The Death of All Things Seen

by Michael Collins

  *

  On the appointed afternoon of the engagement offer, Saul was down in the baths at the Union League Club. He had insisted Einhorn join him before dinner, Saul, then, in the company of a gracious Czech named Pavel Mateˇjcˇek, a valet wearing a white smock. Since his arrival in America, Pavel had spent his days folding towels and robes and filling up plastic cups with mouthwash and setting out talcum powder and deodorant for the members of the Union League Club. He was a permanent fixture who affirmed certain truths for Saul, namely that the poor were necessarily dependent on the rich for their livelihood, and the best of them understood this.

  It was perhaps Pavel’s greatest gift, and why he was still alive when others had been less fortunate under Soviet occupation, and yet, in America, for all his abiding belief in free markets, Pavel Mateˇjcˇek would eventually lose everything to Saul’s Ponzi scheme. In fact, it was partly Pavel’s money that was paying for dinners and expenses upon which he never would have dreamt of spending his money.

  Pavel held a towel toward Saul, who, dripping wet, was pink as a lobster in a mill of men coming and going from the showers in a billow of steam; men of great means, like fat babies, cherubs just born into the world by some monstrous, smoking machinery.

  Saul was in the process of a joke. He could and did tell the most subversive of jokes, usually about his own people, which made it all the more scandalous and unnerving.

  Saul began again, for Einhorn’s sake, and for two other fat men who appeared and were given towels by Pavel.

  ‘Moscow, in deepest winter. A rumor spreads through the city that meat will be available the next day at a Butcher’s Shop. Hundreds arrive. They carry stools, vodka, and chessboards. There is great excitement. At 3 a.m., the butcher comes out and says, “Comrades, The Party Central Committee called. It turns out there won’t be meat for everyone. Jews go home.” The Jews leave. The rest continue to wait. At 8 a.m., the butcher comes out again: “Comrades, I’ve just had another call from Central Committee. It turns out there will be no meat at all. You should all go home.” The crowd disperses, grumbling all the while, “Those bloody Jews, they get all the luck!”’

  *

  At the time of the proposal, Einhorn was circulating an aggrandizing story about an alleged relationship with a Rockefeller heiress he had dated a year earlier while at Yale. Saul had the story vetted, he made it his business to investigate these sorts of claims in the cut-throat business of Finance. It was key to unraveling the psyche of potential clients. He discovered it was more Einhorn’s dumbstruck infatuation with a Rockefeller grand-niece he had met at a party on the Upper East Side.

  Saul dropped the grand-niece’s name amidst the hum of dinner, while attempting to pour the last of a second bottle of Bordeaux. Einhorn put his hand over his glass with a decided temperance. The evening had gotten away from him, Saul’s eyes flashing anger as he continued pouring, the Bordeaux drenching Einhorn’s cuff-linked wrist, so it wasn’t altogether apparent whether Saul knew what he was doing or not, but of course he had.

  According to Saul, there were only so many people of means in the world. Einhorn had to understand this, and there were even fewer Rockefellers, and they were a damnable breed of bluebloods and anti-Semites, and he knew every one of them by name, and it was his business to divest them of as much of their money as humanly possible.

  He mentioned the Rockefeller grand-niece by name again. Einhorn said nothing. It was thus established that Einhorn was a liar, and it didn’t matter, just that it was understood between them that he was, in fact, a liar. He was thus chastened. As Saul put it, ‘One thing you can’t do is to pull the wool over Saul’s eyes.’

  Saul and his people were old hands at history. They had survived the rise and fall of empires, the Roman, the Byzantine, the Ottoman and the scourge of countless pogroms. They had experienced the best and the worst of times. They had been roused, beaten and dragged from their homes, starved and kicked around Europe, and then they had found America and Wall Street.

  *

  Elaine was still asleep. Einhorn thought of speaking over the intercom for the revelation of his voice, but she wasn’t his preoccupation anymore. He left his office and stood in the kitchen along the annex to what had been his son’s and then his eldest daughter’s apartment. They had coveted privacy and independence long before they ever left home. He had been a good provider, but a lousy father. He would submit to this.

  He used a pay-as-you-go cell phone to contact his lawyer. He called from inside a walk-in cedar closet with the mordant understanding that this was how it happened in horror movies, so the only option was the closet when the monster was in the house.

  He shut the door behind him. He stood amidst his daughters’ clothes from years earlier, the rows of imported cashmere cardigans, the Izods in the pastel colors and pop-up collars that were no longer in fashion, along with the obscene number of dresses, shoes, boots, sneakers and sandals, many in their original boxes, never worn, or worn once. In their totality, they suggested a great fraud had been committed, in the way Imelda Marcos and her three thousand pairs of shoes had sparked true moral outrage in a world grown too accustomed to mass graves.

  What Daniel Einhorn had to do was not to believe most things that were said about him and his kind and, furthermore, to protect his family by surrounding them with like-minded frauds, in a confederacy of entitlement, in a string of Day Schools where each measured what they had against those who had as much, if not more, so a child could say without reproach, ‘Why don’t we have what they have?’

  They were not easily understood, the feelings of the privileged, but they could and did feel a genuine hurt that at times life wasn’t turning out as it should and that there were things as yet beyond their reach, and that $40 million was, in fact, not nearly enough money, so the hurt of a child, no matter how misguided, was still a genuine hurt, and they, the children, were essentially blameless and needed unequivocal protection. They were victims who didn’t seem like victims, and, when justice was meted out, they were the ones most often scorned, when they were a symptom and not the problem itself.

  He might have begun his defense thus, in the relative comparison to what others had – well, not the majority, but in relation to those who mattered. He could not account for those who had few aspirations and even less drive, for it was an undeniable fact that, despite what it said in the Declaration of Independence, all men were not created equal. He believed this in his heart – not that men could not aspire to greatness, but most did not. That was a crime in itself. Nothing had come easy.

  *

  Einhorn spoke to his lawyer in the whispering voice of someone contemplating suicide, staring through the slats in the porthole window, a cold eye fixed on the desolate expanse of lawn and a covered swimming pool and pump house that had cost the earth, which nobody used, or hardly ever used.

  He described the dark, how alone he felt. In the background, he could hear his lawyer shuffling papers. He had the distinct sense a light had been flicked on the other end of the line. It infused the grey where he was standing. In previous confidential talks with his lawyer, he had revealed the nature and extent of the fraud to which he had been party, so it was a matter not only of accounting for the monies, uncovering his complicity and culpability in the scam, but establishing that he was not the kingpin behind the fraud and that it was, in fact, masterminded by his father-in-law, Saul. He had papers to that effect, and tapes of conversations in a deposit box, but in the call now there was no talk of a plea bargain, nothing that suggested that he was planning on living, or exposing Saul.

  Einhorn had come to a grander realization about himself. He was ready to assume personal responsibility. This was Saul’s doing. But it went deeper, and, if it were not this fraud, it would have been some other fraud perpetrated alongside somebody else equally as reprehensible as Saul Herzog. At best, he and Saul had found one another.

  In not acting, in not going forward with the information he had on Saul, he
was tacitly refusing to enter the narrative of accountability and full disclosure. His and Saul’s fraud was small potatoes really, running into eighty million dollars tops, when institutional fraud in the mortgage sector ran into the hundreds of billions.

  If he had come forward first, he knew he could have negotiated a plea, faced the prospect of a white-collar jail that was no jail in the traditional sense of what lock-up could be like amidst rapists and murderers. He might have received a ten-year stretch, served five to six with good behavior. There were always second acts in American life. There was enough life ahead of him. It was an option.

  There was the hope again that, in pressing the intercom, in calling for Elaine, she might yet come down, cry, and sit with him and understand that it was a damnable proposition all along, this life, that together they might brave what was to come, and arrive at a clearer understanding of who and what they had been as a couple, in what they had struggled to maintain between them. For there was something between them: the children.

  Elaine had been faithful and agreeable, and, whatever the arrangement of their marriage as conceived by Saul, whatever Elaine thought in the cold light of deliberation, there must have been a sense that something held between them.

  This, of course, was not the whole truth. There were men Elaine had liked more, men of lesser stature, in particular a gentile of low standing, and a man not open to compromise, or acceptable to Saul. In submitting to marrying Einhorn, Elaine had settled on the least of all terrible options. If she had a hint of what was slowly unfolding, if the demise of the family was at hand, she never let on. She never broke rank, never offered succor to Einhorn. Elaine was doing what she had always done. She was watching out for her interests.

  It was Einhorn who was presuming too much, and, at the back of it, there was the great shame of Kenneth Caudill, what Einhorn had resorted to, so it was, in the end, his own undoing really. Kenneth Caudill had called him hours earlier, looking for money. Einhorn couldn’t tell if it was a ruse on the part of the FBI. It seemed so convenient, such a set-up. Kenneth wanted $50,000 to keep quiet. Einhorn had simply hung up mid-call.

  *

  Einhorn looked up. A light shone at the gated entrance to the house, then died. A shadow emerged. A car moved across the crackle of the loose stone drive. He was at the window. A door opened and then closed without sound. It was happening as though it had been planned for a long time, which it had.

  He decided the closet was an ignoble place to be found hiding. His office was a far better place. Let them find him in the act of uploading or downloading a file, doing something suspicious and unnerving and deserving of his fate. Let Saul’s men make a mistake and kill him in his leather chair. Let Saul’s plan backfire. Let the forensics put together the last moments of his life, so it would be tragic, but, by uploading an incriminating file, it would be determined that Einhorn had found a decency and humanity to come forward before he was shot in the face.

  13.

  THERE WERE PEOPLE in spandex working out in the fitness center at five fifteen in the morning. Nate passed them. The breakfast buffet wasn’t open for another fifteen minutes.

  The center had a galactic feel of self-improvement. An infinity pool floated in an effervescent shimmer, a bead of mercury advancing the idea of space without boundaries, auguring how home in the future would most probably be experienced in a float of unmoored space aboard interstellar vessels crossing the void.

  Nate saw existence better in the moment, what true history revealed, deep emptiness, so there was something to Ursula and Frank Grey Eyes’ way of seeing the universe.

  It stalked him still, the quiet assessment of his time back home again, the inlaid memorial plaque out at the graveyard recessed into the grass for the unimpeded run of lawn equipment, and his house out there and now owned by somebody else. It seemed strange you could be so dissociated from your history that the recording of a deed could preclude you from ever returning, that your rights could be thus terminated.

  He remembered Ursula telling him about what Frank had said, that the world was not owned, and that this was the great mistake the white man made that had caused so many wars. Of course, this opinion made Frank a bum in the eyes of everybody else, but Ursula believed it, and it was why she loved Nate too. He had walked willingly into the wilderness, away from possessions.

  Ursula described a night in downtown Toronto when Frank had stood in the middle of a traffic island, dangerously drunk, shouting that the cars were salmon in the late crush of evening spawn. He kept shouting it to everybody around him. All you had to do was close your eyes and you could see it, the other life beyond the immediate one. Things died and were reincarnated as something it was not always possible to imagine, because that was the creator’s great trick. All was concealed, and it was the job of men like Frank Grey Eyes to go out and uncover it.

  Frank wanted to just scoop up the salmon the way his ancestors had, to stand in the flowing, throbbing stream of life. Ursula held him back. She said that the salmon had not completed their journey. Frank stopped. He said that he had been wise finding someone like Ursula. She saw the salmon like he saw them.

  They stood amidst the shoal of life as it passed around them on a traffic island in downtown Toronto and, together, they discovered where the salmon had gone. It was beautiful to know that nothing ever truly disappeared, that they were there, as Frank Grey Eyes had said, and that Toronto wasn’t the mistake everyone had said it was when he’d announced his departure.

  Nate remembered how Ursula told him the story, the beauty of it, when it was nothing but a struggle with a drunk in the middle of an intersection, but she could invest herself with the spirit of another, and so it was about what Frank believed.

  There was that pain in his abdomen again. He called to Ursula in the way he did when he was alone at the cabin, gave voice to her name like a soft incantation. It was almost enough to bring her to him.

  He tried to call on the great strength of the great Per Ingebretson, that figure his father had so valiantly conjured to know that a man could continue alone.

  He had talked about Per and his journey to Ursula. She’d smiled and imagined how the squaws would have found him strong and capable. To the First Nation’s people, the first incarnation of the white man was not feared. They were of a similar spirit, making their way without possessions in the world.

  On the ground she had drawn a circle around Per and around her people, and then another around Nate, and around herself, and then a greater circle around the entirety of circles so it made sense of life in the way she lived it.

  In taking him in the circle of her arms and the girdle of her hips, she created another circle, so he felt the pulse and twitch of energy, the give of her insides in the gentle pulling oneness, letting him find his way back to a place of first origins. This is how love should find two people, conjoined as one.

  *

  Nate was on the road by five forty-five. He passed the graveyard where his father was interred, the hoary frosting on the lawn so it looked, not so much a graveyard, but a golf course.

  It was strange, the converging landscape of places. He was seeing life through Ursula’s eyes. What he remembered of his father was a succession of afternoons at the Winnetka Country Club, a mid-morning splash of soda and dash of Scotch poured from a flask in an allotted recklessness essential to confronting life, his father smoking in deep pulls, a smokiness that blued the air, then waving his way out of the smoke in the sheer act of remembrance, as though he had come from a distant front, which, of course, he had.

  His father had returned from the war in the South Pacific as an atheist, a hero, though he hadn’t felt like one. It was a disaffection that beset many of his generation, yet it never found a name like it did in Vietnam. Medication was self-administered from a bottle.

  His father had favored golf as the modern incarnation of hushed containment of how the world might yet be recouped. He was deadly serious. Golf came closest to the dignified
reach of what American greatness could maintain after the turmoil of two world wars, a refinement of the wild links courses of Scotland, re-envisioned as a more attenuated game played along the sunbaked peninsula of Florida, and up through the swelter of Augusta, or in the dry desert of Palm Springs. This, his father believed, was how you reoriented a society, set the quiet bounds of restriction within the greater illusion of a democracy. You set a man like Arnold Palmer out there, Arnie’s Army!

  His father liked Palmer best for his expansive vision, for the far reach of his firmly hit tee shot. A ball sailing along the fairway, the entire gallery following its course with hushed admiration, knowing it should, or would, land, and most always did, within ten yards of what was expected.

  His father was proud that America could offer the world a man of such distinguished character and grace; Palmer, a man most comfortable in the bosom of the great democracy, walking calmly among enthusiastic spectators. The British Empire had fallen because of snobs and bores with a great imperial condescension of its subjects, and here was Palmer, a new man for a new age; a man among men.

  What his father liked was the keen sense of the predictable: Palmer, deferential, genteel, nodding to his club-laden caddy, conferring intent with simple eye contact, suggesting a six or seven iron on the approach shot, and then proceeding with a striding advance along a flush of fairway, and arriving at the velvet texture of the green that called for a more deliberate, more thorough read of the way the lines broke, the wide arc of Palmer’s putt improbably breaking toward the hole along a line of sight only Palmer could read. And then the tempered applause, while, in the offing, the prospect of a well-made drink awaited, poured by a good-natured Negro at the clubhouse, where neither Negroes nor women alike, were ever going to become members. There were simply bounds that needed to be kept.