The Mark and the Void

by Paul Murray

  ‘It sounds so cynical,’ Paul says.

  ‘As long as everyone understands those are the rules, it does not cause any issues.’

  ‘And even of Ish you’d say this?’

  ‘I’d say it’s something she needs to learn.’

  Paul watches me with a kind of veiled amusement, rocking gently in his chair.

  ‘So what’s the point of it?’ he asks.

  ‘The point?’

  ‘Why put yourself through all this? Why starve yourself of a life? Just to make money, is that it?’

  ‘Howie says that if you have to ask why, then you are in the wrong game.’

  ‘But what do you say?’

  He waits, notebook in his lap. It is dusk: fluorescent lights stud the darkening sky outside like imitation jewels.

  ‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘It’s just to make money.’

  ‘I wonder what he’s like,’ Ish says. ‘You know, what his life is like.’

  I don’t reply. A couple of heavyweight Spanish banks, rumoured to be facing significant write-downs on non-performing property loans, are being aggressively targeted by speculators; the effect is rippling outwards to affect the entire sector, unravelling Europe’s latest bid to stabilize itself.

  ‘I bet he lives in a huge mansion,’ Ish says. ‘With a pool. And a Bentley. And in his garden, he’s got those – you know those bushes, where they’ve shaped them into animals?’

  ‘Topiary.’

  ‘Topiary,’ Ish repeats dreamily, as if pronouncing the name of some mythical land. ‘What do you think, Claude? Has he said anything to you?’

  ‘No.’ I say it in a bored voice, but the truth is that I too yearn to learn more about Paul’s life. He gets to work at eight, he leaves around six; beyond that I know almost nothing. ‘Do you think Billy Budd knew where Melville lived?’ he’ll say if I press him. ‘Do you think Emma Bovary knew what Flaubert did all day?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ I concede.

  ‘I want you to act as if I’m not there. The less you know about my life, the easier that’ll be.’

  ‘Have you got to the part yet where the clown brings Stacy and Timmy backstage at the circus?’ Ish says now.

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘It’s so beautiful,’ she says. She sits smacking her gum for another minute. Then she gets up. ‘I think I’ll go and ask him how he thought of that scene.’

  ‘I wish you would stop distracting him.’

  ‘Who says I’m distracting him?’

  ‘He is trying to work on his project. And you have a report to finish.’

  Ish tiptoes around behind me, then crouches down and whispers into my ear, ‘I think the real problem is that someone’s jealous.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘You’re jealous!’ she exclaims, straightening up.

  ‘Who’s jealous?’ Jurgen says, passing by.

  ‘Claude’s jealous of me talking to his boyfriend,’ Ish says.

  ‘Paul is not my boyfriend,’ I say.

  ‘Look what I have,’ Jurgen says, and takes from his briefcase a hardback copy of For Love of a Clown. ‘A first edition. And it’s signed!’ I open it to the title page, where Paul has crossed out his name and written, ‘For Jurgen … With irie, Paul.’ I look up at him blankly. ‘Irie?’

  ‘It is a reggae reference,’ Jurgen says. ‘I have been telling Paul about my old reggae band.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a band,’ Ish says.

  Jurgen nods. ‘Back in Munich. Gerhardt and the Mergers. Mostly German-language covers, but we had original numbers too. We were regarded as being one of the best reggae and rocksteady crews on the Bavarian financial scene.’

  ‘Were you the singer?’ Ish asks.

  ‘No, that was Gerhardt. He was at the time the number one risk analyst at Morgan Stanley. Our rhythm section came from the Credit Suisse Syndicated Lending Department. Then there was me, on guitar and mortgage-backed securities.’

  Their conversation fades out; I remain entranced by the inscribed page. I have never seen Paul’s handwriting before. It is sprawling, straggly, like briars over a tombstone. Unprompted, an image appears in my head: the author at a cherrywood table, his hand moving across the page, depicting the minutiae of our lives in thickets of ink. For the first time it strikes me: we are being narrated.

  Ish snaps her fingers. ‘Let’s bring Paul to Life tonight! That way we can find out more about him, and it’ll give him a chance to see our crazy side!’

  I groan and rub my eyes. ‘There is work to do,’ I say. ‘Am I the only person who cares about work?’

  ‘That’s a great idea,’ Jurgen says. ‘Do you think he’ll come?’

  ‘Of course he’ll come,’ Ish says. Bending one foot up to her knee, she begins to hop around, arms upstretched to the ceiling tiles and the fluorescent lighting. ‘Sorry, Claude!’ she declaims. ‘But no one person can own Paul! He belongs to everyone!’

  ‘I will go and ask him now,’ Jurgen says, and he walks away, singing to himself, ‘Mach dir keine Sorgen, über die Dinge…’

  ‘Like the air!’ Ish hops back towards her desk. ‘Like birdsong! Like sunshine!’

  To my surprise, Paul accepts the invitation. Now the issue becomes making it out of the office. It has been another bad day – a very, very bad day – for Ireland on the markets. The two ailing Spanish banks have caused a panic across the whole continent, with investors scrambling to pull their funds out of any bank felt to be vulnerable – which includes all the major Irish institutions. The worst hit, Royal Irish, lost a million for almost every minute of trading, and every time I put on my coat another frantic client calls, wanting to know if the government will step in to save it. But the Minister has yet to make a statement – in fact, no one seems to know where the Minister even is.

  Just after six o’clock, I am summoned upstairs by the Chief Operating Officer; exiting the lift on the seventh floor I walk straight into an enormous Garda. My mind floods with a whole new order of panic. Have we been robbed? Is the building under siege?

  The secretary appears in the doorway and motions me impatiently into the corner office.

  ‘Ah, Claude, there you are.’ Whatever turn of events has brought a policeman into her foyer doesn’t seem to have bothered Rachael. But then, Rachael is imperturbable. No matter the time of day or state of the market, she always looks immaculate – streamlined, frictionless, like a virtual avatar of herself. Her hair is perfectly blonde, her skin perfectly white, her very presence has been buffed to a sheen as smooth as a mirror. People say she slept her way to the top, but it is literally impossible to imagine her having sex with Sir Colin or anyone else; others like to say she has a USB port instead of a vagina, and that her husband uses her to charge his phone, which seems marginally more plausible.

  Four men are in her office, crowded uncomfortably on couch and chairs with cups and saucers balanced on their knees. ‘Gentlemen,’ Rachael says, ‘allow me to introduce Claude Martingale, one of our most talented analysts.’

  I turn to the seated men and experience one of those cognitive shocks specific to meeting in real life someone long familiar from a screen. For the last two years, ever since the collapse of Lehman Brothers finally ignited the bonfire that was the Irish economy, the Minister for Finance has appeared almost nightly on the TV news, where he has always seemed measured, controlled, on top of the situation. In the couple of seconds it takes him to half-rise and greet me, it is frighteningly clear that this confidence is a veneer no thicker than the film of make-up applied backstage. Up close, unmediated, he seems actually to embody the country’s dire condition. Shadows devour his features, beads of moisture cling morbidly to the grey folds of his skin; his courtly, reasonable bearing is belied by great dark rings around his eyes. I had heard he was unwell: when I lean in to shake his hand I am hit by a stench so deathly I have to fight the instinct to recoil.

  Rachael introduces the two men on either side of him as the Secretary General
of the Department of Finance, and the Second Secretary at the Department in charge of banking policy. One is fat, one is thin; both wear glasses and the pursed, dismissive miens of civil-service lifers. Nearest the door is a fourth man, small with lugubrious eyes and a sallow complexion reminiscent of yellowing pages. He does not look Irish, but Continental – Portuguese, maybe, or Corsican. Rachael does not tell me his name, and he does not introduce himself; in fact he does not speak at all during the meeting, just remains in his corner, semi-translucent, staring at the Minister with those dolorous, unblinking eyes.

  Rachael closes the door and turns to me brightly. ‘The Minister has dropped by to speak to us –’

  ‘Informally,’ the fat secretary interjects.

  ‘– to speak to us informally about the current, ah, uncertainty in the Irish banking sector.’ Rachael cannot hide her delight at this coup; she is positively glowing. ‘Minister, Claude has advised several major international investors in relation to Irish banks.’

  The Minister opens his mouth into a strange gaping smile and wags it at me, like a grandfather who has had a stroke and is incapable of speaking. Then, as if this effort has caused some internal upset, he hastily brings a handkerchief to his mouth.

  ‘Claude, perhaps you could explain a little more what it is you do,’ Rachael prompts me.

  ‘Certainly,’ I reply, and begin to paint a broad picture of my role – namely, to dig through the loan books, deposit books and unexploded assets of distressed or defunct Irish banks, looking for anything ignored or undervalued that an external capital provider might take an interest in.

  ‘Picking off the good stuff for the vultures,’ the thin secretary translates.

  I smile courteously. ‘Even the vultures have to be persuaded to invest in Ireland at the moment.’

  He sniffs; it is the fatter secretary who speaks next.

  ‘Obviously the reason we’re here is Royal Irish,’ he says. ‘We’ve sunk a lot of money into it, quite apart from the guarantee, and at this stage we thought things would be turning around.’

  ‘They were turning around,’ the thin man corrects him. ‘Up until a couple of days ago. But now because of these bloody Spanish we’ve got investors pulling their money out again, and it’s starting to look like it’ll need another recapitalization.’

  ‘Obviously there are very good reasons for keeping the bank open,’ the fat man says, slinging a foot across his knee. ‘It’s of systemic importance, obviously. And we want to send the message to our international friends that Ireland’s financial sector is in perfect health and ready to do business. At the same time, we can’t just keep paying and paying.’

  ‘So I suppose what we want,’ the thin man says airily, ‘is to get a fresh perspective on the situation vis-à-vis Royal Irish. Our advisers tell us core capital ratios have been returning to acceptable levels, and that once it gets over this, as it were, hump, it should be able to return to profitability without further government assistance. We’d like to know, beyond the current situation, where you might see the bank’s position in six months, a year.’

  The Minister grins mechanically and works his jaws by way of endorsing this, a blast of fetid air issuing as he does so.

  All eyes are now on me, but I am not sure how to proceed. Things have not been turning around at Royal Irish; Royal Irish has been haemorrhaging money for months, first investors’ money, then taxpayers’ money. The general rule in banking is to tell the client what he wants to hear – that way, if you’re wrong, he’s less likely to hold you to blame. But to claim that Royal Irish can keep going for another week, let alone six months, would be like saying Louis XVI is alive and well and will shortly be resuming his kingly duties. It is finished as a going concern; surely they know that?

  The men are waiting. I glance over to Rachael. She draws a thoughtful breath: a weirdly synthetic gesture, like a doll opening and shutting its sightless eyes. ‘Maybe you could give us a broad idea of what a return to profitability might look like,’ she says, with a meaningful nod.

  I think for a moment, then start talking in vague terms about the volatility of the market, how nobody knows what will happen, how some Irish brands are certainly undervalued. It all depends, I say, on the wider recovery in Europe. If things stabilize, and if Royal genuinely do have capital reserves, and if they pursue a particular strategy, and divest themselves of their toxic assets, then yes, in that scenario they could get back on their feet. Each of those ifs would require a miracle, but the secretaries seem pleased with what they hear. They ask some follow-up questions, using financial jargon that makes no sense; the Minister, meanwhile, gazes down at his lap. He appears to be picking skin from his fingers; it comes away in loose white skeins, which flutter down to the floor. Then he leans over to the thin secretary and gurgles something in his ear.

  ‘Yes,’ the secretary says, and turns to Rachael. ‘There’s a new man in charge here? This fellow Blankly?’

  ‘Porter Blankly, that’s correct. He’s based in New York, of course.’ She addresses this to the Minister, who is gazing up at her with a kind of prayerful desperation. ‘But I speak to him almost every day. Porter is – well, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you he’s an inspirational figure. He believes that if you can get the market on your side, anything is possible.’

  The secretaries seem pleased with this too. They whisper together a moment. The Minister grins at us, a crunching sound issuing from his mouth along with a fresh gust of fetor – he is eating raw garlic, I realize; he has been peeling skin from a clove he clutches in his left hand.

  ‘Thank you, Claude,’ Rachael says. Taking my cue, I stand up and shake hands with the visitors again. The Minister has his handkerchief pressed to his mouth again; above it his shell-blue eyes roll wetly at me, as if signalling desperately, There is a man trapped in here!

  * * *

  ‘I don’t get it. What did he want you to do?’

  It’s Friday night; we are leaving the building at last.

  ‘Reassure him. Make him feel he has made the right decision to recapitalize Royal Irish. Tell him they can still get back on their feet.’

  ‘And they can’t?’

  ‘At this stage Royal Irish doesn’t even have feet.’

  ‘Just an arsehole,’ Ish grumbles.

  ‘You mean Miles?’ Paul says. If any one person can be held responsible for Ireland’s current state, it is Royal Irish’s CEO, Miles O’Connor, who made some forty billion euros of loans to property developers that then went bust – although next on the list would be the Minister himself, who has committed the country to paying off all of the money that Royal and the other banks owe. It’s hard to understand. In France, where if someone misses a coffee break there is a national strike, a scandal like this would have shut down the streets. Yet the Irish seem able to absorb any amount of punishment without complaint – like the drunk at the bar you expect any moment to topple off his stool, who instead keeps throwing back shots, his massive inebriation having become a kind of self-perpetuating system, a kind of replacement gravity …

  Just as I am thinking this, I hear Ish say, with a note of alarm, ‘Whoa! That guy looks a bit the worse for wear!’

  That’s putting it mildly: the gentleman in question, wearing a dark wool suit, has a bloody red socket where his left eye ought to be and a withered claw instead of a hand. We stop and watch as he lurches over the plaza and across the bridge, where he is greeted by five or six other similarly cadaverous figures.

  ‘Zombies,’ Jurgen says.

  The zombies have raised a tent on the riverbank opposite, around which they stagger, gesticulating at the traffic with authentically decomposing hands.

  ‘What’s this about?’ Paul says.

  ‘That building there was supposed to be Royal Irish’s new headquarters,’ I tell him, pointing to the concrete shell on the far side of the river. ‘They had just started construction when the crisis hit.’

  ‘Why the costumes, though?’

&n
bsp; ‘A zombie is what you call a bank that’s still trading even though it’s insolvent.’ The first revenant has produced a placard that reads DO NOT FEED THE ZOMBIES and is waving it about.

  ‘They’re saying that if the bank is finished, the government shouldn’t be giving it any more taxpayer money.’

  ‘But why would they give it more money?’ Paul asks. ‘If it’s dead in the water?’

  ‘They’re in denial. They still think it can be saved.’

  ‘Huh,’ Paul says, as one of the zombies’ arms falls off and under the wheels of a truck.

  ‘The Financial Services Centre brings in a lot of money,’ Ish says. ‘But the reason it does is that all of these international banks and funds and special purpose vehicles and God knows what else can come here and do whatever it is they want to do and they know they’ll be left alone. It’s a bit like a red-light zone, see?’

  ‘So…’ Paul is not quite making the connection.

  ‘So if a bank goes bust, it’s like if a hooker dropped dead. Suddenly there’s ambulances coming in, health authorities wanting to do blood tests, news crews demanding to know what’s happened. Even if you, Mr Sex Tourist, aren’t worried about catching whatever it is killed her, still, it’s not feeling so private anymore. So you quietly pack your bag, and the next day you’re off to Luxembourg or Liechtenstein or the British Virgin Islands, or wherever it might be.’

  ‘You mean the Irish government want to cover it up because it’s bad for business.’

  ‘Who knows? Maybe they genuinely think Royal Irish is salvageable. Stick a few more billion in there, close your eyes and hope for the best.’

  ‘It is what in the bank we call “magical thinking”,’ I add. ‘It is more prevalent than you might expect.’

  Paul gazes at the cavorting zombies, the great financial memento mori that is the unbuilt bank hanging over the grey river. ‘They’re going to need it,’ he says.