The Devil I Know

by Claire Kilroy

  She turned to me and I stared at her in amazement, a look she would later describe as one of withering scorn. That’s exactly what I was thinking! I wanted to tell her, and I struggled to formulate that response, but in the end I couldn’t quite bring myself to blurt something so unguarded and I looked back at the sea without comment.

  She said she ought to be getting back to her guests, so I performed my usual pinched routine of expressing disbelief at the time on my watch, never mind that I couldn’t read the tiny numerals in the dark. I watched her make her way back up to the floodlit ranch, understanding that some delicate connection had been broken, and that it had been broken by me, and then I set off home on foot across the moors.

  ‘This is the same barbeque mentioned in both Mr McGee’s and Mr Hickey’s testimonies at which the proposal to purchase the farm in north County Dublin was also first mooted, is that correct?’

  I wasn’t present for that conversation either, but yes, they’d evidently discussed it. Hickey rang me first thing the morning after the barbeque. ‘Where did you fuck off to?’ he wanted to know, but instead of waiting for an answer he instructed me to be ready to be picked up at eight fifteen on Monday morning since an important meeting with McGee and the Bills was scheduled for nine. He asked me to do my best to secure M. Deauville’s attendance and he apologised for the short notice. Apologised to M. Deauville, that is, not to me.

  ‘And was it possible for M. Deauville to attend?’

  No.

  ‘Can you confirm that these are your signatures?’

  [A sheaf of documents is passed to the witness.]

  Yes, that is my signature. And yes, that is my signature also. As is that, and that, and that. These are documents authorising the issuance of €228 million in loan notes by Castle Holdings to co-finance the Shanghai bid. Money travelled through me as freely as languages. Uncanny. That is the word they used.

  The meeting began on Monday morning in the glass boardroom on the Liffey. The bank was set at the broadest point of the river where the mountain water converged with the tidal heave of the sea. Its brilliant expanse blinded my eyes so that when I turned to face the twelve men seated around the boardroom table, a murky shoal of variegations swam across their skin, and although I blinked those shadows would not be dispelled. It was the same crowd that had attended Hickey’s barbeque. Yes, the Hunger was there. The Hunger was always there. The Hunger will always be with us. Look at him.

  ‘Youse’ll be able to see it from here,’ Hickey remarked, standing at the window with his hands clasped behind his back. His belly was as big as a beach ball. Knock him down and he’d bounce back up.

  ‘See what?’ one of them enquired. Boyle, I think. They were all the same. Boyler, Coyler, Doyler, sitting there sharpening their knives.

  ‘Me landmark hotel,’ Hickey said proudly, but no one was interested in Hickey’s landmark hotel any more. Hickey’s landmark hotel was yesterday. McGee closed the venetian blinds and switched on a wall-mounted screen the size of a pool table.

  A map of Leinster appeared on the screen, hatched areas indicating the zones in which development was under way. These areas corresponded to the standing army of cranes stationed across the horizon like pennants bearing regimental colours declaring which territory belonged to whom. We were more than ever a colonised nation. The Claremont site barely registered in the scale of things.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ McGee began, ‘I wish to draw your attention to our next acquisition.’ The screen was interactive. He reached for a substantial land bank north of the M50 and highlighted it blue. It was larger than the entire peninsula of Howth. ‘We’re proposing to construct a new urban quarter for Dublin here.’

  Hickey folded his arms and shook his head, obstinate as a taxi driver. ‘That’s not Dublin.’

  ‘It will be when we’re finished with it, Dessie,’ McGee said. ‘It’s all a question of branding.’ The Bills laughed. Hickey reckoned he’d better laugh too to show that he was in on the joke.

  McGee enlarged the blue site. ‘What I am recommending’, he continued, ‘is that Mr Hickey timetables a consultation process with his pal the Minister.’

  I frowned at the screen. ‘But those lands are already zoned residential, according to your map. We don’t need to bribe the Minister to rezone them.’

  ‘I’m glad you raised this issue, Lawrence,’ said McGee. ‘Lawrence has raised an important issue: we do not need to get the lands rezoned. However, we do need to get the Metro North diverted from its present proposed course along the M1 corridor to serve these lands instead, and that’s where Mr Hickey’s chum Ray comes in.’

  ‘That’s grand,’ said Hickey. ‘I’ll have a word with Ray. Ray will take care a that.’

  ‘Can I leave it with you, Dessie?’

  ‘You can a course, Mr McGee.’

  ‘Excellent. Get a good price off the fucker. These ministers are taking the piss.’

  McGee closed that window and opened another. It was a map of a city built on a river, the distinctively serpentine Thames. ‘Right, gentlemen: London. The profits being generated by the Irish property boom are being reinvested across the water.’ He tapped the toolbar and a rash of flags sprang up across the city. ‘The tricolour is already flying here,’ he said, tapping one of the flags. A photograph of Claridge’s appeared on the screen. ‘And here.’ Hamley’s toy shop on Regent Street. ‘And here.’ Versace’s flagship store on New Bond Street. ‘And here, and here, and here,’ he went on, navigating from one flag to the next. Tiffany & Co. on Old Bond Street. The Savoy, the Connaught, the Berkeley hotels. The Unilever building on Blackfriars Bridge. Goldman Sachs and the Daily Mail building on Fleet Street. Rothschild’s HQ in the City, the Citibank tower in Canary Wharf. ‘Plus we’re steadily buying up the Docklands. We’re invading London not with armies but with hard currency. This is our next project.’ A photograph of a whole block stretching from Harvey Nichols to Harrods. ‘This will set us back the princely sum of 530 million. We’ve outbid the Abu Dhabi royal family.’

  ‘Nice one,’ said Hickey.

  ‘Is that sterling or euro?’ Boyler or Coyler or Doyler asked.

  ‘Who gives a shit?’ said the Duffer. ‘We’ll make that on the farmland alone. Once we get the Metro diverted and hyperinflate the price.’

  ‘And London is just the start,’ said McGee. ‘Questions?’

  There were none.

  After the motion to annex London had been passed, it was time for lunch. It was served in an adjoining room. I left the building to take a call from M. Deauville. ‘They’re talking about making a load more trophy purchases in London,’ I told him. ‘They’re all draped in the green jersey up there.’ I kept my voice to an urgent whisper, wary of being overheard, for the plaza was crawling with investment bankers. I could be shot for desertion.

  ‘I see.’

  Tocka tocka in the background, always the tocka tocka, so that I felt I was vying with a thousand others for his attention. ‘They’re planning on purchasing the Battersea power station.’

  ‘Mmmm?’ He sounded interested, but only mildly. Did he appreciate the scale of the acquisition?

  ‘It’s a prime redevelopment site. Thirty-eight acres in Central London. Seven million square feet of mixed-use residential, retail and office space. And £150 million of the £400 million purchase price will be funded by issuing loan notes.’ I hissed those last two words as if they were contraband, a hard-drugs consignment. Loan notes. IOUs.

  I waited for M. Deauville to plead caution – to plead reason – to point out that this whole thing was getting out of hand, that it was one matter when we were talking about the site across the road from the castle gates where I could keep an eye on things, keep an eye on Hickey, but that we now appeared to be entering a realm of fantasy. Tocka tocka on the other end of the phone until even that petered out and I was listening to silence. Was he still on the line? I looked at the screen. The call-duration counter was running. I put the phone back to my ear.


  ‘They’re buying it with debt, M. Deauville,’ I said at the risk of repeating myself. ‘That’s what they’re talking about up there. They’re paying for £150 million of the Battersea site with debt.’

  ‘How can you buy something with debt?’ I persisted when he passed no comment. ‘I don’t understand what’s happening any more.’ I glanced up at the penthouse suite to make sure they weren’t spying, but the glass reflected the sky. Office workers were striding about checking themselves out in the many mirrored surfaces. They spoke in a contorted nasal accent that hadn’t existed in Dublin in my day. I didn’t like this hard new elite. They made me feel that my day was over. ‘I’d better go back upstairs,’ I eventually conceded when it became evident that I was only taking up M. Deauville’s time.

  There was an acrid smell of sweat in the boardroom, or maybe it was the smell of money. ‘Can’t we open a window?’ I asked, tugging at my shirt collar, ‘isn’t there a window we can open?’ but nobody was listening to me. McGee stood up and I sat down.

  He touched his giant screen to reveal a satellite photograph of an archipelago.

  ‘What the fuck is that?’ said Hickey, eager to display his hunger to learn. Top of the class was not a role in which he was well versed.

  McGee eyed him over his glasses. ‘Are you seriously telling me, Mr Hickey, that you don’t recognise The World in Dubai?’

  A confused hesitation and then Hickey laughed. A course he recognised The World in Dubai! Any developer worth his salt recognised The World in Dubai, and D. Hickey had been monitoring property prices there for months, ready to swoop and make a killing. It was all a question a timing, wasn’t that right, lads? He looked around the table.

  McGee zoomed in on one of the islands. ‘Last month, we purchased the Ireland Island for €28 million and we’re developing it into an Irish-themed resort, to include a large internal marina,’ a computer-generated image of a marina on the screen, ‘apartments and villas,’ accompanying artwork, ‘a gym, hotel and an Irish-themed pub. To distinguish it from the other islands, the Ireland Island will feature a recreation of the Giant’s Causeway. And so, going forward.’ He enlarged a grey blob in a navy ocean. ‘What we’re here to do today, gentlemen, is purchase Britain.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  Laughter. They thought I was joking.

  ‘Now,’ McGee continued, ‘given how much property we’ve added to our portfolio this quarter, we’ll have to issue commercial bonds to cover it.’

  Commercial bonds. More debt. McGee didn’t have any money left and yet he refused to fold. I recognised the compulsive behaviour of an addict. This wasn’t a boardroom. This was a betting shop. McGee needed to join the programme. They all needed to join the programme. But first they had to hit rock bottom. You couldn’t help them. They had to help themselves. I put down my pen and folded my arms.

  My mouth was sour with the taste of coffee. The girl in the pinstripe suit brought in a fresh pot on the hour and the men obediently contemplated her backside, for this ritual was a duty, it was being part of the team.

  I took the opportunity to catch Hickey’s eye. ‘I think we should leave now,’ I told him quietly, and he threw me this imploring, panicked look: don’t ruin this for me, please. It wasn’t the wealth that Hickey was after, I saw then, or not only the wealth, but also the opportunity to sit at the big boys’ table, to be on the other side of the fence for once in his life. Can I leave the Minister with you, Dessie? You can a course, Mr McGee!

  McGee summoned another map onto the screen and slid his glasses down his nose to peer at us over them, nodding gravely as if yes, it was true: he was divulging the blueprint of a top-secret military base. ‘This, gentlemen, is the real target. We’re onto the hard stuff now.’

  Shanghai.

  More food appeared when darkness fell, as well as a brace of bottles of Brunello di Montalcino. McGee made a show of blowing the dust off the labels to demonstrate their vintage. He had tried to fill my glass and I had covered it with a demurring hand. ‘You’ll take a drop,’ the man insisted, and Hickey had shot him a warning look, shaking his head as if I were a volatile animal to be handled with caution. McGee had backed off. The wine was rich in tannin and it blackened their lips. I could smell it on their blackened breaths, their blackened hearts, their blackened souls. All of them laughing in a medieval display of mettle and Hickey laughing loudest of them all, having discovered the dark art of the calculator. What I cannot remember is anything being funny.

  ‘My colleagues inform me that you’ve placed a bid on a site on the Pudong skyline,’ M. Deauville commented some hours later when I left the boardroom to accept his call. Tocka tocka, tocka tocka: messages were criss-crossing the World Wide Web like shooting stars. The news had travelled fast. This was big. I had known it was big. M. Deauville had known it too. Perhaps he had been testing me earlier. Seeing what I was made of. Seeing if I would go all the way.

  It was maybe two or three in the morning by then and my eyes hurt. McGee had suggested a ten-minute break, so I had located an unlocked office at the end of the corridor in which to take the call. I closed the door and slid down its length to the floor, grateful for the respite of the darkness. There were twelve men drinking around that table. I wanted bitterly to make it thirteen.

  ‘It’s hard,’ I told M. Deauville, struggling to control my voice.

  ‘I know.’

  I gazed at the workers scattered throughout the floors of the building opposite. So many of them although it was the middle of the night, their faces gaunt in the glare of the computer terminals at which they stared so intently that they barely registered the cleaning staff working around their sedentary forms, servicing them like drones in a beehive. Tocka tocka they pattered into their keyboards, for all of us were wired into a universal network, monitoring each other’s activities across the globe. ‘I know,’ M. Deauville repeated. ‘I know it’s hard.’ He sounded more alert than when we had spoken at lunchtime. It must have been a new day in his part of the world. Son of the morning.

  ‘Regarding the Pudong site,’ I said, wrenching my faculties back to business matters, ‘we are presently waiting to hear whether our bid has been accepted.’

  Tocka tocka: the ivory ball skipping along the spinning roulette wheel. It settled in a pocket of black.

  ‘Bona fortuna, Tristram,’ M. Deauville said and rung off. Only then did I register that our brief conversation had been conducted in Latin. Bona fortuna. M. Deauville had given me his blessing. And that, looking back on things, was the turning point.

  *

  The earth rotated and returned the sun to us, bringing with it a startling revelation. The men were padding around the boardroom in an exhausted delirium by then, the mark of the plague still staining their lips. Calls had been made across the world. Contracts were being drawn up in various international financial institutions. Things had started to happen. We had already flipped one of the hotels in London and shifted a shopping mall in Dubai, extracting value of over €100 million from those two transactions alone, every cent of which we moved like a stack of poker chips onto the Pudong site, stationing our army at the mouth of this most strategic of ports.

  And then what? Then we waited. Close of business in Shanghai wasn’t for another half hour yet. A call had been promised. The phone was set out in state by McGee’s right hand. We could do no more.

  It had been such a busy night that we did not know what to do with this idleness. We kept an ear out for the phone, trying not to. We kept an eye on the row of clocks, trying not to. Dublin, Dubai, Shanghai; not London, New York, Tokyo as of old. The axis of world power had shifted. I lifted a slat in the blinds to squint out at the shimmering river. It was another beautiful day and everyone had a headache.

  Hickey and I had by that point thrown all our projected profits from the Claremont site, combined with an additional €128 million in loan notes issued by Castle Holdings, into the centre of the boardroom table, forming one of those columns in the clu
ster of poker chips that had been placed on the square marked ‘Shanghai’ and I was praying for us to win, I was pleading for us to win. Every fibre of my being was focused on that outcome. Bona fortuna. That’s when I experienced the startling revelation: that maybe McGee was right. Maybe wealth could be created out of debt and fortunes amassed overnight. Hickey sat with his hairy forearms on the table, his shirtsleeves rolled up past his elbows, his tie tossed over his shoulder in a manner he possibly considered debonair and sweat stains as big as dinner plates under his armpits. If this worked, he would become an extremely wealthy man. Wealthy enough to buy the Castle and Environs out from under my father several times over, to buy any castle he wanted. A millennium-old order would be overturned in a matter of months.

  And if it didn’t work?

  The telephone rang. Silence in the boardroom, twelve grown men pretending they weren’t there while the thirteenth listened carefully. ‘Thank you, Mr Guo,’ said McGee. He replaced the receiver in its cradle and held it there like the throttle lever of a jet engine, forcing his will down the line all the way to Shanghai.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he finally addressed us, ‘I have kept you very late. Go home to your wives and apologise on my behalf. Tell them that while they slept you earned tens of millions each overnight.’

  Hickey got to his feet and I got to mine. Everyone gravitated towards the head of the table, towards McGee. Laughter again only altogether different in quality. This was the shrill, unguarded laughter of disbelief.

  ‘So you signed a contract to purchase the north County Dublin farm that morning?’

  Yes. First we signed the contracts, then we went to see what we had bought.