The Mark and the Void (39 page)

The next day the storm has lifted; the office is filled with sunshine. It slants through the windows in great radiant sheets, burnishing white shirts to such a brightness that from certain angles the room appears to be filled with angels, floating about their heavenly station, reciting beatific litanies of numbers.

‘I still don’t get it,’ Ish says. ‘I thought we were going bust. How can we buy a bank if we’re going bust? And why would we want to buy Royal Irish?’

‘Optics,’ Gary McCrum says, sucking a choc ice, leafing through a watch catalogue. Now that we’re being rescued, everyone’s acting like they expected it all along.

‘Okay, for the last time,’ Jocelyn says heavily. ‘Everyone knows Royal Irish is dead in the water, right? But the government’s been afraid to let it go under, because the whole world’ll hear about it and no one’ll ever put their money in this country again. So a buyout like this suits them perfectly. They can proclaim the bank’s been cleaned up enough to sell on, Royal’s absorbed into a well-respected firm, its name is never spoken again, everyone gets on with their lives.’

‘But what’s in it for us? Why would we buy Royal, if it’s such a basket case?’

Because we’re not really buying it, is the answer. The doomed investments, the enormous book of bad loans, the copious lawsuits as well as Walter’s festering 25 per cent stake have all been quietly parcelled up and transferred to a government agency. ‘Basically, all we’re buying is the name, and the HQ building there.’ Jocelyn jabs his thumb at the monolithic edifice on the far quay, presently invisible behind the window-dazzle.

‘And we’re getting it for practically nothing,’ Gary adds. ‘The site alone’s worth twice what we’re paying.’

But still. Isn’t AgroBOT broke? What about all that Greek debt? Well. This is the clever part of the deal. At the heart of its extremely complicated mechanics is a swap: in return for taking the PR millstone that is Royal off their hands, the government has agreed to exchange all of AgroBOT’s toxic waste for guaranteed state bonds.

‘They’re just going to take it from us?’ Ish says incredulously.

‘I’m not sure they know what it is,’ Jocelyn says.

‘They know,’ Gary contradicts him.

‘Then why would they take it?’

Gary lifts up his watch catalogue, puts his feet on the desk. ‘Not their decision any more, is it?’ he says, rolling the stick of his choc ice with his tongue.

Whose decision is it? The IMF, the EU, the ECB? Some other conglomeration of acronyms? That is not for us to know. The bottom line is that our balance sheet will be clean again and AgroBOT made whole; and the Irish people – along with their unstaffed hospitals, their potholed roads, their overstuffed classrooms, medieval prisons, dying pensioners – will become the proud owners of six billion euros’ worth of, as Jocelyn likes to call it, radioactive Greek shit.

This doesn’t go unremarked upon. Though the government tries to spin it as a happy ending for Royal Irish, many commentators see the AgroBOT bailout for what it is, and are asking why Ireland has been lumbered with rescuing a bank that is not itself Irish, nor European, nor, when it comes down to it, in the northern hemisphere.

A more pressing point is that Ireland simply cannot afford to take on AgroBOT’s debts. The deal, if it’s voted through, will effectively bankrupt the country. So why are they doing it?

‘My surmise is that taking on AgroBOT’s debt is the condition of Ireland receiving aid from higher up,’ Jurgen says.

‘So they’re deliberately bankrupting themselves so they can get a handout from Europe? How does that make any sense?’

‘You are perhaps making the mistake of judging Irish actions by an external standard.’ Jurgen’s smile has the same brilliant opacity as the sunlight in the window. ‘You must remember that unlike the French, the British, the’ – with a little cough – ‘Germans, the Irish have never commanded their own empire. For the greater part of their history, they have been the subjects of foreign powers. Of course, we must go through the motions of equality
und so weiter
. But the fact is that the Irish are at root a slave race. We have seen this during their brief period of good fortune, when they are acting like the servant who has found the key to the wine cellar while his master is away. Even then it is clear they are not fit to be rulers of themselves. And they do not wish it either. This is why, although it seems to you and me the terrible injustice, they will carry their new debt without grumbling, even with gratitude.’

‘They’ll be … grateful? For paying off AgroBOT’s debt?’

‘Exactly so. Do not forget, Claude, this is a country until very recently ruled by priests. Thanks to them, the Irish already believe they are born in debt, a terrible debt of sin which they can never pay in full. A people like this is more comfortable wrapped in chains. For this reason, I am believing the deal will pass through parliament without issue.’

Nevertheless, we must take no chances. ‘As we have seen in the last weeks, the public mood is unpredictable. Prior to next week’s vote, it is more than ever important that the contents of your original report on Royal Irish are forgotten. The IT Department has taken the liberty of destroying all related material on your hard drive and on the AgroBOT servers. You will do the same with any files on external drives or your own machine.’

‘All right.’

‘I must tell you, Claude, you have impressed a lot of people with your handling of this matter. Yes, with the initial report you
have badly miscalculated. But after that, you have made the case to the media very convincingly.’

‘You mean I lied.’

‘Sometimes for the greater good it is necessary to bend the truth a little. For a society to prosper, it’s the strong, not the weak, that must be protected. The journalists will not understand this, of course. But those who know are not forgetting your contribution. You have a bright future here at AgroBOT, very, very bright.’

He returns his gaze to the window. Across the water, the white sky glows in the unfinished windows of the Royal HQ, blind eyes shining through a concrete mask. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’

I am too surprised to reply.

‘True, it does not look like much now,’ Jurgen considers. ‘But in a few years, the housing market will recover, unemployment will fall, and the Irish will be clamouring once more for high-interest loans to fund their four-wheel drives and shopping trips to New York. At this point I am predicting our new acquisition will prove very lucrative.’

‘You mean the whole thing will happen all over again.’

‘Yes, it will happen all over again. But this time we will be prepared.’ He looks out at the river, the static cranes, the office blocks, as if any moment all of it will turn into money … ‘Life is so fucking beautiful,’ he says.

The market loves the
coup de théâtre
of the Royal Irish buyout: although the Irish government hasn’t yet signed off on the deal, AgroBOT’s share price has already begun to climb. In the days that follow, the bank’s credit rating is upgraded, and then upgraded again; the
Wall Street Journal
runs a feature on Porter Blankly, with a picture of the CEO smoking a fat cigar and the quote, ‘When they say you’re over-leveraged … that’s when you buy another bank.’ According to this article, the deal was clinched over a round of golf with Ireland’s political elite, in which Blankly, who flew in directly from New York and had not slept in thirty-six
hours, made a par 5 in two shots before sinking a putt for an eagle 3. The rumour within AgroBOT is that Howie and Grisha were responsible for the details; although investors are demanding an investigation into the collapse of their ninth-floor fund, word is they’ve already been spirited to New York to sit at Porter’s right hand. None of this may be true; still, visitors to the Uncanny Valley report that Rachael spends most of her time these days by the window, gazing out towards the sea, like a lonesome maiden waiting for her sailor to come home.

Does it need to be said that nobody follows through on his vows to leave banking and take up shoemaking, orphan husbandry, semi-professional paragliding, whatever else? Kevin is given a permanent contract; a solicitors’ firm specializing in liquidation opens an office on the ninth floor; Skylark Fitzgibbon reappears in the form of a barrage of publicity pictures from Kokomoko, showing the first shipments of topsoil arriving onshore, rich loamy mounds that will become the greens and fairways of the golf course, smiling islanders beside her in blue Agron Torabundo T-shirts.

‘So Blankly got away with it.’

‘Got away with what?’

‘Cashing in twice.’

‘Not this crazy conspiracy theory again.’

‘I’m just saying.’

No one else is saying; everyone is just grateful to be back to work. And within a very short time, a matter of days, life is just as it was. Or almost.

‘Who is that man, Ish?’

‘What?’

‘The man, there, coming out of Liam’s office.’

‘Oh, the dude in black?’

‘He’s a new employee?’

‘Hmm, I think he’s from Compliance.’

‘Compliance?’

‘Yeah, I heard there’s been someone snooping around the last couple of days, asking questions.’

‘What about?’

‘Beats me. Wouldn’t reckon it’s got anything to do with us.’

‘No, no, of course not.’

‘You going somewhere, Claude?’

‘Yes, I have a, um, meeting. If anyone’s looking for me … ah …’

‘Don’t worry, I never saw you.’

The door doesn’t open so much as implode at my knock, giving way to a seething mass of small children, who run back and forth and bump into one another in an exemplary display of Brownian motion.

‘Thanks for coming,’ Paul says, wading through them with me to the relative safety of the kitchen table. ‘Sorry about the short notice. We weren’t going to do anything, but then Clizia’s game got cancelled, so …’

‘It’s my pleasure,’ I say. ‘It’s not every day that someone turns five.’

‘Thank God for that. Here, let me see if I can …’ He cranes over the swarm and plucks out his son, who is panting with excitement and partially covered with a recent meal. ‘Look who it is, Remington! It’s your Uncle Claude!’

‘Happy burp-day,’ I say, handing him my present.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s an ant farm,’ I explain. ‘Where ants live.’ I help him remove the wrapping paper to reveal the plastic window through which ants may be seen running up and down tunnels with small objects in their mouths, occasionally stopping to flail antennae with other ants. The resemblance to the Financial Services Centre seems to me indisputable.

‘Is Roland in there?’ Remington asks.

‘Hmm, there are certainly some ants that might be related …’

‘Let’s take them out!’

‘Maybe later,’ his father says hastily, removing the box from the boy’s hands and putting it on a high shelf. Remington shrugs and rejoins the anarchy. ‘So I have news,’ Paul says to me.

‘Oh yes?’

‘Yeah. Dodson called.’

The first thing I think of is Banerjee. ‘He’s pressing charges? Or – my God, he’s not dead, is he?’

‘Relax, Banerjee’s fine, they’re all fine. No, he was calling about the book.’

‘What book?’

‘
My
book. He thinks it’s got legs. He wants to publish it.’

‘He wants to –?’ I feel a soar of elation, though also a certain amount of confusion: there do seem to be a number of loose ends to this news, for example that there is no book.

‘There’s no book now,’ Paul corrects me. ‘But after hearing our proposal that night Robert says it’s all right there.’ His voice takes on a loftier tone, adding, ‘He says it’s the book I was born to write.’

‘He says
Anal Analyst
is the book you were born to write?’

‘He’s not 100 per cent sure about the title,’ Paul concedes.

‘Well,’ I say, attempting to take this in. ‘And you don’t … that is, in the past you have had some doubts about writing. The modern audience, competing technologies, that kind of thing.’

‘Cold feet, that’s all that was,’ Paul says dismissively. ‘Does the blackbird sing for an audience? Does the sun rise in the hope that some douche’ll take a picture of it on his phone? I just needed someone to believe in me. That’s what I’ve been waiting for, all this time.’

‘I believed in you,’ I remind him.

‘I know, I know.’

‘Clizia believed in you.’

‘Yeah, well, someone who’s professionally qualified to believe in me, I mean.’

It strikes me that Robert Dodson believed in him the last time, and he just never submitted the book, but I decide not to press the point. ‘And he will give you some money, as well as belief?’

‘He needs a couple of pages first – just the basic set-up, to
show the finance people. But once that’s done, he’s pretty sure he can scrap the previous advance and set up a whole new deal.’

‘Debt forgiveness, eh?’

‘They won’t pay much. But get this. Just a few days after I saw you, I got an email from this investment company, asking about buying the apartment for cash.’

‘This apartment?’

‘Yes! I told them straight up it’s got structural problems. They didn’t seem to care. Cyrano Solutions, you ever heard of them?’

‘No, but there are all kinds of foreign investors in town, buying up property.’

‘I couldn’t find anything about them online. It sounded kind of shady to me. But then the next thing I know we get this huge whomp of money into our account! I mean just like that! And these people say we can wait and move out whenever. Isn’t that crazy? Like I wouldn’t say our troubles are over, exactly, but I’ll be able to keep writing full-time, at least till I’ve got a first draft. After that maybe I can get a few gigs on the side, reviews, that kind of thing – you know, now that I’ve got my bona fides again.’

‘That is wonderful.’ I clink his plastic glass. ‘Congratulations.’

‘Thanks. We were sailing pretty close to the wind this time. Sometimes I even thought … well, why dwell on it. Suffice to say, it’s nice to have some good news for a change. And a lot of it’s down to you.’

‘Me?’ I say, through a mouthful of butterfly cake.

‘You assaulting Banerjee did me no harm at all. He didn’t say it, but I got the distinct impression Dodson’s been wanting to hit him with a sculpture for a long, long time. I reckon I could have given him the ABC after that and he still would have published it.’

‘
Au contraire
, it is your talent.’

‘So the question now is how to end it,’ Paul says, as in a far corner of the room a synthesizer polka starts up and the children dance around. ‘Dodson thinks he’s got to rob the bank.’

‘The banker?’

‘He says it’s the only ending that makes sense. After everything that happens.’

‘I see,’ I say, a cold spiral of metal coiling up from my gut.

‘So I wanted to run something by you. I know you said robbing an investment bank was basically impossible. But I’ve been reading about this guy in France, this Pierrot – you’ve heard of him?’

‘Of course.’

The children are jumping up and down now, the noise so thunderous it almost drowns out the music.

‘He breaks into the back office in the middle of the night, forges some papers, transfers his clients’ money into his own account. Couldn’t that work here?’

The music stops abruptly: the children freeze.

‘Pierrot got caught,’ I say.

‘He got greedy. He did it over and over. What if our guy only does it once? And he takes the money from some really evil client, so it wouldn’t seem so much like stealing?’

I stroke my chin; my fingers feel like ice. ‘It’s true, if he put the money into a third party’s account it would be almost impossible for the bank to get back,’ I say, forcing the words through numb lips. ‘And maybe, if he was lucky, the client wouldn’t find out till their end-of-year returns. Still, it would only be a matter of time.’

‘In theory, though, you could have it so that by the time the client finds out they’ve got away?’

‘ “They”?’

‘The banker and the waitress.’

I feel a curious jolt, as if the world has slipped from its wheel. ‘What about her boyfriend?’

‘She doesn’t have a boyfriend,’ Paul says, erasing him with a single wave of the hand. ‘Maybe the banker
thinks
she has a boyfriend. And that’s what makes his sacrifice authentic? But then he finds out the truth, using a bespoke waitress surveillance
system. Although Dodson’s not 100 per cent about that part either,’ he confesses.

‘Dad, we need you for pass-the-parcel …’ Remington appears at his father’s elbow.

‘Oh, right – but in principle, that’d work? The back-office thing?’

They get away; a happy ending. ‘Yes, I think that would work very well.’

‘
Dad
.’

‘All right, all right. Hey, try the dinosaur cake, Claude, it’s unbeatable!’

He is pulled away. Left by the table, nibbling on dinosaur cake, I think about what he said. Could they really escape, the banker and the waitress? Is there still somewhere in the world the bank wouldn’t find them?

‘You look like one of the musical statues.’

I turn around. Clizia has materialized beside me. ‘Just daydreaming,’ I tell her. ‘Enjoying the party?’

‘I should get back to the office. But I’m worried that if I move I will stand on somebody.’

‘They’re tougher than they look,’ she says with a laugh. Her hair is tied back, and instead of her usual micro-skirt she wears a tracksuit, liberally adorned with food smears and tiny fingerprints; the bruising around her eye has faded almost to nothing.

‘Things are better?’ I say.

She shrugs. ‘If he finishes book.’

‘What about you? How are your … travel plans?’

She shrugs again, though not without a smile. ‘We’ll see. For now, everything is good.’

‘No more volleyball.’

‘I pay off boss.’ She waits a moment after relaying this information, then says, ‘Don’t you want to know how?’

‘Hmm, Paul mentioned that you’ve sold the apartment?’

She looks amusedly into my eyes, and for a moment our gazes
criss-cross, glancing off one another like bright swords in a duel. Then she takes my hand. ‘Come, before you leave, there’s someone I want you to meet.’ She scans the partygoers, then locates the one she is looking for, beside the refrigerator: a small, olive-skinned boy, with a blue stripe on the bridge of his nose and pink daubs on his cheeks.

‘This is one of Remington’s friends from school,’ she says. ‘Tell Claude your name, darling.’

The small child looks up at me. He does not speak: he does not need to. His eyes are a brilliant, luminescent green, like light through the trees of some Olympian forest.

‘I think maybe you know his mother,’ Clizia says innocently. ‘She works in a café near your bank?’

‘Ah – oh – is that right?’ I stammer.

‘It closed … but then it opened again.’

‘I see.’

‘Someone gave them a whole lot of money.’

‘Is that so? Good for them.’

‘But they don’t know who he is.’

‘Well, that’s the business world, so impersonal …’

Clizia touches my arm, leans in to me and says, ‘You’re a good man, Claude.’

‘Me? Oh, you mean the ant farm?’

‘There are not many good men. So few that sometimes we forget even to look for them. We are too busy trying to pick out the best of the bad men.’

I continue to make fish-out-of-water gestures of incomprehension, which Clizia continues to ignore.

‘Oscar’s mother will be coming to collect him in about half an hour,’ she says absently, stooping to pick up a little girl who has collided with the dustbin. ‘If you are still here, you can all walk back together?’

Ariadne? Here? With no more tricks, or ploys, or misunderstandings? For an instant it seems that life and story are merging
at last into one, everything I hoped for coming true … but then my phone begins to ring, and I remember it’s already too late for that.

‘Where are you, Claude?’ Rachael’s secretary is at the other end of the line.

‘I had a meeting.’

A compact, merciless hammering of keys. ‘I can’t see anything in your diary.’

‘Yes, it was … unscheduled.’

‘You’re needed back at the office.’

‘With regard to something in particular … ?’

‘Just get back here,’ she says.