by Mari Reiza
mari reiza
Triple Bagger
Vanity.Fear.Control = Shortcut.2.Happy? enslaved in a world of emotional unavailability
First published by mari reiza in 2017
Copyright © mari reiza, 2017
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Contents
About the author & her novel
Obituary, April 2015
Character list
I. DESIRE
Nuria Friedman to Vittal Choudhary, June 2020
Vittal Choudhary to Nuria Friedman, June 2020
The Triple Bagger 1. DoubleTree, New York, June 2014
The Shortest Way to Happiness. Of the year 2000. Don’t know what’s in my heart
The Shortest Way to Happiness. Of years 2000-2008. Desire (I)
Vittal Choudhary to Nuria Friedman, August 2020
The Shortest Way to Happiness. Of years 2000-2008. Desire (II)
II. DISCIPLESHIP
Nuria Friedman to Vittal Choudhary, August 2020
The Triple Bagger 2. Hôtel Mansart, Paris, July 2014
The Shortest Way to Happiness. Of years 2009–2012. Discipleship (I)
Vittal Choudhary to Nuria Friedman, December 2020
The Shortest Way to Happiness. Of years 2009–2012. Discipleship (II)
III. DEMISE
Nuria Friedman to Vittal Choudhary, December 2020
The Triple Bagger 3. Atahotel Executive, Milano, August 2014
The Shortest Way to Happiness. Of years 2013-2014. Demise (I)
Vittal Choudhary to Nuria Friedman, March 2021
The Shortest Way to Happiness. Of years 2013-2014. Demise (II)
Nuria Friedman to Vittal Choudhary, March 2021
IV. FINALE
Lucy to Nuria, September 2014
The Triple Bagger 4. Kensington Close Hotel, London, September 2014
Lucy to Peter, September 2014
Ends are invariably treacherous
Publication of the Triple Bagger from Alonissos, September 2021
Vittal Choudhary to Nuria Friedman, September 2021
THE END
About the author & her novel
mari.reiza was born in Madrid in 1973. She has worked as an investment research writer and management consultant for twenty years in London. She studied at Oxford University and lives off Portobello Road with her husband and child. She has also written Inconceivable Tales, a collection of short-stories, Mum, Watch Me Have Fun! and STUP, two novellas, as well as novels Marmotte's Journey, West bEgg, PHYSICAL and Room 11.
'Triple Bagger is for a good man who once hurt me, when he failed to be who he was.'
Triple bagger is urban slang for a person who is so ugly that to talk to them you would require a bag over their head, one for yourself in case their bag falls off, and one for your dog. On Wall Street, however, the term has been borrowed from America's national pastime of baseball to refer to an investment that has tripled in value.
Triple Bagger is a work of fiction and is not based on any real companies or people, either living or dead. Although some of it actually happened. It actually happens every day.
Obituary, April 2015
The acquisition of the ninety-nine-year-old corporate health consultancy Enterprise closed on April 1, 2015, after its leaders approved the combination with an accounting giant. According to Enterprise’s spokesman, this union will deliver an enhanced range of services to patients and wider opportunities for peers, with a clear focus on serving all stakeholders with quality and integrity. The purchase is part of a growing trend of amalgamation of advisory businesses.
Enterprise’s unique model driving its dual mission to achieve patient salvation and develop a better mankind will be commemorated in a 'supercharged whiteboard strategy session' to be held at 3 pm on Wednesday, April 3, an event intended to mark the tremendous achievement by all individuals and Squads at Enterprise.
Enterprise leaves behind an unrivalled legacy. For years, extraordinary men endured in their quest to prove their own exceptionality. They felt insecure about most things and believed that only doing the right thing would bring them final satisfaction. They claim it often felt like hardship. It compelled them to achieve, relentlessly, before thinking, and to build more and better, and a place to nurture and worship other people like them. This legitimised them in their mission. They grasped their specialness as privileged and networked individuals with a wealth of talent. They pushed constantly to succeed efficiently and professionally, fast-paced, across geographies. They were full of promise, loaded with purpose. This burdened them at times; it required them to show complete disregard of the limit to their abilities and uncritical contentment at their achievements. They were coerced to control their emotions as they felt constrained to focus, to be what was expected of them. At the end of their pilgrimage, it would not matter much where they had been or where they got to, the merit would be on the quality of the journey to make them into better men.
And to achieve this they turned off all distractions, unfortunately failing to notice they were being outpaced by men they would have once described as unexceptional. Perhaps theirs was not God’s profession after all.
Character list
The editor, Nuria The lovers
The peers: Vittal, Nal, Trojan, Tobias & Alakrita The bosses: Peter, Hammi, Bev, Daniel, Keith, Edd & Tom M.
Luz, Peter's secretary Julia, Bev’s secretary The new recruits: Matt, Mike, Dimitri & Clara Other Enterprisers: Melchior & Niccolò The PEN-ers: Felicity, Cate, Mandy, Rich, Rahim, the three Mary's: Zainab, Marene, Bianca & Lucy
I
DESIRE
1
Nuria Friedman to Vittal Choudhary, June 2020
My dear Vittal,
You are going to think badly of me. You are going to say that I am a fickle woman. But who would have guessed that my feelings could change so radically so fast? Yesterday, when I first met you, I told you. When it comes to entertainment, people read who they don’t dare to be. They want to dream of the famous, a hero (or a villain), of having their name in lights at the top of the Monnaie de Paris. We don’t write about nice ordinary people because they are boring. We may try to live like saints but it is not what we want in our fantasies, it is not good entertainment. The experienced editor in me looks for characters with an abhorrent touch, in some way reprehensible, that can cause instant intrigue,though I also like charming, inspiring deep sympathy and loyalty as well as laughter. Whether you paint a champion or a devil, let it shine in all its colours. It cannot be all good or bad; even the worst character has to have some humanity.
I have to admit that it was that smug look on your face, despite those youthful skinny jeans and the worse-for-wear pair of Converse, that triggered a pang in my stomach. I can picture you once more just now, as you were yesterday, against the backdrop of Mead and Fractal Fluid by Elena Arzak. To your credit you have not done badly in your new vocation. You feel extremely satisfied and are avid for more. I am accustomed to the arrogance of gods, having brought to life so many over the years, but I could perceive in seconds that you have taken this disease to new pathological heights. You were drawing me in. My heart was racing and my mind was set.
I can sense now that there is something fanatic surrounding your past endeavours. I expect a story at worst unconventional and at best sinister. Everything around you has been blurred by disc
retion and wrapped in secrecy. I ask you to tell me your secrets! Write for me about your time at Enterprise, their weird take on the world, how it felt to live by their book. It would not need to be Lincoln, with some responsibility to get the history right; this would be entertainment, and a looser version of events would do perfectly. It is the opportunity to tell your story, with your voice over. It could be your greatest achievement yet. It could get you The Prize.
My dear Vittal, I have all my faith in your power to delight readers and mine to turn the board. This could finally make you into an undisputed great writer. Is that not where you want to be? You know it is in your grasp. You know that you can achieve anything, that there are no limits. Write for me the delusions that took the best of you with precision and ironic detachment, without praising or damning. Bring a ray of sunshine and let us laugh and cry. You cannot hide it from me. Do not deny yourself any longer, you have refused yourself enough pleasure. Your readers will rejoice in your straight, good-natured talking. In the world of pretence that we live in, the idea of a hearty chat is like a boozy lunch. It is just quaint, a thing of the past. How many people would pay to hear you say that ten million dollars is not cool? Tell us what is.
I have become deeply convinced that we can help each other. I am a very perceptive woman, you see, and I have the hunch that we are both up to it. You are excited by my provocation. You are still young despite your forty-something years, energetic and virile, with a renewed thirst for life. I can sense that. You may say that your interest in me, what you gave away the minute we laid eyes on each other, is not professional. It is physical attraction, maybe just the urge for an amorous distraction. I understand, I am a woman pushing forty but nonetheless very attractive. The spark has been ignited.
But you see, Vittal, with me everything is work. It is a kind of professional rapaciousness. And good publishing is after all an articulation of private passions, perhaps most of all seductive passions. It is my vocation. I have made it a norm to publish most of the men I have fucked over the years, and to fuck most of the men I have published. Passions may sometimes be whimsical, but at the height of my profession, one needs to be disciplined. The list of victims reads like a Who’s Who of the weird and wonderful.
Will you be the best of them yet?
I know lust has a power that has no limit, it drives artistry. My dear Vittal, the path to my bed is not hurdle-free. You will have to surpass numerous trials. I will put your mind to the test every single day, and the reward will depend on you. But I know that I have enough for your contentment. I will be yours when you will be mine. Up to you to choose the shortest road to happiness.
Your devoted correspondent,
Ms. Nuria Friedman (pen name)
2
Vittal Choudhary to Nuria Friedman, June 2020
My dear lady,
I do not know what to admire more, your charm or your brutality. Let me be straight in reminding you that publisher requests are dealt with by my agent, although I admit that yours won my scrutiny. It must be a sign.
Your letter bewitches me in part because I seldom get letters, the highest form of communication after silence. Are you playing the White House terrorist attack game where they have cut all our transmissions and we live in a global desert? Did you send it by pigeon? I cannot tell. But being one to put a face to a name immediately, I instantly remembered that you are a pretty face. And what attracts me the most, I acknowledge, is that you are obscene (or is it just a shield around your fragile person?). I have seen many women in the nude before but few have disrobed in front of me so hastily, unless they were paid for. I feel that this spectacle was intended for my eyes only, and I cannot deny that I am touched.
Yet I need to remind you that I am not a proud, horny young writer anymore, awash in rejection slips, but a coveted author. This does not mean that I am financially successful, which is impossible given the plight of the modern artist being paid thirty-nine pence a copy, but that I can get work out there without it sinking soundlessly at once. I do not need to offer readers my address and mobile number, and to sleep with them if they buy my book. I also have a string of prizes to my name, although not The Prize, as you were quick to point out. Hélas, it is hard to deal with the snobs who rule the London literary roost. No offence, but some of us doubt whether The Prize is more than a posh tombola after all.
Yet it intrigues me that you would like me to write an account of Enterprise. The most renowned, most secretive, highest-priced, most distinguished, most entrusted, most envied, most detested organisation of all time, to which I devoted fifteen years of my life before I became a decent man. You would like me to offer you a satirical reconstruction of that insanity, in the voice of mad wisdom, that of the intruder that was playing inside my head, allowing me to disregard anything that stood in the way to numb myself.
My first reaction is doubt. It feels like I have travelled far into the dark but seem unable to recall that episode wholly to my own mind, even less to shape it into a story for the pleasure of another. However, given my fascination for the bait (that is you, my dear lady), the answer is a gentle yes, assuming you can reach an understanding with my agent regarding logistics and financials. It would be unfair to rob myself of my own tale, my own occasion to bitch, even if not totally guilt-free. One writes to leave a trace, to belong across time; it is better than scribbling your initials on the toilet door. Enterprise was chaotic and men need to see it. If I can do that, it may be the closest to leaving a record, my blood on the paper, to an afterlife.
We are all, especially writers, invited to make reason out of chaos, to look back and try to make sense of it all, of what threatens our fragile structure of life. It will be an exercise in crossing back over two thousand miles of arid land, forcing myself to think and feel this time. Every period in your life should have a logic to it, but back then at Enterprise it didn’t. Out of fear. I sense that I ought to feel guilty for that, even ashamed, and that I could indeed benefit from a tabula rasa, to look at things again with a clear mind and scrape out some meaning. I would need to reach my own perverse logic to exorcise the fear still in me, before coming back to life through some kind of corrective punishment. At least now I have the advantage of the outsider: a man on the inside has to beware of all the pieces in the system, but from the outside one can confront the devil directly.
Whether what I get from my experience will be enriched or impoverished through renewed engagement, I am not certain, but I already relish my recollections rushing in morning dress to this celebration of sorts. I must rummage through my mind. I will then weave these thoughts with silk thread to resurrect a new tapestry, beautiful and daunting in equal measure, I suspect, the heart of which resides as forsaken remains in my solitary memory. This recaptured craft may offer a riveting glimpse into a vanished world as repainted by my imagination, my creative ability to produce an image of something that may not have been captured by my senses at the time, may not even have been physically there at all, but that I can now perceive strongly enough to act upon.
I spare you the embarrassment of questioning your own motivation in the matter and assume, my dear lady, that it is noble. As noble as your offer to satisfy me. If you find me worthy of being used by you, my head and my hands are yours.
And, Nuria, I can sense in my heart that you will give me extraordinary pleasure.
Your Master in Happiness,
Dr. Vittal Choudhary Vivo
3
The Triple Bagger 1. DoubleTree, New York, June 2014
‘The man sniggered. He was ugly, vital and powerful and represented pure spite. He was revered. That was the order of things on that island. Such men controlled everything.’
‘Which island was that?’ she says.
‘It was Alonissos, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. After Skiathos and Skopelos it was the third member of the Northern Sporades. It was three kilometres east of the island of Skopelos. And this was many years ago, before Christ.’
�
�I did not know that you had studied the social anthropology of the Peloponnese,’ she laughs.
‘I had a considerable life before I came to you. And don’t give me chapter and verse today, please,’ he says. ‘I do not have the strength for it. It is too hot. Besides, you love the Greek islands, right?’
‘How very convenient,’ she replies. ‘But I may have chosen a different geography with red seas, four moons and three suns. What was the name of the man again? I am all ears.’
‘The man had no name. He was known as the triple bagger. You will see why. If you are patient enough. If you stick with me to the end, that is.’ He continues, ‘This chora was unique in ancient Greece for its social system. It thrived with influential advisers to the most powerful leaders across Greece. Kings, war commanders, statesmen, wealthy businessmen, philosophers, playwrights and poets. Its inhabitants were classified as Ikosians (the Alonissos elite who enjoyed full rights), Liadromites (common men) and Helots (state-owned serfs and enslaved local population). When a son from an Ikosian father was born, the parents had a choice. It must have been the hardest choice of their lives. If they wanted the child to become an Ikosian, they had to maim him so that his face would be disfigured. This would ensure the child’s livelihood as a member of the elite. Otherwise he could become a free common man.’