The Mark and the Void (20 page)

Paul is on the sofa in my living room, leafing through a magazine. He gets up when I come in. ‘There he is! There’s the hero!’

I do not give him the acknowledgement even of a snort of exasperation, simply wrestle off my jacket, now soaked with rain, and throw it over a chair.

‘Igor had to leave,’ he says. ‘He had a big exterminating gig. Beetles.’

I go into the kitchen area, where cupboard doors have been flung open and the counter littered with tartine and cookie wrappers. ‘What is this?’

‘Oh, yeah, we got hungry, so we made a snack.’

‘And drank two bottles of Brouilly?’ I say, finding the empties upended in a bin.

‘Yeah, we were thirsty, also, it turned out.’

‘How did you drink two bottles of wine in twenty minutes?’

‘Well, we didn’t drink both of them, we –’

‘My rug!’

‘Yeah, see that’s most of bottle one there.’

Clenching my jaw, I slam the cupboards shut, bundle up the debris and wipe down the surfaces.

‘So I think we made some important headway there,’ he says.

‘We made some important headway in the wrong direction.’

‘Mmm,’ he says ambiguously, and then, ‘Look, I’ll be perfectly honest with you. That didn’t go 100 per cent according to plan.’

‘I know it didn’t go 100 per cent according to plan,’ I say. ‘I was very well placed to see it not going according to plan.’

‘Igor and I have been discussing it,’ he says. ‘We both feel we
may have taken a slightly wrong turn with the whole virile, masterful thing.’

I stamp back into the living room, strew salt over the wine-stained rug. ‘Maybe this whole idea was a wrong turn.’

‘Don’t say that. It was just a dry run, remember? And at least she knows who you are now, right? You’ve put yourself on the map, so to speak.’

‘I have put myself on the map as a gibbering psychopath,’ I say.

‘You’re blowing it out of proportion. Try and see it from the perspective of a novel. When do these things ever work out the first time round? There have to be a few comic mishaps, right?’

I replace the salt in the cupboard and dust my hands.

‘And anyway, there was a positive outcome.’ Paul follows me back into the kitchen. ‘By listening to your conversation, I was able to work out something that you had in common: a shared love of modern art. That’s something we can build on.’

At the present moment I don’t want to build on anything; I am damp and hungry, and desire nothing more than to go back to the office, putting this misconceived episode behind me. But Paul, no doubt sensing a threat to his pay cheque, keeps buzzing about me. ‘Look, if you’re really feeling bad about it, we can start over.’

‘How can we start over? This is reality, not typing. We can’t just throw it in the bin.’

‘Ariadne’s not the only beautiful waitress in town. I’ve got a whole folder full of them, brunettes, blondes, redheads …’ He falls silent, realizing he has said too much.

‘You have a folder full of waitresses?’

‘Of course not. It’s a figure of speech, that’s all.’

‘A figure of speech meaning what?’

‘Nothing, forget I said it.’

Cogs begin to turn in my mind. ‘Has the folder of waitresses … has it got something to do with all this bizarre surveillance equipment?’

‘It’s got nothing to do with anything,’ he says impatiently. ‘Can we just drop the subject?’

‘Not if I’m being implicated in one of your scams.’

‘It’s not a scam, it’s a totally legitimate business venture, and anyway, it’s over, it’s all in the past … oh, for God’s sake.’ He rolls his eyes. ‘I’ll tell you, all right? But you have to promise to keep it secret.’

He glances over his shoulders; then, bringing his hands together and pulling them apart, as though unfurling an imaginary banner in the space over his head, says, ‘Hotwaitress.com.’

‘Hotwaitress.com?’

‘That’s right.’

‘What is Hotwaitress.com?’

‘Right now it isn’t anything.’

‘But it was a business venture? Some Internet thing?’

He sighs. ‘Well, really I should go back to the beginning. To seven years ago, when
For Love of a Clown
came out. I was young and naïve, I had the usual fantasies – everyone would stop what they were doing to read it, I’d become famous, it’d usher in a new era of peace and harmony, all that. Instead it got one terrible review and then vanished without a trace. Look, the world is full of books. Moaning because no one wants to read yours is like complaining that you’ve been standing on the street corner with your dick out for an hour and nobody’s stopped to give you a blowjob. Still, it hurt me. And when I sat down and tried to start book number two, I had problems.’

‘You were blocked?’

‘I was blocked, I’d lost faith – whatever the reason, nothing was happening. And meanwhile, of course, I’d got married, we’d taken out this huge mortgage to buy the apartment, Remington was on the way, I had no idea how I was going to pay for it all.

‘I didn’t tell Clizia because I didn’t want to worry her. I acted like the new book was coming along fine, and I kept heading out to work every morning. But at this stage I wasn’t even trying to write,
I was just sitting in cafés, looking out the window, wondering if everyone would be better off if I just jumped off a bridge.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Clearly you’ve never been in debt, Claude. After a while it’s all you can see. And it’s a vicious circle, because the more I worried about it, the less chance there was that I’d ever come up with an idea for a book. Anyway, there I was, being depressed in various cafés. There were maybe three or four I’d go to at different times of the day. Over time I got to know a few of the waitresses quite well, and if it was quiet we’d have these long, philosophical talks. They were young, they had all these hopes and dreams, and though I couldn’t exactly share their optimism, still, it was a way out of this endless despairing conversation I was having with myself the rest of the time. In fact, I realized after a while that talking to the waitresses was actually the high point of my day. And then it hit me –
that
was the idea.’

‘What? Become a waiter?’

‘No, no, I mean that relationship. Waitress and customer.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You think you’re the first man to fall in love with a waitress, Claude? This is a growing phenomenon. And it’s no mystery. Think about how we live now, packed off in our digital eyries. Yes, we have phones, we have email, but we might not speak to an actual flesh-and-blood person all day. And then we go to a café, and suddenly in the midst of our fully networked isolation there’s a pretty girl who smiles at us and asks how we are. She’s actually there, not just a face on a screen. And she’s bringing us cake! Is it any wonder we form attachments?’

‘That sounds plausible,’ I say gruffly, embarrassed at having my own situation so unsparingly detailed. ‘But how does your business venture relate to it?’

‘Okay. So you’ve developed these feelings, which are very natural and human. What happens when you sit down in a café or restaurant only to find that your favourite waitress isn’t there? On
the one hand, it doesn’t sound like a big deal. But seeing her was literally the only thing you had to look forward to all day! And it actually feels pretty crushing. That’s the kind of scenario Hotwaitress is designed to eliminate. What we proposed –’

‘ “We” – this means you and … ?’ I ask with a sinking feeling.

‘Me and Igor. What we proposed was a comprehensive guide to waitresses in cafés and restaurants all over the city. When they’re on, when they’re off, what sections they’re working, their likes, dislikes, hobbies and pastimes, the latest gossip as well as plenty of pic—’

‘Wait, wait,’ I interject. ‘Are you serious? This was a genuine business venture?’

‘Well, yeah,’ he says, looking slightly offended. ‘What’s the problem?’

There are so many problems I have difficulty focusing on one. ‘How exactly would you find out all these personal details? The waitresses are just going to tell you?’

‘No, of course not. We’d have a dedicated data-collection team deployed across the city. And we’d also repackage whatever the waitresses have uploaded themselves, on to Facebook and so on.’

The surveillance equipment: at last the pieces fall into place. I feel a kind of deep and distressing pang within, a sort of moral headache. ‘Surely this can’t be legal.’

‘It’s an information service, that’s all,’ Paul says. ‘How can information be bad?’

He sits down opposite me and leans earnestly over the table. ‘Imagine being able to tap into a resource like that for Ariadne. Think what a comfort that would be.’

‘I wouldn’t be comforted by the knowledge that countless others were out there, stalking her online.’

‘It’s not stalking,’ Paul says.

‘It is,’ I say.

‘It’s not.’

‘It is practically the definition of stalking,’ I say.

Paul throws his hands in the air. ‘It’s the twenty-first century! People expect to be spied on! For a good-looking woman it’d probably be more upsetting if she found out she
wasn’t
being spied on.’

‘And your wife, what did she think about this business venture?’

‘Oh, Clizia,’ he says impatiently.

‘Well? You told me before how much she hated being stared at by men in the club. What did she think of you keeping waitresses under surveillance?’

‘Clizia’s living in a fool’s paradise. We have to eat, don’t we? This is what people want now. They don’t want novels. They want reality, up close and personal.’

‘Someone else’s reality, turned into entertainment.’

‘You might not like it. But I’ll tell you this, the response to Hotwaitress was the polar opposite of the response to
Clown
. We had investors queuing out the door! Venture capital, private equity! We had a pre-launch party with an elephant – an elephant!’

‘So what happened? Why aren’t you an Internet millionaire?’

His face clouds. ‘There were legal issues. You know how it goes – it got tied up in court, all our funding went on solicitors’ fees.’

‘Maybe for the best,’ I say.

‘It could have been big. Loneliness is one of the few growth areas these days. And it’s self-perpetuating, you know? Because the more people pay to stop feeling lonely, the lonelier they tend to get.’

‘Is that why you spend all your money on lap dances?’ I say.

He purses his lips, lowers his eyes. ‘About that,’ he says. ‘I’m going to need another advance.’

‘Whatcha readin’ there, Claude?’

‘Nothing. Old news.’

‘I saw you in the Ark.’ Ish is chewing one of their home-made cookies. ‘I was waving at you, but you didn’t notice.’

‘Ah-um …’ I swivel my chair away, busy myself shuffling documents.

‘You were talking to that waitress, and then you just took off, like a streak of lightning! What happened, she catch you sneaking a peek down her top?’

‘Mmm.’ I stare at the screen and batter a random series of keys.

‘Like a streak of lightning.’ She chuckles to herself, and then, abruptly, she stops. ‘Wait a second … are you after her? Were you in there trying to chat her up?’

‘I am not “after” anybody,’ I say irritably.

‘Is that what all this put-my-life-in-a-book stuff is about?’ she asks. ‘You’re trying to get with Ariadne? That’s her name, isn’t it? Ariadne?’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Ariadne,’ Ish repeats, as if she’s talking to herself, and then, ‘There’s nothing to be embarrassed about, Claude. She’s gorgeous. And she seems really cool too, like a real free-spirit type.’ She notes this with a kind of sadness, as though she were watching Ariadne through the bars of a cage. ‘Though I wouldn’t have thought she’d be the kind of girl
you’d
go for.’

‘I’m not “going” for anyone,’ I snap; I experience a sudden, vehement wish for her to go away, because now I too can see the bars of the prison we are both incarcerated in, and my plan to escape seems foolhardy, laughable, like trying to dig your way out of a cell with the stirrer from a semi-skimmed latte.

‘Okay, whatever you say,’ she shrugs. ‘Anyway, FYI, I have a date tomorrow night.’

‘What are you telling me for?’

‘No reason,’ she concedes, and turns to her computer.

This afternoon’s episode has left me with serious doubts. Paul’s intervention not only ruined a promising conversation with Ariadne, but I can’t even console myself with the thought that it might have inspired him to write; instead, it seems only to have reawoken memories of his hare-brained business plan.

Now I find myself torn. After today’s demonstration, the wisest course of action is surely to cut my losses and abandon the project. At the same time, the more I find out about Paul’s life,
the more responsible I feel for him. Clizia’s permanent fury now makes perfect sense. To marry an artist and find yourself chained instead to a professional lost cause, whose efforts range from monetizing isolation to outright theft – isn’t that a betrayal just as bad as the one that brought her here? When she signed up to work as a waitress and instead found herself contracted to a lap-dancing club? Would it be any great surprise if she were looking for a way out?

The rain comes down all day, and the next morning it is heavier still, turning the plaza into a dismal game of hopscotch, figures in black shoes and trench coats leaping and splashing their way to shelter. At the zombie encampment, one of the tents has collapsed, and the undead scurry about with tape and buckets.

‘What’s going to happen to them when Royal Irish gets shut down?’ Gary McCrum says, looking out the window. ‘Will they all just leave?’

‘I suppose. Royal’s the zombie bank, after all.’

‘Shame.’ Gary McCrum scratches his belly. ‘They bring a bit of life to the place.’

‘They’re zombies, Gary.’

‘You know what I mean.’

The government has had a number of days to digest our report, but so far no action has been taken on Royal. The Minister gives a brief statement this afternoon, but it’s just the same threadbare phrases again: Royal is open for business, Ireland’s fundamentals are sound, the IMF is not moving in. Behind him stands the little Portuguese man I saw in Rachael’s office; he listens to the Minister with lowered eyes, as if to a eulogy at a funeral.

Dark days for Ireland, and Greece, and almost everybody else; but at BOT the good times continue to roll. The market has responded positively to our quixotic takeover bid for Agron; the American bank’s board of directors is reportedly receptive, as, no doubt, a beached whale would be receptive to being put back in
the sea; an underwriter has been found, and Porter Blankly’s old friend the Caliph has offered BOT a line of credit to the tune of several billion.

‘I still don’t understand how this is supposed to work,’ Ish says. ‘Agron is huge. We’re small. If we borrow all this money to buy it – won’t we be over-leveraged? Like, massively?’

‘This is in fact the whole point,’ Jurgen says. ‘Porter’s strategy is to distribute BOT’s connections so widely across the global marketplace that we become systemically necessary, that is, too big to fail.’

‘So they can’t let us go down, because then all of the people we’ve borrowed from would be pulled down with us,’ Kevin glosses.

Ish still seems unconvinced. ‘It sounds like putting on a suicide belt so that no one will bump into you on the subway.’

‘That is quite a good comparison,’ Jurgen agrees. ‘We are hoping BOT’s high market standing will persuade the other subway riders to fund a particularly large and explosive suicide belt.’

To ensure a quick turnaround, the deal will be done here in Dublin, where at least some of the extraordinarily complicated legal requirements can be brushed under the carpet. Corporate has been assigned extra offices in a building in the neighbouring block; extra staff are being flown in from New York.

On the ninth floor of Transaction House, meanwhile, where until a few months ago a property company had its offices, new doors with code-locks are being hung, expensive new desks and chairs delivered, thrillingly white new whiteboards fitted to the walls. Details are scant as yet, but it is believed that the activity has to do with Porter’s other prong: to take BOT deeper into the abstract, developing new financial instruments that will ensure profits no matter what is happening in the so-called real world. Howie’s name is on the door of the corner office; he is taking Grisha with him, and a hand-picked team of junior analysts.

‘Those guys are going way out.’ Kevin is seeking to
alleviate the heartbreak of being passed over for the team by acting as a kind of ninth-floor John the Baptist, making sonorous prophecies about their work whenever the opportunity arises. ‘
Waaaay
out.’

‘But what are they actually doing?’ Gary McCrum asks.

Kevin shakes his head. ‘All I know is that there’s some heavy fucking maths involved.’

‘I heard Porter was giving them a hedge fund,’ Jocelyn Lockhart says.

‘I heard that too.’

‘I heard it was a hedge fund, only more counterintuitive.’

‘That’s one thing you can count on.’ Kevin slings his foot over his knee and swivels in his chair. ‘Whatever it is, it’ll be
majorly
counterintuitive.’

‘And is Rachael involved in it too?’

‘Rachael,’ Kevin snorts.

When we are alone, Ish tells me that Howie asked her to be on his team.

‘What? Why didn’t you mention this before? What did you say?’

She doesn’t reply for a moment; a sudden blast of sun through the venetian blind throws tiger-stripes of shadow across her face. ‘I said no.’

‘No?’ I am confused: in our world, when an opportunity is presented, you take it. ‘I don’t expect you to make the slog here for ever. Howie is the growing star. He will bring you with him.’

Ish shrugs, sips from her water bottle. ‘Maybe I’m happy enough making the slog,’ she says. ‘Anyway, it sounds like cobblers.’

‘Did he tell you what they were doing?’

‘Some sort of a fund all right. He said it was going to transform Western civilization. But it’s Howie, Claude. He’s a bullshit artist.’

‘Porter doesn’t think he’s a bullshit artist. Kevin told me New York’s started bringing him in on strategy meetings.’

‘That bloke’s never had a strategy in his life that didn’t involve putting his dick up some poor unwitting bastard’s arsehole.’

‘Well, in their eyes he is a genius.’

‘Yeah,’ Ish says disconsolately. ‘Who knows, maybe he is.’ She turns back to her terminal. ‘Bend over, world. Here comes another genius.’