All the Things You Are (11 page)

Glatt nods and does the philosophical shrug again, an ‘all the same to me' look in his eyes.

‘No contest. Am I going to deny I turned into four-fifths of an asshole there? Lead us not into temptation, you know what I mean? They didn't make that prayer up for no reason. And I'm going to spend the rest of my life likely as not incarcerated, and my wife and daughters are never going to speak to me again. And as I am a man, let me be a man, and live with what I have done as a man. But what I want to say to you (because you might find it a help) is this: Jonathan Glatt was not a fantasy. Jonathan Glatt was not Bernie Madoff, my friend. The funds my investors placed in my trust were in turn invested, widely and wisely. Just, a) when returns weren't as eye-catching, or as brisk, as you wanted (I don't mean you personally, I mean The Public At Large), we proceeded to b) bolster the yields with a little help from the new accounts. Which is strictly speaking not permitted. But hey, it's what everybody wants, am I wrong? These days, everyone wants to think he's the smart guy with the edge on everyone else. Everyone has an entitlement complex. Everyone wants more than he deserves, believes he deserves more than he does. No one wants to wait in line. And as long as new clients kept arriving, and the old clients were happy with their dividends, as long as we kept all the chairs in the game, nobody lost. As long as we didn't stop the music, everyone was dancing. You wanna know something, Mr Brogan? And I concede, I took my eye off the ball there, what with the drugs, and the girls, and so forth, Jonathan Glatt is human, all too human, and he only has himself to blame, but, and I believe this: if everyone had kept their heads, and not called their money in, hey, we'd all be dancing still.'

Danny can't take any more: his head slumps and he holds his hands up above it, palms out, imploring Glatt to halt.

‘This is not why I'm here in any case,' Danny says. ‘I mean, not that I don't think you're a delusional fuck who will never get what he deserves, which is probably, I don't know, death by public burning or some such, maybe that medieval thing where they disembowel you but you're still alive—'

‘Hung, drawn and quartered. I saw that on the History Channel. Or was it BBC World? First they—'

‘Shut the fuck up and listen,' Danny says. ‘I am not a member of your general public. I used to put my savings, when I had any, in the bank. You were recommended to me by an old schoolfriend of mine, name of Gene Peterson. An old friend I believed I could trust. Do you remember him? Gene Peterson? We met you for dinner.'

Glatt makes a thinking face, like a politician on TV pretending to consider a question, then he goes in his notebook.

‘Gene Peterson, Gene Peterson. Yes. Gene Peterson. He brought a few investors my way, not just you.'

‘All right. Well listen up, Mr Glatt. I'm not here to remonstrate with you or to ask you why you stole my money. I'm not even here to abuse you, although obviously the temptation is great. And I certainly don't want to hear your justifications and rationalisations, your, uh, “philosophy of life”, such as it is. All I want you to answer, a couple questions about Gene Peterson. First, give me the names of the other investors he brought to you.'

‘I don't think that would be …'

Glatt tails off, and makes a vague gesture with one hand.

Danny laughs.

‘I'm sorry. What was that? Ethical? “I don't think that would be ethical”, is that what you were reaching for there? You're a riot, do you know that, a laugh riot. You should take this act on the road. You're ready for prime time, yes you are. All right, let's do it this way: I say a name, and you say yes if I'm right, no if I'm wrong, how's that? That doesn't violate your “ethical code”, does it?'

Glatt grimaces, rolls his eyes and shakes his head.

‘Dave Ricks.'

Glatt nods.

‘I know Ralph Cowley for sure.'

Glatt nods.

‘That's the gang all there. And did they all lose out? Did you fuck them all over?'

Glatt goes in his notebook again.

‘No. Matter of fact, each of them got out in time, and they were ahead when they did so.'

‘How much? Given your twenty-five grand minimum?'

‘Not like you. Less than forty K apiece, that kind of neighborhood.'

‘And Gene?'

‘Gene? Gene cashed out early too.'

‘He
what
? He … so I was the sucker. Gene got me in, and I came in for a huge whack, and his reward was, he got out?'

‘That's not exactly how I'd put it. But I can see that's how it appears.'

‘How'd you know Gene?'

Glatt does the gesture with his hand again, a flourish in the air, redolent of complexity, the abstract, the uncertain. How does anyone know anything?

‘I meet … I
used
to meet so many people,' he says. ‘It could be anywhere. A dinner, a function, the gym. With Gene, our kids went to the same school in Chicago, in Oak Park, got to be friends, our wives, so on.'

‘I thought you were based in Milwaukee.'

‘Most of my business, my offices are …
were
in Milwaukee. My family lives in Chicago. My family …'

Glatt bows his head, shakes it, lifts it.

‘You know they never visit, have never visited. My wife, maybe not a surprise. My
kids …
my daughters are fifteen and twelve. I haven't seen or heard from them in six months.'

Danny looks at Glatt, whose eyes have filled up, and thinks of all the families that he stole from, the families that he brought to ruin. He thinks of his own family, and tries to make it all Glatt's fault. But he knows it's not, knows that at least one of his old friends, his former friends, is to blame. Knows, too, that he is to blame himself. He thought he deserved extra. He thought he was entitled to something for nothing.

‘So everyone has a sob story,' Glatt says. ‘Gene … we played tennis. He's a guy, what, you were at school with him? I bet he was the captain of the team, whatever team, the guy you wanted to impress.'

Danny doesn't nod or agree, doesn't want to risk complicity with Glatt. (Although to be honest, how much worse could it get? There's nothing left for Glatt to steal.) But yes, that's exactly what Gene was like. Still is.

‘Because all the time, people were asking me, how can I get in on this thing? Pushing themselves forward. Eager. Greedy. Breadheads. It used to disgust me. Human nature, it can be dismaying. Gene was different. First thing he asked was, could he bring other people in, people he thought deserved a shot in the arm. It was his condition for signing up. He got in himself, then, once everyone else was established, he got out. And he didn't lose a dime. In fact, he made a lot, quite a lot of money.'

Danny's heard enough. He stands, nodding at Glatt, unable for the moment to speak.

Glatt looks up. ‘There was one other person,' he says, his finger scrolling down a page of the open notebook.

‘Excuse me?' Danny says.

‘There was one other guy Gene Peterson brought in. I never met him. But he got out ahead as well.'

One other guy. But there were no other guys. Just Dave and Danny, Ralph and Gene. No other guys who knew.

‘And who was that?' Danny says.

‘Looking for the name … here he is … in fact, not a he. Claire is not a guy's name, is it?'

‘Claire? Claire who?' Danny says, his voice cracking.

‘Claire … Bradberry, it says here,' Jonathan Glatt says. ‘Claire Bradberry. Ring any bells?'

A
t least the kids are all right. That is the only thing keeping Danny even remotely sane as he and Jeff drive the I-90 to Chicago to check out Dave Ricks and Gene Peterson: the fact that Barbara and Irene are safely stowed with his sister Donna. Not that Donna had been especially pleased to see him last night. He had tried to get in and out without too much by way of explanation, but that was never going to work, not with Donna.

‘Danny, the deal is if you want me to keep looking after your kids, you have to tell me what's going on,' she finally said.

Sunday night, same old, same old, Danny and Donna going at it head to head in the living room. He turned away to see them both reflected in Donna's picture window, stretching across one entire wall. Roll back thirty years and younger incarnations of themselves would have been taking the Sunday-night blues out on each other: what to watch on TV; who didn't help who with his homework (Donna never needed any help with hers); whose turn it was to walk the dog.

And there they were, at it again, not in the family home off Arboretum Avenue but in Donna's flat-roofed modernist house on the side of a hill overlooking Lake Ripley in Cambridge, Wisconsin. Danny had always wondered whether it was a Frank Lloyd Wright, or school of, if there was a school of. He had never wanted to ask Donna because if it was a Frank Lloyd Wright, she would be mad at him for being dumb, and if it wasn't, she would be mad because it wasn't. But that didn't seem like much of a consideration, since she was mad as hell at the best of times and for no reason at all. Still, Danny figured there was no point in provoking her, although throughout their lives, this had been a far from reliable plan: if Donna were a country, she would have been North Korea, hugely secretive and impossible to fathom, but liable at any time to drop a bomb on you or shoot at you from over the border, just to keep you on your toes.

She got the house as part of her settlement from the guy who was a Big Man in Computers, or Dot.Coms, or Finance, Brad, or maybe Thad; Danny only met him twice, once at the wedding, and then when he came into town on his own, got drunk at the bar in Brogan's, burst into tears and asked Danny if he thought Donna had ever actually liked anyone. Danny thought about it, although not for long, and then said no, not really. The marriage ended soon after.

Everything changed when Danny had kids. Suddenly there were two people Donna could definitely be said to like, not to mention love: Barbara and Irene. She started to show up at the house unannounced, which freaked Claire out, since Donna had never hidden her disdain for Claire, and never let pass an opportunity to mention some Chicago actor who coincidentally was Claire's age and was doing really well in New York or London or Hollywood, see, here she is on TMZ with Kate Winslet.

Eventually, Danny told her that if she wanted to see the girls, she had to either pretend to be polite to Claire or to just shut up around her, and Donna consented to a combination of these approaches, grunting helloes and goodbyes and thank yous through a fixed grin that looked like a four-year-old's felt-tip scrawl. Because she really did want to see the girls, and they really did want to see her. And she would take them at the drop of a hat for weekends and even on week nights, letting them sleep over and dropping them the twenty miles to school the next day, and for weeks at Easter and summer. And she was
nice
to them, in a kind of old-school strict-but-fair way, and made sure they read their Maud Hart Lovelace and Laura Ingalls Wilder before their Meg Cabot, and taught them to sew and to knit and to cook and lots of other stuff Claire and Danny couldn't or wouldn't have, or didn't have time to, using all the school-teacher skills she trained for but had never used, until ‘When can we go stay with Aunt Donna?' became the most spoken phrase in the house. And since neither Danny nor Claire had any other living relatives, Donna's rudeness was allowed to dwindle into an endearing piece of family mythology, because where else were they going to get such reliable child care?

Danny looked back across the open-plan room and into the big kitchen, where Barbara and Irene sat around the table, their heads bent in concentration as they inked and colored and outlined some elaborate Manga-style comic they had created with Donna's assistance and encouragement, drawing each other's attention to this or that detail, laughing out loud at their work. He thought of how quickly, once they got over their disappointment at not seeing their mom, they had acquiesced in his suggestion that they stay with Aunt Donna an extra few days, an acceptance made easier by the DS games Danny had stopped off at Target to get and the new Halloween costumes he popped for at Mallatt's on Kingsley Way, vampire for Barbara, who's read all the Twilight and Vladimir Todd books, Kitty-Kat for Irene, who, well, likes kitty-kats.

Then he tracked back past Donna's glowering face to the window, the better to avoid replying to her question, clocking her reflection again. She was dressed in the Mid-West mufti she adopted after Brad or Thad split the scene: deck shoes and slacks and a plaid shirt over a turtle neck, her hair cut short and sprayed in place like a piece of hard candy, the Methodist minister's brisk, no-nonsense wife. Her sleeves were buttoned at the wrist and her turtle neck nudged her chin, because her arms and chest and, for all Danny knew, much of her lower body too, were a mosaic of lurid tattoos, a legacy of the five years she spent with that motorcycle guy in Oakland. Or maybe it was those motorcycle guys. There was rehab after that, and possibly a short stay in a psychiatric unit. There were also gay phases, one as a dyed blonde (or it could have been a wig, Danny only saw photos) lipstick lesbian, one as a Goth (the piercings at least were easily removable). There was the buttoned-up secretary phase, which was when she met Brad, or Thad, who presumably found the fact that beneath her navy suit and high-collared blouse lay the body (art) of a hardcore rock chick a major turn-on. None of that evident last night, looking fully at home in her refuge in the piss-elegant bolt-hole of Cambridge, WI, with its twinky stores full of antiques and pottery and horrible paintings and over-priced chocolates. He wondered if she heard the clock ticking as loudly as before, if one morning it would be Donna who pulled yet another disappearing act.

Danny checked himself briefly in the glass. He was looking remarkably well, he thought, for someone going through what he'd been going through: collar and tie, three-piece dove-gray double-breasted, black Oxfords, he had even remembered to shave. Keeping up appearances: that was his legacy from his parents, just as Donna's rage was hers. Sometimes the self-assurance, the calm, the steadiness feel authentic; he knew Claire believed in them devoutly. But of course, they weren't. He occasionally thought that, of the two, he was the better actor. He'd never shared this thought, of course. He looked again at his mask of a face, and at his twin sister's: with their hair roughly the same length, they'd never resembled each other more. Danny may not have had an angel of death tattoo across his back, but he was equally skilled at keeping secrets.