The Mark and the Void (10 page)

This constitutes a major change in BOT’s direction.

Before the crash, every bank had to have at least one Russian physicist on its payroll. The bulge brackets would go on safari to St Petersburg and return with whole university departments, setting them up in grim dorms to remind them of home, where they would sit gloomily eating pirogi and scrawling in refill pads.

Sir Colin, our former CEO, saw this, as he saw so much of the twenty-first, twentieth and indeed nineteenth century, as so much modern flim-flam. He didn’t believe investment banks
ought to be trading for themselves at all – how could that not lead to a conflict of interest? – and the idea of betting the house on equations which nobody in the entire operation understood except for some depressed-looking Vlad in a pirogi-stained vest he thought simply unhinged.

‘But that’s what makes it counterintuitive, see?’ Howie is particularly excited by the new arrival. ‘Nobody’s doing this stuff right now.’

‘They’re not doing it because it didn’t work,’ I point out.

‘Crazy Frog, you think the first aeroplane worked? You think the first telephone worked? The first shot of penicillin –’

‘I get the point.’

‘This guy is a visionary, Claude. He’s out there, out in the fucking Siberian tundra, staring at the fucking sun and seeing – seeing –’

‘Seeing what?’

‘Seeing the shit that’s going to take us to the next level.’ Howie leans closer, lowers his voice. ‘He’s been telling me about his PhD. Providential antinomies. Ever heard of them? Of course you haven’t, they haven’t been used for three hundred years. But guess what, Grisha here’s discovered some way of applying them to bond yields.’

‘To do what?’

Howie flaps his hand in irritation. ‘
I
don’t know. What they do isn’t the point. The point is that this time
we’re
the ones doing the crazy paradoxical rocket-science shit. This tiny, insignificant little bank has, through a fluke of history, got a split-second start on the big boys. That’s what Porter’s counterintuitive strategy’s about, see? If we wait for them to grow their balls back, they’ll wipe us out. But if we take advantage of that head start, and do all the things that right now they’re afraid to do – who knows how far we can go?’

Grisha has been given his own office, a small, cramped box room behind the Sales Department with just a desk and a
whiteboard – no TV, no Bloomberg, not even a phone. He doesn’t seem to mind; he spends most of his time out on the plaza, apparently talking to the pigeons.

‘Look at that,’ Howie says approvingly, gazing down from the window. ‘Mad as a nail. How can he
not
make us a fortune?’

Porter’s memo coincides with a golden streak for the bank such as I have never experienced before. Every call we make, every pitch, every trade, every merger, buyout, bond issue, comes off as smoothly as a case study in an economics textbook. Europe teeters ever closer to the brink of some unimaginable financial apocalypse, whole streets in Greece burn, and here the zombies by the riverside grow in number as the Royal Irish recapitalization, as predicted, fails completely, the fresh infusion stripped away by international speculators – but our share price leaps up, and up again; the whole world is long BOT.

Yet to me these successes seem somehow insubstantial. Without Paul there, everything has begun to slide out of focus; and the longer he is gone, the worse it gets. Figures blur on the screen, clients’ voices merge into one another. I’m waylaid by memories, things I haven’t thought about in years, a game of tarot in my aunt’s kitchen, my mother taking my hand as we cross the Pont des Arts.

Perhaps it’s to combat this that I find myself returning again and again to the Ark to watch Ariadne dance her
pas de seul
between the tables. How alive she is, how embedded in her day! Even when she’s daydreaming, standing still, she seems to throw off energy, invisible waves that ripple outwards to catch up the people around her. Will she catch me up too? If the two strands of our story come together, might the writer come back in order to tie the knot?

‘Doing some reading?’

‘What? Oh – yes – beginning the Royal Irish accounts.’

‘But this is not accounts.’ Jurgen fishes out the book stuffed
under the stack of ledgers. ‘
De Part et d’Autre
, François Texier. Another novel?’

‘Philosophy,’ I say gruffly, cheeks crimsoning. ‘It’s … I thought it would be useful, for something I am planning to do.’

‘Very good,’ Jurgen says. But he does not leave; instead he parks himself upon the adjoining desk, gazes out for a moment at the rain and then says, ‘You know, Claude, an artist is not like a banker.’

I open a folder, highlight a raft of redundant files.

‘It is in an artist’s nature to be mercurial,’ Jurgen continues. ‘Do you know this word, “mercurial”? It means prone to rapid and unexpected change, as liquid mercury is in the barometer.’

‘I am familiar with it,’ I say. The files yield up pale blue, translucent images of themselves, as if I am extracting their ghosts and transporting them to some electronic afterlife.

‘It is a good word,’ Jurgen says.‘Mer-cur-i-al. It is what Stacy calls Bobo the clown in Paul’s book – have you reached this part, where Stacy breaks up with Bobo?’

‘Of course,’ I mutter.

‘Bobo, as a clown, is constantly searching for new jokes and new sensations. Stacy, as a health and safety officer, wants order and regularity. Their two lifestyles are completely different. This is why she terminates their relationship.’

‘She does that in Chapter 5,’ I object. ‘But then at the end she realizes she’s still in love with him.’

‘I stopped reading after Chapter 5,’ Jurgen says. He broods over his folded arms for a moment. The recycling bin flashes indigo as the files are subsumed and resurrected as empty space. ‘I suppose the thing to remember is that it is only a book,’ he says, getting up. ‘Not real life.’

On Tuesday morning, my team has a meeting with Cornerstone, one of several American private equity firms currently occupying the city’s five-star hotels. The market believes Ireland will soon
go the same way as Greece: bankruptcy, riots, decades of national bondage. Value investors like Cornerstone are gambling the opposite. Operating on the principle that the moment of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, they sift through the wreckage of Irish society, checking out shopping malls, stud farms, golf courses, whole estates of houses, businesses that can’t stay afloat and, of course, the loan books of faltering Irish banks.

We meet them at the hotel. There are three of them, tanned, sockless, in open-necked shirts and Patek Philippe watches, exuding an air of amused, joshing serenity. I do a surreptitious check for any giveaway tattoos. Many American bankers are ex-military – bland-faced, blue-eyed, faultlessly courteous men who went directly from their tour of Iraq or Afghanistan to MBAs in Wharton and Harvard. Indeed, the head of Cornerstone, General John Perseus, was one of the top commanders of the original invasion of Iraq; I suppose when you have seen an entire country being shelled to oblivion, holding your nerve during a bear run on the stock market does not present a major challenge.

Cornerstone are interested in Royal Irish. That they have chosen to consult us about them is quite a feather in our cap. This morning, though, I cannot get the pitch straight in my head. ‘Excuse me – let me just, ah …’ I awaken my laptop screen, squint at the spreadsheet. Numbers swim between the columns, decimal points dancing about like fleas. ‘Ah …’

The three private equity bros gaze at me amusedly, serenely, hands draped loosely between their legs in the enormous leather armchairs.

‘Of course, the pertinent data has already been set out for you in the accompanying file,’ Jurgen says, stepping in. ‘If you will turn to page four …’

‘Fail to prepare, prepare to fail,’ Kevin says philosophically as we are leaving.

‘What are you on about, pipsqueak? Claude had them eating out of his hand,’ Ish says.

Jurgen does not say anything, but when our car pulls up at the IFSC he waits for the others to climb out and then turns to me. ‘You know that as a managerial policy I do not believe in issuing threats or warnings,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ I say guiltily.

But there is no more; with that he gets out of the car, closing the door in my face.

‘Maybe you need someone observing you,’ Ish hypothesizes. ‘You know, like electrons.’

‘Electrons?’

‘What’s that thing about electrons? You know, that unless someone’s there looking at them they don’t stay in the one spot? Instead they’re just sort of spread out all over the place?’

‘I have been working as an analyst for years without anyone observing me,’ I say.

‘Maybe you didn’t know you were an electron.’

‘I’m not an electron,’ I say.

It is late; we are among the last ones left in the office. Outside, arrayed in the darkness, the buildings with their sparse panes of light look like monolithic dominoes waiting to fall.

‘You’ve tried calling him?’

‘Hundreds of times.’

Ish tocks a pencil against her teeth. ‘I wonder what happened,’ she says.

‘It is obvious what happened,’ I snap. ‘He realized the novel wasn’t going to work.’

‘Why wouldn’t it work?’

‘Why?’ I can’t contain my anger any longer. ‘Because what we do is – empty! Meaningless! No one in the world could find it interesting, unless they were being paid!’

‘You don’t
know
that’s what happened. Wouldn’t he have said something, if he was just going to drop the whole thing? Like, why would he just disappear?’

I limit myself to another glower, push my brain to engage with the wall of numbers on the screen.

‘Those new directions you said he was thinking about,’ Ish says. ‘What were they, exactly?’

‘What were they?’ I repeat.

‘Like, maybe there’s a clue there. To what might have happened to him.’

She gazes at me ingenuously. I have a momentary vision of Ariadne stepping towards me, cupping my face in her hands, bringing her lips to mine, and experience a brief stab of pain.

‘He didn’t have anything concrete,’ I say.

She falls silent again. On her desk sits an ever-growing mountain of papers she’s waiting to show to the writer – articles about her gift-island, photocopies from textbooks, Polaroids of her younger self, skinny, smudged, beaming, with her arm around various stocky topless tribespeople – like ingredients for a spell, as if she believes he might be able to summon her up out of her own past.

‘Could it be,’ she says at last, ‘he wants you to find him?’

‘I told you, he does not answer his phone.’

‘No, I mean, track him down. You said he was thinking up new directions for the book. Maybe this is it. This is what happens.’

‘The writer is in the book?’

‘Yeah, and the banker has to help him. Like in that film, you know, with that guy.’

Find him: for some reason, the idea has never occurred to me before, as if the traffic between his life and mine could only ever be one way. It has, I must admit, a certain resonance. But how would we find him? He projected himself into our world without betraying any hint of his own, in spite of our best efforts.

‘Maybe there’s a clue in here.’ Diving into her bag, she pulls out
For Love of a Clown
and starts flicking through it. ‘Does he mention any neighbourhoods? Can you remember?’

I frown. Mostly the clown is travelling around in a caravan, or
pitched up in a field with the rest of the circus, though there is a memorable scene near the end, when the clown comes to Stacy’s house and honks his nose outside her window –

‘Wait a minute,’ Ish says, opening the book up again to the very first pages. ‘Of course there’s a clue in it. Look, the publisher’s address is right here. Asterisk Press, Cromwell Road, London. They’ll know where he is.’

Genius! I seize the phone there and then, but Ish reminds me that it’s the middle of the night. ‘Right, right,’ I agree, setting it down again but remaining on my feet, full of nervous energy. I look at Ish, swivelling gently in her chair. ‘Well. I suppose we should go home.’

‘I suppose so,’ Ish agrees.

‘Thank you for helping,’ I say.

‘I’m in the book too, don’t forget,’ she says. ‘I want to find out what happens.’

That night sees the worst riots yet in Athens. While the new Greek government huddles inside the Old Royal Palace, Zegna Square is alight. Cars burn like pagan fires, gunshots streak through the black sky; masked protestors and masked police come together with a thunderclap that can be felt in the chest even thousands of miles away. Next morning, I have nervous clients on the line as soon as I turn on my phone, and at 10 a.m. I see Walter’s limousine pull up outside. Nobody from his office calls me; they just assume I will know he is there, which, to my embarrassment, I do.

In the back seat, Walter is livid. What are those gobshites doing over there? Will their fucking shambles of a government last the week? If it falls, and Greece tells its creditors to go to fuck, what then? I tell him that his investments have been spread across a wide portfolio precisely to protect them from this kind of shock, and that in fact Dublex will most likely benefit from the increased volatility in terms of security contracts. It’s the same speech I gave him a few weeks ago when the Spanish banks teetered, and a few weeks before that when it was Portugal on the brink. Every time his fears are harder to dislodge, as if he can see the flaming torches massed outside his house.

‘I don’t see what he’s so worried about,’ Kevin comments when I return. ‘It’s not like he’s going to run out of money, whatever happens.’

‘The more you have, the greater your fears of losing it,’ Jocelyn Lockhart says. ‘Classic human psychology.’

‘In Somalia, you worry about an empty rice bowl,’ Gary McCrum concurs. ‘In the suburbs, you worry about burglars
running off with your flat-screen TV. But if you’re a billionaire – what would it take for a billionaire to lose everything?’

‘I don’t know,’ Kevin says.

‘Well, Walter fucking knows. I guarantee you, Walter lies awake every night, conjuring up whatever kind of Boschian nightmare you’d need to make any serious dent in his fortune. Defaulting Greeks are just one pixel of the fucking IMAX screen of unrelenting carnage that’s the inside of that man’s head.’

‘That’s why serious players never quit while they’re ahead,’ Jocelyn says. ‘They’re always rushing off to make more billions to protect the billions they have already. Looking for that little bit more that’ll make them bulletproof. But then that’s just more for them to worry about. It’s a vicious circle, see?’

‘So …’ Kevin looks deeply troubled by this information. ‘Are you saying … they shouldn’t bother? They’d be better off not being rich?’

‘No, I’m saying they need to tighten their focus,’ Jocelyn says. ‘If you’re worried about the apocalypse, you want to be investing in two things and two things only: weapons and gold. And by gold I mean actual bullion you can hold in your hand, not some certificate. Then, when it all goes tits up, you’re ready. Fortress in the Swiss Alps with an underground generator and its own water supply, maybe three hundred mercenaries to take out any fammos who come looking to get in – sorted.’

‘ “Fammos”?’

‘Yeah, from the famine, you know.’

‘An island would be better,’ Gary McCrum asserts. ‘With a self-sustaining farm.’

‘Oh, yeah, an island’s the ideal,’ Jocelyn says. ‘Though you’re probably going to have to cut back on your mercenaries a bit.’

‘Or get robot mercenaries?’ Kevin says.

‘Nice,’ Jocelyn says. ‘You should say that to Walter. He’d be well impressed.’

‘You think?’ Kevin says.

‘Might even sign you up for a place in the fortress,’ Jocelyn says. ‘You could look out the window and watch us all burn.’

Kevin beams, as though he would like this very much indeed.

At last a quiet moment presents itself. I use my mobile so the bank won’t record the call; the line is poor, and the girl who answers doesn’t seem to know anything about Paul. ‘You published his novel,’ I tell her. ‘
For Love of a Clown
, surely you know it?’

The girl tells me, rather peevishly, that it must have been before her time, then puts me on hold. A moment later a second voice, a man’s, comes on the line. He introduces himself as Paul’s editor. Warily, as if he suspects some kind of scam, he tells me that while Asterisk Press did indeed publish Paul’s first novel, they have had no contact with him for some time.

‘Really?’ This strikes me as strange. ‘He has not been in touch regarding his new book, the story of an Everyman working in a mid-tier investment bank?’

‘No,’ the editor replies. ‘We haven’t heard anything from him at all.’

‘Hmm,’ I say, and then, ‘perhaps you have an address where I can contact him?’

‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘We can’t give that information out to strangers.’

‘Yes, but I am not really a stranger,’ I explain. ‘You see, I am the Everyman whose adventures will appear in his next novel.’

He apologizes again, invites me to leave a message which he can pass on, though he adds that Paul has not replied to any correspondence for several years, so they don’t know even if the address they have is the right one.

A series of phone calls to literary magazines and institutions in Dublin proves scarcely more informative; of the few people who remember him, one insists that he is dead, and refuses to be persuaded otherwise even when I tell him I recently had lunch with
him. Nevertheless, a picture begins to emerge. One acquaintance makes reference to the writer’s disappointment over the reception of
Clown
; several speak about a hostile review in the national press.

Once I retrieve this review, which is hidden behind a paywall, his retreat from the literary world becomes considerably less of a mystery.

‘ “How can something so trivial feel so exhausting? Reading this deeply unfunny, unintentionally depressing book, one might be tempted to conclude that the novel, like the circus, has simply had its day, and that novelists have come to inhabit the same territory as the clown chosen here as protagonist – once-beloved figures so outmoded that they now inspire only pity and incomprehension.” ’

‘Fucking hell,’ Ish says.

‘ “Yet this book comes on the heels of Bimal Banerjee’s masterful
The Clowns of Sorrow
, in which the obsolescence of these forgotten jokers gives them a tragic grandeur, confronting us with the unbreachable gulf between ourselves and the past …” ’

I fall silent, skimming down the page. Ish nudges me. ‘What else?’

‘There is a lot of stuff here about Banerjee continuing Joyce’s great hermeneutic project.’

‘What about Paul?’

Frowning, I read down to the last paragraph. ‘She thinks he should not write any more novels.’

‘Right, I got that.’

And it seems that, for many years, he took her advice. I think back to that first conversation, the ‘wall’ he said he’d hit with his work; now it appears in quite a different light. Yet these discoveries have brought him no closer, and we must resort to desperate measures.

‘What the fuck is that thing?’ Kevin says.

‘Telephone directory,’ I say.

‘Landlines?’ Kevin says. ‘Who still has a landline?’

‘I keep a landline for when I need to find my mobile,’ Jocelyn says.

‘We’ve got a maid to do that,’ Gary says.

There are ten men listed who have the same name as the writer. Whenever Jurgen isn’t within earshot, I go through them one by one. Over the course of the evening, I manage to make contact with a butcher, an upholsterer, a sound engineer, a data miner, and a retired army captain who served with the United Nations in the Biafran War. They know nothing about my Paul, yet I can’t shake the sense of them as facets of a crystal, different aspects of the same entity – the men he might have become in different circumstances, at a different time, with different choices.

As I put down the phone for the last time, I have one of those dizzy moments, the vertigo that comes when just for an instant you get an inkling of how vast the world is, how populous and unknowable … Then it recedes again and is gone.

‘What about that number there?’ Ish points to an uncrossed name at the top of the list.

‘It’s disconnected.’

‘That doesn’t mean there’s no one there. Think about it. If this was a book
,
where would the person you were looking for turn out to be? It’s always the place with the disconnected phone, right?’

She keeps prodding me until I look the address up. It turns out that 323 Superbia is only ten minutes’ walk from the Centre, and so, mostly to mollify her, I agree to pay it a visit.

‘When?’ she says.

‘Soon,’ I promise.

‘I can’t wait that long! The suspense is killing me!’

‘All right, all right.’

Taking the lift down to the plaza, I follow the tram tracks in the direction of the train station until I pass out of the Centre. And here, on the teeming road, are the Irish: blanched, pocked,
pitted, sleep-deprived, burnished, beaming, snaggle-toothed, balding, rouged, raddled, beaky, exophthalmic; the Irish, with their demon priests, their cellulite, their bus queues and beer bellies, their foreign football teams, betting slips, smartphones and online deals, their dyed hair, white jeans, colossal mortgages, miraculous medals, ill-fitting suits, enormous televisions, stoical laughter, wavering camaraderie, their flinty austerity and seeping corruption, their narrow minds and broad hearts, their drunken speeches, drunken fights, drunken weddings, drunken sex, their books, saints, tickets to Australia, their building-site countryside, their radioactive sea, their crisps, bars, Lucozade, their tattoos, their overpriced wine and mediocre restaurants, their dreams, their children, their mistakes, their punchbag history, their bankrupt state and their inveterate difference. Every face is a compendium of singularities, unadulterated by the smoothing toxins of wealth and privilege; to walk among them is to be plunged into a sea of stories, a human comedy so rich it seems on the point of writing itself. For a moment I wonder, hopelessly, what the International Financial Services Centre can offer to compare – then I remember that this was his very point, that the storyless, faceless banks are the underwriters of all this humanity, that we are the Fates who weave the fabric of the day …

Coming from the Centre, with its clean lines and ubiquitous dress code, the chaos of detail is almost overwhelming; I take refuge in the map on my phone. It takes me off the thoroughfare and into a warren of flats and terraced houses. There are no cars, no people, just boarded-up windows, incoherent graffiti, detritus so random it seems deliberate. The further I go, the worse it gets, till the very molecules of the air and brickwork seem on the point of fraying, drifting apart to leave yawning rents of pure nothingness. And then, in the midst of this desolation, I come upon a large, glittering tower.

To say it appears out of place would be an understatement. It looks like a five-star hotel that has been stolen from some
exclusive neighbourhood of Shanghai or Los Angeles and then dumped here. Gilt filigree gleams from the railings of the balconies; mosaics twinkle on the dark stone of the façade; a majestic eagle peers down from the distant rooftop. From one side of the building hangs an enormous hoarding. Beneath the marks of rain and dust, it shows in black and white two willowy girls with kohl-ringed eyes, gazing hungrily over basketball-sized wine glasses at a smirking young man in very tight jeans who has hoisted himself up to sit on the kitchen counter, car keys flung in some obscure invitation on to the table in front of him. All three figures balance sunglasses in their hair, as if life could, at any moment, become too radiant to behold. The strapline below them reads,
SUPERBIA
:
ENTER BEAUTY
.

The entrance door to the lobby is flanked by two stone effigies, one of which holds an intercom. There is no response from 323, or indeed anything to indicate the intercom is working. Impulsively, I try the door – and it gives way.

The lobby is full of silence and dust. Nymphs bathe in dust in an ornate fountain; dust cloaks the tall mirrors along the walls. Gaps have appeared in the Moorish tiling, and the nameplates of the metal letterboxes are empty.

The lift is not working so I mount the stairs in intermittent light. No sounds can be heard anywhere. Reaching the third floor, I make a left, but after a short distance run into a thick plastic sheet that hangs like a filthy veil from ceiling to floor. Pushing it aside, I can just make out a lightless corridor studded by pockets of deeper darkness, doorways to rooms, or the shells of rooms. From somewhere a sharp, scurrying noise issues. I hurry back the way I came, turn a corner, then another, then stop and try to orient myself – and realize I am standing outside apartment no. 323. Mostly as a formality, I lift my hand to knock, and then I hear a voice.

‘You pawned it?’ it says. And then again, ‘You
pawned
it?’

‘That’s right,’ says another voice, a woman’s.

‘Jesus, Clizia!’ The man sounds very like Paul, though his tone is different from any I have heard him use. ‘What am I supposed to work on?’

‘Work!’ the woman’s voice, fierce and heavily accented, crows. ‘You tell me the day you want to work, I go out and buy you brand-new one. Work, this is the big joke! Ha ha, I am laughing!’

His tone hardens. ‘Well, where’s the money, so?’

‘What money?’

‘The money from my damn writing desk, that’s what money.’

‘Is gone.’

‘Gone? You spent it? All of it?’ Heavy footsteps pound the floor. ‘On what? Lottery tickets?’

‘I bought
food
, idiot! I bought
food
, so we don’t
starve
!’

‘That’s great! And what are we going to do tomorrow? What are we going to do tomorrow, when the food’s gone and my desk is gone?’

‘Oh yes, tomorrow is when you were going to make the big moneys, I forgot.’

‘Well, what’s your plan, exactly? Pawn the floorboards? Pawn the, the damn oxygen in the air?’

‘I leave you, that’s what! I leave you!’

‘I wish you
would
leave me,’ the man roars back. ‘I wish you would leave me, then I could get some peace and quiet! I wish one of us had the courage to bring this nightmare to an end, so I could at least look forward to dying al— oh, hello, Claude.’