The Mark and the Void (33 page)

‘That’s it? He waltzes off into the sunset with his pockets full of money and we’re all supposed to cheer? That’s fucking lame, Claude. He’s never done a good thing for anyone, give me one reason why he should get the girl too.’

‘Because that’s how life is,’ I snap.

‘Well, no one wants to read that story, believe me.’

‘You’re the expert on what people don’t want to read,’ I return, but he doesn’t hear. He’s storming back and forth, berating himself in the same deranged manner I heard when I came in.

‘Banerjee was right,’ he is saying. ‘It just can’t be done. It just doesn’t work any more.’

My anger fades, and I feel a pang of guilt: have I done this to him? Have I infected him, and his wife, with my own misplaced hopes? Or is there some way forward?

‘Didn’t you tell me once’ – I am embarrassed at the desperation evident in my voice – ‘that at some point in his life everyone finds himself at a crossroads? Where the clock strikes thirteen, and he must make a choice who he will be, good or bad? Can’t we find that moment for the banker?’

Paul looks down at his hands; I have a strange sense of impending dissolution, like an actor at an audition who has delivered his lines and now stares into the darkness, waiting for his invisible judges to dismiss him.

‘What were you saying a minute ago, about listening to the market,’ he says, with his head bowed.

‘I said you shouldn’t do it.’

‘No, I think you were on to something. Maybe that’s the angle we need to take. Work out what people want, and go from there.’

‘Work out what Wombat Willy wants?’

‘He buys books, doesn’t he? I’ve got to make some money from this, Claude. I’m on the fucking ropes here. The whole industry’s on the ropes. It isn’t the time to be precious.’ He kneads his scalp distractedly. ‘So what is it they want? Strong narratives, right? Exciting stories, characters you remember. Drama, violence, murdered prostitutes. A serial killer is on the loose, that kind of thing.’

‘That sounds like the kind of stupid
scénario
the world is already full of.’

‘Well, we can spin it, right? Tweak the formula. The murderer’s the detective, the murderer’s the narrator, something like that. The first thing we need to do is think of a fresh angle.’ He brings his fingertips to his temple, as if he were trying to tune in a radio. ‘You said something interesting there about
Ulysses
not having enough plot. So how about … how about we
give
it a plot? We use the characters and the basic set-up – but with a high-octane, twenty-first-century story!’

‘Are you talking about … ?’

‘A sequel to
Ulysses
!’ A feverish light dances in his eyes, sickly sweat burnishing his forehead.
‘
Think about it! It’s the most literary book there is! And yet it ends on this completely inconclusive note. That’s why for generations readers have been crying out for a follow-up. And now here it is!’ He seizes his pen, writes with such vigour that he tears the page. ‘It’s ten years after the last book ended. Leopold Bloom is divorced from Molly. He’s hit the bottle, he’s bitter, he’s jaded, he’s working as a cop in New York City. A rash of murders has broken out across the city. The killer’s leaving obscure literary references written on their bodies …’

Pornography
, the word pops into my mind. I am still hoping he will break off, crack a grin, tell me
Gotcha!
; but on the contrary, it only gets worse.

‘Jesus, Claude, I think I’ve got it. How about this for a twist. When you get to the last page of the book, Bloom goes, “I can now reveal the murderer was … YOU!”’

‘What?’

‘“YOU!”’ he says again, pointing his finger at my chest, almost beside himself with excitement.

‘Me?’

‘You, like, whoever’s reading the book. Think about it, who’s the very last person the reader will suspect of committing the crime? Herself, right? Imagine how she’s going to feel when the detective says, “It was YOU!” And we could have like a 3D finger pointing out of the page!’

‘How can the reader have committed a crime in a fictional world to which she has no access?’

‘That’s a minor detail,’ he says. ‘Anyway, why should the reader get off the hook? She’s as guilty as anybody. Don’t you see? This turns the whole crime genre on its head! It’ll be huge!’

He returns to his scribbling, giggling to himself all the while; he doesn’t notice as I slip out of the room.

In the kitchen, I find Clizia placing a bucket under a drip. ‘You have a little leak?’ I say, though the leak is more of a stream, descending steadily from a grey mass in the ceiling.

‘Oh, this old place!’ Clizia says gaily. Then, glancing at the bedroom, with the same false smile, she says, ‘He’s forgotten about the review?’

‘I think it’s given him some interesting new ideas!’ I say. We both laugh, though I am not sure why. ‘And you?’ I inquire. ‘Your ankle, it is better?’

‘Vot?’ she says, still smiling.

‘When you spoke on the phone earlier, to your coach, I thought …’ Clizia looks at me uncomprehendingly. ‘Never mind,’ I say.

‘Bye bye, Claude,’ Remington, now drawing a large multicoloured R, sings from under her feet.

‘Goodbye, my friends,’ I say, in the kindly fashion of the family doctor in a nineteenth-century play. ‘I will see you both very soon, I’m sure.’

I am halfway down the corridor when she catches up with me. ‘Frenchman!’

I turn. The smile is gone; her fingers are tight around my flesh. ‘He will write the book this time – won’t he?’

What can I tell her?

‘Of course,’ I say.

A dark-skinned boy runs into a crystal-blue sea. A man in a suit hands his passport to a ticket agent. The boy leaps from the water with a shell in his hand, a plane lifts into a powder-blue sky. A young woman sits cross-legged on the sand, boring a hole in the shell. More shells lie in a pile at her feet. She and the boy turn at the sound of a motor. It is the man in the suit, speeding over the waves in a powerboat. The boat runs up on the beach. The boy leads the man to the spot where the woman sits. The man opens his briefcase and takes out a thread. The woman smiles, and begins to string the shells on to it.

Agron Torabundo
, a voiceover says.
Not global. Planetary
.

‘It’s testing really well,’ Skylark Fitzgibbon says, folding closed the screen. ‘In European and American markets.’

Be careful what you wish for, isn’t that what they say? Ish has got what she wanted: plans are in motion to ‘save’ Kokomoko. Already sea walls are being constructed, sand imported to replace what’s been taken; this Skylark Fitzgibbon, who emerged from the Marketing Department last week like a kind of Barbie-shaped Erinys, sends us regular updates on the golf course, now to be located at the northern end of the island in an area she refers to variously as ‘almost uninhabited’ and ‘effectively uninhabited’.

‘One last thing: what do you think those shell necklaces would retail for? I know they’re not for sale, but if they were, does eighty-five dollars sound right? Ballpark?’

A paranoid mind might suspect that all of this had been put together specifically to torture Ish. Every email, every peppy chat with Skylark, visibly reduces her, as if some verdant last fragment
of her own simpler, happier past were being surgically excised. But there is nothing she can do.

My computer has been returned; getting back to work, I find the world in its customary state of turmoil. The impending investigation of money-laundering by a major British bank is causing havoc on the FTSE. In Greece, a bomb in an Athens bank has killed three tellers, one of them a pregnant woman; investors respond by buying up German bunds. The euro is in crisis, America is in crisis, the market is on the brink of meltdown yet again, like a hysterical ex-lover who keeps calling you up, threatening suicide.

Ireland, on the other hand, is weirdly calm. Economically, the situation is worse than ever, but the Minister’s death seems to have functioned as a kind of pressure valve. Thousands attend the state funeral, and as the encomiums keep coming, public anger is diverted to other, less disruptive emotions: pity, guilt, a kind of defanged, non-specific regret. The marches peter out; awkward questions about the Royal Irish report dry up; the abusive calls and sinister black faxes, which I had been receiving in a steady stream, dwindle almost to nothing; and one morning I arrive at work to find Jurgen standing at the window with a mug of coffee and a contented air, like a man surveying a pile of freshly chopped logs. At first I can’t see what’s giving him so much satisfaction. Then I realize. The quay is bare; the zombies are gone. It looks as if the pavement has been scoured to ensure not a trace of them remains, though down in the water, fragments of placards, bottles and items of clothing bob forlornly.

‘Police?’

‘Local people taking matters into their own hands.’ His smile is as sheer and white as a cliff face. ‘The Irish understand what needs to be done.’

I think about Ariadne’s friend with the dreadlocks, try to summon up some spark of triumph. Nothing comes. Instead I feel as if she’s been banished too, scrubbed away from my world, even
though I can see her, just about, through the dawn-dazed glass of the Ark.

AgroBOT rampages on. The acquisition of clearing house Parsifal is completed, that of TerraNova asset management almost. Kevin points proudly to a
Wall Street Journal
article calling the bank ‘omnivorous’. An inspirational memo from Porter notes that ‘a stitch in time saves nine’; our subsequent long position in Time Warner, where in a shock move Bastian Stich is appointed CEO the following week, pays off handsomely. Our stock rises; people revise their bonus expectations upwards; there is talk of moving into a new premises. Champagne is drunk, cigars are smoked, lap dances enjoyed; the rain-logged sky is a rag soaked in chloroform, pressing relentlessly down on the city.

Then everything changes.

‘What’s this shit?’ Gary McCrum says, staring at his terminal.

No warning, no explanation; just a small but noticeable decline in our share price.

Liam English plays it down. ‘Regression to the mean, that’s all. Market valuation’s been increasing for six months straight, there was bound to be an adjustment sooner or later.’

‘This isn’t an adjustment, it’s a nosedive.’

‘It’s not a nosedive,’ Liam says irritably. He looks off into space, tugs on his tie as though pumping it for information, then concedes, ‘Look, there’s a certain amount of rethinking going on out there about counterintuitiveness. It’s the usual story – you do something new, everyone else piles in, there’re some bad deals, the market panics. As the originators we might be carrying the can for more than is fair. It’ll pass.’

He huffs back to his office and closes the venetian blind; but through the apertures we detect, or imagine we detect, the blue glow of an electronic cigarette.

‘He’s stonewalling us,’ Jocelyn Lockhart says.

‘You think something’s happening?’

‘There’s rumours going around.’

‘What sort of rumours?’

‘That we over-borrowed to pay for the Agron takeover. That our core assets are overvalued. That we’re broke, essentially.’

‘But … it’s not true, is it?’ Kevin says.

‘It’s just some hedge fund taking shots in the dark,’ Gary McCrum says. ‘Standard trash-and-cash. Liam’s right, it’ll burn itself out.’

Jocelyn shrugs. ‘We’ll see.’

I spend most of the day taking calls from clients and counterparties, listening to casual but pointed inquiries about trades and investments; I assure them that there’s nothing to worry about, that this is simply an anomaly, that by tomorrow everything will be back to normal.

On the contrary. Overnight, the temperature becomes a fever, and the next morning the calls begin before I even leave my apartment, slowly but inexorably rising in volume and anxiety over the course of the day, while the bank’s share price slowly but inexorably falls. We field the queries, we soothe the qualms, we placate and mollify to the best of our ability – but as our superiors aren’t telling us anything, this doesn’t amount to much.

‘Word is we’re over-leveraged.’

‘It’s mid-quarter, everyone’s over-leveraged.’

‘I heard we couldn’t make good on a deal.’

‘That’s bullshit.’

‘Don’t yell at me, I’m just telling you what people are saying.’

‘Come on, if we’d DK’d on a trade we’d know about it. It’d be all over the place.’

‘It
is
all over the place.’

‘I had a customer ask me today if we were still solvent. This is a guy I’ve traded with for years. I said yes but I’m not even sure we are.’

We are not sure of anything, except this: AgroBOT is under siege – a strange, metaphysical siege, in which lies beset truth.

The question of who began the attacks very soon becomes
unimportant. In the market, it does not take long for rumour to become self-fulfilling. Spread a story, no matter how wild; if even a handful of shareholders believe it and sell their stock, a notional drop in value becomes an actual drop, the false narrative supersedes the true, people panic, the sell-off intensifies, the share price collapses, the hedge fund or whoever was behind the initial short makes a killing.

If a company’s fundamentals are strong, as ours are, this won’t happen; the rumours won’t stick, the attacks will abate, the short-sellers will give up, look for an easier mark elsewhere. It’s only a matter of time: that’s what we tell ourselves, that’s what we tell our clients. But we can feel the market as never before, a palpable entity, delving into our terminals, our trades, our collective past – an invisible hand, tapping the walls, looking for the weak spot.

I’m in the office till close to midnight, trying to talk away client jitters; I’m back again at 6 a.m., doing the same. As the minutes tick towards the opening of the market, the fear mounts, the pressure becomes almost unbearable, a hissing force that pushes against the eyeballs. Events roll silently in a band across the TV, messages ping on to my computer screen, Joe Peston and Dwayne McGuckian and Mike Purzel iterate numbers into their headsets, the telephones ring and ring and ring. The effort of defending the bank is visible on every face, and although the floor is as noisy as ever, it seems we can hear the silence beneath it, oceanically deep, oceanically cold.

And the loudest silence is Porter’s. In our hour of need, he seems to have vanished, leaving us with only more conjecture.

‘I heard he had another heart attack.’

‘I heard his wife tried to commit suicide.’

‘He wouldn’t stay out of the office for that.’

‘If you’d stop whining like little girls for a minute,’ Dave Davison’s bored baritone rises up from behind a divider, ‘then you’d realize the reason we haven’t heard from him is that he already has it covered. We’ve got an open line of credit with his buddy the Caliph. More than enough to carry us through some market hissy-fit.’

That’s true, but there is a hitch. Following his merciless quashing of the rebellion, the Caliph has been removed by his Imperial Guard to an undisclosed location while the last dregs of the uprising are mopped up.

‘It’s a delicate situation,’ Jurgen explains. ‘They are purging his ministries of any suspected sympathizers. For security reasons, the Caliph prefers to monitor this from a distance.’

‘And what about us? He can’t even pick up a phone?’

‘It is only a matter of time,’ Jurgen says.

Others are less optimistic.

‘Someone knows something,’ Howie says, watching the screen. ‘Someone’s got something on us.’

Business on the ninth floor has stalled. Howie’s investors, spooked by the sudden dip in our fortunes, refuse to believe his assurances that the bank and the fund are two separate entities; some of them are even demanding their money back.

‘I tell them, how can I give you your money back? I
invested
it. That’s what you paid me to do. It’s not like I put it a suitcase and buried it in the back garden.’ He has been down here most of the morning, Chinese wall notwithstanding; he claims he is trying to contain the contamination, though he spends most of his time kicking furniture.

‘What are the hedge funds saying?’ I ask him.

‘They’re saying we’re fucked, Claude. It’s not like it’s a secret. People are climbing over each other, trying to ditch their stock. Some crowd in California are betting a fortune we’ll be gone in less than a week.’

‘Less than a week?’

‘Why not? Bear went under in less than a week. Lehman went in less than a week. They were both much bigger than us.’

A chill of silence sweeps through the room, as if a door had been blown open by some soundless storm.

‘But why is this happening?’ I say. ‘What is it they think they know?’

‘They know AgroBOT’s a pissant operation run by people who don’t have a bull’s notion what they’re doing,’ Howie returns.

‘If it did go under …’ little Terry Fosco pipes up, ‘would that mean our shares’d be worthless?’

‘It won’t go under,’ Dave Davison insists. ‘I’m telling you, they won’t let it. They can’t.’

‘Though if it does,’ Gary McCrum says with a kind of bitter relish, ‘we won’t get a penny. We’ll be at the end of a long, long line.’

‘Where’s Porter?’ Kevin cries. ‘Why doesn’t he say something? Why doesn’t he do something?’

The same questions, the same unsatisfactory answers, hour after hour, like a torturous carousel; and in the background the edifice we thought indestructible is being steadily and invisibly dismantled, as if by ghosts. By now, most of the calls have dried up: clients no longer want reassurance; instead they seek to put as much distance as they can between them and us. New business is non-existent.

‘We’re like lepers out there,’ Howie fumes, sending another wastebasket flying. ‘We’re like Greece.’

One man remains unafraid of infection. Around lunchtime, Walter’s car pulls up outside. He doesn’t look like someone whose empire is on the brink of collapsing. Instead he looks like he’s swallowed it whole; he’s grown so bloated that to fit in the limo I have to sit with my knees practically up to my chin. I’m expecting an inquisition about the bank’s current performance, or a furious command to liquidate his investments, but he doesn’t even mention AgroBOT’s travails, just hands me the usual bundle of cheques. Hasn’t he heard? Or doesn’t he care? Maybe as Walter Corless he believes himself immune to the flying grit of circumstance; he writes his own story, which intersects with the wider world’s only as and when he desires it. Or maybe he, too, knows something we don’t.