpet, Ebbetts would have treasured the slow, delicious moments that made up this seduction. He was selling two con men the Brooklyn Bridge, the identifiable apex of his professional life. And he only had a professional life. This was it.
All of what he’d said in the prospectus was true, more or less. At least, it would probably be true at some point. And that’s what investments were, weren’t they? You accurately predicted the needs of the future. You anticipated behaviour, you factored in stupidity and greed and human nature, and you were left with something. And then you bought it and waited for the world to catch up.
Ebbetts had worked at BRG for thirty-one years and had been treated well. He made between $225,000 and $300,000 most years. He hadn’t made any friends. He was, as he was told every two years or so, a valued employee. Harry understood that this was what his people were best at: distance. They set up an invisible barrier, and somehow you knew where it was and that was as close as you dared approach. Ebbetts was the vulture who hopped toward the carcass after the lions had finished, after the lurking hyenas had had their fill.
Ebbetts had convinced Dale to put money into Ethical Ice. At that point, Dale’s mind was itself like an iceberg, slowly drifting in non-territorial waters. What had he seen, Harry wondered, when faced with that proposal? Dale had spent his life being conservative in his work and non-conservative in his life. But he’d made money in the oil sands, one of his few forays into the unknown. Perhaps he saw another opportunity, one final score. The business had been changing around him. His knowledge was no longer valued. And what he did know was splintered like a mirror, shards picking up small, distorted images and flashes of light. There was no coherent picture, just the half-knowledge that he’d made money, that in his time he had been a player. Maybe he was hoping to leave something for Harry and Erin, a comforting thought.
There were civil suits against Grimes, Hubbard and Dench. Bladdock said they’d probably find him or one of the other partners. Money trails were hard to cover. Harry joined one of the suits, another lottery ticket.
One of the newspapers had found an escort agency that Ebbetts used—Gentlemen Only. His tastes, said the Hungarian proprietor, gravitated toward dark-haired women in their thirties, though a few were into their forties. In twenty-three years he had spent $1,879,660 on these women. Maybe, Harry thought, he felt that this contact would make him more comfortable with other women, that he would be more marketable. But it probably only made him more comfortable with other escorts. One of the girls—Tamara, age thirty-seven—said in an interview that Ebbetts tried to lure her out of the life, wanted to marry her, but she had turned him down. Most of the time they didn’t have sex, she said; they simply went for dinner or to a function. It was like a marriage, the pleasant chat over an expensive dinner, the silent ride home, a chaste kiss.
Altogether, it looked to be roughly $70 million that was gone, taken from the original fund investors and BRG clients and Dale. This was on top of the $30 million August and Press had taken out of BRG. It was noted that Ebbetts’s Yorkville condo had been sold to a French lawyer in November. That same week, Felicia’s house was sold for $2.4 million to an Indian businessman who owned a chain of discount optical stores. Ebbetts’s leased BMW had been returned without complication. There was no trace of him.
APRIL
HARRY DROVE EAST THROUGH THE CITY, to a street unlined with trees, rows of tiny bungalows framed by naked yellow grass. This would have been a working-class neighbourhood back when there was a working class, before they were edged out by the underclass. These yards, Harry guessed, would have once been impeccable. The backyards would have had gardens with tomatoes and zucchini in them, draped over trellises built by Italian workers who sat on their small front porches in singlets and were happy merely for the evening breeze.
Now the front yards were scrofulous and littered, the concrete walks buckled, the paint peeling. Walls had torn shingles in the pattern of bricks. Many of these people were renting, Harry guessed. He went to number thirty-two and knocked on the door. The porch had been crudely enclosed with chipboard and mismatched windows. Inside were piles of newspaper and lawnmower parts, cans of paint and oil, a reclining chair. A woman finally answered. She was just over five feet tall, in her late sixties perhaps, though she looked older, her face lined, her sour grey hair thinning and stretched tight over her scalp. The house smelled of cigarettes.
“Ms. Grimes?” Harry asked.
“I paid those taxes. You got no right.”
“I’m not with the tax department. I’m here about Dick. He worked with my father.”
“Dick.”
“Dick Grimes. You’re his sister?”
She smiled, revealing oversized dentures the colour of ear
wax. “You’re looking for Dick, you should have come by fifty years ago. That’s when the little shit lit out.”
Her name was Charlene, and she told Harry that Dick had left as a teenager. He’d never threatened to leave or thrown a tantrum, the usual teenage bullshit. Their father had left when Dick was one, and some of the boyfriends their mother had weren’t what you’d call father figures, and the last one, well, he was a piece of work. Max. And Max laid a beating on Dick, and maybe that was what did it, but he was gone after that, and she figured he’d be back in a few days, a week at most. Their mother phoned the police after two weeks, but what were they going to do? Never heard a word from him, not in all this time.
“What’s he doing now?” she asked. “He was always good with numbers. I told him he should work in a store.”
“He worked in the stock market.”
“That’d be about right. A shrimp, but I guess you can’t hold that against him. He rich now?”
“Yes, he is.”
“A regular millionaire.”
“I’d put it at around twenty-five million.”
“I’m his sister,” Charlene said quickly. “I looked out for him.” Her eyes glittered briefly with a sibling instinct the colour of coal. He played by himself as a child, she told Harry. Whole street filled with kids, and they’d go out in the morning and come back for dinner or not till dark, gone for twelve hours playing hockey or on their bicycles, lost in the ravines, doing whatever. But Dick stayed inside. Too rough and tumble out there. Too much life for him. She didn’t know what he got up to.
Harry stood on the stoop and chatted with Charlene for a while. She offered him a cigarette and he took it, the first one he had smoked in twenty years. The air carried the first of spring. They smoked and chatted about Dick. Across the street, a man dragged his garbage to the curb. In the shade, there were still a few patches of dirty snow. A boy went by on a bicycle, wearing a T-shirt, anxious for summer.