Sila's Fortune (25 page)

‘The headlong rush? said the woman with the green eyes, decidedly friendly.

Zadie nodded.

‘It's a feature of the system. It's not about the bankers themselves. Credit, and hence the essence of our system, is inevitably threatened by the headlong rush since it's based on futures. The future is our only maturity date. By definition, we're constantly moving forward, and if things move faster we have to move faster. The financial world is a race circuit where the cars have no brakes. When things are going well, all the cars race round. If one of them has an accident … anything can happen.'

Everyone fell silent. The young woman with green eyes glanced at Simon. Then suddenly, there was a thaw in the atmosphere. The narrow-shouldered quantitative analyst felt he had been adopted.

A caterer had prepared a buffet. Simon was hungry. The young woman complimented him on his appetite. He asked her name. She was Jane Hilland.

‘My mother's French,' she explained.

‘And I suppose your father's a British banker?' joked Simon, referring to the Hilland Bank.

‘He is. I didn't realise you knew him,' said Jane with a big smile.

The young woman was an art history professor at Cambridge. All this was overwhelming; clearly Simon's first impression had been right: he should never have come.

‘What I love about Vermeer,' he said suddenly, ‘is the silence that radiates from his paintings.'

It was something he had read in a class many years ago. He still remembered it. Jane looked at him warily.

‘Yes … I'm sure,' she said.

‘It's all the more surprising given he was conceived during a thunderstorm.'

There was a flicker of doubt in Jane's eyes as though she suspected he was making fun of her. Simon panicked.

‘Maybe I'm wrong,' he said.

‘I have to confess, I don't know one way or the other,' said Jane magnanimously, ‘I don't think so, but never mind …'

‘I love art.'

‘And Rimbaud, don't forget Rimbaud!' Jane reminded him, smiling.

In two minutes flat Simon had managed to blow any impression of intelligence out of the water. But though he did not realise it, his innocence was more touching than the cleverest speeches. Jane liked unusual people. In Simon she had found a perfect specimen.

She asked about his parents. He told her they were dead. His face tensed at the word. Again she found him touching.

‘You enjoy working in banking?' she asked.

‘Yes. It makes me feel like I'm a gangster. I used to be a maths geek, now I'm a gangster in a foreign city.'

‘A gangster?'

‘Just an expression. A tough guy.'

Jane thought of her father. No – this was not how she had ever pictured a banker.

Simon, who still had a glimmer of common sense, started laughing.

‘I'm joking. Let's just say I find the image makeover interesting.'

This spark of lucidity in an otherwise absurd conversation had the benefit of stopping Jane on the fatal path towards maternal feeling.

‘I'm afraid I have to leave. I've got somewhere I have to be. But I'd like to see you again, you are a remarkable person.'

Simon shuddered.

‘I'd love to.'

‘A remarkable person,' he thought to himself. ‘
Remarkable
is very positive. A lot better than
banal
for example.'

That evening, he ate a lot, drank a lot, talked a lot, more often than not coming out with gibberish so off the point that he kept everyone in stitches. Without realising, he was the clown prince of the evening and everyone complimented Zadie on finding a Frenchman with such a deadpan sense of humour. Blessed are the simple-minded.

When he got home, Matt was waiting for him.

‘So, did you fuck her?'

At this late hour, the question was exhausting. Simon answered that he had met a wonderful woman who taught art history. His friend stared at him with the barely disguised scorn he reserved for matters of women, as though he alone was capable of making a judgement in this domain.

‘Art history, eh?'

‘Yes. She seems very clever,' added Simon though he had no idea.

‘Good-looking?'

‘You could say that.'

‘So, you mean she's ugly?'

Matt sighed. Then he stretched and yawned, clearly bored. Simon felt humiliated. He had managed to charm and now he was being denied his victory. Now his conquest was ugly when actually she had been wonderful, so icy at first and then so warm.

‘You going to bang her?'

This was how Matt always talked. Always in the crudest terms. Naive though he was, Simon sensed a maliciousness in Matt, a desire to put him down though he could not understand why.

‘I'd happily see her again.'

Matt nodded disdainfully.

‘So how was the party?'

Simon gave a detailed account of his every gesture, his every fear, his encounter with Jane, his conversations.

‘You really said that a good banker was a greedy, blind liar?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Are you crazy? You've worked your last day at Kelmann.'

Simon felt his heart hammer. Unfortunately his best, his only friend had a knack for coming out with a cruel truth, a bitter prophecy.

‘I don't think so.'

Matt sniggered and explained why what he had said went against the fundamental rule of business, which was hypocrisy. The cake must be all gold and diamonds, even if it was nothing more than a thin film concealing all the treachery in the world. Words must cloak things with a dazzling layer designed to reflect the majesty of desires, otherwise, if the truth was told,
it would all explode. Developing his argument, in one of the lyrical flights he so favoured, especially late at night, he went on to state that in fact the rule applied to the whole of society, which lived on myths and put all its hopes in ideological constructs, pure egalitarian populist images, feeding the social Moloch with necessary illusions.

Simon only vaguely listened.

‘Maybe,' he said. ‘It's possible. But not only was Zadie not angry, she's asked me to join her team. She's been appointed head of derivatives and I'm going with her.'

Matt's smile froze into a rictus.

The fire bellowed in the night like some great monster. Flames climbed the rigs, licking at the oil rising from the bowels of the earth with the speed of a conflagration. The fire was sticky, liquid, heavy and devastating, cloaking everything in sweltering suffocation. Dark clouds of gas rose into the heavens, drawing the fire upwards where it spread across the blazing sky. The initial explosion had sent up an incandescent geyser in front of the security guards and then the barrels began to explode, belching torrents of flame. The ground, the air were thick with this blistering blindness and everyone had dashed from the surrounding sheds and fled.

Lev was called and he came by helicopter to survey the disaster.

Stock still, he uttered not a word. The high explosives needed to snuff the wellhead were on their way; meanwhile the bulldozers, black ants in the flickering flames, were digging trenches to check the progress of the fire.

Over his head the sky was burning. Nothing in his face betrayed the least flicker of emotion. The workers were impressed by his calm. Lev Kravchenko, on the brink of the abyss, seemed unmoved. No anger, no determination, no despair. Apathy perhaps, mingled with shock. They'd been
quick to act … They'd made an offer; he had refused and immediately the punishment. Naked violence, he had thought last time. The time had come.

I want to be independent
.

Lev had talked like Riabine; he had been treated like Riabine. But he was not like the farmer. He was not an animal holed up in his lair. Standing on an embankment before the fire-ravaged landscape, he had nothing in common with the
muzhik
. He felt none of the primeval terror the man must have felt when threatened. Obviously, his complete indifference was simply a facade. No one can remain completely indifferent when his property is being destroyed. This bubbling oil slick creeping across the ground, stippled with flame and smoke, was eating away his money, his only protection in these troubled times. He himself was being diminished there, but the real danger would come at the critical moment when he would stand alone, naked in the face of danger, protected only by the fragile rectitude of his body. The moment when he would simply be himself, Lev Kravchenko, the man he had once been, with no support, no money, no men.

Already, though he did not realise it, his figure standing on the hillock, a dark twig silhouetted against the wall of fire, displayed his tragic weakness in the face of the elements. Even as he stood thinking that his empire was beginning to shrink, it was his body that seemed to have been weakened by the attack. And in the thunderous roar of the fire, Lev was no more than an inconsequential silence.

It took three days and nights to extinguish the blaze. The well was not capped. Soon the mechanical insects would be able
to resume their ballet, though a considerable number of them had been amputated. And Lev did not have the money for the repairs.

Back in Moscow, Lev spent the better part of his days with bankers. They were not unresponsive to his overtures, proof that the Seven had not yet reached an agreement. The reason for this was clear. They feared Lianov and were reluctant to put him at the head of the vast multinational that would result from the merger of Liekom and ELK. Nor had they united against the head of the Brotherhood, for several reasons: because Litvinov was still head of the company, officially at least, and Lianov did not yet have complete control. Because their interests were linked inasmuch as the Brotherhood's activities, especially in the field of investments, were becoming more legitimate. Lastly, because they had their own disaster to deal with. Russia was bankrupt. As expected, the IMF provided money. Traces of it could be found the very next day in the offshore accounts: part of the manna had been misappropriated by the oligarchs. In Russia, however, the same oligarchs were still in a difficult position and the political future remained uncertain. Who would replace Yeltsin?

In all the chaos, the confusion of insolvency and embezzlement, in the midst of all the trafficking in power, money and influence, Kravchenko's problems were of little consequence. So the banks had not closed their doors to him. Instead cold-faced men simply informed Lev that their own positions were too tenuous and that, with the bank liable to collapse at any moment, they were in no position to lend such large sums.

In August 1998, the Saniak hedge fund declared bankruptcy.
No one had had an inkling they were in trouble. The management of the fund had always been obscure, focused primarily on the founder and CEO, a Ukrainian of dubious background who had suddenly become rich, and the fund had been too exposed to Russian debt. While the monthly newsletter gushingly boasted unprecedented earnings, increasingly risky investments, intended to shore up losses, had finally led to its collapse. By the time the investors realised what was happening, they'd already lost everything. And the Ukrainian vanished as swiftly as he had appeared.

It was a serious body-blow. The company's losses amounted to almost a billion dollars besides which Lev had lost a third of his personal fortune. Everything else was salted away in tax havens and seemed to be safe. But even tax havens could be dangerous. Nauru, an island grown rich from mineral deposits and money laundering, had also gone bust. Its inhabitants now lived in rusty Mercedes, with no wheels, no petrol, trying to live off the remnants of an island devastated by strip mining.

Lev's divorce seemed likely to hasten his bankruptcy. When they met with the judge, Elena was thinner and more beautiful than ever. She gazed at her Hun with a last flicker of tenderness and a lot of hostility.

‘You were to blame for Riabine,' she whispered to him.

She didn't know how right she was.

‘And I hear you've been seeing a lot of some prostitute. Congratulations.'

Lev did not react. But in private, when the audience was over, he quickly explained the situation to her. He was in desperate straits. Elena listened in silence. As always, she was quick to
understand and he wondered whether she already knew all about his problems. But she did not waver.

‘I already told you, I want half your fortune – or what's left of it. It's not for me, it's for the children. They have to be protected. And I want them to be schooled abroad. They need to get out of this country. Just look at what you've become.'

She was a different woman. Or perhaps she was revealing a part of herself which had been masked by her love for him. The force of her intelligence made her stiff and cold and if, now and then, Lev thought he caught a glimpse of the woman she had once been, a sudden reversal revealed to him the icy face of his enemy.

Dreams of fire haunted the oligarch's nights. Sheets of flame that had him waking up in a sweat. In the depths of sleep, towards 3 am, in that perilous moment of weakness and fear, Lev would tear himself from his nightmares as though ripped from sleep by sheer terror. He gazed at the room, the bed, the windows, probing the depths of his solitude.

During one such wakening, he remembered something Elena had said: ‘You were lost the day you did nothing to help that black waiter in the restaurant in Paris. That day was your downfall. And it was mine too.'

The accusation had seemed totally unjust to Lev. He remembered nothing about what had happened. How was he responsible for this waiter?

So, he would also have to fight his wife. Unless she was prepared to accept half of his debts. This was a fortune he was more than happy to give to her.

As he struggled, back to the wall, the curious pleasure of
defeat carried him forward. Life was no longer that strange boundlessness of time made up of a thousand exertions and hazy with uncertainty and patience; now it was a swift jolt where everything was at stake: his fortune, his reputation, his life. For a man tormented by the absurd, hounded by self-doubt, danger was the promise of action. It was now or never.