Mount Pleasant (28 page)

“You didn’t protect my father. You didn’t protect August. Tell me, Press, why would anyone kill a man who had a month to live?”

Press looked at the ceiling.

“How many of your clients packed up, Press? How many defectors?”

Harry had heard from Bladdock that several families had quietly decamped, taking their millions. But nothing was quiet in that world. Or, more accurately, everything was quiet, but everything was also known. Maybe others got spooked and took their money out too. BRG was getting old. It looked old. Press no longer had the breezy air of the guy who nailed the winning basket.

“What happened, Press? Give me the simple version.”

“There is no simple version.” Press’s voice was a rasp.

“The company’s falling apart, so August gives $7 million to charity,” Harry said.

“August was in pain,” Press said, as if this was an explanation.

“And you put him out of his misery.”

The receptionist looked in nervously, then darted away.

“You put money into Spectre Island,” Harry said.

“Water water everywhere.” Press wavered slightly in his chair.

“Icebergs,” Harry said.

“Titanic.”

“I’d say so.” Harry looked at Press’s red-rimmed eyes, the spectral loss in them. He could feel anger welling up. “That money’s gone,” he yelled. “You empty fucking suit. Do you even know what happened here?”

“I built this company, Harry,” Press said with sudden force. “What have you ever built? Felicia was right about you. You haven’t amounted to anything.”

It didn’t surprise Harry that he hadn’t escaped his mother’s acid judgment, though it surprised him that she’d said this to Press.

“She was right about you, too, Press. She said you were a ruthless son of a bitch who would be eating out of a Dumpster if it wasn’t for family money and August telling you where to put it.”

Press stared at the empty glass on his desk. He picked it up and examined it like it was an ancient artifact.

“You took my father’s money,” Harry said. “You took other people’s money. Did someone take your money, Press?”

Press put the glass down heavily. Harry doubted that he grasped the details of the scam. August was the brains. But how did he get involved with a hedge fund with no assets other than unclaimed icebergs floating stupidly in non-territorial waters? How did they make the same mistake as Harry?

“Your problem, Press, is that you can no longer maintain the facade of being Prescott Lunden.”

Press offered a damaged smile. “Least of my worries.”

Harry looked around the man’s office, null in its decor, the subtle beiges and ancient carpet. There weren’t any photographs, and the only painting had probably been supplied by the decorator.

“Our job was to preserve,” Press whispered. “The barbarians were at the gate.”

“You’re the fucking barbarian at the gate,” Harry said, standing and leaning toward Press, his hands on the desk. “Why was August downtown at six a.m., Press? The only reason would be to meet someone, someone he knew. But that person didn’t show. Instead, two thugs were waiting. You set him up, didn’t you, you heartless son of a bitch.” Harry grabbed Press’s shirt and shook him. It was like holding a rag doll. He pushed Press back into his chair. “Do the right thing, Press.”

Press slumped, his mouth open slightly, and stared to the back of the room. He seemed to Harry to be on the verge of unconsciousness.

Press’s secretary came in, looking afraid. It wasn’t clear if Press was aware of her presence. His eyes were open. “Mr. Lunden, do you want me to call the police?” She looked nervously at Harry.

“Helen, why don’t you do that?” Harry said. “Tell them that Mr. Lunden stole several million dollars from my father. Tell them he’s a fraud. That he’s been a fraud for thirty years. Tell them he has some information about the murder of August Sampson.”

She stood there, unsure of what to do. Press’s mouth was open, his eyes glazed.

Harry turned and left. He walked out to his car and sat there as it warmed. It still wasn’t clear what Dale’s role was in this. You could sleep with your wife’s best friend, but you couldn’t steal money from the neighbours. One was merely recreation, the other a commandment. But then you got to a point, didn’t you? You found yourself sitting in your Jaguar with the garage door closed and a bottle of bourbon between your legs and the engine running, and a pop song was playing on the radio and you couldn’t remember the title; it was on the tip of your tongue.

Dale had seemed so utterly in control when Harry was a child, the illusion of every son. Though in Dale’s case, it was likely true. But his second wife left him and his brain unravelled, and he was left unmoored. The calm of the financial world, the dignified lunches with men who looked like him, had given way to a new paradigm of risk and complexity. The city was changing, the markets were changing. It was like a stage set that had been struck at the end of act one, the act two curtain opening to reveal a new configuration that conjured a completely different world.

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 betrayed. 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.