Mount Pleasant (14 page)

“But it is something.”

“It is. But what is it? You have the head of one of the major banks coming down to the site, a man whose annual salary is just south of $12 million, offering public support for the protesters. Maybe his media coach recognized it as a good PR move. But he’s still making $12 million.”

“What are you saying?” Verma said. “That there has to be blood in the streets? We have to burn the banks down?”

“Mackenzie promised to burn Rosedale,” Harry said. “At the time, it wasn’t a neighbourhood, simply a house, the house of William Botsford Jarvis, Sheriff of the Home District and staunch defender of the Crown. But it was a symbol.

“Mackenzie hated Jarvis; Jarvis hated Mackenzie. Most revolutions get personal at some point. But a colonel in Mackenzie’s army—Samuel Lount—said he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t
burn the house. Jarvis’s wife, Mary, and two of her sick children were inside at the time and he couldn’t torch it: he would not fight women and children. Lount was later hanged by Jarvis. Hanging the man who spares your wife. Maybe their marriage wasn’t going brilliantly.”

Briscow put up his hand now, but Harry galloped ahead.

“Mary Jarvis used to ride her horse in the mornings. Perhaps she rode as distraction. She was lonely. It was a great century for loneliness in this country. For a while, theirs was the only house in the neighbourhood. Maybe the love was gone and she rode slowly through the ravines thinking of ways to cook her husband’s heart.”

His students obliged him with a titter.

“Mackenzie sits in our history as a hero. But how much actually changed? The elasticity of the ruling class is epic. They make a few concessions and regroup. The Occupy movements are widespread, but there hasn’t been any change in banking policy or tax policy. After the crash of 2008, there weren’t any indictments; the one percent is still the one percent. The people have been heard and the regime is intact.”

The occupation of St. James Park reminded him of an anti-nuclear march he’d participated in as a student. That sense of solidarity when hundreds walked down Yonge Street, blocking traffic. A feeling of righteousness and malicious glee at bringing the world to a halt. That brief confederacy, the promise of sex. But the nuclear world marched on regardless.

“Here is an exercise. You’ll all go down to St. James Park and talk with the protesters. Gauge the mood. Is this a revolt? Is this simply posturing? What do you think will be accomplished? Go on your own if you have a chance this week—who knows how long it will last? And then, for our next class, we’ll meet down there, beside the gazebo.”

Harry looked up at the clock. It was 11:20 a.m. Another forty minutes before the students would stand up and their faces would go by in a blur of ennui, leaving him alone in the starched fluorescent light.

After class, Harry walked to his office and called Tommy Bladdock. He had already dropped the files and whatever he’d found in Dale’s apartment off at Bladdock’s office and was surprised to see that the accountant was a muscular man in a tight polo shirt. He had expected a human mole.

“Tommy, it’s Harry. Just checking in. Was there anything in that paper?”

“The paper isn’t much help—it’s been scrubbed. But I found his other trading accounts. And we may catch a break. Word is, the Securities Commission is looking at BRG. I have a guy there, and I’m hoping he’ll share.”

“I don’t know how much more cash I can—”

“We can work that out later. First, your father. There are two trading accounts. Dale was heavily into Pathos, as you mentioned, but it looks like he got quite a bit out before it cratered. You can see here, there is $1,287,321.80 in cash in one account. There was still a pile of Pathos, pretty much worthless, and almost two million in bank stocks, utilities, gas, all dividend. In July—”

“He was in the hospital then.”

“In what kind of condition?”

“Dying, suffering from dementia.”

“Well, in that condition, he allegedly cashed out what was left through different trading accounts. The total would be just north of three million.”

“Where did it go?”

“We don’t know. But we will. Maybe someone was operating a Ponzi out of BRG.”

“That seems unlikely, Tommy. BRG is very quiet. Old money.”

“What are they spitting out for their clients annually, forty, forty-five million?”

“Bit more, maybe.

“Anyway, there’s a trail. A little thin, but …”

“Well, thanks, Tommy. Keep me posted.”

“You’ll be the first.”

He had paid Tommy a $1,200 retainer, and the meter was running. It was like buying five hundred lottery tickets. What were the odds? But action, Harry reasoned, even expensive and fruitless action, was still preferable to inaction.

When he got home, Harry went online and checked his anemic retirement account. He might need to plunder it so he and Gladys could get by. Financial people said that was the single worst financial move you could make. The money taken out would be taxed, for one thing. And the fund was already woefully inadequate for his retirement. But what were his options?

When Harry was fifteen, he took the money that was in his bank account—the accumulated birthday cash from his grandmother, mostly, almost $1,900—and invested it in the market. The three therapists Harry had briefly seen since posited that he was either trying to win his father’s approval by entering Dale’s arena and excelling, or he was trying to kill his father by making money at the very thing Dale made money at, thus sending the message that Dale was redundant and Harry was now the man of the house.

He put all of his savings in an asbestos mine, on the vague advice of a broker he’d talked to while bartending at one of his parents’ parties. It was high-risk, high-gain, the man said. Harry heard only the high-gain part. With the windfall, he planned to buy a Jaguar when he turned sixteen and impress Jennifer Summers when he gracefully wheeled into the school parking lot wearing leather driving gloves with holes at the knuckle. He would show his mother-hitting father that making money on the market was child’s play. But asbestos chose that moment to go from miracle substance (It’s fireproof! It’s light! It’s cheap!) to carcinogen.

Since then, Harry had been mildly unsuccessful as an investor. The banks had reliably climbed, but he’d been gutted by mining fraud. Conservative and diversified—this was the philosophy he had been born into, and he had attempted to embrace it, though a part of him still held to the One Great Stock theory, the idea that a substantial (though not suicidal) leap into a brilliant start-up would be his deliverance. He had tried it twice since his asbestos adventure, with hydrogen fuel cells (O HydroDyne, you radical purveyor of cutting-edge poverty) and pharmaceuticals (BioNute, you opaque ethical sewer). So he was skittish. Still, he now found himself hovering around a Chinese manufacturer of solar panels, the familiar logic nagging. First, it was Chinese, a synonym for growth and technology. Second, it was on the right side of history. However fossil fuels ended—bang or whimper—eventually they would end, and something would replace them. Evidently not the hydrogen fuel cells he had bet $27,000 on. But if the Chinese government willed SunRise Inc. to rise up, it would rise up. It was traded on the New York exchange and had almost doubled since it had come onto Harry’s radar two months ago, going from $5.12 to $9.81. You want to be on
that rocket when the Chinese government dictates that the future is solar.

Solar power would give China independence from foreign oil sources—untrustworthy Arabs, flaky Venezuelan socialist dictators, African nations that could collapse by brunch. It would give the immoral Chinese moral and (yet more) financial leverage over the amoral Americans. Cheap, abundant energy would keep its 1.4 billion restless citizens in line and would feed the insatiable domestic economy. And solar was green: the heavy blanket of particulate smog that covered most of Shandong Province, resulting in an estimated 770,000 lung disease–related deaths a year (the UN’s admittedly dodgy stats), would gradually dissipate. This wasn’t a stock that was, in any real way, driven by market forces. And these, Harry knew from the bitter experience of not owning them, were the best kind.

What if he put twenty grand into SunRise and it went up tenfold? This still left him with a disappointing number. If he put in fifty K and it went up twelvefold? This was better. Six hundred grand. Sixty and fourteen—and he would cut the fantasy off there.

While he waited on SunRise, Harry was betting on the apocalypse. It was a strategy that was freighted with obvious ironies. The world had to approach collapse—it had to resemble a Bosch painting—in order for Harry to profit. His first move had been to put money into the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index Fund, a safe haven. The index was based on the price of several food staples—beef, coffee, corn and wheat among them. He reasoned, as all investors in the index must have, that we would always need food. Populations were growing, and the price of food would go up. It did, in fact, go up. Food was more expensive than it had been since 1854, the year its cost was first calculated. In 2008, the number of the world’s
hungry, which had been on the wane, increased. The reason for this was attributed to the false economy created by the various commodities index funds, which had made some people a great deal of money but further impoverished others.

The details blurred. He wondered how much of this was true. The media was prone to drawing crude causal lines between events, then pronouncing with authority.

His other hedge was water. Bread and water, that prison metaphor. What is more elemental than water? Our bodies are made up of it (oddly, men’s bodies have a greater percentage than women’s; perhaps all the tears women shed). Here was a necessary commodity (unlike that imposter, gold), and a diminishing commodity. It was transparent and familiar and increasingly politicized. Several aquifers had collapsed in the U.S., and the Americans were quietly looking north, not for the first time. California and Texas could be approaching End Days in terms of looming water shortages. The Ogallala Aquifer, which gave life to the Midwestern agricultural belt, was shrinking rapidly. When this reached a critical mass, there would be a destabilizing period when water would be much more valuable than oil or gold. Harry had done his homework, as his father had once instructed him. Rainfall in the Brazilian rainforest was down more than twenty-three percent over the last sixteen years. Worldwide, desert habitats had encroached on more than 1,682,000 square kilometres of vaguely arable land in less than twenty years. The Athabasca Glacier, the hydroponic apex of North America, which fed three oceans (Pacific, Atlantic and Arctic), had lost half its volume since 1844 and was retreating by more than two inches every day; you could actually stand there and watch it disappear. There was a tour group in Banff that organized gourmet lunches at the base of the glacier so you could watch it go. There were more than a dozen countries
where political stability was already tenuous and water shortages were imminent. You could plot on a graph where these two lines would meet and suddenly there would be madness on an unimaginable scale. China’s wheat belt was disappearing due to pollution of groundwater and the accelerating usage by rampant industry. The situation was likely much worse than China admitted. Las Vegas could return to desert as Lake Mead continued to evaporate and the Colorado River continued to shrink. In the north, the Athabasca River was being plundered by the oil sands and could disappear in a decade.

The more Harry researched the world of water, the more frightening it became. It took hundreds of litres to irrigate enough cotton to make a single pair of blue jeans. The average North American woman over the age of seventeen owned nine pairs. On the conspiracy websites, where he wandered late at night, secret deals had already been made among various Knights of Malta to keep Opus Dei members in water. A cell within the American government had achieved secret control of the Great Lakes.

So Harry bought into a hedge fund called Spectre Island that was heavily weighted in water. It invested in a company that used Icelandic icebergs to make bottled water, then sent those bottles to Dubai, where drought was a fact of life. The company had a bottling plant in Maine and was poised to move, according to two analysts he semi-trusted. Spectre was the odds-on favourite to be named “Hedge Fund of the Year,” and that would attract more institutional money and the price would move up.

For Harry to thrive, the world had to fail. But it was already failing. He wasn’t contributing to its collapse, or even profiteering. He was seeing the world for what it was—a series of bad bets made by mankind.

TWELVE

H
ARRY WAS MEETING HIS SISTER
for an early dinner at Umlaut. Erin arrived late, wearing boots that he guessed cost $800. The restaurant was done in a subdued grey palette and resembled a first-class airport lounge, a contrast to its heroin-addicted Belgian chef, who had recently died of a deliberate overdose. He’d been found in the kitchen, according to Harry’s morbidly informed sister, with a sheaf of recipes on precisely how to prepare his unappetizing, heroin-ravaged corpse. It was titled “The One-Metre Diet.”