Mount Pleasant (29 page)

TWENTY-THREE

I
T WAS AFTER ELEVEN
, and Harry sat in the December gloom of his third-floor study. The phone rang, and he looked at the display and saw Bladdock’s number and tried to divine whether it was good or bad news. He picked up. Bladdock’s voice had the tenor of a child who can’t wait to tell on someone.

“Sorry to call so late, but you should hear this. My guy at Securities says they actually started to take Spectre Island apart six months ago. Thing of beauty. Truly. Hedge was put together by a guy named Grimes. Richard Grimes. He had two partners, Bill Hubbard and Sylvia Dench. Short version: three years ago, they sell units by way of successive offering memoranda by a capital management firm and other firms pursuant to prospectus exemptions in the Securities Act, blah, blah. This nets $31 million. Basically local investors. So they go international by way of successive confidential private placement memoranda. Pick up another, I don’t know, looks like maybe $40
million. They’re giving themselves advisory and performance fees up the yingyang. Three percent of net asset value. And Grimes is the guy setting the NAV, which is based on four-fifths of fuck all. Basically, the strategy is taking long positions in equity-related securities, hedged by short positions in commodities. At least, that’s how they sell it.”

“Who’s Grimes?” Harry asked.

“So far, he’s a ghost. But he appears to be local.”

“They’re looking for him?”

“They’re looking for the money.”

“And how did this get to BRG?”

“That I can’t tell you. Securities is looking into it at the moment. And I have to say, it’s kind of a masterpiece. Grimes sets up two funds in the Caymans—Spectre Island and Ethical Ice—and then he puts the money into a company he controls—Glacial Pace—which is incorporated in Luxembourg and is supposed to be towing icebergs to Maine, where he got the state government to kick in the money to retool a former root beer factory. He’s got at least two other shells set up in town, probably more, and he’s basically playing chess with himself. But this pitch—I tell you, Michel-fucking-angelo. World’s running out of fresh water, pollution, global warming, panic in the streets, yadda, yadda.”

This all sounded sickeningly familiar. “So what happens if they catch him?”

“Well, the thing is, probably not much.”

“Stealing $71 million is no longer a crime?”

“It depends on who’s doing the stealing and who’s getting robbed. Securities isn’t exactly Eliot Ness. They nail Grimes, and what they’ll likely charge him with is non-criminal fraud.”

“What the hell is ‘non-criminal fraud?’ We have fraud that isn’t a crime?”

“Yeah, I know. The optics aren’t brilliant. But what it means, basically, is they can’t prove
mens rea
.”

Harry recalled his private-school Latin, long gone from the curriculum, he guessed. “Guilty mind? We all have guilty minds, Tommy. Difficult to prove, but universal, no?”

“It’s the difficult-to-prove part that’s key. What they’re saying is Grimes didn’t set out to screw everyone; he’s a fuck-up, not a thief. The reason they say this is, apparently there is a deal memo with some sheik in Dubai and that bottling factory in Maine.”

“And that’s enough.”

“Pretty much. It’s weak, I know.”

“What about the institutions involved. Are they culpable?”

“Well, the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority appointed controllers, but they’re essentially covering their own asses.”

“What about here—everything ultimately came out of Toronto, didn’t it?”

“Yeah, but here’s the thing, Harry. The reason no one ever really gets busted for this shit is that basically the Family Compact is still alive and well. I mean, the judges on this are playing tennis with the lawyers who are litigating—they came out of the same firm half the time—who are intermarried with the bankers, who have cottages on the same lake as the regulators, and there is one big happy inbred clusterfuck. So essentially, no one is going to take a fall. Not at BRG, anyway. Grimes, if they find him, will get banned; that might be it. If it wasn’t for Sampson getting killed, this whole thing would never have gone public at all. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Lunden walk on this. There’ll be a few civil suits. They’ll exclude him from the pack, but they won’t bury him. His phone calls won’t get returned. Maybe he gets a fine—hundred grand, something to put on the record.”

“What if he’s responsible for August’s death—do we have ‘non-criminal murder’ now?”

“You get plutocrats killing each other, the peasants aren’t out in the streets with torches. Who knows what’ll happen with Lunden. My guess is those two kids will take the fall—eight years, out in five if they don’t stab someone in the shower.”

“If they find Grimes, how much do you think they’ll recover?”

“Well, usually most of the money is gone with these things. It’s like water—an ancient sea becomes a desert. Sometimes you get ten, twenty cents on the dollar. If they get him and there’s some money left. They sell his assets—the Ferrari, the beach house, etc., but mostly it’s Houdini time. We might get something from some of the enablers, but you’re looking at six years of litigation.”

Harry looked out the window. Branches from the huge maple swayed slightly. The maples had been planted during the 1930s as a government make-work project for the legions of unemployed. The park was filled with them; they lined the streets. Some of them were getting brittle with age, and after a wind storm, huge branches lay in the park like missing limbs. Fresh wounds in the trees.

“Tommy, ask your Securities guy who brought the hedge fund to BRG. Ask him if it was Dick Ebbetts.”

Harry woke with a deep sense of loss. He plotted the financial arc of three generations. His grandfather amassing a fortune, partly through luck, then giving most of it away; his father building his own significant wealth and watching it get taken away, his brain firing in dull echoes. And now Harry looking for ghosts.

He felt a sudden need to do something measurable and
concrete. He decided to build a fence. They would sell the house, and this new fence would add value to it.

It was far too late in the season to be building a fence. But winter had failed to arrive with any force, and Harry stared at the grey, listing cedar fence they had lived with for more than twenty years and wondered how he’d been able to bear it. He wanted a sleek, stained cedar fence made of narrow horizontal boards, a clean Japanese look that would induce a Zen calm and ignite prospective buyers. It was too cold to stain, and the new cedar would grey slightly in the remaining winter months, but that might add a certain character, he thought. He got dressed and had a coffee and knocked on Mrs. Dackworth’s door, hoping that it wasn’t too early, though she lived alone and seemed to be up by six every morning, judging by the noises through the party wall. She opened the door and Harry examined her sweet, confused, retired face and gave her a pitch about replacing their mutual fence as she looked at him curiously. He was glad that he had helped carry things in for her and cleaned her eaves; for these reasons, she liked Harry and went along with his fence-building plan.

He had less luck with his other neighbours, a quarrelsome family of five. Phil, the father, was a gruff, unhappy man who fixed his car himself. Harry had had only a handful of cursory exchanges with him over the course of two years. A tired and likely hungover Phil came to the door in an unfortunate bathrobe and told Harry that it was the wrong time of year, that he wasn’t going to have a goddamn fence shoved down his throat, that he had better things to do with his money and that the existing fence, which listed in two directions and buckled at every post, was just fine as far as he was concerned. He held a pugnacious expression after he delivered this speech, the kind that invited you to punch him.

Harry decided to build anyway. He’d leave the fence between his and Phil’s yard as it was and build another one right against it, forfeiting six inches or so of his property (a forfeiture of roughly $15,000, he estimated, that thin strip of useless land).

He drove to the lumberyard, rented a post hole digger and ordered twelve ten-foot pressure-treated four-by-fours, twenty-two two-by-fours and four hundred one-by-two cedar boards that he spent an hour sorting through, discarding the ones that had too many knots or were too grey or were miscut. They’d arrive by two p.m., the man said. Harry also ordered eight bags of quick-drying cement, then left with a bag of galvanized nails, two bags of crushed limestone and the digger, and stood for a moment, trying to think of anything he’d forgotten. It had been decades since he’d built a fence.

When he got back, Gladys was sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee and reading a novel.

“Where were you?” she asked.

“Lumber store. I’m building a fence.”

“It’s winter.”

“The ground’s not really frozen yet.”

“Oh, Harry. What has possessed you?”

“I’ve already cleared it with Mrs. Dackworth. She’ll pay for half the materials used on her side.”

“Why didn’t you clear it with me?” Gladys twisted the espresso lever out and hammered the old grounds into the steel compost container on the counter. “You don’t think this is something I should have a say in?” She ground some beans and yelled over the sound of the grinder. “I’m guessing the Manson family isn’t on board,” she said, her head gesturing toward Phil’s. “How much is this going to cost?”

“I’m doing the labour myself. It will add $15,000 to the value of our home.”

“Only if we sell it,” Gladys pointed out. “Is that your plan?”

“It’s an option.”

She gave him a bleak, angry look.

Harry went down to the basement to find his power saw, which he hadn’t used in almost a decade. He looked in the furnace room, taking out plastic bins and opening them to find old photo albums, baby clothes, ski boots, ancient bills. And finally the orange power saw. After another ten minutes he emerged with a hammer, a crowbar, a plastic level and an extension cord. He dragged it all outside, then went inside to find an old sheet, which he draped over their outdoor table to use as a work surface.

“Harry, do you know how to build a fence?” Gladys asked.

“It’s like riding a bike. It all comes back.”

Harry examined the fence, its grey pickets like uneven teeth. He suspected he could pull half of it down by hand. He pulled a post toward him, and it moved more than a foot. It was warm for the season, though still cold, edging below zero. The sky was clear to the south but overcast with deep blue clouds above him. Once he got moving, he’d warm up. He began pulling the boards off, using the crowbar to pull the top of the board out, then using his weight to push down. The nails were rusted, some of them almost disintegrated, and most of the boards came away easily. An hour later, one side was exposed. He did the south side, then pulled the posts. Some of them weren’t cemented. The ones that were had rotted above the cement and simply broke off. He stacked all the wood in the lane and went in and told Gladys that he was calling a junk guy to come and collect it, and if they had anything else that needed throwing out, now was the time.

Gladys looked out the back window to the newly naked yard. “We’re so exposed,” she said. “How long will it take you to build the new one?”

“The wood is supposed to be here at two.”

“Isn’t it an awfully big job?”

“Not really.”

Harry hammered in stakes and tied a string and marked the post holes along the line, then began the hard work of digging the holes. He was quickly sweating with the effort. It was almost dark by the time he had them all done and realized that the wood hadn’t arrived yet. He called the lumberyard to find that there were problems with the flatbed truck and they’d have to drop the wood off tomorrow.

“In the morning? I’m waiting on that wood.”

“I’ll make a note,” the lumber guy said.

The next morning, Harry was up early, wandering the desolate backyard. Sparrows bickered in the forsythia bush. A black squirrel raced along the electrical wire. It was bitter, and the air had a metallic tang. Gladys came out with her coffee, a parka over her pyjamas.

“There is a point in every job,” Harry said, “when it looks worse than it did at the beginning. It’s like adolescence—those pimples and braces and gawkiness. But it will be a thing of beauty.”

“You seem to be deliberately trying to make us more vulnerable.”

“I should have consulted you. I just wanted to replace the squalor with beauty. You’ll see.”

“We can’t afford it. You know we can’t afford it. You just keep pushing. What is it you’re after? This race to the bottom.”

Harry observed the forsythia and imagined its bright yellow bloom in spring. “You’ll be happy when it’s up.”

“Fuck you,” Gladys said and went inside.

Harry couldn’t recall Gladys ever uttering those two words, this most common of epithets, uttered a million times an hour
globally—vehemently, ironically, from cars, in tavern parking lots, in bed. And now in their backyard. Harry looked at the house and then back at the barren mess and went back to work.

The truck with the wood arrived at noon, and Harry helped the man unload it. The flatbed was too big for the alley, so they unloaded at the front and Harry had to carry everything around to the back. By the time he was finished, his arms and legs were leaden. He needed to sit for a few minutes, remembering when he’d built fences one summer as a student, working for a contractor his father knew. He built fences, then painted them, shirtless in the summer air, dreaming of bored housewives who invited him in and revelled in his youth.