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The Volunteer

Page 32

by Salvatore Scibona


  Meantime, the brand loyalty of its dim clients had made private wealth the division best positioned to profit from keeping the parent’s name, albeit in acronymous form. The rump firm, FLV Partners, continued holding the aged hands of modest investors who hoped to limp toward the grave with little more at the end than they needed to tip their hearse drivers.

  This client base typically kept its assets in testamentary trusts. It may have been the flip allusion, by the CFO during a board meeting, to the prevalence on the books of so many clients still using testamentary vehicles, which did not even offer the postmortem advantage of avoiding probate, that had tipped the balance of the parent’s more conservative directors in favor of spinning off private wealth in the first place. Whether the managers who had tolerated this prevalence saw even more dimly into the future than the clients didn’t really matter: the whole division was dead weight.

  After dissolution, the board of the new FLV, LLC, wasted no resources trying to market the staid old brand directly to new clients; they might as well have pushed Oldsmobiles on college students. Instead, they aggressively pursued established freelance wealth managers and boutique operations that could bring existing client books to the new entity together with the managers’ reputations and relationships. These new managers functioned as nimbler subbrands under the corporate umbrella still recognizable to those who wanted to squint at the acronym and see the sober old names Frisk, Lambert. It was easier to buy innovation than to grow it in tired soil. Tech companies did this sort of thing all the time. The assets within the existing portfolios of the recruited managers tended more often to dwell in such savvier instruments as revocable living trusts, with the manager himself serving sometimes as trustee. The personal and unwary nature of these client-manager relationships often allowed for much longer-term strategic planning and more ambitious growth objectives than the traditional FLV client wanted to pursue. In rare cases, the new managers cultivated such trusts without even the knowledge of the beneficiary, either because of a confidentiality clause within the trust instrument or because the beneficiary could not be located or, in at least one instance, because the beneficiary refused communication with the manager-trustee.

  This last quasi-orphaned trust had come onto the FLV books along with its manager-trustee shortly before the mortgage crisis of 2008. The central FLV database listed little more information about the trust than the Social Security number of its sole beneficiary, one Dwight Elliot Tilly, born November 14, 1948, in Davenport, Iowa.

  FLV had received no communication from said Dwight Elliot Tilly, although periodic credit checks showed that the Social Security Administration had not added the number on file for him to its Death Index, until which time company policy did not require efforts to identify secondary beneficiaries. However, while FLV’s corporate database contained no record of communication with said sole beneficiary, some of the recruited managers had been known to dawdle in the uploading to corporate’s database of contact information held in the Outlook accounts and spreadsheets of their personal desktop computers and those of their executive assistants and bookkeepers. These formerly freelance managers who had “come in from the cold” generally had long-established client lists but no longer wanted to deal with the hassle of regulatory compliance and shopping for liability insurance to cover the man who cleaned their office windows. The new managers were notoriously delinquent in duplicating their data for corporate, a lapse that some in Compliance suspected amounted to a deliberate means of continuing to manage some of their clients’ accounts under the legal aegis of FLV, while leaving open the option of carrying off such “dark” clients in the event another outfit should court the managers or they should choose to go back out on their own. In practice, however, such hypothetical dark assets represented a vanishingly small percentage of the capital under the firm’s management. And the associates in Compliance, all housed at the Vancouver office, who were responsible for actually looking at the dossiers, had usually just finished business school and showed no desire to harass senior managers who might someday, somewhere within the worldwide web of asset management professionals, represent the catalyzing relationship they would need to make their careers blow up. Before the old men died, they would need to pass on their accounts to somebody.

  One such recruited senior manager, who was technically attached to the Fort Worth office but was as likely to show up at the Hong Kong or Arlington facility, needing to borrow a couple of summer interns and the laminating machine; and who managed any number of large private accounts perfectly open to the scrutiny of Vancouver, as well, one might fairly have assumed, as several such “dark” trusts, which weren’t really hidden from Vancouver so much as neglected by it, in deference to the way the old-timers had done business back in the seventies and eighties; and who in fact did manage the said “dark” trust for the benefit of said D. E. Tilly; and who had earlier that month materialized at the boutique Socorro office, established two years before to service the burgeoning retirement colonies of nearby Las Cruces and Truth or Consequences; was a lean man of seventy who did all his business with the door open, brought coffee and bizcochitos to all his temps, and who had won himself the admiration of everybody in that office by calling corporate during his first week and threatening to retire unless Socorro was authorized to break the service agreement with their bungling and malicious copier technicians. His name was Percy Lorch.

  Tilly never having endorsed the long-ago check from Pierson-Blatt, the sum of one hundred thirty-some-odd thousand dollars had reverted to the bank account of the trust, of which Lorch had got himself made the successor trustee according to the terms of the trust instrument’s Gone Missing Clause. He had appointed himself manager of its corpus, in which capacity he had had no choice but to continue to reinvest the proceeds, as was his fiduciary responsibility, since 1975.

  The Lincoln slowed, its directional flashed, but it demurred to turn into the FLV parking slot and did not stop. Its driver did not enter Pueblito D and Lorch’s temporary office suite there, and did not acknowledge ownership of the trust—a step that Lorch had insisted, during several unwelcome phone calls over the years, most recently last Tuesday, did not even constitute a legal happening. The corpus belonged to Tilly forever regardless of his acknowledgment, unless he and Lorch sat down somewhere and reassigned it.

  “It doesn’t disappear because you won’t admit it’s yours,” Lorch had said.

  “How did you get this number?” Tilly said into the receiver of his unlisted home telephone.

  “I can’t touch the asset except to invest it. Don’t you see that? Nobody can legally use it. Crescit eundo—it grows as it goes—for the benefit of a paper entity, until you say it should do otherwise.”

  “What are you doing in New Mexico?”

  “The business of America is business,” Lorch said.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I have a special project here. Do you fish in your old age, Sergeant Tilly? Reading the water is reading the edges of current, the frontiers, the flanks of change. That’s where the hungry trout swim. Wherever you find a landscape or a nation undergoing disturbance, there you will find the entrepreneur. The secret of management for capital growth isn’t having a stomach for risk, it’s finding beauty in the destruction of obsolete systems and taking delight in the prospect of creating new ones. To dwell on the past is to stay poor. Look at the Islamics—”

  “Don’t call here again.”

  Lorch made a low inarticulate sound of annoyance. “Live how you like, but is there really no one else you might be of use to?”

  “Get away from me.”

  “FLV in Socorro. Look us up online. I’ll tell you our number,” Lorch said. “You pretend not to write it down.” But Tilly hung up.

  * * *

  • • •

  NEVERTHELESS, AFTER HE HAD DROPPED Elroy at the Sunport, Tilly continued driving to Socorro.
/>   He went all the way to Socorro, yet he did not stop there. He continued out of the parking lot, heading westward on U.S. 60 through stark and featureless terrain. A cold and sun-shocked nothingness. He was driving across the bed of an ancient sea. No snow had fallen here. The distant red mountains promised the true future that might still possess him. Not the promise of golden cities the conquistadors had sought here, but the remoter world, the dream world that took the form at the horizon of mountains but might have been composed of unearthly elements, home to unearthly creatures. In the mountain future, all things promised would be brought to completion, all things hinted said aloud, the sun would shine equally on all sides of everything it touched.

  The terrain softened and colored. Big sagebrush and winter fat burst from the seabed. Elk tramped meaninglessly through the grassland. The flats ended. The ground rolled. The road gathered upward. The shadows of clouds raced up the slopes. The Lincoln was already passing through the higher terrain that moments before had composed the unearthly future but now, having been reached, became only the promise of other terrain that would follow.

  A hawk circled under a cloud.

  When the road gave way to descent again, a salt-white figure appeared in the foreground to one side below. Soon it replicated itself on the other side of the road. Then it doubled again and became an arrangement of monuments, approximately human in size, identical and isolated, spaced at regular intervals and continuing to multiply. The road drew the car toward them inevitably. As the speeding car persisted in not reaching them, the white figures grew from human to superhuman to colossal proportions. They were blocks with bowls atop them. Any moment the daring road would veer away from them; but it didn’t. They grew in intricacy. They shared a common pose, a facing up and out, identical as salt-white flowers seeking all the same sun, with identical white pistils pointing.

  In an instant the disguise of distance evaporated—or he entered the reality the figures had occupied all along. He was driving toward an immense plain of hemispheric antennae, spaced over many desert miles, pointed in silent concert at the sky and listening. Alone but, given their identical inclination, together. And the road did not veer away but shot through them as if to rattle their family peace. The car, the road, changed nothing about them. They surrounded colossally. They stood indifferent, listening. They showed nothing of what they heard, were not changed by it in any visible way. Each antenna a white bowl with flights of white stairs leading into its concavity for people who were not there, who seemed never to have been there and who would never arrive; each bowl inclined on identical white plinths mounted on railroad tracks through which the blue grama and rabbitbrush grew. Antelope walked among them. The hawk was gone.

  Twenty-seven white antennae that, though mere half worlds, lacked for nothing, that listened and made no sound.

  Then they were behind him. The terrain empty but for scattered yucca with leaves like a clutch of swords. He continued through Datil and Pie Town, heading not so much westward as sunward.

  At Quemado—to circle Socorro rather than flee it, to concentrate his route and thus his mind—he turned to the north-northeast and followed the road through dead ground, keeping the sun on his left. Where the road bent toward Cuba, he veered onto a trail that led up a mesa toward a cluster of clapboard buildings, long abandoned. This arrangement once had made a town. He needed sleep. A windowless shack had a cross on it. A path down a slope led toward a collapsed ridge, a pit, and the massed tailings of an old mine. A rattlesnake lay atop a mud oven—an earthen bowl inverted and cracked. Mavis ran at the snake and hollered and darted back to his feet and hollered, but the snake was dead. He poured some water on his hair, though the wind was cold and the desert dusk was coming on fast, and the dog bit at the water flowing off his head, and he scratched at his scalp, and the sun began to go down. He had not eaten lunch or supper. He sat on a red-brown slab of particleboard nailed across the chapel porch, and the desert rose up finally and touched the sun.

  Hunger honed his vision. The whole earth was red. Then it was purple. Even the scant grass. He looked toward the sun and yet away from it, at everything else but the sun, until it was weak enough not to blind him.

  The same sun rose now on Bagram.

  The car cooled and ticked in the dust.

  The sun, as the mountain began to eclipse it, became an aperture in space-time through which every person who had ever looked on it from whatever outpost could speak and be spoken to. And he told the lieutenant he was still alive. And he told the hooker in Da Nang he had thrown away her barrette at last when Elroy had sent him a wallet from Dubai. And he asked his father to tell him what to do, but his father didn’t answer. And he told his mother he had made a mistake, but she didn’t answer him either, as if she was waiting for him first to admit what the mistake was. And he told Bobby Heflin he had come to Bobby’s ranch like he wrote to do in his letters, but Bobby wasn’t there. And he told Wakefield he had stolen his food. And he told Louisa, wherever she was, his real name. And he looked at the sun on the ridge and told Elroy—but he couldn’t say it, he couldn’t even think the thing that needed saying.

  Because he did not ask forgiveness, none was offered him, not by any of them. And he asked the girl Trisha what in the world she had been trying to do, planting her feet in the hall, telling a man with a hot gun she wouldn’t let him pass.

  Of all these specters, only the girl Trisha answered. Over the years, she had crossed his path in visions at least as often as the others had, and always, like the others, looking away from him as if among them he had succeeded in becoming the no one he had meant to be.

  This time, however, the girl turned to him in her bloody sweater, and asked what Lorch had once asked, “You know what the more excellent way is, don’t you, Mr. Tilly? The more excellent way is love.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE PURPLE ILLUMINATION of the bones of the dead town and of the ponderosa pine in the gully behind included the man on the porch watching the crust of sun that remained. His head bent low, and he shook it and sent the purple water in his hair flying. He seemed to think. The dog got up and trotted to his feet and sat. He ran his hand over the hair twice and smoothed it. When his face came up again, the sun had set.

  All night invisible animals scurried under the floorboards of the airless chapel where he slept and dreamt, and in the morning he had made up his mind.

  He ate no breakfast. He drove straight to Cuba and southward through Albuquerque and made Socorro again by midday. He ate no lunch either. He parked, and the dog shot automatically over him to the door as he opened it, and he grabbed her neck and tied her to the steering wheel and went inside.

  Mr. Lorch was not in, the girl said, looking at her phone, and at Tilly, and at her phone. Could another manager help him?

  “I’ll wait,” he said.

  “They all say that,” she told the phone—but no, she was addressing Tilly while texting someone else. “Mr. Lorch is special. Are you an existing client?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “For existing clients I’m allowed to call him.”

  “Perhaps I am.”

  She laughed toward her thumbs tap dancing on the phone’s glass face.

  Her desktop computer pinged, then pinged again complexly. Two short tones, then a long, a short, and a long one.

  “He’ll see you now.” Without looking up, her head inclined to the side to indicate the desktop. “That’s our code. Don’t tell him I told you.”

  “How does he know who I am?”

  She indicated a peephole camera on the back of her computer.

  “Do I show myself in?”

  She smiled warmly. “Mr. Lorch would like to meet you in the Regency Courtyard outside Pueblito C.”

  In the courtyard, a gently frowning white-haired man wearing a tailored business suit and cowboy boots paced in the snow and talk
ed on a smartphone. Had Tilly passed him on the street he would not have known him. He had grown taller, which was impossible. Perhaps he had only lost weight. His face was averted.

  He glanced sidelong in Tilly’s direction and pointed at the phone and held up a finger. With a wave he invited Tilly under the portal to a bench decorated with a mosaic in the forms of bright cows and snakes, but Tilly did not sit. The natty man wore the sort of glasses that used to be called horn-rimmed, though his frames were made of iridescently marbled acetate.

  “I know, darling,” he said. “You’re stretching a limited resource beyond its capacity—no, you’re—thaaat’s right, and that’s why your dermatitis is flaring up—thaaat’s right.” He took a pen from his pocket and thumbed the top and wrote on the outside of a folder, granddaughter, rehab; and showed the folder to Tilly without looking at him and held up a finger. “You should bring that one to your mother—thank you—no, but we love you and we want you to come through this like—thaaat’s right. You’re our trooper. We all love you, and I love you.” He looked down his bifocals at the phone and tapped it quickly many times with his thumbs and put it back to his ear. “Yes, that’s exactly right. And you promise to call in a week? Just call one of us. I know I can trust you. That’s right, show it to me in La Jolla.” He looked down his bifocals and squeezed the edge of the phone and turned to Tilly, and all at once Tilly saw planted in the skull the eyes of the man he had known.

 

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