The Mark and the Void

by Paul Murray

  ‘So you want me to help you.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You want me to rewrite your character, so it’ll click with this girl in the café, like Pretty Woman or something.’

  ‘Yes, or Cyrano de Bergerac. You have diagnosed very accurately the emptiness of my life. Now I want you to help me to fill it.’

  He puffs out his cheeks, watches a busload of ponchoed tourists alight into the rain.

  ‘You don’t like it. You think it is an impossible idea.’

  ‘It’s not that I don’t like it,’ he says. ‘Frankly, I’m so broke that if you were proposing I dress up as your nanny and spank you I’d give it serious consideration. But I don’t get it. You’re not a bad-looking guy. You have a ton of money, you’ve got your whole French thing going on. What do you need me for? There must be lots of women out there just dying to jump in the sack with you.’

  ‘They are all the wrong women.’

  ‘And Ariadne, who you barely know, you’re certain is the right woman.’

  ‘Yes. But I don’t think she will be impressed by my money. Or my Frenchness.’

  ‘It’s always the one you can’t have, eh?’

  ‘I don’t know. It is this time.’

  ‘And why ask me?’

  ‘I liked your novel. It seems to me that it too is a story of opposites attracting.’

  ‘Okay, sure, but the fact remains I tried to rip you off, Claude. Why would you trust me after that?’

  I consider this. ‘Your plan was very stupid. Yet your intuitions were strong. First, to pick me out as the subject for your scam – to find someone, as you say, who feels something is missing from his life and so can be manipulated. The next thing, you discover Ariadne. From all the women you could have chosen, you find exactly the one I will fall in love with.’

  ‘I picked her out because she happened to be in my line of vision. If it had been the blonde one I would have said her.’

  ‘I disagree. These split-second decisions are a matter of pure instinct. It’s the same thing that makes the great trader. He can see the story before anyone else – not all of it, just the first lines, the edges, as they are coming out of the future. But that is enough.’

  Paul does not react to this, just continues to gaze at the shifting silver-grey mosaic of the rain on the windscreen. ‘You don’t have to literally write the words in my mouth,’ I tell him. ‘What I want is a consultant. Someone who understands this world of the heart that has become foreign to me and can advise me what to do. If you agree, then I propose to pay you –’

  I name a sum; I feel it is generous. But he seems unmoved. I don’t understand.

  ‘There is no downside here. Even if you think it’s a waste of time, you’ll still get paid. It isn’t exactly writing, but at the very least it’ll pay for you to reclaim your desk from the pawn shop.’ At the mention of the desk he flinches, but before he can speak there comes a cry from outside. From the top of an incline, Remington is shouting that he has found something. His father rolls down the window.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I found an ant!’ the boy shrieks. ‘Look, Dad, look!’

  He hurtles down the hill and over to the car, holding out his cupped hands. A tiny black shape scurries back and forth over the pink dunes of his palms – antennae flailing, all its landmarks stripped away in an instant. I feel a surge of pity and recognition.

  ‘Can I keep him, Dad?’

  ‘What do you want an ant for?’

  ‘To be my friend.’

  ‘Hmm, I don’t know if we’ve got room in the apartment for pets.’

  ‘Please?’

  ‘All right, all right. Now shake off some of that water, we’re going home.’

  ‘Where will I put my ant?’

  ‘I don’t know, stick him in your pocket.’

  ‘I have a box,’ I interject hastily, and dig around in my coat. Emptying out a heap of breath mints, I present the plastic case to Remington, who tips the bewildered ant inside.

  Paul gets out to put the boy into his seat, then climbs back into his own. But he doesn’t start the engine; he just sits there, contemplating the rain. Then at last he turns to me. ‘I’ll do it,’ he says. ‘But it’ll cost you —’

  The figure he names is double what I proposed. His audacity makes me laugh. ‘Maybe you should be working for BOT.’

  ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have got in half a million euros’ worth of debt,’ he says without smiling. ‘Then I wouldn’t have had to start thinking like a banker.’

  ‘I think I’ll call him Roland,’ Remington says, dangling the breath-mints box before his nose in the back seat. ‘Sit, Roland. Stay, Roland. Play dead, Roland.’

  ‘What kind of name is Roland for an ant?’ Paul objects. ‘Think of something else.’

  ‘Hmm … Roland?’ Remington says.

  Paul turns around in his seat. ‘Jesus Christ, Remington, the name you just thought of was Roland.’

  ‘What’s a good name for an ant, Dad?’

  Paul thinks for a minute. ‘Anthony,’ he says.

  Remington and I are forced to concede that this is a good name.

  ‘See, that’s what you’re paying for,’ Paul says.

  I mean to keep it to myself, but am so excited that in a moment of weakness I let slip to Ish that I have engaged the writer’s services. She is not impressed.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re even talking to that slimeball,’ she says.

  ‘There didn’t seem any point in holding a grudge,’ I say. ‘After all, he didn’t actually do anything.’

  ‘He did plenty,’ Ish says. ‘Imagine if his plan had come off, where would we be then?’

  ‘Now I have seen how he lives I can understand it a lot better,’ I tell her. ‘He has a young family. He’s deeply in debt. He bought an apartment during the boom that is now worth a fraction of its original price.’

  ‘Join the club,’ Ish comments mordantly.

  ‘He’s stopped writing.’

  ‘Completely?’ This takes her by surprise.

  ‘He hasn’t written anything for seven years.’

  ‘So what does he do all day?’

  ‘Nothing. Drinks, goes to strip clubs.’

  ‘So you’re going to give him another crack at robbing the bank, is that it?’

  I don’t answer. Ariadne has arrived with our orders. She smiles at me as she sets down the plate, I smile back at her …

  ‘Claude?’

  ‘Ah, yes, so…’ Without mentioning Ariadne, I give Ish the barest sketch of the plan, the idea of continuing the next months of my life ‘as if they were in a book’.

  ‘What’s the point of that?’ she says.

  ‘I suppose it’s a kind of life coaching. Embracing the moment, that kind of thing. Discovering my humanity.’

  ‘That chancer, what does he know about humanity? When’s the last time anyone saw his blimmin’ humanity?’

  ‘Well, this is only a pretext,’ I say. ‘My real hope is that if I ask him to create the scenarios for me, after a while he may be inspired actually to write the book.’

  ‘The book about the banking Everyman?’

  ‘That book. Any book. It seems to me that if he has a regular income, maybe he will no longer feel so disillusioned. He will remember he is happier as a working writer than as an unemployed con man. This is my – what do you say, ulterior motive?’

  ‘Be careful, Claude,’ she says gloomily. ‘You can’t try and change someone. My online psychic’s always telling me that.’ She chomps down on a stick of celery. ‘Are we going to be in these, whatyoucall, scenarios as well?’

  ‘Ha, I think I will keep him away from the bank this time. To avoid any temptation, you know.’

  ‘Probably right,’ Ish agrees. She crunches her food morosely for a moment, then says, ‘The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if I wanted to be in a book anyway. You know, what if I turned out to be one of those characters nobody likes? And they skip all t
he bits with me in them, and they complain on Apeiron about how boring I am?’

  ‘You’re not boring.’

  ‘If he was going to put me in a book, I’d much prefer it was the me from a few years ago. When I was travelling with Tog, going to all those amazing places.’ She twirls the celery vacantly in the air, lost in some sad dream, then suddenly brightens. ‘Oh, here, though. Did I show you my necklace? My mum just sent it over.’

  She hooks the string with her finger, pulling it free of her neck so I can see it better. The necklace is composed of shells; they all appear white at first, but when I lean closer I see that they are very subtly graded, running from blue to pink.

  ‘It’s from Kokomoko?’

  ‘Yeah, one of the tribal elders gave it to me. Here, I’ll show you a picture.’ She takes her tablet from her bag and pulls up an image of an extremely wizened old woman. ‘Her name’s Kavitatni. She’s a king.’

  ‘Not a queen?’

  ‘No. She’s a king from about three centuries ago, called Viri the Fierce.’

  I am confused.

  ‘Well, like I was telling you, on the island, everything and everyone’s all bound up together.’

  ‘In the gifts.’

  ‘Yeah. Everything circulates, which means nobody really dies. Instead, all the ancestors are still floating around. They’re in the gifts, they’re on the fishing boat, they’re at the feasts. And whenever there’s an important decision to be made, the dead kings speak through their chosen mouthpiece.’

  ‘So your friend here is … possessed by this King Viri?’

  ‘Well, she channels him. It’s quite funny when you’ve got some bigwig from Shell or whatever coming over wanting to talk about mining rights, and they find themselves having to make their presentation to the ghost of a king in the body of an old lady.’

  There are more pictures, semi-naked people in coracles, or daubed in spirals, brandishing spears; I make appreciative noises, all the while watching Ariadne from the corner of my eye as she circulates between the tables.

  Was Clizia right? Is my plan insane? Many of my colleagues have attended weekend seminars on picking up women, the kind that advise you to begin by insulting whoever it is you want to sleep with; others are signed up to Internet dating agencies that promise ‘perfect love without suffering’ by feeding your personal data into a computer to find your optimal match. Hiring a writer to mastermind my courtship does not seem significantly madder than these. And I wasn’t lying to Ish: I do nourish hopes that I can coax Paul back to writing. If his debts didn’t weigh so heavily, if he had time and space to think, why shouldn’t his creativity flourish once more?

  * * *

  In the meantime, however, there is work, where the mood is less buoyant. We have been holding out hope that Tordale will come back to us, but today on the news we see the former British Prime Minister being welcomed by the Caliph of Oran to his magnificent palace. ‘That’s that, then,’ Ish says.

  Kevin doesn’t follow. ‘He’s there with the UN,’ he says. ‘Setting up a ceasefire with the rebels.’

  ‘That’s just the cover story,’ Ish says.

  I explain that as soon as the Prime Minister left office, he had signed up as a consultant to one of the Big Three banks; that’s the real reason he’s in Oran.

  ‘What would a politician know about banking?’ Kevin asks.

  ‘He doesn’t need to know anything,’ Ish says. ‘His phone’s got every head of state in it from the White House to Beijing. Think about it. You’re a genocidal tyrant facing down a hundred thousand Islamic fundamentalists. Who do you want as your financial adviser? A bunch of nerds with four-colour pie charts? Or the guy with the back door to every nuclear missile silo in the Western world?’

  It’s just business; these things happen all the time. Still, the news casts a pall of gloom over the whole office. Then, as if he has sensed, from across the blue expanse of the Atlantic, his acolytes losing faith –

  ‘Inspirational memo!’ Kevin exclaims. ‘A new one!’

  ‘Holy shit!’ Around the office people jump up from their cubicles, jack-in-the-box fashion, the better to contemplate the message.

  ‘“All that glitters is not gold,”’ Ish reads.

  ‘What does it mean?’ Kevin says. ‘Why’s he telling us all that glitters is not gold?’

  ‘It’s a riddle,’ Ish decides.

  ‘Are you talking about the Blankly email?’ Joe Peston from TTM says, coming in from the lobby.

  ‘Did you get it too?’

  ‘Everybody got it.’

  ‘What do you think it means?’

  ‘Not sure,’ Joe says, rubbing his jaw. ‘It seems to operate on a number of different levels.’

  ‘I imagine it means all that glitters is not gold,’ I say. ‘That is, be careful of overvalued stock.’

  ‘What are we, four-year-olds?’ Joe says. ‘Everyone knows all that glitters isn’t gold.’

  ‘This guy’s paid twenty-eight million dollars basic a year,’ Jocelyn Lockhart concurs from across the divider. ‘He’s not getting that just to send his staff proverbs. There’s a whatdoyoumacall. A subtext.’

  ‘Maybe he wants us to short gold,’ Kevin suggests. ‘Like, when he says all that glitters isn’t gold, he means gold is overvalued.’

  ‘The price of gold has risen for the last six months,’ Joe muses. ‘Could be time for a correction.’

  ‘If he wanted us to short gold, wouldn’t he just tell us to short gold?’ I say.

  ‘What kind of a riddle would that be?’

  ‘Yeah, Claude, don’t be stupid.’

  ‘The memo says all that glitters is not gold,’ I point out. ‘His issue is not with gold itself. He’s talking about other, misleadingly glittering substances.’

  The others agree that this is a good point. ‘But if all that glitters isn’t gold,’ Jocelyn says slowly, raising a finger, ‘then all that doesn’t glitter isn’t necessarily not gold. Right?’

  There is a silence as we struggle to establish whether this makes sense or not, and are still doing so when Jurgen clips in and tells us summarily that the Minister’s office has been in touch again about the Royal Irish report, and that they do not think they can wait till the end of the week.

  Ish and I look at each other. ‘When do they want it?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Jurgen says.

  ‘Tomorrow?’ We boggle in unison.

  ‘What’s the rush?’ Kevin says.

  Jurgen wiggles a finger in his ear. ‘My conjecture is that Royal Irish has run out of money again. If so the Minister will have to decide in the next few days whether to infuse yet more funds, or whether the time has at last come for a wind-down.’

  ‘That’s all very well, but how can we possibly get the report done by tomorrow?’ Ish says. ‘Do they have any idea how much information there is to go through?’

  ‘There is a series of black boxes within the accounts,’ I explain. ‘I am beginning to think an anonymous investor has used them to build up a holding in the bank. Either way, it is very hard to get a clear picture of its status.’

  Jurgen considers this. ‘But you have a general idea?’

  ‘Oh, we’ve got a general idea, all right,’ Ish chimes in. ‘It’s fucked, that’s the general idea.’

  ‘My professional opinion would be that the bank is fucked,’ I concur.

  ‘They’re facing litigation left and right,’ Ish goes on. ‘Their collateral’s going up in flames. Their brand has become an international byword for corporate malfeasance. There’s literally no telling how much they owe. The Minister can pour in as much money as he likes, it’ll never be enough. They’ll bleed him until there’s nothing left.’

  ‘And there is no positive spin we can put on this?’ Jurgen says.

  ‘That is the positive spin,’ I say.

  ‘Believe me, they don’t want to see this report any sooner than they have to,’ Ish says.

  ‘What about the idea that the bank is of systemi
c importance? Too big to fail?’

  ‘Not true,’ I say. ‘The bank’s business is all in one small sector, commercial property. If the government decides to wind it down, the losses will be contained.’

  ‘And the creditors?’

  ‘Will face significant write-downs. But they will be expecting that.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Jurgen stalls momentarily in that way he has, as if encountering a glitch in his coding. Then he nods assent. ‘Very good. Get as much done as you can before tomorrow. Rachael wants to see it before you sign off. And remember,’ he says, pausing on his way back to the office, ‘keep all this information confidential until the report is published.’

  He turns to go, and is almost knocked down by Gary McCrum, who comes barrelling into the room in a state of extreme agitation. ‘He solved the riddle!’ he exclaims. ‘He solved it and he’s made a bloody fortune!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Howie! It was so simple! So simple!’ For what seems like a long time he is too excited to tell us anything more; he just bounds around, hooting, like an ape that has won some banana lottery.

  ‘What’s the safest bet for an investor?’ he says when we manage to calm him down. ‘Better than gold, even?’ He looks manically from one face to another. ‘T-bills, right?’

  ‘T-bills?’ Kevin says, curiosity overcoming embarrassment.

  ‘US Treasury bonds,’ I tell him. ‘Essentially IOUs issued by the American government. They are regarded as practically risk-free.’

  ‘Oh, right, I knew that,’ Kevin says.

  ‘What’s that got to do with Howie?’ Ish asks.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ Gary exclaims, partially reverting to ape mode. ‘That’s what Porter’s email meant! T-bills are shakier than they look!’

  ‘Howie bet against US Treasury bonds?’ Joe Peston says, somewhat scandalized.

  ‘It was him and Grisha. Some crazy fucking rocket-science deal using those weird antinomy things. But it came down to shorting T-bills. And then on the news – wait, have you heard the news?’