Sila's Fortune

by Fabrice Humbert

  ‘I still don’t understand.’

  Zadie sighed. She got to her feet, took a few steps.

  ‘It will be a simple process,’ she said wearily, ‘extremely simple. Now that the IPO’s gone well, now that a little time has passed, Kravchenko will call us, in a couple of days maybe, a couple of weeks tops. It will be a pleasant conversation. We’ll congratulate each other for the umpteenth time on our success. And then Kravchenko will ask for his money. Hardly surprising, he needs that money, he’s fighting off his creditors. Everyone’s cash poor. There’ll be a silence on the phone. Then we’ll tell him it’s not possible. At that point he’ll ask in that gruff Russian accent: “And why is it not possible?” And we’ll tell him the truth. We’ll tell him that Liekom, having acquired a controlling share via an investment fund, has taken over ELK and that Lianov is now his boss. We’ll tell him the whole deal is fraudulent, that it was based on falsified business valuations and if word of that spread, the share price would tank. We’ll tell him that Lianov controls ELK but Kelmann controls the information. Incidentally I should tell you that we sold all the ELK shares at a healthy profit so we have nothing to lose. We’ll tell him he no longer controls ELK and that his fate is in Lianov’s hands. We’ll tell him that, as far as he’s concerned, it’s all over.’

  ‘That’s completely immoral!’

  Zadie stared at him in astonishment.

  ‘Only you could come out with something like that in a place like this! Immoral! Am I hearing things? What exactly is immoral? Stripping an oligarch of a fortune he owes to the carve-up of the Soviet Union? A man who expanded his empire by taking over dozens of other oil companies using money or threats? Kravchenko’s fate will be exactly the fate he forced on others, the same way that I’ll be tossed aside for the very reasons I’ve been successful. It’s possible some of the directors of Kelmann will end up in prison some day when the rules of the game are changed. Is that immoral? No, it’s something much worse. It’s a trap, we’re all caught up in it. And I don’t know how to get myself out.’

  ‘But you liked Kravchenko! I saw you with him! He charmed you. I’ve never seen you like that with a man.’

  ‘He charmed me and we are going to ruin him. That’s the trap, Simon. It’s just the trap. No one escapes. The moment you try to move, fate springs the trap. Make one movement to join the ranks of humankind and it’s all over.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a part of that. Shane can do what he likes. In fact I think I’ll tell Kravchenko what’s going on.’

  Zadie shook her head.

  ‘Who did the valuations, Simon?’

  He drew back.

  ‘You’re involved, Simon. The IPO dossier was based on your valuations and your risk assessment. I’m telling you this as a friend, Simon: if there’s anyone who might suffer as a result of that dossier, it’s you. If anyone’s to blame, it’s you.’

  The colour drained from Simon’s face.

  ‘You were the one making the decisions, not me.’

  Zadie gave a sad little smile.

  ‘We’ll see what the SEC have to say. There are malicious rumours that they’re very soft on billionaires,’ she added, ‘but I can assure you, they won’t be soft on you. And American jails don’t exactly have a good rep.’

  ‘But I obviously work for Kelmann, you’re the ones who’ll be held responsible. You’re the ones who told me to overvalue the assets.’

  Zadie’s expression hardened.

  ‘I personally gave you no such order. And anyway, I hardly know you. You’re a junior quantitative analyst, as far as I know, one of my team in London. Like I said, Simon, no one gets out of the trap.’

  Simon left the office. It was a cold night. He buttoned his coat, turned up his collar and plunged into winter. Zadie was right: the trap had sprung shut. He felt scared. He felt as though he was about to be crushed. But terrible as his fear was, the thought that he had been hired for his gullibility pained him most. He had thought he was competent; with his work on the POL product he had felt on top of the world. But his greatest talent was his stupidity: Zadie had kept him on her team in order to con him, to use him, to exploit his naivety. The goldfish was back in his bowl.

  A thin drizzle started falling. He pulled his collar tighter. His personality leached away into the dark night. The gangster’s suit, his recent illusions, everything was dissolving and slipping away. His terrible fragility was once again rolling out its baneful power – with its cortege of doubts, of misery, the black banner of failure. He was swept up by the rain, by murky drizzle, by dark thoughts. He felt so stupid, so powerless, with nothing to protect him. The streets were deserted, no flicker of life brightened the darkness of the city. Simon quickened his pace. He needed warmth. He needed Jane to reassure him. She would find the words.

  27

  The news came as no surprise to anyone in a capital pervaded by excess. Many such incidents had happened before. And every day there were comparable events that no one mentioned, since the victims were unknown.

  Until now, Lev had invested all his energy in the struggle. He truly had started again: he had been prepared to risk his life. Sometimes, in the evening, as he thought about the frantic activity that had been required during the day to dole out what little money he had, in precise, targeted operations to areas of the business threatening to collapse, he smiled. He smiled because he was deferring the moment when he would howl, because he was tempering the scream, because life bubbled up inside him like a fountain of youth. Everyone was surprised by his cheerful mood. The workers and managers in the company felt a closeness to this man in his struggle that they had never felt before, despite the fact that Lev still could not afford to pay wages, doled out a little cash from time to time, simply repeating that the company flotation had gone well and money would soon come flooding in. Even the managers who trooped into his office and left frustrated having received some meagre handout, the promise of a week’s or two weeks’ salary, of a 10 per cent pay increase ‘as soon as the money comes in’, felt a sort of sympathy for him. And perhaps he was also less aloof, less calculating. He was fighting. He tried to get production figures up, to have the damaged oil wells repaired, to keep his creditors at bay. He had no family, no friends, no allies. Only enemies and those who did not care. The evidence of this fact delighted him. The situation had not changed, it was simply more straightforward, more clear-cut. But it thrilled him like a spark of life in an old man who is dying. He was alive. He worked like a maniac, played like a maniac, slept with Oksana and with other women. He hungered for women’s bodies. There was in his pleasure a profound truth he had forgotten, one revealed to him in Oksana and other women as they offered themselves to him: the tremulous present. Lev was the great philosopher, the great sage because he lived in the present. And so time stood still, a tinkling of cymbals, a marvellous suspension before moving on to other pleasures that were fleeting and therefore eternal, since they were gilded by the magic of the moment.

  Lev Kravchenko was a happy man. At some party, he ran into Elena on the arm of another man. Even though their divorce had not yet been settled. They chatted. And Elena’s eyes were shining, with love or with sadness, because she rediscovered the man she had known long ago, because the ghost had been made flesh again.

  The following night they slept together. There was nothing to hope for, a fact they both realised, Elena perhaps a little less clearly because she was still haunted by the ghost, whispering in her ear words of the past and of lost illusions of love. But there was also an exhilaration to spending the night together, to take the gifts offered by life because there could be no way back, no second chance – just the marvellous luck of being alive at least for a little longer.

  ‘Do you remember the shooting gallery?’

  ‘What shooting gallery?’

  Lev didn’t answer. The memories were his. His alone.

  One day, he phoned Shane. They joked for a while with that menacing undertone of enemies. They congratulated ea
ch other again on the success of the IPO. Then he asked for his money. Shane told him it wasn’t possible.

  ‘And why is it not possible?’

  And the other man, the enemy, told him everything. He explained that the business valuations had been false, that Liekom now owned the controlling share and therefore now controlled ELK. That he, Lev Kravchenko, had no further say in the matter. Shane added that Kelmann had hedged its bets and made a profit in betting against him, against Liekom, and in selling the shares. That it would take just one article in the Financial Times for the value of the company to plummet.

  ‘Lianov might not be happy.’

  ‘The time of the gangsters is over. Besides, Liekom needs us. I’m sure Lianov won’t be happy, but he’ll get over it. It’s nothing personal. We’re just doing our job. Making money.’

  From the outset Lev had wondered how they would try to hoodwink him. He had tried to find out, had sent men to investigate, but his enemies had a talent for keeping out of sight and he had found nothing. This was why he had lost and Shane and Lianov had won.

  And yet Lev could have won. In fact he had already won since he existed, but he might also have triumphed in the battle against his enemies, something that would have been an added pleasure. He was convinced there was a solution. That he had only to think about it. He still had faith in his intelligence.

  He would have marched into the board room in New York to meet Shane and Lianov and addressed them in the tone of a master.

  Yes, he could have triumphed.

  But just as his Mercedes, on its usual route, was overtaking a small red Fiat, the bomb exploded. Shards of glass and metal sliced the air like lethal weapons, decapitating the driver. Lev did not howl. His body suffered barely a scratch. When it was found, many people were surprised: he was smiling.

  He had died smiling.

  28

  In American football, however uneven the game, there suddenly comes the moment of reckoning – the moment when a player breaks away from the scrimmage and runs hard and fast for the end zone, wreathed in glory.

  Sila was running. Since his regrettable fit of anger, he had been running. He needed to run. He had made a naive connection between his violence and his lack of physical exercise. And this was why he now wore himself out on long runs, far from the city, through the Everglades where he could be alone. In the maze of waterways, along an often marshy course riddled with inlets, barred by expanses of water he had to skirt round, a primitive environment inhabited by prehistoric animals, a vast confusion of small mammals and huge reptiles surrounded him, giving him a sense of boundless freedom. He shook off the identity of the polite, methodical restaurateur and ran, ran endlessly, his pace faltering now and then, given the unforeseeable obstacles of the course.

  On this particular day, Sila had been running for about an hour. The air was crisp, the sky grey, perfect weather for running. A four-by-four appeared suddenly about a hundred metres behind him. He was not surprised, since the narrow sandbar strip of land flanked on either side by sawgrass marshes was a popular thoroughfare. Several boats tied up along the bank stood waiting for alligator hunters. But when a second four-by-four appeared around a bend ahead of him, an unpleasant shudder ran through him.

  The two vehicles stopped about fifty metres from him. Now Sila knew what was coming. He wondered only whether Ruffle was part of the pack. He stood stock-still, alert, catching his breath.

  A car door opened. Sila ran, trying to get as far as possible from the two vehicles, though he knew that the trap had been carefully planned since the spit of land was only a couple of hundred metres wide. But no one had reckoned on just how fast Sila could be. Running as hard as he could towards the swampland, he tried to skirt round the cars to go back the way he had come. If he had enough time, if he could make it back to the washed-out dirt track about a kilometre back where the ground was so rutted, no car would be able to follow him. And he was sure that no man in the world could catch up with him when he was running, especially if he was running for his life. But how could he make it as far as there?

  No one had tried to block his path, and the car door had slammed shut again. The two cars drove after him, their engines roaring, and suddenly all Sila could hear was this sound, this mounting threat. A viscous fear surged through him, but still he ran, his breathing regular, determined to get through.

  And he made it past them. About twenty metres from the marsh, he took a sharp right and stared ahead at the barren ground, knowing he had a kilometre to run. The long dash for the end zone.

  In a surge of desperation, he sped on. He knew he was running too fast, that no one could sprint for a whole kilometre, but the engines were roaring behind him and even if the cars could not reach their top speeds on these dirt tracks, their acceleration rate was second to none. He tried to focus on his breathing, to become nothing more than this breath, this pounding movement. He tried to become the race itself. His years of training, the magnificent machine that was his body hurtled forwards at extraordinary speed while behind him the cars spluttered over the potholed terrain. At this point one of them veered away from the swampland back to the solid road. Sila realised in panic that it would try to overtake him on the right and cut him off. He ran even faster. Ran as though the finishing line was in sight, as though there were only fifty metres between him and salvation while far away, too far away, the band of trees offered an illusory promise of deliverance. He had no choice. If the car overtook him, he was finished.

  It overtook him; the men surrounded Sila, they stopped the car and climbed out. There were four of them, armed with baseball bats, and Ruffle was one of them. Sila was alone and his chest was burning. Tears of pain rolled down his cheeks. He tried to maintain his speed but without realising it, his pace had slackened. Ahead of him, unmoving, the pack fanned out to form a barrier.

  In American football, however patchy the game has been, there suddenly comes the moment of reckoning, the moment when a player – to the roar of the crowd – stops a running play, brings his opponent down with a hard tackle. Ruffle could feel this moment coming. Suddenly, he forced himself out of his immobility and rushed towards Sila at a surprising speed given his size. He was carried forwards by his rage. Sila, exhausted, panting, lurched sideways trying to dodge the blow. But his body no longer responded as it should. The movement was neither fast enough nor clean enough. Even so, in a football game Sila would have managed to dodge his opponent. But Mark Ruffle’s hand, his bandaged hand, the hand that had been broken was clutching a baseball bat. And it was this bat that broke Sila’s run. A blow that sent him sprawling to the ground.

  The four men surrounded him. Four more clambered out of the car behind to join them.

  With a single blow, Ruffle broke his left knee. Then the right. Methodically, without uttering a word.

  Beyond the line of trees, far beyond the end zone of salvation, Sila’s scream was heard.

  29

  Shoshana did not hear the scream. But somehow or other, over the swampland and the forests, she sensed it. Perhaps through the fragile bond she had forged with the waiter or perhaps, more rationally because, knowing her husband, she had been expecting it. The nigger had to pay, he said over and over.

  She had wanted to warn Sila. She had wanted to go to his restaurant and talk to him. But, without knowing why, she hadn’t. Because she secretly hoped that her husband would not act on his threats, because she was afraid, because she felt betrayed, for all sorts of bad reasons which, in any case, would have changed nothing since Sila was not a man to be frightened by threats.

  When Ruffle came home, he had that Sunday air about him. Shoshana quizzed him. He told her he’d been out in the swamps hunting alligator.

  ‘Did you catch one?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah, big one,’ he said curtly.

  She went out to the car. In the trunk she found the baseball bats. She came back into the house carrying one of them.

  ‘You hunt gators with baseball bats?’r />
  ‘It’s to smash their heads in. It’s just a game.’

  She got her coat.

  ‘I’m going to find your alligator.’

  She wandered the swampland without finding Sila. Her eyes were misted by tears. Her body, shaken by sobs, slowly crumpling in the driver’s seat. In the middle of the swamp, after miles and miles of driving round in the maze of her despair, she stopped the car. All around her were the grey skeletons of trees. She buried her head in her hands. What had happened to Sila? She wept for this man, she wept for herself and she wept for her husband. She could expect nothing more of life now, she who had never expected much, who had simply wished, like in a soap opera, that she could love her husband and her children in a big house with a garden out front. Just a gentle loving husband. Reality was mocking her. And Shoshana went on crying.

  As the past and the future fell away, only one certainty remained: she had to leave. She could not go back to the house, she had to take her son and never see Ruffle again. She had to leave.

  It was over. Never again would she live in limbo, waiting for a change that would never come, moving between fitness centres and televisions and cold white rooms.

  She turned the key in the ignition.

  30

  Simon slipped the key back into his pocket and stepped into the apartment, sadly dark and deserted. He was sorry that Matt wasn’t there. While his friend hated his successes, he could be a comfort when times were tough. He always came out with crude expressions to try and cheer him up, his favourite being: ‘Sling your prick over your shoulder and walk.’ That evening, it would have taken a lot of pep talk to cheer him up.

  On the kitchen table, he found a note: ‘My pet, I’m heading for the centre of the universe. London’s not enough for me any more. I got the wrong place. The rain of gold is falling in New York, that’s where the real fortunes are being made. I’ll get in touch as soon as I’ve become a new man. A quick name change, and I’ll call you. Matt?’