And that’s stupid enough to make me stop. What, the thing’s going to come up through the floor? Or out of the sewer, like something from a bad movie? What am I, nine years old? For heaven’s sake, whose tiny balls are these? I am Constantine Kyriakos. I could kill any shark.
Using.
Only.
My.
Balls.
In the flagstoned room Patriarch Megalos is looking a little concerned, so I have another chuckle and say that it will be a very lucrative market, and a lot of total arseholes are going to get rich out of it, and wouldn’t it be better for these billions of euros to flow into the coffers of the OSASS than those of the Landesbanken? Because the Germans, Eminence, are crazy for this stuff. ‘Tulip fever,’ says the Patriarch. I have no idea what that means, so I nod and say: ‘Got it in one.’
‘May I tell you about what I believe, Constantine Kyriakos?’
‘Please do.’ Please don’t.
‘I am a believer in God, of course, but also in something else. I am a believer in Greece. Greece has suffered very much in these last years for sins committed elsewhere and to some extent for sins we committed ourselves. Ours were sins of laxity, as you might say, and those of America and the rest were sins of enthusiasm. They were seized with the joy of an impossible equation, a getting of something for nothing, and the result was that our sleepy little country was brought to a dark place. But I believe it may be that a great reversal is coming, that the focus of civilisation may shift from California and Beijing on and on around the globe until it is once again in Athens, just as Plato once said that it would. In the twelfth book of the Civitas Dei, we find that Plato believed in a circular cosmos. He taught that the universe repeats upon itself, and that one day he would again be teaching in Athens just as he was then. It is the doctrine of apocatastasis: a return to the beginning. I understand there is a proposition of mathematical physics which might support such a pattern.’
Yes, well: a topologist is a person who cannot tell the difference between a teacup and a donut. I remind myself not to get smart with the nice client, and nod as if I spend my weekends talking cosmological theology with my buddies and this idea is a personal favourite.
Megalos carries on: ‘I do not believe in perfect return. I do not believe it is inevitable. The world is not so kind. But I do believe that it may come, if we seize it – and when it does, our little country shall rise to greatness once again. We shall once more have fire in our spines, and Greece shall be torn no longer.’
I take time to consider this mountainous soundbite of wisdom. I compose my face into a suitably contemplative mode. ‘That would indeed be a fine thing.’
The words hang there and I see the priest behind the man: the flash of devotion that he carries deep inside.
I swallow, and we look at each other across the table, breathing in the beeswax air from the desk and listening to the sound of Athens above our heads. Megalos nods once, then sighs heavily. The shine in him retreats, and the modern theologian re-emerges. ‘I believe this is a matter of practical theology. In the world we inhabit now, theology is speculative. It is the discussion of otherworldly things. But to our forefathers it was no more than the examination of commonly known truths. These days we hear of the Garden of Eden and we think of a garden. We hear of original sin and we imagine a specific transgression – but our sin is not one of action but of understanding. Ah. You look like one of my novices. Indulge me.’
‘Of course.’ So long as we can have your business, I will listen to this once a month, every month, for the rest of my life. Who knows? It may even come in handy if I meet an attractive nun.
‘You have heard of the Persian Immortals?’
Persian Immortals. Yes. Sure. In my head: a picture of men in blue armour. Sparta, Thermopylae. That terrible American film. ‘An army of ten thousand elite soldiers. When one died, he was replaced by another man, so it was said they were eternal.’
‘Yes! Exactly. And yet also and most fundamentally: no. You parrot what you have been told, but your teachers missed the point because they are circumscribed by their own immersion in a culture of written words. It is not that a man died and another was called to be an Immortal, to fill a role. Rather, Immortals cannot die because the role supersedes the man. When a body falls, another steps into its place – so the Immortal goes on. A person living in this way is not the sum of their experience, of fallible human memory, but the expression of a permanent identity. It is not a convention or even a magic. It is a truth, as simple as the sunrise. But the true Greece exists only in that other world. The Greece we inhabit now is a shadow. We must rediscover a way of being in which the divine is everywhere, in which we move through a world where theology is literally true. If we can do that, we will indeed return to the days of Plato and our greatness.’ He smiles, and I wonder if my mouth is noticeably open or if I look as fucked in the earholes as I presently feel.
‘Well. To make this happen, we must have many things, but one, inevitably, is wealth. So. Here I am. The coffers of the Order must grow so that they can be released at the proper time, to buffer the poor and nurture the coming spring. You see?’
‘I see.’
‘So tell me, Constantine Kyriakos. Honestly.’ He leans back, and something in his posture says that if he was another sort of person he’d stretch his feet out, maybe even prop them on the kidney desk and let the big stupid hat fall on the ground. I wonder if he ever does that, just let it go and feel naughty as his no doubt weighty office hits the floor.
‘Tell you what?’
‘Tell me of your catabasis, of course.’
Is that even a thing? ‘I have two, but I can’t get them to breed.’
He laughs and waves his hand. ‘Forgive a scholar his jargon. Catabasis is the journey of Orpheus into the underworld to retrieve his love. Yours went better than his.’ Rumbling in his belly: more chuckling. Gosh, he’s funny. I let him know I think so. Encouraged, he leans forward. ‘Please, Constantine Kyriakos. Indulge me. Tell me about the shark.’
Oh. Oh! He’s a fan. My God. The Patriarch of the Order of St Augustine and St Spyridon is a starfucker. Okay. Okay: that, I understand. I reach out my hand to him, then collect myself and press it to the palm of the other in an unconscious gesture of prayer. ‘Beautiful. And truthfully, not remotely interested in me. They take seals, you know, and tuna. I think she was a little lost.’
‘“She”?’
‘For the sake of argument.’
‘It is all quite Orphic, you know. Very Greek. All that’s missing is a girl for you to rescue.’
Something impels me to honesty. ‘I was diving with a woman, but to be honest I feel I was somewhat rescued from her by the shark.’
Megalos chuckles: oh, you sinners and your amusing lifestyles! Then he sobers. ‘And now? How did you feel?’
The truth slips out. ‘The shark was very big, Eminence, and I was very little.’ A beat. ‘I suppose it was the most spiritual experience of my adult life.’
Now, now, now he extends his hand to me across the desk, capturing mine, accepting the divinity of my experience and touching it, tasting it with his fingers. He spreads my fingers, probing like a butcher with a joint. His gaze fixes unblinking on my face, searching and unveiling. I can feel his nails as he grips my arm. What can he possibly find in my flesh that is so all-fired important? Is he looking for melanoma? For tattoos? What does he see in my eyes?
After a long moment, he exhales and releases me. ‘We shall do business,’ he says.
Rock and fucking roll. The Eagle has landed, it’s a small step for man, mission accomplished.
I look back at him: my best impression of a sheep glimpsing the fold and wondering, perhaps not for the first time, whether it might be the place for me. ‘You won’t regret it, Eminence.’
‘No, my son. I won’t.’
Which is one of those weird things priests say which make them sound like actors in the Godfather movies. He waits a moment, then smiles.
With great sincerity: ‘Torn no longer, Nikolaos Megalos.’
*
I have been in the office for an hour or so. It’s a Wednesday, which is when I usually re-emphasise my alpha status by hugging all the other men. A few years ago there was a TV show about problem dogs. It ran late at night on those channels you basically only watch if you’re staying in a hotel, and it came on after all the other dross and it was full of bullshit Freudian analysis of misbehaving Rottweilers and doggy hypnosis to uncover past lives as a wolf. Homeopathy for dogs? Yes. Acupuncture? Yes. Massage? Yes. Colonic irrigation? Sure – why not? (Because it’s a fucking dog, you morons. If it’s unhappy and you stick a hose up its ass, I can almost guarantee that you will not ameliorate the situation one tiny bit.)
And then there was this one guy, Sam, who used to work with police dogs and he had no time for any of that shit at all. ‘If the dog thinks you are the boss,’ Sam said, ‘you will be fine. You pay attention to the dog, you feed the dog, you exercise the dog, you own the dog, it’s your dog. However, if the dog thinks you are weak, it will fuck with you. Dogs are not cosy. Dogs are dogs. They are animals. They need clear hierarchies or they get confused and when they’re confused they piss on things, bite things, and mate with things until they get less confused. That’s all. That’s what it is. There’s just you and the dog and one of you is on top.’ And then he looked out of the screen and I swear to you he was talking only to me, and he said: ‘Actually, it’s not all that different with people.’ And I knew that he was right.
Since then I have been careful to mount everyone in the office a few times a month. I get my arms around them and I make them carry me a little. If it’s a straight guy, I make them squirm out of the way of my genitals. Once they’ve done that, they basically just do what I want, irrespective of whether they are my junior or not. It’s ridiculous how effective it is. In theory, I suppose, one of them might hit me, but so far no one ever has.
I am particularly careful to do this with Harrison. Harrison is technically my boss, although it’s only technical because I’m a rainmaker and he’s not. He’s a box-ticker and a brake on the excesses of the younger guys. Basically Harrison is here to make sure no one engages in any activity that is actually illegal, or if they do, we can all say we didn’t know and fire them and that will be that. He’s the trip-switch between the world and the bank’s own profits: if anything really shitty happens, Harrison gets burned personally, but the bank survives. This makes him naturally conservative, but if I hump his leg from time to time he goes pink and runs away – he’s shy and British, and married to an appalling Danish woman who sings hymns in the car when she drives him to work – and that means I can just get on with life.
Harrison is at root a perfectly acceptable person. He is inoffensive, competent and decent. He has never come to any of my parties and he does not comment on anything in the gossip sheets. He does not drink too much or take any form of intoxicating pharmaceutical. He has reached his natural ceiling and this does not bother him. It’s almost awe-inspiring how average his life is, and he seems to love that.
But he does one thing which makes me want to fart on his head. He believes he is a hard-core banker, a wheeler-dealer, and he insists on keeping an old monochrome CRT monitor on his desk, one of those ones from the eighties when he was coming up in the business. It’s made by IBM and it pollutes the office just by being there.
So Harrison has this excrescence on his desk and now a lot of the guys have set up their expensive computers to look the same, like it’s some sort of useful tool. It won’t display graphics properly, just characters, so you’ve basically got a text-only monitor. Next they’ll have a town crier come through the office and read the stock prices. ‘Oh, Constantine, you should get one, this way you don’t get distracted by Twitter and Facebook.’
You should not be distracted by anything, you infant. When you work, you work. Does fucking SEAL Team Six get distracted by Twitter? No. Why not? Because they focus. They have discipline. They know that what they do has consequences. People will die. Well, here is the news: the same is true of us. Money is life. Poverty kills. If you are going to get distracted by your computer, you don’t deserve your job.
But no. Harrison has everyone thinking that the answer is to cut down on your distractions, not your tendency to get distracted. Typically weak anglophone logic. So he has this Stone Age display with the prices ticking down it, and in the summertime we have to double everyone else’s air-con usage because it throws off heat like a bastard. You can actually detect it with a Geiger counter. It is the only thing I cannot get him to flex on by repeatedly putting my arm around him and crushing his shoulders against my chest. How this of all things comes to be the sticking point, I have no idea.
He’s at lunch, so I’m sitting at his desk because we’re talking strategy and the conference room is in use.
Brunner, the Swiss, is talking about the Asian property market and how we all need to pay attention to it. I am not paying attention to Brunner because I am already paying attention to the Asian property market, and I’m not sure it’s going to do anything very interesting.
In the pretentious monochrome of Jim Harrison’s outmoded terminal, I see a flicker, almost a ripple. For a moment I think the dratted thing is finally failing, giving up to modernity, and halle-fucking-lujah. But no, it isn’t. Something is happening in the real world and it is reflected on the screen. The last digit of each stock value shifts to 4, just for a moment and one after another, running down the alphabetical list. For me this is like witnessing a solar eclipse or seeing Halley’s Comet, which I did when I was very small and plan to do again when I’m old. It is a rare and beautiful mathematical caprice called a Markov chain: an apparently meaningful sequence in a flow of random numbers. This is a particularly pretty one, a wonder of nature requiring a staggering string of coincidences. It looks almost like animation, conveys a sense of movement and of deliberation. The 4 moves back up the line, then hovers around the middle of the list.
Roscombe AG is a decent-sized pharmaceutical company. They make an antacid everyone uses, and they’re the market leader in some palliative drugs for chronic conditions. In other words they are boringly profitable, and reliably positioned. Short of a radical reinvention of medicine or a massive embezzlement, they will exist for ever. On the screen, I watch as their euro price goes:
91.750
91.754
91.740
91.450
94.750
41.750
91.750
Somewhere, no doubt, there are people shouting ‘What the fuck?’ Probably New York. Then the 4 works its way back again from left to right, and then it’s gone.
It takes barely a second. No human trader could act on that sort of blip, but for a very brief period of time, Roscombe’s stock was at less than half price. Someone could have made a fortune, and someone probably did. There’s a layer of buying and selling now that happens in eyeblinks, as our algorithms and their algorithms fight it out over tiny fluctuations, and may the best software win. The banks have bought up huge warehouses and derelict buildings near the exchanges so as to cut milliseconds off the transmission times of their orders, filled them with the highest specification of computers in rows and rows and rows. There are no offices, just endless clean corridors occasionally patrolled by security men, and humming boxes looking for opportunities. Somewhere in those buildings is a trader – an automated system – that just made out like a pirate. Probably more than one.
A 4, like the fin of a shark. Of course that is what I would see. It was inevitable the comparison would occur to me. I’m getting used to my obsession, even getting rather fond of it, like the annoying but familiar tics of the lift machinery in an apartment I rented in Manhattan. The human mind is a device for seeing patterns. We can see faces in clouds, myths in the stars. My mind has a sort of
dent, and that dent is shaped like a shark, so all the patterns and possibilities I see fall into that form. Of course a number 4 is a dorsal fin. So are black buttons and crescent moons. So are zeppelins and sushi and Madonna’s conical bra. If you venture twenty-two million nine hundred and thirty-one thousand or so digits into the digits of Pi, you will find 4 occurring eight times in succession. Should I attribute significance to that as well? I can find sharks in the patterns in a whisky glass, sharks in my kolokitho keftedes.
Ten seconds later, Roscombe AG goes down. The price suddenly slumps 44.444 and doesn’t go back up. It hangs for long enough that humans can notice, can act, and then abruptly it’s 4.444 and then it’s just a row of dashes. The screen fizzes and dies, and I see something huge and greenish-white slip down and away into the cathode grey.
‘What the fuck?’ says De Vries.
‘Moment of silence,’ I reply, holding up my hand.
‘For Harrison’s toy?’
‘For Roscombe AG. RIP.’
And they all say ‘What?’ and run over to other screens to check. I don’t bother to follow. Roscombe is dead, and a few seconds later they’re nodding, murmuring: ‘Shit, I wonder what happened. Jesus.’
I know what happened. Roscombe was playing in the shallows and it was taken by a shark.
*
Stella’s house is the place I return to, over and over again, though I am not welcome any more and so, customarily, I visit only in dreams.
Yet here I am on the doorstep: not for the first time these last months, but for the first time in a very long while I actually ring the bell. Cosmatos stamps along the hall, well-remembered curmudgeonly tread on a thinning modern Iranian carpet. Flings wide the door. Stares at me. I see his hand go back as if directing my attention to the clock behind him on the wall. Am I late?
With his open palm he slaps me, and screams into my face, wide-eyed and grieving, a noise that is like a dockside winch going very badly wrong. It lasts for a remarkably long time, rising and falling. I stare into his mouth, past his teeth. I see his uvula. I smell his breath, stinking and heavy with coffee. The sound is surprisingly complex. If you were to graph it, you’d want a three-dimensional representation of its components one against another to appreciate it properly. Because of the phlegm in his throat, it’s coming out as a chord, and I can see the colours around it hanging in the air.
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