The Mark and the Void

by Paul Murray

  Jocelyn shrugs. ‘We’ll see.’

  I spend most of the day taking calls from clients and counterparties, listening to casual but pointed inquiries about trades and investments; I assure them that there’s nothing to worry about, that this is simply an anomaly, that by tomorrow everything will be back to normal.

  On the contrary. Overnight, the temperature becomes a fever, and the next morning the calls begin before I even leave my apartment, slowly but inexorably rising in volume and anxiety over the course of the day, while the bank’s share price slowly but inexorably falls. We field the queries, we soothe the qualms, we placate and mollify to the best of our ability – but as our superiors aren’t telling us anything, this doesn’t amount to much.

  ‘Word is we’re over-leveraged.’

  ‘It’s mid-quarter, everyone’s over-leveraged.’

  ‘I heard we couldn’t make good on a deal.’

  ‘That’s bullshit.’

  ‘Don’t yell at me, I’m just telling you what people are saying.’

  ‘Come on, if we’d DK’d on a trade we’d know about it. It’d be all over the place.’

  ‘It is all over the place.’

  ‘I had a customer ask me today if we were still solvent. This is a guy I’ve traded with for years. I said yes but I’m not even sure we are.’

  We are not sure of anything, except this: AgroBOT is under siege – a strange, metaphysical siege, in which lies beset truth.

  The question of who began the attacks very soon becomes unimportant. In the market, it does not take long for rumour to become self-fulfilling. Spread a story, no matter how wild; if even a handful of shareholders believe it and sell their stock, a notional drop in value becomes an actual drop, the false narrative supersedes the true, people panic, the sell-off intensifies, the share price collapses, the hedge fund or whoever was behind the initial short makes a killing.

  If a company’s fundamentals are strong, as ours are, this won’t happen; the rumours won’t stick, the attacks will abate, the short-sellers will give up, look for an easier mark elsewhere. It’s only a matter of time: that’s what we tell ourselves, that’s what we tell our clients. But we can feel the market as never before, a palpable entity, delving into our terminals, our trades, our collective past – an invisible hand, tapping the walls, looking for the weak spot.

  I’m in the office till close to midnight, trying to talk away client jitters; I’m back again at 6 a.m., doing the same. As the minutes tick towards the opening of the market, the fear mounts, the pressure becomes almost unbearable, a hissing force that pushes against the eyeballs. Events roll silently in a band across the TV, messages ping onto my computer screen, Joe Peston and Dwayne McGuckian and Mike Purzel iterate numbers into their headsets, the telephones ring and ring and ring. The effort of defending the bank is visible on every face, and although the floor is as noisy as ever, it seems we can hear the silence beneath it, oceanically deep, oceanically cold.

  And the loudest silence is Porter’s. In our hour of need, he seems to have vanished, leaving us with only more conjecture.

  ‘I heard he had another heart attack.’

  ‘I heard his wife tried to commit suicide.’

  ‘He wouldn’t stay out of the office for that.’

  ‘If you’d stop whining like little girls for a minute,’ Dave Davison’s bored baritone rises up from behind a divider, ‘then you’d realize the reason we haven’t heard from him is that he already has it covered. We’ve got an open line of credit with his buddy the Caliph. More than enough to carry us through some market hissy-fit.’

  That’s true, but there is a hitch. Following his merciless quashing of the rebellion, the Caliph has been removed by his Imperial Guard to an undisclosed location while the last dregs of the uprising are mopped up.

  ‘It’s a delicate situation,’ Jurgen explains. ‘They are purging his ministries of any suspected sympathizers. For security reasons, the Caliph prefers to monitor this from a distance.’

  ‘And what about us? He can’t even pick up a phone?’

  ‘It is only a matter of time,’ Jurgen says.

  Others are less optimistic.

  ‘Someone knows something,’ Howie says, watching the screen. ‘Someone’s got something on us.’

  Business on the ninth floor has stalled. Howie’s investors, spooked by the sudden dip in our fortunes, refuse to believe his assurances that the bank and the fund are two separate entities; some of them are even demanding their money back.

  ‘I tell them, how can I give you your money back? I invested it. That’s what you paid me to do. It’s not like I put it in a suitcase and buried it in the back garden.’ He has been down here most of the morning, Chinese wall notwithstanding; he claims he is trying to contain the contamination, though he spends most of his time kicking furniture.

  ‘What are the hedge funds saying?’ I ask him.

  ‘They’re saying we’re fucked, Claude. It’s not like it’s a secret. People are climbing over each other, trying to ditch their stock. Some crowd in California are betting a fortune we’ll be gone in less than a week.’

  ‘Less than a week?’

  ‘Why not? Bear went under in less than a week. Lehman went in less than a week. They were both much bigger than us.’

  A chill of silence sweeps through the room, as if a door had been blown open by some soundless storm.

  ‘But why is this happening?’ I say. ‘What is it they think they know?’

  ‘They know AgroBOT’s a pissant operation run by people who don’t have a bull’s notion what they’re doing,’ Howie returns.

  ‘If it did go under…’ little Terry Fosco pipes up, ‘would that mean our shares’d be worthless?’

  ‘It won’t go under,’ Dave Davison insists. ‘I’m telling you, they won’t let it. They can’t.’

  ‘Though if it does,’ Gary McCrum says with a kind of bitter relish, ‘we won’t get a penny. We’ll be at the end of a long, long line.’

  ‘Where’s Porter?’ Kevin cries. ‘Why doesn’t he say something? Why doesn’t he do something?’

  The same questions, the same unsatisfactory answers, hour after hour, like a torturous carousel; and in the background the edifice we thought indestructible is being steadily and invisibly dismantled, as if by ghosts. By now, most of the calls have dried up: clients no longer want reassurance; instead they seek to put as much distance as they can between them and us. New business is non-existent.

  ‘We’re like lepers out there,’ Howie fumes, sending another wastebasket flying. ‘We’re like Greece.’

  One man remains unafraid of infection. Around lunchtime, Walter’s car pulls up outside. He doesn’t look like someone whose empire is on the brink of collapsing. Instead he looks like he’s swallowed it whole; he’s grown so bloated that to fit in the limo I have to sit with my knees practically up to my chin. I’m expecting an inquisition about the bank’s current performance, or a furious command to liquidate his investments, but he doesn’t even mention AgroBOT’s travails, just hands me the usual bundle of cheques. Hasn’t he heard? Or doesn’t he care? Maybe as Walter Corless he believes himself immune to the flying grit of circumstance; he writes his own story, which intersects with the wider world’s only as and when he desires it. Or maybe he, too, knows something we don’t.

  ‘Most of our lenders have rolled over the loans we need to keep operating today,’ Jurgen says. It is morning, just about; outside, first light struggles against twisting cords of rain; Jurgen has a curiously antic quality about him, that maniacal energy that comes with lack of sleep. ‘However, in return they are seeking significantly more margin, which is proving problematic. We could sell off some bonds in order to raise the cash, but the fear is that this might be interpreted as a sign that we are in trouble.’

  ‘The market seems pretty clear that we’re in trouble, Jurgen.’

  ‘Yes, however, they don’t know yet how much trouble,’ he says.

  Panicked eyes meet in
momentary panic-embraces.

  ‘One of our hedge-fund clients has requested we return the cash they have given us to administer,’ he explains. ‘This will leave a serious hole in the bank’s balance sheet.’

  ‘What about the Caliph? The line of credit?’

  The Caliph remains incommunicado. ‘His secret service is reporting a security breach, presumably some handful of militants that escaped the bombing. There is no threat to the Caliph himself, but personal access is limited to his Imperial Guard.’

  ‘We don’t want to access him. We just want him to give us some money.’

  ‘We are monitoring the situation,’ Jurgen says.

  After the briefing there is nothing to do. All our meetings have been cancelled: no one wants to trade with us. In limbo, people start acting strangely. Some leave without explanation for long, fugue-like breaks, return muttering to themselves, attended by unfamiliar smells. Others throw their feet up on the desk and make long-distance calls, or sit motionlessly for hours, staring at online poker hands. On the way to the toilet I encounter Kimberlee the receptionist emerging furtively from the handicapped stall with Dave Davison, the back of her skirt snarled up in her tights.

  Who could blame them? As the share price falls, and our lives are hollowed out proportionally, I yearn for something physical – the touch of a hand, a smile, anything that could deliver me from all this abstraction. But it feels like the physical world is ever less available, like we’re trapped in a car that’s plunged into the sea and we can’t get the windows to roll down …

  Then a cry goes up. ‘Porter’s making a statement!’

  Instantly a crowd gathers under the big screen, weary faces burnished by hope. Banking being essentially a confidence trick, to insist publicly on your solvency is a risky move: unless it’s pitched exactly right, it could be taken as an admission that the game is up. But this is Porter Blankly! Of course it will be pitched right! Porter will explain everything, and we will come back bigger and better than ever.

  ‘… beleaguered bank,’ the news anchor is saying, ‘amid mounting fears of a debt downgrade…’ At the bottom of the screen, the crawl reads, 11 per cent drop in twenty-four hours …

  ‘Eleven per cent!’ someone behind me moans.

  ‘Shh!’

  ‘Don’t shush me, I took out a loan to buy those shares!’

  ‘Shut the fuck up!’

  ‘… failed to calm a hostile market, causing an escalating series of margin calls, amid speculation that at least one Wall Street firm has refused any further trade with Agron Torabundo and that restructuring is becoming unavoidable…’

  ‘Fuck you, bitch, Porter’s going to restructure your ugly face!’

  ‘… go live as these questions and others are put to the bank’s Co-Vice President of Global Equities, George Death.’

  The crowd in front of the TV falls silent. ‘What?’ someone says.

  The picture cuts to a conference room where a very small man is crossing a stage to a lectern.

  ‘Who the fuck is this guy?’

  ‘Did Porter shrink in the wash?’

  The man has begun to speak; however, only the top of his head is visible over the top of the lectern, and it quickly becomes evident the microphones are too far away to pick up his voice. An aide runs on and frantically begins adjusting the mikes; the Co-Vice President, apparently unaware of any issue, continues to read inaudibly. Muttering can be heard from the unseen press corps. There is a crunch of static. ‘—iderable upside,’ the top of the Co-Vice President’s head says. ‘That is all I have to say at this time. Thank you, gentlemen.’ He stumps away from the lectern in a fusillade of flashes and hollering.

  For a moment, silence. Then:

  ‘Christ, that’s not going to help.’

  ‘Couldn’t they have found someone more than four feet tall?’

  ‘Couldn’t they have found someone whose name isn’t Death?’

  ‘Actually, I think it’s pronounced Deeth.’

  ‘Oh, great, call the Wall Street Journal.’

  ‘Shares have just dropped another two points,’ Gary reports.

  The room churns with exclamations of gloom, until Rachael appears in the doorway. Clapping her hands in a teacherly fashion, ‘You heard the Co-Vice President,’ she says. ‘The bank is fully capitalized, so please concentrate on your –’ She pauses, as her secretary clatters in at top speed to whisper in her ear; then, turning pale, she rushes back to her office. A minute later, the news comes across Bloomberg that AgroBOT’s long- and short-term credit rating has been downgraded to junk.

  The grumbling of a moment ago resolves into a single, consensual moan: it might be the bank’s death-cry.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Kevin asks, tugging my sleeve.

  I explain that the big institutional investors, the pension funds and so on, are prohibited from putting their money in anything with a rating of BB+ or lower, and so the downgrade means that at the stroke of a pen we have lost most of our lenders, and with them the money we need to do the things we do. It seems I can feel a physical snap, a breaking-away, and I go to the window, half-expecting to find Transaction House now floating down the Liffey. But of course everything is where it always is.

  In the lobby the lift doors hiss open. Brent ‘Crude’ Kelleher, who to judge by his jubilant expression has not heard the latest news, saunters into the office bearing two large paper bags. ‘They’re giving away muffins at the hippie place!’

  In the general indifference, I feel like an icicle has stabbed me in the heart.

  ‘Some sort of closing-down thing,’ Brent says, then, clearly troubled by my reaction, ‘I got one for you, Claude.’

  I push past him, jab the button for the lift, almost immediately think better of it and crash down the stairs.

  Rain is falling again, in dense needles that seem to surround and isolate the people dashing across the plaza, like some ingenious, ever-shifting force field, the ultra-fine bars of some immanent cage. After weeks of downpour, floods have beset Dublin; the underground rivers that criss-cross beneath the city’s foundations have come to the surface and found the plains where they would in the past have dissipated now occupied by the tax-relief malls, car parks and apartment blocks of the boom. And the Liffey’s rising, too: on the far side of the plaza, trash laps the mossy tops of the quays, jackals feeding on the slimy corpse of some enormous beast.

  In the Ark, it looks like the end of the world is expected any minute. Rain-soaked consumers jostle past each other, deliberately avoiding eye contact, arms loaded with pastries, crêpes, organic prune juice. At the counter, the staff have a besieged look. With some difficulty, I elbow my way through to Ariadne.

  ‘Claude!’ she exclaims when she sees me, but in an instant her delight turns to sadness. ‘Where have you been?’ she says, with an unconcealed note of accusation.

  ‘Busy,’ I say guiltily, and then, ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Special deal,’ she says. ‘Buy anything, get two other things free.’

  ‘Some special occasion?’ I am praying that Brent has got it wrong.

  She shrugs fatalistically. ‘We are closing.’

  Nothing changes, but everything does: I feel like an extraterrestrial in a comic book, who, looking up at a blank square of sky, knows that his home planet has exploded. ‘I see.’

  ‘I have told you the landlord wants to put up the rent, right? So we went to see the bank, but they say there’s nothing they can do.’

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ I say softly.

  ‘Today’s our last day, that’s why we get rid of everything. If there’s anything you want, just take it. I don’t charge you.’

  ‘What’s in there?’ A florid woman beside me points suspiciously at a wicker tray of buns. I wait while Ariadne explains that these are cinnamon, these pear, these raisin; the woman, still glowering mistrustfully, throws a couple in her basket, then stalks off. Outside the rain rattles from the overflowing gutters like gunfire.
/>   ‘The Ark is leaving just when we need it most,’ I say.

  ‘Ay, what can we do? We don’ want to close, but is impossible. I don’ know who does the landlord expect to move in and pay his crazy rent. Or does he jus’ want to force us out?’

  I start to explain the logic of the upward-only rent review – that the value of a building as an asset is based on the rent that could be charged for it, meaning it often makes more sense to keep that rent high and the building unoccupied than to lower the rent and have to mark down its overall … I tail off. Ariadne is gazing at me with a mixture of bewilderment and horror. All I can do, even now, is parrot the lines of the enemy! What is wrong with me?

  ‘What will you do?’ I say quickly. ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘I don’ know yet,’ she reflects. ‘Everything happens so fast. I’d like to stay, but it’s hard to find work here, and is so expensive, and…’ She lets out a heavy, troubled sigh. ‘Is people just going to let this happen?’

  ‘You mean the rent review?’ Though I know she doesn’t.

  ‘I mean everything.’ She casts a sallow hand at the window, the waterlogged, debt-laden nation outside. ‘It gets worse and worse, and still people just shrug their shoulders. In Greece, in Spain, they’re out on the streets. Here, if you go on the streets, they think you’re a fool or a criminal and you deserve whatever you get. What’s everyone so afraid of? Why don’t they do something? If they care?’

  As she says this, her eyes swing directly up to meet mine, their challenge so violent that I take an involuntary step backwards. I begin to ask her about her friend the zombie, then realize that the answer, whatever it is, will probably not reflect well on me, so instead I change the subject. ‘Oscar will go with you? If you leave?’

  ‘Of course,’ she says, it seems to me curtly; and then from behind me there comes a crash, and we look over to see that someone has knocked a box of pasta from the shelf. Ariadne groans, and fetches a dustpan and brush. ‘Mother of Christ, these people,’ she murmurs, kneeling down to sweep up the spilled linguine. ‘If any of them have come before today, we wouldn’t need to close.’