Lev weighed up the situation. Shane was right. No bank would lend him the money. The offer to discuss a loan had simply been a lure. As always, Kelmann would make its money on the IPO. Teams of financial experts and corporate lawyers would get to work racking up billable hours.
He got to his feet.
‘I’ll leave you to sort out the details with my lawyer.’
He left without saying goodbye.
‘He held up pretty well,’ said Zadie.
The attorney looked at her without a word. He had won, his victory had been total, yet his prey had got away; the man hadn’t so much as quavered.
‘I hope he chokes on his money! He’ll be back to us begging, I’m telling you, and he’ll wind up in the gutter. What we’re giving him is just a band-aid.’
Shane moved away to talk to the lawyers.
‘For a man on his knees,’ Simon said admiringly, ‘he stood up to us pretty well.’
Alone in the corridor, Lev was shaking. But he composed himself. The money from a stock market flotation meant he would be able to save ELK and afterwards he’d be stronger than ever. As always, the crisis would be a bloodletting, only the strongest would survive and they would have a stranglehold over the market. All the smaller companies would die and he would profit, he would make back his lost billions and come back to this same boardroom to meet with this man and give him a piece of his mind. But in the next couple of months, he needed to save his skin.
On the forecourt outside the Kelmann building, his bodyguard posted behind him, Lev took a deep breath. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he saw a woman looking at him as she walked past. It was Jane Hilland, who, having spent an hour window-shopping on Fifth Avenue, was heading for the restaurant where she was to meet up with Matt and Simon. Knowing he had been in a meeting with the oligarch, she assumed Simon was already waiting for her. From the state of the Russian man, the meeting had clearly been tough.
And yet as she walked into the pleasant, understated restaurant she did not see Simon. She wandered through the dining room but he had not arrived yet. She found a seat, ordered a drink and read a newspaper. After some minutes, she heard a voice say: ‘I believe we’ve met before.’
Matt was standing in front of her. Since they had been on the same flight, she assumed his comment was intended as a joke and gave him a polite smile.
‘Oh, hi. You’re here.’ Her voice was flat.
‘Yep. Almost on time,’ said Matt.
‘Please, have a seat.’ Her tone belied the words.
‘Simon not here yet?’
‘Well spotted,’ said Jane.
Matt did not reply. He was in his element. Sitting at a table with a girl, everything seemed possible.
‘Good choice, this restaurant.’
‘Sorry, I’m just finishing this article.’
Matt looked her up and down. He found her ugly and sophisticated. He loathed her and that excited him.
‘Is it earth-shattering, this article?’
‘No, it’s stupid. But stupidity has its attractions.’
Matt felt awkward with Jane because everything about her seemed settled and established. Nothing unnerved her; the way she looked, from her clothes to her make-up, was flawless and meticulous; her reactions were perfectly controlled and the way she spoke – the imperious, loathsome way she spoke – typified all the elements of her control: efficient, precise, peremptory.
But Matt knew his own strengths, and he knew too that Jane had been too rude with him at their first meeting to be completely indifferent. So he set to work.
He told her about his evening. She looked bored. He was funny. She condescended to make a comment or two. He mocked himself. A spark of interest flared.
She found him affected, pathetic, infantile. The designer stubble, the playboy posturing, the veneer of confidence concealing a chasm of self-doubt seemed to her ridiculous. She was astonished: how could Simon be friends with this man? But she had to admit he was quite funny.
‘What hotel are you staying at again?’ she interrupted.
‘Hotel? That’s an overstatement. I can’t afford a hotel. No, it’s more a hovel. My job is to hunt down the cockroaches. It is a task to which I apply myself with my innate sense of duty.’
He gave her an obsequious look, his shoulders sagging, palms turned upwards. Jane smiled – a genuine smile this time. Matt knew he was on the right track. Don’t try to be clever, successful, dazzling: she wouldn’t buy that for a minute. The poor self-mocking schmuck, that was the role he needed to play. It was just one more mask, and one all the easier for him to wear given his actual circumstances.
His face was transformed. The hint of brutality, of arrogance that sometimes hardened his features disappeared. He was just a nice guy.
He asked her about herself, about where she grew up. He led her further and further back into the innermost recesses of childhood, of pleasure, of nostalgia. Matt knew his subject. Exploit flaws, this was his role, his talent. Nosing into places where he would not be rejected, where there were no defences. Jane was a little surprised to find herself telling him about a horse she had loved when she was ten years old. She would groom and curry-comb it, and was the only one to ride the horse. Sometimes, without her father knowing, she liked to sleep next to it in the straw, in the warmth.
He asked her about her father. He was coming close to the heart of the matter, to the complex mix of admiration and resentment she felt for this man who had never really taken an interest in her, who spent all his time at work or with his mistresses. And now she could not help but lose her perfect control, could not help but be taken like all the others, so completely did Matt seem to understand her heart, the mixture of love, of fear, of bitterness, dark feelings that he himself had been plagued by all his life. To his surprise, he realised that beneath her cold exterior Jane was weaker than most women, that deep down she yearned to surrender. Her expression changed too. Behind the self-control, behind the make-up, behind the adult, the traits of childhood and adolescence began to appear. He rolled back the years. Working brilliantly and effortlessly, a skilled manipulator.
A voice called them back from this childhood, an unpleasant croak. It was Simon. He took off his coat and sat down.
‘Sorry, the meeting went on longer than expected.’
Jane and Matt fell silent. What was he talking about? They had to give up the landscapes of the past. With some difficulty, Jane came back to the present.
‘I ran into Kravchenko. He looked upset.’
‘He’s got good reason. We insisted he put all his assets up as collateral. And float ELK on the stock market. We took everything down to his underpants. So his balls are hanging out.’
Simon was ineptly trying to play the hard-nosed banker.
‘Why did you have to stay behind? Kravchenko had left.’
‘He was the only one to leave. Everyone else stayed. Including his CFO and his attorney. There were a lot of details to sort out. I’ll be working with a specialist on the structured products we sold ELK to prepare everything for the IPO. It’s a huge task … and a serious sign of confidence. Sorry to keep you waiting.’
‘Kravchenko’s lost everything?’ Jane asked.
‘Why are you so interested?’ Simon teased.
‘I find ruin is always interesting.’
Simon shrugged.
‘I don’t know if he’s lost everything. To be honest, I think he’ll survive. He’ll find investors. He’s tough, he impressed us all, even Shane, one of the partners, who hates his guts. You know how hard it is to impress Zadie, well, she was completely shaken up. Kravchenko didn’t turn a hair. We told him we were taking his fortune and his assets and he just treated us like servants. Then again, his debts are colossal and he has powerful enemies in Russia.’
‘Well, it just means one less Russian, which can’t be bad,’ said Matt.
‘You remember that dinner we had at Lemerre’s place where the waiter was punched?’
‘What’s the connection?’
‘The Russian guy that night, it was Kravchenko.’
‘Really? In that case, I’m even happier he’s bankrupt. The pampered oligarch is having to beg for his survival now. I remember the woman who was with him. She had class.’
‘Elena Kravchenko, she’s a well-known academic. They’re separated and she’s suing him for half his fortune – though we’ve got every rouble earmarked as collateral. He’s with some prostitute who demands extortionate amounts of money. Everyone’s bleeding him dry.’
‘How do you know all this stuff?’ asked Matt.
‘Bankers probe hearts and minds,’ interjected Jane.
Matt felt a twinge of jealousy. Even this was slipping away from him. His insight into others. Into their secrets. The area where he felt most comfortable. And the person with the edge was the autistic Simon. The guy hiding behind his numbers and his hang-ups.
‘But why do you want to destroy Kravchenko?’ asked Matt.
Simon looked surprised.
‘We don’t want to destroy him. The bank just needs assurances, that’s all.’
‘If his company doesn’t pull through, Kravchenko will end up frozen to death under a Moscow bridge.’
‘They’ve got bridges in Moscow?’
‘I’ve no idea, but if they have, that’s where he’ll wind up. Honestly, I have to say, the whole business seems bizarre.’
Jane looked at Matt. She realised he was not as stupid as she had thought. Not stupid at all.
A waiter came to take their orders.
A few hundred metres away, Lev Kravchenko had walked into Central Park, sat down on a bench and was staring into space.
A squirrel hopped across the grass in front of him and scampered up a tree, its paws rustling on the bark. In short, sudden bursts the rodent climbed to the topmost branches then, with a bound, leapt to the next tree. It gripped the branches and, with disconcerting ease, took off for the next treetop.
Lev had not noticed the squirrel. He was thinking about what had happened at Kelmann. He would have to start all over again. Though he had already made and lost his fortune, he would play again for the pleasure of winning or losing, just so that he might feel again the thrill of the game, feel the blood pound in his veins once more. The flash of rage he had felt for Shane had done him good. It was good to experience life directly unmediated by boredom or indifference. He had to gamble to survive, to try to recapture the distant feelings of a past that was so remote that perhaps he had never lived it.
Yet there was one episode. A carnival in Moscow with food stalls and fairground attractions. Out walking with Elena in the first months of their relationship, both bundled up in winter coats, they had happened on the fair in a square and Elena had insisted on looking at the attractions. They found themselves at the shooting gallery. Plastic ducks on revolving plaster pipes that you had to shoot with a rifle firing pellets. Lev had grabbed a rifle, fired … and missed. He tried again and again but the lead pellet missed its target. Under the slightly mocking gaze of the stallholder, he had tried again and failed. And then Elena began to laugh and laugh … And he laughed too at his ineptness; he had always been clumsy and a poor shot.
He remembered this laugh like some great moment of recklessness. A dazzling fragment against a backdrop of merry-go-round horses prancing to the music of tinkling bells in the whirl of the carnival’s multicoloured lights.
Now, sitting on this bench in this city at once familiar and strange, a city of meetings, of hotels he’d stayed in fifty times but barely knew, he thought of this scene, and he thought too about a phrase from Tolstoy which had struck him as a young man, a terse sentence that summed up the peaceful, humdrum life of the magistrate Ivan Ilyich as it faltered after a long howl lasting three days and nights at the age of forty-five: ‘Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and most terrible.’ And if this phrase had profoundly marked him, it was because he felt he understood its true meaning: ‘Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.’ It was because life was life that it was terrible. It was because Ivan Ilyich Golovin, realising his disease was terminal, recognised the absurdity of this life which had been respectable in every way, that he suddenly howled, and that this howl went on for three days and three nights, foundering in the darkness of his torment. And to Lev, the death of Ivan Ilyich had always remained the real issue. Would he too die howling for three days and nights, life’s illusion suddenly exploding in his face? Or would he die remembering a laugh heard at a carnival? Lev knew that the answer to these questions was undoubtedly more important than losing his business or his fortune. Howling for three days and nights or remembering a laugh.
And it was partly because of these questions that he had to stay strong now, for he would not howl so loudly if he risked his life heroically, considering that the only true beauty in life was life itself. So he had to play the game to the end without dwelling on doubts.
Lev, Simon, Matt, Jane, Zadie brought together in the fragmentation of fate. But all these creatures had become tiny, as minuscule as the gleam in the eye of the squirrel. The little creature is bounding still in an endless, headlong rush from tree to tree, high above human lives. He leaps while around him New York looms, vast and vertical, on this public holiday. Around the lush green heart of the city, the skyscrapers soar, ochre, white or translucent, slender or squat, erecting impassible bodies to the ocean’s undertow. Begotten of steel, concrete and cement, standing stones along the horizon, the mythology of power. And the squirrel disappears in the tremendous pulse of the city, swelling like some mythical monster, devouring destinies and melting them into a million others.
The doors open: the buildings disgorge their human cargo, subways empty. Buses screech to a halt, doors opening, passengers disembarking, then pull away again. People hurry through the streets. Countless unknown quantities merging into vast concordances, billions of possibilities, in a frenzied breathlessness.
A deafening racket winds through the streets. Traffic is at a standstill; horns blare. It is impossible to hear anything. The horizon is filled with sounds, people, lights, buildings, sparks. A glut.
At the base of the towers the ocean beats. As one gradually pulls away from Manhattan, from the financial district, the Twin Towers, the sound fades, the horizon clears and suddenly there is nothing but the stark immensity, the surface dark with waves flecked with foam.
Everything has disappeared.
26
The IPO was a success. Simon had done a good job, meaning he had obeyed orders. His risk assessment, picked up by the expert dealing with the portfolio, had been outrageously optimistic, the issue price extremely attractive and, as always, Kelmann’s publicity machine had been so powerful that everyone had been able to sing the victory song. The oil company had attracted large and small investors. ELK had become a top-rated company, money flooded in and if Lev was no longer running the show on his own, at least he knew he would be able to save his company.
‘It’s a total success,’ declared Simon one evening in Zadie Zale’s office when it was all over.
She nodded.
‘You don’t seem very happy.’
Zadie studied Simon.
‘He’s not going to survive.’
‘Who?’
‘The Russian. He was never supposed to survive. ELK will cease to be an independent company. That’s how it’s going to pan out.’
‘What are you talking about? He can make it. The company’s completely sound.’
‘It’s completely sound and he won’t survive. Now leave me alone, I need to finish dealing with this project.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Of course you don’t understand. You don’t understand anything. That’s why you were brought on board. To do the maths and not understand things.’
Flabbergasted, Simon said nothing. Zadie got up, took him by the arm and led him out of the office.
&
nbsp; ‘I’m sorry Simon, I’m tired. Just leave me to it, it’s been a bad day.’
Simon related the conversation to Jane.
‘There’s obviously something she’s not saying. You need to worm the information out of her.’
‘She’ll be pissed off,’ said Simon anxiously.
‘That’s exactly what she needs to be. Otherwise she won’t tell you anything.’
The following evening, Simon went to Zadie’s office. He had steeled himself to do this.
‘What did you mean yesterday?’
‘About what?’
‘About Kravchenko – and about me, while we’re at it.’
Zadie’s tired eyes were ringed with dark circles.
‘He’s interesting, the Russian, isn’t he?’ she said. ‘Well, I find him interesting. A lot more interesting than Shane or anyone in this bank. Obviously whether or not I find him interesting makes no difference, but it’s something. Even if I’m forced to admit that Kravchenko doesn’t exist.’
Once again Simon did not understand anything, though for very different reasons from the previous evening.
‘Kravchenko doesn’t exist any more than Simon Judal, renamed Jude, any more than Zadie Zale or even Shane. No one exists in this world. I really should have worked in finance before I studied philosophy. I’d have written much better essays. I finally understood the meaning of life when I came to work in the bank. We are nothing. It doesn’t matter that we exist since we exist only to ourselves and a handful of close friends. Kravchenko will disappear and it will be of no consequence: just a ripple on the surface of things. And it’s not some capitalist plot to reduce people to nothing, it’s simply the irrefutable reality of our world: so many creatures that are so similar that they are nothing. And even if each one of them squawks like a duck loudly proclaiming their existence, it means nothing. Kravchenko is doomed, there’s nothing I can do to help him, in fact I’ll play a part in his downfall, as will you, and none of it will matter because we don’t exist, because we’ll be merely a handful of banking transactions.’
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