The Mark and the Void (14 page)

‘What’s going on?’ the bouncer demands.

‘He take my money!’ the dancer says accusingly.

‘I didn’t!’ Paul protests.

‘You take!’

‘It was a simple misunderstanding,’ Paul says to the bouncer.

‘I no misunderstand!’ the dancer counters, in a voice like a circular saw. ‘I understand very well! This man is thief!’

‘Would you just let me explain? What happened was, I wanted to tip her, but I only had a twenty, so I put the twenty in her G-string, and then I took out a ten as change –’

‘He take my money!’

‘As
change
– what, I can’t take change?’

‘Right, mate, you’re out,’ the bouncer says.

‘But I’m a regular!’ Paul cries. ‘I have a loyalty card!’ This does not sway the bouncer, who twists his arm behind his back and shoves him down a gauntlet of jeering drinkers towards the exit. I give chase, reaching street level just in time to see Paul propelled over the asphalt to land in a heap on the kerb opposite.

‘You’re barred!’ the bouncer shouts after him.

Crossing the road, I help him sit up. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Oh, sure.’ He examines his front teeth with a finger and thumb. ‘They say you’re barred, but then in a week they’ve forgotten all about it.’

By the stairwell, the bouncer is laughing with his cronies; now they step aside to allow in a stag party.

‘So this is what you do instead of writing,’ I say.

‘When I can afford it,’ Paul replies tersely. He drags himself to his feet and spits.

‘I think that is a great shame,’ I say.

‘You’re one of a very small number.’ He takes his wallet from his pocket, peers into it fatalistically, then replaces it.

‘You never answered my question.’

‘What question?’

‘Why did you pick me? For your … plan?’

He shrugs, looks away. ‘I told you before. You were different. You had qualities.’

‘What qualities?’

‘Loneliness. Desperation.’

This stings; to cover it up I spit out another question. ‘And the book? Did you ever intend to write it?’

‘Oh Jesus, Claude, what does it matter?’ he exclaims, jumping to his feet. ‘Okay, I never intended to write a book. Happy?’ I don’t reply, look down at the cracked asphalt instead.

‘And I’ll tell you what else, if I did through some calamity start a new book, I wouldn’t write about you and your friends in a hundred years. A bunch of people with one character attribute between them, Mr Greedy, Mr Greedy, Mr Greedy and Mr Greedy, like something out of Roger Hargreaves’ nightmares? Who’s going to want to read about that?’

He stares at me with blazing eyes, as if expecting an answer. I say nothing; I feel a huge rent has been slashed in the canvas of my soul, and blackness is billowing out.

‘Look,’ he says, maybe regretting his candour. ‘You’re not the worst of them. I’m sorry I did this to you. But my God, man. You don’t even live in the world. You don’t breathe the air, you don’t eat the food. You’re up in your strange little satellite, placing bets on all of us down below like kids racing beetles. How could you think, how did you ever possibly think that you were an Everyman?’

I can’t speak; what can I possibly say? Paul waits a moment, with his hand on my shoulder; and then he turns and walks away, leaving me in the shadow of the club, from which the music booms so loud that even out on the street I experience it not in my ears but in my chest – pounding between my ribs, like someone else’s heart.

I meet Chris Kane in the gym the next morning; he tells me that he stayed out with the Tordale team till three. He appears aglow with health, in spite of his long, debauched night and minimal sleep; this is often the way with my banking colleagues, even the older men, as though they had a picture of themselves mouldering in the attic, or, more likely these days, had outsourced the disintegration of their bodies to some proxy in the Third World, some Manuel or Cho or Pradeep who wakes up one day with shattered capillaries, clogged lungs, a fissiparous liver that are none of his doing. ‘Great bunch of lads,’ Chris Kane says, and then, ‘I just hope Ish didn’t damage our chances.’

‘That guy was out of line.’

‘He wasn’t serious! Fuck’s sake, you have to show you’re able to take a joke!’

Upstairs, Ish is already at her desk. I can feel the resentment directed at her from around the room – as can she, to judge by her posture, crouched behind her terminal.

‘Thanks, Claude,’ she says in a low voice when she sees me.

‘Thanks for what?’

‘For sticking up for me.’

I blush, as our pusillanimous show comes back to me; if Tordale were testing our moral fibre – though they almost definitely weren’t – we failed with flying colours.

‘What a night,’ Ish says.

‘Just business.’

‘I bet Rachael’s bulling.’

‘They never intended to take us on.’

‘Howie said they did. Howie said that when we were having our argument he was in the jacks doing rails with the main guy, and the main guy started telling him he was thinking of leaving his wife.’

‘So?’

‘He said it showed we’d got to the next level.’

‘It didn’t show anything. They’re not going to take us on. They won’t take on Danske either. They came here to drink, that’s all.’

I find Jurgen standing at the window, peering out at the zombies with his binoculars. They are just beginning to stir: one heats a saucepan of water on a gas burner, another eats a bowl of cereal in the opening of his tent. They are not wearing their costumes yet: you can see how young they are.

‘Have we heard anything?’ I say, keeping my tone neutral.

‘They will revert to us by the end of the week,’ he replies in the same clipped, mechanical tone. A pretty girl with a heap of tousled brown hair emerges from a tent and turns on a string of fairy lights; adjusting his focus wheel, Jurgen says, ‘You have completed your report on Royal?’

‘It’s not due for two more weeks.’

‘That is not what I asked you.’

‘No, it’s not finished,’ I say, and then, feeling rebellious, ‘but I can tell you now that I would not recommend Royal Irish to any client.’ Jurgen says nothing to this, just continues to stare out. I am about to step away, then I stop. ‘What happened last night,’ I say.

‘Yes.’

‘We are supposed to be a team.’

‘Yes, we are supposed to be a team,’ he returns.

‘A team looks after its members.’

He remains silent, stares out at the zombies. Then he says, ‘A team exists to achieve goals. If there were no goals, there would
be no team. Therefore goals take priority over members. And members who do not achieve the team’s goals will be replaced.’

The report is going slowly, very slowly. Financial institutions are chimerical creatures at the best of times, but Royal’s books are like nothing I’ve ever seen. Every figure is a door into a world of illusion – of shapeshifting, duplication, disappearing acts. Deals are buried or recorded more than once; borrowers are split into two or lumped together; mysterious sums arrive and depart without explanation, like ships full of toxic waste that pull into a harbour in the middle of the night and the next day are gone again.

Royal Irish: the name sounds like a bad poker hand, one that looks unbeatable until it capsizes and you lose your shirt. After everything that’s happened, it’s sometimes hard to remember that until quite recently it
did
look unbeatable. When I first arrived at BOT, only a couple of years ago, Royal was being described as ‘the best bank in the world’.

Across the ocean, the subprime market was just beginning to turn, but Ireland was still booming. Coming from Paris, which for several years had been in the doldrums, I felt like I had stepped through the looking glass. Every day was like Christmas Eve: the shops, the pubs, the restaurants were all full, all of the time. In the beginning, the boom was fuelled by IT and pharmaceuticals. Now it was construction. Dublin was undergoing its very own Haussmannization. Cranes cluttered the skyline, new builds were everywhere; the old architecture, meanwhile, was being transformed, hospitals becoming shopping malls, churches becoming superpubs, Ascendancy manors becoming five-star golf resorts.

And at the heart of it all was Royal. They were the developers’ bank of choice, spinning out the credit from which the new city would be built. In the fevered boomtown climate, the value of property could double every six months; already several of these
developers had become billionaires. But they didn’t rest on their laurels. Instead, they used what they’d made on their last project to borrow more for their next one. Royal were happy to pay out: they had a steady stream of cheap credit from European investors, eager to gain exposure to the turbocharged Irish economy.

Only Bank of Torabundo stayed away. Our chief executive, Sir Colin Shred, was deeply sceptical about Royal. He thought they were over-invested in a single sector, he thought that sector was heading for a crash. But Royal’s share price had risen astronomically – 2,000 per cent in seven years – and our clients were howling at the fortunes they were missing out on. It was clear to me within a few weeks of starting at BOT that if I could change Sir Colin’s mind, many people would be grateful to me.

I decided to set up a meeting with Royal’s CEO, Miles O’Connor, to talk through his figures and long-term strategy. But this proved far from easy. As head of the best bank in the world, Miles was a man much in demand. Businessmen and governments alike clamoured to learn his secrets; he was flying all over the world, dispensing wisdom. I had almost given up hope when Bruce Gaffney, a salesman I knew at Royal, called to tell me that if I came to the Shelbourne Hotel that night he could get me five minutes – no more.

Royal’s AGM had been that morning and an air of jubilation filled the hotel lobby, along with wafts of cigar smoke that drifted in through the revolving doors. When he began at Royal, then an inconsequential boutique, Miles had targeted the rugby clubs both for staff and for clients; the atmosphere tonight was that of a locker room, loud with backslapping and hur-hur-hurring; the waitresses were having a hard time. I spent what seemed like many hours on the margins of things, having the same desultory conversation about the French scrum over and over again. Any time I caught a glimpse of Miles, he was at the centre of a cluster of men who hung on his every word like barfly apostles. Then,
out of the blue (or had Bruce, unbeknownst to me, intervened?), I found myself thrust up against him.

I had not expected to like him, but I did. Moments after meeting me, the leader of one of the world’s most successful banks was calling me a ‘sound cunt’ and asking what I was drinking! After working in Paris, where everything was swamped in protocol and 23-year-old men conducted themselves like mouldering dukes, I found this refreshing to say the least. He was slight, silver-haired, foxy, quite unlike the meaty second-row types he liked to surround himself with; he was smoking a fat cigar, which in the reception room of one of Dublin’s oldest and costliest hotels was even more against the rules than it was elsewhere. He had a mischievous sense of humour.

‘Take a look, Claude,’ he said, pulling his phone from his pocket. ‘What do you make of this fella, eh?’ I looked at the phone. On the screen was a picture of a glossy black stallion. ‘His name’s Turbolot,’ Miles said. ‘We’re thinking of appointing him to the board.’ His frank black eyes regarded mine. I gazed back at him dumbly. Slapping my stomach with the back of his hand, he hooted with laughter. ‘Your face! Jesus Christ!’

He knew Sir Colin didn’t care for him. He didn’t seem to mind; instead he found it quite natural. ‘He’s a Brit. He hates to see the Paddies getting ahead. To him, that’s the lunatics taking over the fucking asylum. But the tide has turned, Claude, that’s what he needs to accept. Do you know what we did last week? Bankrolled a consortium to buy the Chichester Hotel from the Duke of Edinburgh. The Irish are buying up the Queen’s fucking back garden! Of course the old guard don’t like it.’

‘He thinks you’ve taken on too much risk,’ I told him; I realized that with him I could speak directly. ‘He thinks you’ve left yourself exposed if the market turns.’

Miles dismissed this with a wave of his cigar. ‘Look, Claude, he’s your boss, I don’t want to speak ill of him. But Sir Colin’s a fossil. He’s the remnant of an empire that’s spent the last
hundred fucking years slowly sinking into the sea. Ireland is different. It’s small, it’s young, it’s versatile. And because in Ireland we’re not wedded to a whole lot of empty protocol, we understand that when change happens, it’s big! And it’s fast! There isn’t time to run all your decisions past Risk and Treasury and whoever else. Your job is to get the money out to the fella who’s going to use it, ASA-fucking-P, and there’s an end to it.
He
doesn’t want to be hassled by some prat with a diploma looking for fucking pie charts and breakdowns and all that. He wants to make something happen. He wants to do a fucking deal. Now the question is, are you going to help him?’

He looked me straight in the eye, smoke pumping from his mouth in industrial quantities, sweat beading on his brow, his bow tie slightly askew. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you’re here to ask me how it all works, and I’m just going to tell you the truth, which is that I don’t have the faintest fucking notion. Sometimes I feel like the dog that woke up with two mickeys – I know it’s a good thing, but I’m fucked if I know how it happened. I’ll tell you this, though: the Irish have been everybody’s bloody slave long enough. It used to be whenever I’d go to the airport it’d be full of young people shipping off to Australia or New York for whatever gammy bit of work they could get. Now when I go the airport I see them coming back. Coming home, because they can have a better life here. I know it’s all supposed to be about the bottom line. But I’m proud of that, I’m bloody proud. You’ll have another?’

He pointed at the half-empty glass in my hand; before I could reply, he had disappeared and a fresh pint materialized. It took me a moment to realize that was the end of the interview. But when I thought about it, what more analysis did I need? He was right, wasn’t he? Maybe on paper the bank looked vulnerable – but that was only if you believed in the old way of doing things. The world was changing. Switch on the television, you saw ordinary people being turned into superstars overnight. Why
shouldn’t Miles and his developers do the same for Ireland? Why should they be weighed down by the relics of the past? History was being rolled back, ancient oppressions undone; did it matter if the bank’s loan book outweighed its deposits?

To Sir Colin it did. He rejected my request to issue a ‘Buy’ recommend for Royal; he declined to hear the presentation I’d put together. Later I heard that was when the board of directors began to mass themselves against him. But of course he was right. Looking through Royal’s loan book now is like swimming through a drowned world, the numerical ruins of hotels and houses, of malls and towers and temples, all buried under blue-tinged, airless fathoms of debt; the city is being sold off piece by piece, for bargain-basement rates, and the airports are full of people saying goodbye.

‘You are ready to order?’

‘Not yet, thank you, I am waiting for someone.’ I speak offhandedly, without quite looking at her.

‘Okay,’ Ariadne says gaily. ‘Call when you want me.’

I watch her glide away, divert her course at a raised finger, lavish her smile on two men in iron-grey suits who don’t know quite what to do with it. Outside, a steam of ricocheting droplets hovers over the plaza. For the last week the rain has been almost continuous; in the office we have all become experts in its different personae and gradations – can predict the worst of downpours, gauge the gaps that will allow us a coffee run. More than once I have dreamed that the Ark has come unmoored and floated away with me in it.

‘Checking out the arses, eh?’

I look up. Bruce Gaffney, my Royal Irish contact, is grinning down at me, emitting his familiar emphysemic-dog laugh,
hcchh hcchh hcchh.
He peels off his raincoat, parks himself across the table from me. ‘I wondered why you wanted to meet in this kip. Now I get it. How’s tricks, Claudius? What can I do you for?’

I tell him the government has commissioned a report from us on Royal. He issues a comical huff of exasperation. ‘Reports,’ he says. ‘They can’t get enough of those things, can they?’

‘The last recapitalization didn’t work. You’re running out of money faster than they can replace it. They’re wondering if there’s any point giving you more.’

‘Well, if they don’t want to see yours truly fed to the sharks by a bunch of very fucking unhappy bondholders they’ll keep the taps on,’ he says. ‘You’re French, Claude, you know the famous German bonhomie doesn’t stretch all that far.’

Ariadne returns with her order pad; I ask for two coffees. The instant she turns away, Bruce goes into a routine, boggling, winking, panting in fake agony. ‘The point is, soon there won’t be any money left to give you,’ I say, ignoring this. ‘They can’t raise those kinds of funds any more.’

‘Dark times, Claudius, dark times,’ Bruce Gaffney says, and shakes his head, as if I have been telling him about some other bank in some other country very, very far away. ‘Aha!’ He brightens, as Ariadne returns with our coffee. ‘The goddess of the grounds. The Beatrice of the bean. Thank you, darling.’

I try again. ‘Can you survive without another recap?’

‘What, nothing at all?’ he says, as if affronted, then, seeing my expression, changes tack: ‘What I mean is, we’re almost over the hump! If we could get another, say, seven billion, we’d definitely be able to hold our own till this all blows over.’