Street Symphony (8 page)

Bart said, “You’re not listening.”

Something about the sad, fast-moving fish made her say, “We both know –” But then she stopped because they were going to pretend, weren’t they, that everything would be all right.
All right
covering the fact that the money was missing, that it must be returned and that Bart was in it, if not up to his neck, at least to his third shirt button.

He reached for the last piece of bread and smeared it with the oily substitute for butter.

“What can be done?” Roseanne asked.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you.”

“That’s a cruel thing to say.”

So he was going to have to deal with her feelings as well as figure a way out of this mess?
It’s not as though I actually handled the money.
Yet in a sense, he had. Three million dollars had slithered away like one of those fish in the tank beside their table. He needed time alone to think. Maybe if he said another mean thing to her, Roseanne would get up and walk out and solve one of his problems. He looked at her, smart in her pink shirt and denim jacket, and imagined her fearsome mother going tight-lipped and saying,
I always thought his eyes were too close together
. Her father would try to reason and then cast blame. His own mother must never know. If he went to jail, he’d have to pretend he was backpacking round Australia for five years. Roseanne could fly out there periodically and mail postcards from Sydney, Brisbane, the Great Barrier Reef.
Reef rhymes with thief
. But he had stolen nothing and was absolutely not guilty.

He tried to recall other times in his life when he’d known for certain that tomorrow was not going to be a better day, but mostly they’d been to do with undone homework or dental appointments.

“They used to send convicts from the UK to Australia,” he said. “I’ve seen a rock in the sea near Sydney where they used to chain the bad ones and leave them there to bake to death in the sun. Do you want dessert?”

She stopped herself from crying by smiling grimly and saying, “We could share the
tarte Tatin
.”

“I could leave town, leave the country.”

It wasn’t, in banking terms, a huge amount and it was not up to him to replace it. But three million dollars had disappeared from the account of the rich client while he – Bart, jokingly and amiably, till now, called “Simpson” at the office – was training the new employee. And on Friday, Finn Harvey, a bright young man with fine references and a “future”, had also vanished. His future would likely now be spent on some sunny island off the coast of Spain, surfing, snorkelling or indulging in whatever watery pursuit pleased him.

This couldn’t happen. Could never happen. Should never have been allowed to happen. The policemen had been polite in the temple of money that morning, as if overawed by the aura of wealth. Bart replayed the scene that was now stamped on his memory. The boss, two cops, himself, all standing up. Himself the prisoner in the dock. Today, Monday, eight hours ago, 10:30 a.m. The beige walls of the office had closed in round him. Were the cops looking at his new grey jacket and thinking he’d spent part of the loot on it? “We’ll need to look at your computer. Your cellphone, please. We’ll be checking everyone who’s had contact with Mr. Harvey. He appears to have changed his number and shut down his email account.”

His own future, moving from junior manager to senior and then to a bigger branch in a bigger city, shrank in that moment, and fear cast its paralysing net over him. Had the other three in that office seen him as villain or incompetent idiot? He looked again at Roseanne as she turned to speak to the waitress.

He truly wanted to be alone with the dilemma without the need for explanations, sympathy or deep delving into the reasons for this breach of security and trust. It had all begun to go wrong, he thought, and stopped. What a ridiculous phrase. Who knew about first causes? Maybe Harvey’s mother had slapped him once too often when he was ten. Maybe Darya, his last girlfriend, had never got over her failure to graduate. Even the death of a beloved dog could drive a person to strange deeds. But he was sure that the makings of disaster went further back, all the way back to the very beginning. In the womb! That’s where it all began to go wrong.

But there
was
nothing wrong. Except that three million bucks had disappeared. And he was being unfair to Roseanne. She wanted to help him, to reassure him. Her own knowledge of finance meant that she understood the problem and wanted to talk about it. She loved him and would do her best, but right now all he wanted to do was go to Mr. O’Brien and say, “I wasn’t the only one who checked the guy’s references.” But it was Monday evening and Mr. O’Brien would likely not be home.

She was saying, “I know something about fish.”

His new cellphone rang.
We’ve found the money. It was all a mistake.
But it was the boss asking him firmly to make sure he’d be in early tomorrow to talk to the people from head office who were flying in to look at the problem. “Yes, sir. For sure.”
If I haven’t fled to some fertile part of the Interior to grow pumpkins and salad, maybe moving on eventually to grapes and starting a winery now that my promising career as a banker is over.

If he went to Spain to track Finn Harvey down, they’d think he had gone to claim his share of the cash. And Harvey could have chosen any place in the world. Why was Bart thinking of Spain?
It’s where I would have gone.

The waitress said to Roseanne, “It’s nothing to do with me. You want to speak to the manager.”

Of course the bank will repay you, Mr. Orlafson. The money will be in your account tomorrow. Plus the interest, naturally.

“It’s not natural,” Roseanne said.

She was still going on about the dirty water. He was thinking about his computer.

“You don’t look well,” she said.

“It’s not a crime,” he said.

“I only meant…”

But Bart had been responding aloud to the detective who had no doubt by now found the pictures he’d meant to delete last week. They were only naked, and partly naked, women, all gorgeous, all – well. It was truly stupid to check into that stuff at work. The boss would find out. There would be no more friendly Simpson jokes.

“Shut up,” he said to himself.

“Hey!”

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

She looked around, but there was no one else close by.

~ • ~

1605 Perryvale Avenue. Such a nice address
, Elsie McDowell had thought when she moved in two years ago. A ranch-style house built in the fifties, one in a curving line of similar houses, each one with its own green patch of lawn. A few ornamental cherry trees gave shade to people who walked along the sidewalk with their dogs and kids. After the divorce when it seemed that life would never be real again or the least bit pleasant in any way, her good son had found this small home for her, and partly for himself.

“Bart isn’t here,” she said to the nice-looking young fellows on the doorstep. “He lives with his girlfriend most of the time. If you’re collecting money, I gave a few months ago. His computer? He carries his laptop about. Or one of those Pads. Never without it. It’s what they do nowadays, isn’t it? PCs, desktops are outdated, aren’t they? Young people need to be texting and tweeting all the time or they feel out of it. If you can’t find him at work, he often works late, then he’s with his girlfriend. She’s a nice girl but not what I expected really. But are they ever? If you have kids, you’ll know. Especially with boys. What mother ever really likes her son’s choice of woman? Are you married? Why don’t you come back when he’s here? Tomorrow, maybe.”

She was proud of herself as she closed the door. Chatter as weapon had triumphed once again. Her art had been honed on the righteous, on political canvassers, and especially on those who asked for money. The two policemen returned to their car and drove away.

But why had they come looking for Bart? She went to his room to see what she could find on his sleek new screen. It was a week since she’d logged on. She supposed all men liked to look at naked women. Pathetic really. These sites full of “sights” must be affecting the trade in porn magazines. The little email sign popped up. It was wrong, she knew, to read his messages, but her own were usually boring stuff about meetings of the volunteer society, choir practice, or when can we meet for tea. Once again she invaded her son’s privacy. But he was her son, so privacy had no real meaning.

She could only look at the subject and name on each message. If she opened them, he’d know they’d been read. Though he’d suspect some outside spy, anyone else in the world except his loving mother. What kind of mother would she be though, if she couldn’t figure out her child’s password?

From:
fh, Subject: cash
. She deleted that one and deleted it from the delete file too. Dates for hockey practice. That time of year, already? Nothing there.

She tried to call his cellphone, but the line was dead.

~ • ~

After he’d made the call to Bart,
Arvin O’Brien said to his mistress, “He’s good. I mean he’s good at his job. But there’s the money.”

“You said he didn’t take it.”

“Not personally but he let it go.”

“So he didn’t profit from the crime.”

Putting his trousers back on, Arvin admired Madeline’s thought processes. In fact, young Bart “Simpson” had done the opposite of profit. He was now part of the investigation and his future looked murky.

“The question is,” Madeline went on, lying there nakedly, “do you still trust him?”

Driving home, Arvin put that question squarely to himself and considered the largeness of the word
trust
. Bart had trusted Finn Harvey, who had turned out to be totally un
trust
worthy. Therefore, when it came to evaluating others, Bart had let the bank down and was not to be
trusted
. To be fair, he had read the résumé and the references himself and found no fault. But Bart had strongly recommended the guy. That was the point Arvin would have to make clear.

~ • ~

“Coffee?” the waitress asked.

Bart nodded. Yes, he would have coffee. Yes, he would eat pie. While O’Brien, as everyone at the office knew, was with his mistress on Mondays, Fridays and Sunday afternoons, he was sitting here in this crummy restaurant, not sure whether the tuna salad he’d eaten was fresh, wondering whether to brave things out or go into the office crawling or be righteous like his father, now living in Iowa with Brian this-is-best-for-all-of-us McAllister. After all, why should his life be ruined because he’d unknowingly encouraged a crook? Ignorance was no excuse, some sanctimonious person had said. But in this case, it was. Finn Harvey was an open-faced twenty-four-year-old who’d seemed eager like a friendly dog, anxious to learn, allowed therefore to see files that might better have been kept from him. Anyone could have been deceived. Anyone! And it was not, repeat not, his fault. He would walk into the office and say, “Look, Arvin, this is as much your responsibility as mine and I refuse to carry the can for it –”

Roseanne was saying loudly to the manager, “Your fish are not happy.”

“Fuck the fish!” Bart yelled. He picked up the water jug and smashed it against the tank.

He walked away, leaving Rosanne and the waitress to pick up the slithering fish from the floor and put them into a bucket. The manager followed him out to the street.

~ • ~

“I wasn’t expecting you this evening,
dear,” his mother said. She waited till he’d changed from his wet and smelly jacket before she told him about the cops.

“Did they look at the computer?”

“I told them you didn’t have one.”

He went to his room, lay down on his bed and listened to U2 singing “Where the Streets Have No Name”. For once, it sounded like a good place to be.

~ • ~

Glenda O’Brien was proud of her ability
to pretend that everything in the garden was lovely. She was biding her time till she could find an affordable place in Vancouver. Due to the downturn, real estate was moving with the speed of a drugged snail, and she wanted to have enough money for Marty and Evan so that they didn’t feel deprived by the change. Arvin would come in soon from “working late” with that silly smile on his face. A smile, she well knew, that spoke of sexual satisfaction. But this time he walked through the hall and into the living room frowning. Perhaps all was not well
with the Madeline arrangement.

“Trouble at the office?” she asked.

“You could say that.”

“I did say it.”

“Sorry, Glennie. There’s some money missing.”

“Oh dear. An inside job?”

“Seems so.”

“Did you have anything to eat at the – office?”

“Not really.”

Glenda wasn’t sure why, and she knew it was unkind to hit someone who was already down, but anger, long dormant, surfaced like a hungry shark.

“She doesn’t feed you?” she shouted. “You fuck her and then you come back here for dinner. And you want sympathy besides. I’m being extremely calm and reasonable and I’m going to move out. I hadn’t planned to go till after the boys were back at school but you leave me no choice, Arvin. This is the absolute end.”