Mount Pleasant (32 page)

He entered the number. She picked up, and Harry could hear her talking to someone else. Ten seconds went by before she finally addressed her cellphone.

“Del, it’s Harry Salter. I left you a message.”

“Harry, great to hear from you. How is that adorable house?” Harry could hear her again talking to someone else, pointing out the features in a house they were in.
Did you notice the darling sconces?

“I’m thinking of putting it on the market, Del. I need to get an idea of what it would go for.”

“Off the top, Harry, sight unseen, which I never do, but since I was the agent, blah, blah. That neighbourhood—through the roof. I’d say eight ten on a bad day. Eight fifty if we get some cowboys blowing their brains out in a bidding war.”

“A place on the block went for $900,000 in June. Bigger than ours, but in the ballpark.”

“Well, June. Everyone loves June. December, not so much. Christmas is good for divorce and suicide. It’s death for real estate. You don’t want to show it until early spring if you can hang on. January, everyone feels poor after Christmas. Credit card bills coming in. Heating bills through the roof, not that we’ve actually had winter. February, everyone’s depressed. March, they start to stir. Then April is the new beginning. Why not take on more debt? The world is green.”

“I’ll see, Del. May need to move a little earlier than that.”

He wondered what she looked like now. Twenty years ago she had been an intense woman who didn’t seem to have any life outside selling houses. Dark-haired, distracted, sexy. But he’d get two other agents to give an opinion before he chose who to go with. He could hear Del talking to whomever she was with.
You will die when you see the master bedroom
.

“Let’s chat this week, Harry,” Del said before turning again to her clients.

Harry pressed End.

If they sold the house for $850,000, there would be roughly
$420,000 left after paying off the mortgage, line of credit, real estate agent’s fee, taxes, legal fees, credit cards. They could pay cash for a very modest, possibly cheery condo downtown, cycle everywhere, get out to more plays, go to cheap, hip restaurants. No more ants or mice, no more damp basements. No more debt. Harry still wouldn’t have any money. His retirement was perilous, his employment tentative. He would be broke, but he’d have slain the dragon. A rebirth, then, not a retreat.

The wind came charging through the tunnel formed by the buildings, a chaotic gale that blew in more than one direction at once. A snowflake sped by erratically. The shoppers were in dark hues, grim and purposeful, hunched against the wind, moving in ragged single file like mine workers on a shift change. Harry darted in and out of a dozen stores, the Christmas music lively and annoying. His debt revived, and now sat in his head like the Memphis horn section that had played on those Stax soul records he’d loved as a kid. It had a jaunty, danceable rhythm. In the end, he bought his mother a literary mystery novel that was set in Florence. He got Ben a boxed CD set of The Band, and Gladys got a pashmina. In his heart, his house had a hundred bidders; it sold for a million. He was free.

TWENTY-FIVE

“D
O YOU THINK WE
’
D HAVE BEEN HAPPIER
if your father had left us money? If he’d
had
money.” Gladys asked. It was New Year’s Eve, early in the evening. They carefully sipped wine. She was wearing the pashmina he’d bought her for Christmas, a modest hit.

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

T
HE 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 that 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.