The Mark and the Void

by Paul Murray

  ‘Genius or not, no one’s going to invest in something they know will lose money,’ I say. ‘It’s like asking them to throw their savings in the fire.’

  ‘You’re right about that, Crazy.’ Howie commends me with the whiskey glass. ‘Getting people on board, that’s the drawback. But say to start out we don’t pick something utterly hopeless. Instead we come up with something that could theoretically turn a buck. For instance, we put a golf course on the island, and a five-star hotel –’

  ‘A golf course?’ Ish repeats in a half-shriek.

  ‘Well, sure. It’s all right there in your email. The rolling meadows, the sand dunes, all that. It’s perfect.’

  ‘But the island’s tiny,’ Ish protests. ‘And the meadows are where the islanders graze their goats.’

  ‘In fairness, people aren’t going to travel thousands of miles to see a bunch of goats,’ Howie says. ‘Anyway, the point is that this time round it’s the investment proper that’s the insurance. See? If the big wave never comes, we can make money from the hotel – a conventional return, call it. But if the wave does come, as seems statistically likely, and if the island goes under with our investment – that’s when we really cash in. Call that’ – with a bow to me – ‘your irrational return.’

  Neither Ish nor I speak. She is pinned back in her chair, eyes huge, as if she has witnessed an atrocity.

  ‘Come on, guys! Show some enthusiasm!’ Howie half-laughs, half-shouts. ‘Don’t you see the bottom line here? Even when it all goes tits up, you still get paid! Profit is finally liberated from circumstance! It’s the Holy Grail! It’s the singularity!’

  ‘It’s madness,’ I say.

  ‘The investors don’t think it’s madness, Claude.’ Howie shakes his head. ‘That last meeting I had’ – he gestures towards the door the stubby man with the moustache recently exited – ‘he’s putting a million in it. A million of his own money, for something that doesn’t even have a name yet.’

  ‘Then he is mad too.’

  ‘Maybe it sounds mad now. But that’s because you’re ignoring the existing information. The smart investor knows that in a few years from now there aren’t going to be any more conventional profits. What’s on the cards for Ish’s little island isn’t a one-off. This is just the beginning.’

  ‘You’re talking about global warming.’

  ‘I’m talking about the whole fucking shooting match, Claude. Seizures in the electricity grid, degradation of ecosystems, the spread of epidemics, the disintegration of the financial system – they’re all part of the same phenomenon. Civilization has become a bubble. When it pops, it’s going to be very, very messy. Even in the best-case scenario, no one’s going to make a cent for three hundred years – unless they can work out how to make loss pay.’

  ‘But that means profiting from human misery!’ Two bright spots have appeared on Ish’s cheeks.

  ‘Profiting from conditions we did nothing to create,’ Howie says. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Obviously it’s fucking wrong, Howie. How’s anything going to get better if your stupid fund pays out every time there’s a humanitarian disaster?’

  ‘I don’t understand why you’re getting so emotional,’ he says. ‘It’s maths, that’s all. It’s a new mathematical model, according to which capital will no longer be adversely affected by developments in the non-banking world. How can that be a bad thing?’

  ‘Because we live in the non-banking world! The non-banking world is the world, don’t you get it? What’s the point of making millions if in a few years the whole planet will be underwater?’

  Howie just looks at her, with the dumb, bestial eyes of a lamb; Ish emits a furious gurgle, then jumps to her feet and stamps out of the room.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Howie says. Grisha chuckles approvingly. ‘Okay, Ivan, off you go,’ Howie tells him. Still chuckling, the Russian lurches out.

  ‘Christ, he gives me the fucking creeps,’ Howie says. ‘I don’t think he’s washed once since he got here.’

  I take a last sip of my whiskey and rise to my feet. ‘I should get back too,’ I say. ‘This has been very entertaining. Between ourselves, though, you don’t honestly believe it can work, do you?’

  Howie laughs. ‘I’m just giving people what they want, Claude. That’s all I’ve ever tried to do.’

  ‘You think this is what they want? To invest in catastrophe?’

  ‘Of course it is. A great big flood’s coming, we’ve got the lifeboat? An Ark for the chosen few, where they can relax with a martini, watch everybody else drown? It’s exactly what they want. It’s what they’ve wanted their whole lives.’

  ‘But this’ – I gesture around me at the computer, the office, the rooms and staff beyond, the external manifestations of the fund – ‘it’s not an Ark. It isn’t anything. It’s a fiction. A fairy tale.’

  ‘We’re in the business of fairy tales, Claude.’ He swirls his glass a moment, then says, ‘Did you know I started in stats? That was my undergraduate degree. In my final year, I did a paper on salaries-to-performance ratios in the City of London. One of the Big Five banks let me and a couple of friends come in and analyse the track record of their best traders. We spent a month going through five years of figures: the stocks they’d picked, the hits, the misses, the money they’d made and the money they’d lost. What we found was that a random selection would have given better results than their picks. One year one guy might be lucky, another year another might be lucky. But year-on-year consistency was close to zero. Meaning that if you’d pulled the stocks out of a hat, or had a monkey pick them by throwing darts at a board, in the long run you would have done better.

  ‘Anyhow, we go to the bank’s Chief Financial Officer with our findings. We’re expecting they’ll cause a stir. If there’s nothing more to it than blind chance, then the bank’s whole trading operation is a sham! So yeah, we’re pretty excited. And the CFO listens and says it’s a very interesting study. That night, he has one of his minions take us out on the piss – cocktails, strippers, the whole bit, and then we go back to college and that’s the end of that. Except that when I finish my degree I find I can’t get a job in London for love nor money. No one in the Square Mile will touch me, not to clean the fucking toilets. So it’s back to the Emerald Isle with my tail between my legs.’

  He smiles up at me; I gaze back at him, not understanding.

  ‘It’s meaningless, Claude. All of this,’ he says, flicking a hand at the window, ‘and all of this,’ tapping the Bloomberg, ‘and everything you do and everything everyone like you does all day long in cities around the world – it’s meaningless. You don’t have the information to predict what the future will bring. Yes, you think you can make an educated guess. This whole trillion-dollar industry is predicated on the belief that clever men can make educated guesses. But it’s an illusion. In actuality, your educated guesses are just pissing in the wind. Statistically speaking.’

  He rotates his tumbler on the glass-topped desk. ‘I guess the good news for us,’ he says, ‘is that people like illusions. They like strong narratives, they like good stories. The one about the brilliant CEO who makes tough decisions and turns the company around. The one about the clever man in the very expensive suit whose penetrating analysis can tell if the share price will go up or down. Even now, when everybody’s out for our blood, they still want to believe that we’ve got the answers. That someone’s got the answers. They’d rather believe that than the truth.’ He tosses back his whiskey. ‘In fact that’s about the one sure bet you can make. If it’s a choice between a difficult truth and a simple lie, people will take the lie every time. Even if it kills them.’

  * * *

  Halfway down the stairs I find Ish sitting on a step; from above, I can see dark roots growing through her blonde hair. I’m about to tell her what Howie more or less admitted – that Phase Two is a mirage, a trap for unwary investors, that nothing will come of it. But was that what he said? When I revisit the scene
of only a moment ago, I find it has already become shifting, elusive, uncertain, as though the conversation had contained some hidden application, some proprietary software that now acts to shut down any memory of it, every detail, large and small, vanishing out of my mind even as I watch …

  She wipes her eyes perfunctorily. ‘What’s this about Walter?’ she says.

  Reluctantly, I tell her about the concealed stake in Royal, the rewritten report.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ she says, shaking her head.

  Outside, night is setting in: across the river, the floors of the unoccupied office blocks fluoresce, a thousand cold fires blazing for no one.

  ‘I wish Rachael had fired me,’ Ish says. ‘Then I wouldn’t have had to find out about any of this. I would have felt like I’d done something noble. Instead of helping Howie turn the end of the world into a cash cow.’

  ‘It’s not as bad as you think.’

  ‘It is. It’s worse. Actual people are going to be affected by this. People who don’t know what a derivative is. People who don’t even have bank accounts. They’re going to wake up some morning and find they’re not able to buy food, because some genius five thousand miles away has found a new way to game the system.’

  ‘It won’t work. It can’t. It doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘Nothing we do makes any sense. Doesn’t seem to stop it.’ She turns to look at me. ‘What kind of people are we, Claude? Like – what kind of people are we?’

  ‘None of this is your fault.’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’

  ‘If Howie hadn’t thought of it, someone else would. You were trying to help, that’s all.’

  She snuffles, blows out her cheeks, then lets out a single bark of a laugh. ‘I did have my period,’ she says.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘When I sent the email to Porter? And Howie was saying I must have had my period, to do something so emotional and mad? I did have it.’

  ‘It is not emotional and mad to want to help people,’ I tell her, but she doesn’t reply, just gazes out at the scraps of light on the river as they glister and disappear into the blue-black opacity of the night.

  4

  King Tide

  This sucker could go down.

  George W. Bush

  The Minister dies next morning. I’m taking a call when I see the news flash up on the terminal. Reflexively, I stand to check the big screen mounted on the wall; all around the office my colleagues do likewise, popping up over the dividers like so many Italian-suited meerkats.

  The announcement is followed by a lavish package of biography and tributes, clearly put together weeks before: pictures of the Minister as a child, sitting on a donkey in knickerbockers; rasping footage of him as an ambitious young TD; fellow politicos voicing the usual saccharine platitudes.

  ‘Poor cunt,’ Jocelyn says.

  ‘Maybe now they’ll appoint somebody competent,’ Brent ‘Crude’ Kelleher says.

  Jurgen watches, arms folded, from the back of the room; even when the obit comes to the Royal Irish scandal, and the controversial report, he remains utterly impassive.

  The market is equivocal about the Minister’s death. The financial news is dominated instead by yet another banking scandal: a trader in a Parisian bank has embezzled an as-yet-unknown number of millions from a client account.

  ‘He was on the Delta One desk at Pécuchet, but he’d started out in back office and he knew all the security codes,’ Joe Peston says. ‘Sneaked in at night when all the drones had gone home, forged a whole load of documents signing the client’s money over to himself.’

  ‘Wow, old school,’ says Kevin. On the screen a bewildered-looking man in a black suit and black tie is being led in handcuffs to a police van.

  ‘The French press are calling him “Pierrot”,’ Joe says. ‘Because he’s all in black.’

  ‘The famous French sense of humour,’ Jocelyn says.

  ‘How much did he take?’ I ask.

  ‘Not a huge amount originally. Ten million or so from some mutual fund. They hadn’t even noticed, it was the crazy trades he was making with it that got him busted when Internal Compliance finally woke up.’

  ‘Ten million euro!’ Kevin nudges me joshingly. ‘That’d buy a lot of frog’s legs, eh, Claude?’

  The news lifts everybody’s spirits – partly Schadenfreude, partly bankerly superstition, the belief that at any given time there are only a limited number of Bad Things that can happen, which if they’ve already happened to someone else therefore can’t happen to you.

  I try to use it to break the ice with Ish, who ever since the Howie episode has been monosyllabic. ‘This rogue trader will hurt Pécuchet,’ I say.

  ‘Good on him,’ she says. She is glowering into her computer as if attempting to destroy it telepathically.

  ‘Good on him for stealing ten million euro?’ I repeat.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And losing it all on futile bets?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Money that was enough to build a whole school, that instead goes up in smoke?’

  ‘Oh yeah, like they were going to use one cent of it to build schools.’

  ‘Well, they were not just going to throw it away.’

  ‘You’re right, Claude. They were going to use it to add a few more inches to some squillionaire’s fucking money mountain, so he could stand on top of it, waving his dick at everybody below. That’s what they were going to do. That’s all any of us ever do.’

  I think about this, rocking gently in my chair. Ish hammers at her keyboard, ignoring the lights on her phone. ‘Is everything all right?’ I say.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here anymore,’ she blurts. ‘I feel like a prostitute – worse than a prostitute, I mean, at least prostitutes have the excuse of really needing the money.’

  ‘But you do need the money,’ I say. ‘For your mortgage.’ I intend it as a consolation, but that is not how it sounds.

  A little later, Jurgen appears, descending in a kind of hail of false heartiness. ‘Claude, Claude, Claude,’ he says, clapping me on the shoulder. ‘How is everything, Claude? What are you working on at the moment?’

  I explain that, in anticipation of more fallout from Pécuchet, I’m changing from a Neutral to a Sell recommend on several Continental banks – then tail off. Jurgen is not listening; instead he is merely nodding vacantly while staring over my shoulder at my terminal.

  ‘Are you looking for something?’ I ask.

  ‘Hmm? Me?’ he says innocently, now scrutinizing the documents on my desk.

  ‘Are you … are you spying on me?’

  ‘Of course not,’ he says, and then, ‘What areas, specifically, did you think I was spying on?’

  ‘What’s going on?’ I snap upright in my chair.

  ‘Nothing,’ Jurgen assures me. ‘Except that HR has confirmed you used to work in the back office, like Pécuchet’s rogue trader did.’

  ‘That was years ago,’ I protest, ‘in a different bank, in a different country. I have never even been in the BOT back office.’

  ‘Exactly,’ he agrees. ‘So it is safe to say you are not embezzling funds from your present clients.’

  ‘Are you seriously asking me this?’

  ‘It has come down from Compliance,’ Jurgen says apologetically. ‘Everyone with a back-office history is being checked, across the whole bank.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ Ish says. ‘Claude’s as straight as a die. He won’t even take sugar home from the canteen.’

  Jurgen’s interrogative gaze swivels on to her. ‘Sugar sachets are company property,’ he says.

  ‘You have my word, I have not been embezzling, forging or making unauthorized trades,’ I say.

  ‘That is good enough for me, Claude.’ Again he pats my shoulder. ‘However, we will need to take your hard drive, just to make sure.’ He motions over two men in black T-shirts, who set about detaching plugs and cables, and finally lift my terminal off the des
k.

  ‘Is this absolutely necessary?’

  ‘Phone,’ one of them says to me, holding out his hand.

  ‘How am I supposed to work?’

  ‘It won’t take long,’ Jurgen promises.

  ‘This fucking place,’ Ish says when they have finished. ‘I swear, as soon as I get my next bonus I am gone.’

  ‘Right,’ I say.

  ‘I mean it this time.’

  I dig out some old paperwork and spread it over my denuded desk, but am too furious to do anything. I turn to the TV: it is showing a report from Oran, where an airstrike on rebel positions is believed to have secured the region at last. A clip of the Caliph and the British ex-PM smiling together, ringed by Imperial Guards, is followed by shots of smoking wasteland, weeping women, charred body parts. Oil prices have stabilized following the news, a voice tells us.

  I get up, go to the window. The rain is pouring down interminably, turning the world into thin, shifting vertical bands like monochrome ribbons, as if the whole day’s been fed into the shredder. Where is Ariadne? I think with a pang. And where is Paul? Has he given up on me? Did he decide the banker was unsalvageable after all, even in fiction?

  ‘Call for you, Claude,’ Kimberlee says.

  The voice on the line is heavily accented, and sounds upset. It takes me a moment to identify it as Clizia’s.

  ‘He got a review,’ she says.

  ‘Paul?’ I’m confused. ‘For the proposal?’

  ‘For Clown,’ she says. ‘Some idiot on Apeiron. He is going crazy. Please, Frenchman, you must come!’

  I fetch my tablet from the apartment so I can read the review in the taxi. Posted last night by someone styling himself Wombat Willy, it is headed ‘A Fiasco Is Not a Circus’ and consists of a long list of criticisms, which includes, though is not limited to, the unfunniness of the clown, incorrect inspection procedures followed by the health and safety officer, the implausible ending (in which Bobo saves Timmy from a subdural haematoma by performing a one-man show that keeps him laughing until the ambulance arrives (‘SHOW ME ONE MEDICAL TEXTBOOK THAT SAYS THIS!!!’)) and a misleading comparison on the jacket copy to Bimal Banerjee’s The Clowns of Sorrow. He also notes that the book was delivered two days late and that he got a paper cut taking it out of the box, before giving it a rating of two thistles and a swastika.