Mount Pleasant (33 page)

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

H
ARRY 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.

The sun was weak in the afternoon sky. Harry drove north and crossed the ravine and parked near the gates of Mount Pleasant Cemetery. A few people milled. When he got to his grandfather’s crypt, he saw that the stone angel was gone.

Harry looked out along a low swale dotted with stone spires and Celtic crosses. The city’s builders contained beneath five feet of fertile soil. Tens of thousands who had dreamed in technicolour. Each one added singly to this heap, carted north after solemn prayer and laid down amid a crowd of distracted friends. The failure was palpable, an aroma that lifted out of the ground in spring, the rot of near-greatness, the essence of mortality.

His mother was recovering well. She might live another twenty years, though Harry guessed her liver would betray her. She was fragile and couldn’t bear fragility. Her final years would be a fresh argument.

Ben had found a new girlfriend, an uncomplicated business major, and Harry was buoyed by the laughter he heard when
they were together. Sarah had been a foreign country—Ben was intrigued but never at home.

Dale was perched on a modest swell. His money was gone, come to dust like a living thing. Harry didn’t mourn his father’s passing, or even the passing of his money. He mourned the absence of possibility, the procrastination of his life with Gladys, the failure of his own imagination. They had gotten $800,000 for the house, paid off all their debts, bought a modest condo in the heart of the city. They’d sold the reliable Camry, too. They cycled and walked, urban pioneers. They had almost convinced themselves it was a fresh start.

Harry stared out at the granite markers rising out of the ground like early wheat. A flatbed truck with a winch lowered a pebbled gold coffin into a hole. Harry had failed to inhabit his own life. His father, for all his many flaws, had inhabited his; this was one area where he was a success.

Eventually Harry would be in this cemetery, staring up from the gloom of his coffin through the tangled roots into the empty sky. His ragged suit, the dry skin drawn tight, his last thoughts still rattling in the yellowing skull, the words lost on prevailing winds, the quiet deceptions, the fears of a child standing in new clothes among strangers on the first day of school. The hours collected like dust, the channel changer limp in his hand. Money swirling in useless eddies. What is left in that memory, what caress lingers, what unspoken love? His essential stats on the headstone, the enduring cold. Who will stare down with love in their eyes? Who will lay daffodils gently on the stirred earth and linger under the April sun? Who will pay to have him carted to the boneyard?

The sun was low, a wink of light against the horizon, the last of it, beckoning.