The Mark and the Void

by Paul Murray

  Only Bank of Torabundo stayed away. Our chief executive, Sir Colin Shred, was deeply sceptical about Royal. He thought they were over-invested in a single sector, he thought that sector was heading for a crash. But Royal’s share price had risen astronomically – 2,000 per cent in seven years – and our clients were howling at the fortunes they were missing out on. It was clear to me within a few weeks of starting at BOT that if I could change Sir Colin’s mind, many people would be grateful to me.

  I decided to set up a meeting with Royal’s CEO, Miles O’Connor, to talk through his figures and long-term strategy. But this proved far from easy. As head of the best bank in the world, Miles was a man much in demand. Businessmen and governments alike clamoured to learn his secrets; he was flying all over the world, dispensing wisdom. I had almost given up hope when Bruce Gaffney, a salesman I knew at Royal, called to tell me that if I came to the Shelbourne Hotel that night he could get me five minutes – no more.

  Royal’s AGM had been that morning and an air of jubilation filled the hotel lobby, along with wafts of cigar smoke that drifted in through the revolving doors. When he began at Royal, then an inconsequential boutique, Miles had targeted the rugby clubs both for staff and for clients; the atmosphere tonight was that of a locker room, loud with backslapping and hur-hur-hurring; the waitresses were having a hard time. I spent what seemed like many hours on the margins of things, having the same desultory conversation about the French scrum over and over again. Any time I caught a glimpse of Miles, he was at the centre of a cluster of men who hung on his every word like barfly apostles. Then, out of the blue (or had Bruce, unbeknownst to me, intervened?), I found myself thrust up against him.

  I had not expected to like him, but I did. Moments after meeting me, the leader of one of the world’s most successful banks was calling me a ‘sound cunt’ and asking what I was drinking! After working in Paris, where everything was swamped in protocol and 23-year-old men conducted themselves like mouldering dukes, I found this refreshing to say the least. He was slight, silver-haired, foxy, quite unlike the meaty second-row types he liked to surround himself with; he was smoking a fat cigar, which in the reception room of one of Dublin’s oldest and costliest hotels was even more against the rules than it was elsewhere. He had a mischievous sense of humour.

  ‘Take a look, Claude,’ he said, pulling his phone from his pocket. ‘What do you make of this fella, eh?’ I looked at the phone. On the screen was a picture of a glossy black stallion. ‘His name’s Turbolot,’ Miles said. ‘We’re thinking of appointing him to the board.’ His frank black eyes regarded mine. I gazed back at him dumbly. Slapping my stomach with the back of his hand, he hooted with laughter. ‘Your face! Jesus Christ!’

  He knew Sir Colin didn’t care for him. He didn’t seem to mind; instead he found it quite natural. ‘He’s a Brit. He hates to see the Paddies getting ahead. To him, that’s the lunatics taking over the fucking asylum. But the tide has turned, Claude, that’s what he needs to accept. Do you know what we did last week? Bankrolled a consortium to buy the Chichester Hotel from the Duke of Edinburgh. The Irish are buying up the Queen’s fucking back garden! Of course the old guard don’t like it.’

  ‘He thinks you’ve taken on too much risk,’ I told him; I realized that with him I could speak directly. ‘He thinks you’ve left yourself exposed if the market turns.’

  Miles dismissed this with a wave of his cigar. ‘Look, Claude, he’s your boss, I don’t want to speak ill of him. But Sir Colin’s a fossil. He’s the remnant of an empire that’s spent the last hundred fucking years slowly sinking into the sea. Ireland is different. It’s small, it’s young, it’s versatile. And because in Ireland we’re not wedded to a whole lot of empty protocol, we understand that when change happens, it’s big! And it’s fast! There isn’t time to run all your decisions past Risk and Treasury and whoever else. Your job is to get the money out to the fella who’s going to use it, ASA-fucking-P, and there’s an end to it. He doesn’t want to be hassled by some prat with a diploma looking for fucking pie charts and breakdowns and all that. He wants to make something happen. He wants to do a fucking deal. Now the question is, are you going to help him?’

  He looked me straight in the eye, smoke pumping from his mouth in industrial quantities, sweat beading on his brow, his bow tie slightly askew. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you’re here to ask me how it all works, and I’m just going to tell you the truth, which is that I don’t have the faintest fucking notion. Sometimes I feel like the dog that woke up with two mickeys – I know it’s a good thing, but I’m fucked if I know how it happened. I’ll tell you this, though: the Irish have been everybody’s bloody slave long enough. It used to be whenever I’d go to the airport it’d be full of young people shipping off to Australia or New York for whatever gammy bit of work they could get. Now when I go the airport I see them coming back. Coming home, because they can have a better life here. I know it’s all supposed to be about the bottom line. But I’m proud of that, I’m bloody proud. You’ll have another?’

  He pointed at the half-empty glass in my hand; before I could reply, he had disappeared and a fresh pint materialized. It took me a moment to realize that was the end of the interview. But when I thought about it, what more analysis did I need? He was right, wasn’t he? Maybe on paper the bank looked vulnerable – but that was only if you believed in the old way of doing things. The world was changing. Switch on the television, you saw ordinary people being turned into superstars overnight. Why shouldn’t Miles and his developers do the same for Ireland? Why should they be weighed down by the relics of the past? History was being rolled back, ancient oppressions undone; did it matter if the bank’s loan book outweighed its deposits?

  To Sir Colin it did. He rejected my request to issue a ‘Buy’ recommend for Royal; he declined to hear the presentation I’d put together. Later I heard that was when the board of directors began to mass themselves against him. But of course he was right. Looking through Royal’s loan book now is like swimming through a drowned world, the numerical ruins of hotels and houses, of malls and towers and temples, all buried under blue-tinged, airless fathoms of debt; the city is being sold off piece by piece, for bargain-basement rates, and the airports are full of people saying goodbye.

  * * *

  ‘You are ready to order?’

  ‘Not yet, thank you, I am waiting for someone.’ I speak offhandedly, without quite looking at her.

  ‘Okay,’ Ariadne says gaily. ‘Call when you want me.’

  I watch her glide away, divert her course at a raised finger, lavish her smile on two men in iron-grey suits who don’t know quite what to do with it. Outside, a steam of ricocheting droplets hovers over the plaza. For the last week the rain has been almost continuous; in the office we have all become experts in its different personae and gradations – can predict the worst of downpours, gauge the gaps that will allow us a coffee run. More than once I have dreamed that the Ark has come unmoored and floated away with me in it.

  ‘Checking out the arses, eh?’

  I look up. Bruce Gaffney, my Royal Irish contact, is grinning down at me, emitting his familiar emphysemic-dog laugh, hcchh hcchh hcchh. He peels off his raincoat, parks himself across the table from me. ‘I wondered why you wanted to meet in this kip. Now I get it. How’s tricks, Claudius? What can I do you for?’

  I tell him the government has commissioned a report from us on Royal. He issues a comical huff of exasperation. ‘Reports,’ he says. ‘They can’t get enough of those things, can they?’

  ‘The last recapitalization didn’t work. You’re running out of money faster than they can replace it. They’re wondering if there’s any point giving you more.’

  ‘Well, if they don’t want to see yours truly fed to the sharks by a bunch of very fucking unhappy bondholders they’ll keep the taps on,’ he says. ‘You’re French, Claude, you know the famous German bonhomie doesn’t stretch all that far.’

  Ariadne returns with her order pad; I ask for
two coffees. The instant she turns away, Bruce goes into a routine, boggling, winking, panting in fake agony. ‘The point is, soon there won’t be any money left to give you,’ I say, ignoring this. ‘They can’t raise those kinds of funds anymore.’

  ‘Dark times, Claudius, dark times,’ Bruce Gaffney says, and shakes his head, as if I have been telling him about some other bank in some other country very, very far away. ‘Aha!’ He brightens as Ariadne returns with our coffee. ‘The goddess of the grounds. The Beatrice of the bean. Thank you, darling.’

  I try again. ‘Can you survive without another recap?’

  ‘What, nothing at all?’ he says, as if affronted, then, seeing my expression, changes tack: ‘What I mean is, we’re almost over the hump! If we could get another, say, seven billion, we’d definitely be able to hold our own till this all blows over.’

  ‘You said that the last time.’

  ‘Yeah, but last time we should have said we needed fourteen billion. I don’t know where we got seven, frankly. Some trainee probably just made it up.’

  ‘But you see’ – I am struggling to keep my patience – ‘that’s exactly why they’ve asked me to write this report. They don’t trust the figures you’re giving them.’

  ‘Right, right,’ he says, his attention wandering across the plaza again; then, as I open a folder and pass a spreadsheet over to him, ‘Ah, here, don’t be dumping this stuff on me, not on a bloody Friday afternoon.’

  ‘I just wanted to know if you can clarify some things.’

  He rolls his eyes, presses his lips, as if I had brought him to lunch and then tried to sell him a watch.

  ‘This figure here, do you know what it relates to?’

  ‘What, off the top of my head?’

  ‘It’s fifty million euro.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Gandon.’

  ‘Gandon is here. Whitcroft is here. Dreyer’s, Gane International, all those are accounted for. But this money here, there’s no indication where it’s going. Instead someone’s tried to bury it by hiding it inside another transaction.’

  Bruce Gaffney flicks his teeth with his fingers to produce the first two bars of ‘La Marseillaise’. ‘Must be one of those things, then, mustn’t it?’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘The things they have on aeroplanes. That they dig up when it crashes. What do you call it? A black box.’

  ‘A black box?’

  ‘Yeah, a black box.’

  ‘You are telling me nobody knows what this fifty million might relate to.’

  He shrugs, looks me full on. The plaza passes translucent in his glasses, veiling his eyes.

  ‘I’m trying to help you,’ I say.

  ‘Oh Jesus!’ He throws up an exasperated hand. ‘Maybe Miles took a few quid out to invest or something. It’s a bank, Claude, it’s a highly complicated fucking, you know, operation. I mean, are you going to put every single rubber fucking band into this bloody report?’

  ‘With so many irregularities it will be hard to find a buyer.’

  ‘Fine, fuck the buyers. It’ll sort itself out. Like I’ve told you for the last two fucking years, what Royal has is a minor cash-flow problem. The real issue is that we’re being made the scapegoats. We’re carrying the can for the whole country turning to shit. Well, fuck that, Claude. Fuck that. It’s not like we went around putting a gun to people’s heads and telling them to take out a second mortgage. Everybody partied. Now they’re blaming us for their hangover.’ The flare of temper is quickly damped down; he becomes affable again, solicitous. He leans in closer to the table. ‘Look, I know the books are a bit of a mess. It’s fucking Royal, what do you expect? But the fact of the matter is the place is sound. I’m in there every day. I can tell you with my hand on my heart, it’s sound. Now I know you’re a straight shooter, I’m not going to tell you what to put in your report. But I would ask, as a colleague, that you give the full story. Don’t just be banging on exclusively about anomalies or black boxes or whatever the fucking secretary dropped behind the radiator.’

  As he gets up I ask him about Dublex.

  ‘What about Dublex?’ he says.

  ‘Do they have a holding in Royal?’

  This time his ignorance seems genuine. ‘First I’ve heard of it. Walter crawls out of his gravel pit the odd time for a round of golf with the board, but that’s about the size of it.’ Now a smile crosses his face. ‘Here, have you seen these lads dressed as zombies outside the new HQ? It’s fucking classic, there’s a zombie Miles and everything, this little lad with a silver wig and this suit covered in shit? Hilarious.’ He pauses judiciously at the door. ‘See, that’s the kind of protest they should have in Greece instead of chucking petrol bombs. They’re making their point but at the same time giving everyone a bit of a laugh. Fuck knows we could use one. Good to see you, Claude. If there’s anything else I can do for you, you know where to ask.’ He points at his bottom, then hurries (‘Fuck’s sake!’) back into the rain.

  I gather the documents spread over the table, tap them straight, set them down again. There is nothing I can do that will make them make sense; they are not a black box, but a black hole, into which time, trust, meaning, other people’s money, disappear endlessly.

  ‘Another coffee?’ Ariadne has reappeared at my shoulder.

  I smile stiffly. ‘I should go back to work.’

  ‘You can wait till rain stops,’ she says, and then, ‘Hey – you want to try something?’ Before I can reply she has whisked away, and then whisked back again with a plate. ‘Baklava. It’s my grandmother’s recipe.’

  She hovers as I lift a forkful to my mouth. The cake is sweet and sticky, with crunches of almond and cinnamon. It’s hard to eat with her watching me, and also hard to swallow, and speak. Nevertheless, I am able to declare, mostly honestly, that I like it.

  ‘My grandmother makes it much better. I think it’s maybe the honey she use.’

  ‘No, it’s good,’ I say, taking another bite. ‘Savoureux, as we say in France.’

  ‘In Greek, we say nostimo. Which means, hmm, something you want to come back to. You know, like nostalgia, the pain to want to return home.’ She laughs. ‘That’s Greece, you cannot even eat a cake without the past come looking for you.’

  I smile. How green her eyes are, and bright; looking into them is like walking through an enchanted forest. It strikes me that I am alone with her; I feel an odd sense of unburdenment, as if we are two characters in a play meeting in the wings while the scenery is changed.

  ‘So, you are from Greece?’ I say, wincing internally at my accent, the dinosaur-clomp of the words. ‘What has made you come to Ireland?’

  ‘Ha ha, you watch the news?’

  ‘It has not always been like this.’

  ‘No, until this year we cover it up. And you, you’re from France?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. There is a pause; I realize in horror that I have exhausted my entire conversational repertoire.

  ‘And your friend too?’ She nods at the empty seat.

  ‘He is not my friend.’

  ‘Not the man, today. The other one. Doesn’t wear a suit, always in black.’

  ‘Oh, him. No, he is Irish.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he come here anymore?’

  ‘He, ah … well, he lost his job.’

  ‘Ah, that’s a shame.’ She appears genuinely dismayed. ‘I always liked to see you two talking. It look like you are coming up with a secret plan. I thought someday maybe you’d call me over, make me a part of it. “Okay, Ariadne, here’s what we’re gonna do.”’

  ‘We almost did,’ I say.

  ‘Well, if you ever make another, let me tell you I am a very good person to be included.’

  ‘Is that right,’ I say levelly, though I feel like I’m in a car that is spinning out of control.

  ‘Yes, because, for a beginning, I can make special cake with magical powers of returning the past. I can paint the abstract paintings with magical powers of not selling. And, hmm,
I can use my Greekness to give the etymologies of many words, very useful quality.’

  ‘Give me an example.’

  She draws herself up straight, knits her brows, takes a moment. ‘So,’ she says. ‘This word psyche, that means your mind or your soul or your spirit. In Greece, in ancient times, psyche was the word for a butterfly. And in those times they think, when you are nervous about something, or you feel something intensely, you have inside you a psyche. And then slowly the meaning changed, and this psyche becomes something immortal that is essential to you.’

  ‘But that’s how the idea of the soul began? From butterflies in the stomach?’

  ‘Or you can look at it the other way round,’ she says, fixing me in her green gaze. ‘You can say these moments when inside you is jumping – like when you’re talking to somebody you like – that’s how you know you have a soul.’

  And she smiles, and I smile, and her eyes glow at me, and with a flurry of heartbeats I have the indescribable but irrefutable sense that I am back in the story again, or that life and story have somehow come together in one impossibly fragile moment, like a psyche, a butterfly lighting on my palm …

  Raised voices can be heard as I approach the door, but this time I resist the urge to eavesdrop. I knock stoutly; after a series of rattles and chunks it opens a fraction. Paul’s beleaguered face falls further when he sees me.

  ‘Oh God, you again? I told you I was sorry, can’t you just leave me alone?’

  ‘Wait!’ I jam my foot in the door. ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘There’s nothing to talk about!’

  ‘Just for a minute. Please. You owe me that much.’