“Suffice to say that my teacher never returned to Minnesota, more or less abandoning his affairs of business. (The corporation’s profitability was never at risk, thanks to an ingenious system of checks and balances implemented by its brilliant founder decades ago.) A bevy of close friends and colleagues made pilgrimages in an attempt to unravel the mystery and lure him to his senses, to no avail. His wife did finally come, after many months, begging an explanation of what had happened, or was happening (if he felt the latter might more easily be answered). “I’m suing a local club” was all she could get out of him. When the baffled woman pressed him on why the legalities couldn’t be handled from elsewhere (meaning Duluth), he had no response. As a last resort, she begged him to come home, if only for the sake of their special-needs child, who cried out for him at night — he remained unmoved.
“If the fabled Frank MacKlatchie’s billions were born of a series of Big Ideas, he was suddenly struck by a thunderclap with the biggest of them all. As the Buddha’s prior life had prepared him for his seat beneath the Bodhi Tree, so had my guru’s secret yearnings and aspirations made him ripe for what he now planned — the death of all he’d come to represent, not just to the world but to himself. He knew that a life of wanton commerce and rampant lovelessness had tattooed his very soul, marking and defining him as surely as those insipid guidebook symbols did Mandry’s Gastropub. Franklin MacKlatchie saw that he was already dead; and like a grandmaster, plotted his checkmate. If you’ll allow, I’ll recite the moves of the game as they were told to me…
“The case against Mandry’s settled out before trial. (Victory had never remotely been in question; Mr. MacKlatchie’s attorneys routinely scorched the earth to procure it.) The token figure agreed on by both sides, fifty-five thousand dollars, was given to a home for wayward children. When word of the legal resolution became known, executives at the highest company level sighed in relief with the presumption his ‘aberrant’ behavior had run its course. How little they understood of what Franklin MacKlatchie was becoming! But how could they have known? To have even had an inkling of his imminent sea change, one would need to have been cut from the same cloth.
“His stroke of genius was to purchase Mandry’s outright — lock, stock, and wine barrel. He wanted the new ownership kept secret, so the transaction was carried out anonymously by three trusted successors. What he told those gentlemen next was shocking: he would be pleased to now vanish off the face of the earth! (Or at least wished to give the appearance of having done so.) For all intents and purposes, my Sir would henceforward be dead to the world, whereabouts unknown. Only the handpicked triumvirate would be privy to his new role as spectral CEO and ringmaster, running the whole circus from a cheap motel room. In order to effect such a plan, my Sir drew up an encyclopedic contract worthy of Borges — oh, I loved Borges, wrote three papers on him at Loyola! — that would make it virtually impossible for any person, entity, board member, or trustee to compromise Franklin MacKlatchie’s status as majority owner, regardless of perceived quote-unquote absenteeism or, say, on the basis of perceived quote-unquote abandonment and dereliction of duties; nor could he be deposed or expelled by the assertion he was in breach due to mental incompetency. The contract was signed by the necessary parties forty-eight hours after the defamation case against Mandry’s was resolved, which coincidentally happened to be the day his put-upon wife made her last stand, with a renowned psychiatrist in tow. (My guru indulged the missus, knowing he’d be vacating the Drake that evening and disappearing for good.) After a brief interview and some careful consideration, the learned man suggested a diagnosis of idée fixe, optimistically suggesting the condition would eventually ‘clear’ with the same mysterious abruptness with which it took hold — though naturally, it was impossible to say just when. Mrs. MacKlatchie was despondent.
“While spouse and handicapped child were generously provided for in perpetuity, those selfsame handpicked men thought it cruel, both to ‘the widow’ and to them—the triumvirate — to be forced into telling her lies of omission. The ex cathedra whims of their boss now seemed punishing and unsavory, but, alas, the contract tied their hands; if they dared reveal to anyone the peculiar actuality of the situation, well, the draconian provisions of the signed agreements would trigger immediate termination, along with financial penalties designed to be ruinous. My heart went out to Mrs. MacKlatchie when Sir told me of the numerous detectives she hired to find him — if he should ever leave me, I wondered what desperate measures I would resort to! — but their efforts came to naught. Though it’s probably more accurate to say that whatever she paid them, her husband increased by multiples sufficient to allow the investigators to sidestep their professional ethics and report back to their client empty-handed. They even returned her fee.
“A final section of the covenant had a bewildering stipulation that you’ll come to see as the acme of his achievement, the jewel in the crown, the bell tower of the cathedral. In simplest terms, it stated that the entire edifice would collapse — the contracts he’d so meticulously crafted be rendered null and void—in the moment he chose to reveal, whether by deliberation or in error, to any person or persons, in writing or in speech, that he, Franklin Tannenbaum MacKlatchie, was the sole legal owner of Mandry’s Gastropub LLC. In the event of such a seemingly innocuous occurrence, all controlling interests in FM Industries would immediately cede to the triumvirate, and its founder be permanently ousted. By the time those trusted (if greatly discomposed) servants read that clause, they knew in their hearts that the man they once revered and loved, and who so brilliantly mentored them, was completely insane. Yet they had no choice but to follow his instructions to the letter. As said, the charter he drafted was insuperable — a castle keep of elegant logic whose divine proportions, akin to those of a late Beethoven string quartet, made it an exemplar and holy grail of Golden Ratio jurisprudence.
“But let’s get back to Mandry’s. When he took possession, not only did Mr. MacKlatchie insist on retaining the manager and the bouncer — the very men who’d spurred his momentous transfiguration — but lavished them both with substantial raises and benefits as an incentive against their finding other work. With that hedge in place, he was now ready to implement an unthinkably bold, unthinkably strange artifice. I’ll sketch it for you now: he began to drink, heavily, in his own place of business. In two weeks’ time, my guru became a failed pickup artist, a lewd and lascivious nuisance to the lady patrons — a tacky replica of the troublemaker Marcus initially mistook him for. Now remember, the bouncer was unaware that Mr. MacKlatchie was in fact his employer and benefactor, and only familiar with him as the once outraged gentleman who in response to a false accusation—Marcus’s! — had sued the pub and lost, a falsehood, of course, which had been artfully publicized. And by the way, the backstory concocted for the Sir’s ‘drunkard’ persona was that after a protracted bankruptcy and divorce, the failed defamation suit had driven him to the tipping point of sanity.