The Mark and the Void

by Paul Murray

  * * *

  Then something happens that puts the book out of everyone’s mind. A little after midday – 7.05 a.m., New York time – Ish jumps out of her seat. ‘I just got an email from Porter Blankly!’

  A moment later, similar exclamations can be heard about the room. I look at my inbox. ‘I’ve got one too.’

  Kevin comes rushing up. ‘Porter Blankly’s sent us all emails,’ he says.

  ‘It must be one of his inspirational memos,’ Gary McCrum says.

  ‘Fuck!’ Ish says.

  ‘Have you read it yet?’ Kevin asks.

  ‘I’m too excited,’ Ish says. ‘Claude, you open it.’

  Tentatively, as if handling a live wire, I move the cursor over the envelope icon and click on it. The email consists of two words. ‘“Think counterintuitive,”’ I read aloud.

  ‘“Think counterintuitive,”’ Ish says.

  ‘“Think counterintuitive,”’ Kevin mutters to himself.

  Around the office the phrase can be heard repeated over and over, like a murmurous breeze circulating between the cubicles.

  ‘Is that inspirational?’ Ish asks. ‘Do you feel inspired?’

  ‘I definitely feel something,’ Kevin says, frowning and assuming an odd posture, as though searching for his keys. Before there can be any further discussion, however, Jurgen appears to tell us that a very important email has just come in from Porter Blankly.

  ‘We know,’ Ish says.

  ‘Good,’ Jurgen says. ‘Rachael has been in touch to say that each department must submit one major counterintuitive strategy by the end of the week. Until further notice, counterintuitiveness should be considered your top priority.’ He is on the point of bustling off again, but Ish calls him back.

  ‘What does it mean?’ she says.

  Jurgen pushes his glasses up his nose, surprised. ‘I have received only the same memo as you, but I am guessing it means that instead of bowing to the prevailing wisdom and following the herd, we will now be innovating exciting new outside-the-box-type alternatives.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Ish.

  ‘How counterintuitive does he want us to be, exactly?’ Jocelyn Lockhart asks.

  ‘How counterintuitive?’ Jurgen says.

  ‘Well, say if my intuition is telling me it would be a bad idea to punch you in the face. Does that mean I should punch you in the face?’

  ‘Or set fire to the computers?’ Gary McCrum chips in.

  ‘Or stop working now and go to the pub? You know?’

  Jurgen strokes his chin thoughtfully. ‘These are good questions. Porter has not specified his parameters. Perhaps we should limit the counterintuitiveness to our respective fields for now, and later, if we find we are still bogged down in conventional, mainstream thinking, we can experiment with more radical options, such as face-punching.’

  Initially the response to the new imperative is not entirely serious: free pizza is mooted, paid naptime, daily meetings before the markets open in order to study staff dreams for potentially important data. A couple of days later, however, the strategy becomes less abstract. That morning, Kimberlee the receptionist comes hurtling into the Research Department to tell us that a tramp is asleep in the supply cupboard. She wants to call security; the analysts, however, see an opportunity to demonstrate their machismo, and an Armed Response Unit is quickly put together in the shape of the Oil team leader, Brent ‘Crude’ Kelleher, and his mountain-biking cronies, Andrew O’Connor and Dwayne McGuckian. ‘How are you “armed”?’ Ish asks. In unison, the Armed Response Unit roll up their sleeves and begin copious flexing of biceps.

  Not long after, though, they hurry back in, looking decidedly less intrepid. There is a tramp on the premises, they confirm; however, he is no longer asleep, or, for that matter, in the supply cupboard. A moment later, with a guttural roar, a ragged figure lurches in. He is tall and spindly, with blazing eyes and a voluminous thicket of black beard that gives him the look of a medieval mendicant, flagellating himself around Europe. Long streamers of duct tape hang from his shoulders; I can’t understand what he’s saying, but it is clear that he is very, very angry. He charges down the aisle between the cubicles in pursuit of the Armed Response Unit, who career out of Research into Sales; a moment later they reappear in the lobby, frantically jabbing the button for the lift, when its doors open and two enormous security guards jump out and dash after the tramp, who turns and speeds back towards his supply cupboard. Too late! We watch from our cubicles as the guards rugby-tackle him, bringing him crashing to the ground; then one of them springs up to kneel on his back, while the other one prepares to hit him with his baton. The tramp howls out some kind of unintelligible imprecation – and the guard stops, baton frozen in the air.

  ‘Deystvitelno?’ he says.

  The tramp issues another screed.

  The security guard climbs off his back and says something apologetic. Now the tramp rises to his feet and straightens himself. The first security guard says something to the second security guard. Then both the security guards start obsequiously dusting down the tramp, who stares away into the middle distance with an imperial hauteur. Through the glass of the lobby we see Liam English coming in our direction, fists clenched by his side; the Armed Response Unit follow after him, looking chastened. Liam English dispatches the security guards with a single jab of his thumb. Then he embraces the tramp.

  BOT has a new employee. Grigory Erofeev, or Grisha as he prefers to be called, although he makes it clear that ideally no one would speak to him at all, has been flown in directly from Moscow’s Institute of Advanced Mathematics to head our new Structured Products Department, where he will come up with mind-bending combinations of currencies, futures, swaptions and other such entities, which the bank can sell on to clients and use on its own account.

  This constitutes a major change in BOT’s direction.

  Before the crash, every bank had to have at least one Russian physicist on its payroll. The bulge brackets would go on safari to St Petersburg and return with whole university departments, setting them up in grim dorms to remind them of home, where they would sit gloomily eating pirogi and scrawling in refill pads.

  Sir Colin, our former CEO, saw this, as he saw so much of the twenty-first, twentieth and indeed nineteenth century, as so much modern flim-flam. He didn’t believe investment banks ought to be trading for themselves at all – how could that not lead to a conflict of interest? – and the idea of betting the house on equations which nobody in the entire operation understood except for some depressed-looking Vlad in a pirogi-stained vest he thought simply unhinged.

  ‘But that’s what makes it counterintuitive, see?’ Howie is particularly excited by the new arrival. ‘Nobody’s doing this stuff right now.’

  ‘They’re not doing it because it didn’t work,’ I point out.

  ‘Crazy Frog, you think the first aeroplane worked? You think the first telephone worked? The first shot of penicillin –’

  ‘I get the point.’

  ‘This guy is a visionary, Claude. He’s out there, out in the fucking Siberian tundra, staring at the fucking sun and seeing – seeing –’

  ‘Seeing what?’

  ‘Seeing the shit that’s going to take us to the next level.’ Howie leans closer, lowers his voice. ‘He’s been telling me about his PhD. Providential antinomies. Ever heard of them? Of course you haven’t, they haven’t been used for three hundred years. But guess what, Grisha here’s discovered some way of applying them to bond yields.’

  ‘To do what?’

  Howie flaps his hand in irritation. ‘I don’t know. What they do isn’t the point. The point is that this time we’re the ones doing the crazy paradoxical rocket-science shit. This tiny, insignificant little bank has, through a fluke of history, got a split-second start on the big boys. That’s what Porter’s counterintuitive strategy’s about, see? If we wait for them to grow their balls back, they’ll wipe us out. But if we take advantage of that head start, and do all the things that
right now they’re afraid to do – who knows how far we can go?’

  Grisha has been given his own office, a small, cramped box room behind the Sales Department with just a desk and a whiteboard – no TV, no Bloomberg, not even a phone. He doesn’t seem to mind; he spends most of his time out on the plaza, apparently talking to the pigeons.

  ‘Look at that,’ Howie says approvingly, gazing down from the window. ‘Mad as a nail. How can he not make us a fortune?’

  Porter’s memo coincides with a golden streak for the bank such as I have never experienced before. Every call we make, every pitch, every trade, every merger, buyout, bond issue, comes off as smoothly as a case study in an economics textbook. Europe teeters ever closer to the brink of some unimaginable financial apocalypse, whole streets in Greece burn, and here the zombies by the riverside grow in number as the Royal Irish recapitalization, as predicted, fails completely, the fresh infusion stripped away by international speculators – but our share price leaps up, and up again; the whole world is long BOT.

  Yet to me these successes seem somehow insubstantial. Without Paul there, everything has begun to slide out of focus; and the longer he is gone, the worse it gets. Figures blur on the screen, clients’ voices merge into one another. I’m waylaid by memories, things I haven’t thought about in years, a game of tarot in my aunt’s kitchen, my mother taking my hand as we cross the Pont des Arts.

  Perhaps it’s to combat this that I find myself returning again and again to the Ark to watch Ariadne dance her pas de seul between the tables. How alive she is, how embedded in her day! Even when she’s daydreaming, standing still, she seems to throw off energy, invisible waves that ripple outwards to catch up the people around her. Will she catch me up too? If the two strands of our story come together, might the writer come back in order to tie the knot?

  * * *

  ‘Doing some reading?’

  ‘What? Oh – yes – beginning the Royal Irish accounts.’

  ‘But this is not accounts.’ Jurgen fishes out the book stuffed under the stack of ledgers. ‘De Part et d’Autre, François Texier. Another novel?’

  ‘Philosophy,’ I say gruffly, cheeks crimsoning. ‘It’s … I thought it would be useful, for something I am planning to do.’

  ‘Very good,’ Jurgen says. But he does not leave; instead he parks himself upon the adjoining desk, gazes out for a moment at the rain and then says, ‘You know, Claude, an artist is not like a banker.’

  I open a folder, highlight a raft of redundant files.

  ‘It is in an artist’s nature to be mercurial,’ Jurgen continues. ‘Do you know this word, “mercurial”? It means prone to rapid and unexpected change, as liquid mercury is in the barometer.’

  ‘I am familiar with it,’ I say. The files yield up pale blue, translucent images of themselves, as if I am extracting their ghosts and transporting them to some electronic afterlife.

  ‘It is a good word,’ Jurgen says.‘Mer-cur-i-al. It is what Stacy calls Bobo the clown in Paul’s book – have you reached this part, where Stacy breaks up with Bobo?’

  ‘Of course,’ I mutter.

  ‘Bobo, as a clown, is constantly searching for new jokes and new sensations. Stacy, as a health and safety officer, wants order and regularity. Their two lifestyles are completely different. This is why she terminates their relationship.’

  ‘She does that in Chapter Five,’ I object. ‘But then at the end she realizes she’s still in love with him.’

  ‘I stopped reading after Chapter Five,’ Jurgen says. He broods over his folded arms for a moment. The recycling bin flashes indigo as the files are subsumed and resurrected as empty space. ‘I suppose the thing to remember is that it is only a book,’ he says, getting up. ‘Not real life.’

  * * *

  On Tuesday morning, my team has a meeting with Cornerstone, one of several American private equity firms currently occupying the city’s five-star hotels. The market believes Ireland will soon go the same way as Greece: bankruptcy, riots, decades of national bondage. Value investors like Cornerstone are gambling the opposite. Operating on the principle that the moment of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, they sift through the wreckage of Irish society, checking out shopping malls, stud farms, golf courses, whole estates of houses, businesses that can’t stay afloat and, of course, the loan books of faltering Irish banks.

  We meet them at the hotel. There are three of them, tanned, sockless, in open-necked shirts and Patek Philippe watches, exuding an air of amused, joshing serenity. I do a surreptitious check for any giveaway tattoos. Many American bankers are ex-military – bland-faced, blue-eyed, faultlessly courteous men who went directly from their tour of Iraq or Afghanistan to MBAs in Wharton and Harvard. Indeed, the head of Cornerstone, General John Perseus, was one of the top commanders of the original invasion of Iraq; I suppose when you have seen an entire country being shelled to oblivion, holding your nerve during a bear run on the stock market does not present a major challenge.

  Cornerstone are interested in Royal Irish. That they have chosen to consult us about them is quite a feather in our cap. This morning, though, I cannot get the pitch straight in my head. ‘Excuse me – let me just, ah…’ I awaken my laptop screen, squint at the spreadsheet. Numbers swim between the columns, decimal points dancing about like fleas. ‘Ah…’

  The three private equity bros gaze at me amusedly, serenely, hands draped loosely between their legs in the enormous leather armchairs.

  ‘Of course, the pertinent data has already been set out for you in the accompanying file,’ Jurgen says, stepping in. ‘If you will turn to page four…’

  ‘Fail to prepare, prepare to fail,’ Kevin says philosophically as we are leaving.

  ‘What are you on about, pipsqueak? Claude had them eating out of his hand,’ Ish says.

  Jurgen does not say anything, but when our car pulls up at the IFSC he waits for the others to climb out and then turns to me. ‘You know that as a managerial policy I do not believe in issuing threats or warnings,’ he says.

  ‘Yes,’ I say guiltily.

  But there is no more; with that he gets out of the car, closing the door in my face.

  * * *

  ‘Maybe you need someone observing you,’ Ish hypothesizes. ‘You know, like electrons.’

  ‘Electrons?’

  ‘What’s that thing about electrons? You know, that unless someone’s there looking at them they don’t stay in the one spot? Instead they’re just sort of spread out all over the place?’

  ‘I have been working as an analyst for years without anyone observing me,’ I say.

  ‘Maybe you didn’t know you were an electron.’

  ‘I’m not an electron,’ I say.

  It is late; we are among the last ones left in the office. Outside, arrayed in the darkness, the buildings with their sparse panes of light look like monolithic dominoes waiting to fall.

  ‘You’ve tried calling him?’

  ‘Hundreds of times.’

  Ish tocks a pencil against her teeth. ‘I wonder what happened,’ she says.

  ‘It is obvious what happened,’ I snap. ‘He realized the novel wasn’t going to work.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t it work?’

  ‘Why?’ I can’t contain my anger any longer. ‘Because what we do is – empty! Meaningless! No one in the world could find it interesting, unless they were being paid!’

  ‘You don’t know that’s what happened. Wouldn’t he have said something, if he was just going to drop the whole thing? Like, why would he just disappear?’

  I limit myself to another glower, push my brain to engage with the wall of numbers on the screen.

  ‘Those new directions you said he was thinking about,’ Ish says. ‘What were they, exactly?’

  ‘What were they?’ I repeat.

  ‘Like, maybe there’s a clue there. To what might have happened to him.’

  She gazes at me ingenuously. I have a momentary vision of Ariadne stepping towards me, cupping m
y face in her hands, bringing her lips to mine, and experience a brief stab of pain.

  ‘He didn’t have anything concrete,’ I say.

  She falls silent again. On her desk sits an ever-growing mountain of papers she’s waiting to show to the writer – articles about her gift-island, photocopies from textbooks, Polaroids of her younger self, skinny, smudged, beaming, with her arm around various stocky topless tribespeople – like ingredients for a spell, as if she believes he might be able to summon her up out of her own past.

  ‘Could it be,’ she says at last, ‘he wants you to find him?’

  ‘I told you, he does not answer his phone.’

  ‘No, I mean, track him down. You said he was thinking up new directions for the book. Maybe this is it. This is what happens.’

  ‘The writer is in the book?’

  ‘Yeah, and the banker has to help him. Like in that film, you know, with that guy.’

  Find him: for some reason, the idea has never occurred to me before, as if the traffic between his life and mine could only ever be one way. It has, I must admit, a certain resonance. But how would we find him? He projected himself into our world without betraying any hint of his own, in spite of our best efforts.

  ‘Maybe there’s a clue in here.’ Diving into her bag, she pulls out For Love of a Clown and starts flicking through it. ‘Does he mention any neighbourhoods? Can you remember?’