The Mark and the Void

by Paul Murray

  ‘Why don’t you give the food to the shelter?’

  ‘Because it close too. Last week. Brendan says the government won’t give any more money. You know, they have all this bullshit with the banks.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say faintly, and with a flush of shame.

  The door opens and closes, opens and closes; the beginnings of the lunch crowd join the pandemonium, a fresh stream of shoulders and elbows bruising their way by.

  ‘I must go back to work,’ Ariadne says defeatedly.

  She takes a step into the melee, and it hits me, like an axe blow, that this is the last time I will see her. There will be no sunsets, no hooting train whistles, no valedictory speeches: I have not earned any of that. She will simply leave the frame and be gone and never be replaced, that’s how it works in the real world –

  ‘Wait!’

  She turns, looks at my hand on her sleeve.

  ‘Maybe I can do something,’ I say, with a dry mouth. ‘For the café. Find a backer, negotiate with the landlord for a couple of months’ extension. Buy some time, at least.’

  ‘Thanks, Claude,’ she says gently. ‘But I think it’s too late.’

  ‘I know people,’ I insist, still clutching her arm. ‘I should have thought of it before. I’ll go back to the office and make some calls.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she repeats. ‘That’s very kind.’

  Investors are always looking for a good opportunity, I tell her, forecasts for the service industry are strong, then take into account footfall in the Financial Services Centre, and the growing market for specialist foods – on and on I babble, with less and less idea what I’m saying, just to keep the conversation alive, to keep her here with me for a few seconds longer, until at last the words run out and I am left gaping at her in silence. Ariadne doesn’t move away. Instead she looks down again at my hand on her forearm, then up again at me: some invisible veil falls away, and in that instant I see that she has understood everything. Nowhere to hide now; all I can do is pretend I haven’t noticed she’s noticed, find some trivial remark that will give us both an escape route. But my powers of dissembling have deserted me; instead I hang wretchedly in the lamplight of her gaze, like an abject, sodden stranger who appears on her step in the middle of a rainstorm and throws himself on her mercy.

  Someone is calling her name from behind the till. With a supreme effort I manage to relinquish her arm, but she stays where she is a moment longer, holding my gaze with strangely liquid eyes. ‘Goodbye, Claude,’ she says at last. Leaning forward she kisses my cheek. And then she is gone, devoured in the churn of lunchtime vultures.

  The rest of the day is an unremitting agony. Never has the office seemed so toxic. The bland pastel shirts, the veined mock-leather of the desks, the swirling screensavers and bright glowing spreadsheets: these are merely lesser darknesses in a vast and opaque and airless night, a lesson in entropy that is repeated and repeated until it has drummed its emptiness into every cell of my being.

  The scale of the pain catches me off-guard. I thought I’d reconciled myself long ago to being without her. Now I realize that instead of giving her up, my heart had concocted a future in which we would go on, if not together, at least in parallel – that I might continue to love her from a distance, and she would continue to live her life with that love wrapped around her, an unseen protector, like an angel’s wing …

  I do my best to keep my promise to her, but with the bank in its current state of public disintegration, pitching an investment is like a poisoner trying to sell cookies door-to-door. At this stage most of my contacts don’t even answer the phone. There must be something I can do! In a novel, the café’s rack-renting landlord would turn out to be one of our wicked clients – Walter Corless, maybe, who for all these years has harboured an irrational hatred of macrobiotic foods, and plans to convert the café into a car park; I would confront him, and gloatingly he’d reveal to me all of his sinister and illegal business dealings, only to discover that I’d recorded the conversation, and thus brought down his whole Babelian empire.

  But in the real world, which is the world of business, there are no stories like this – with heroes and villains, motives other than profit. The ‘landlord’ isn’t a person, just the name given to an investment portfolio; the decision was made in the void eye of another hurricane a thousand miles away, a Canadian pension fund, a German reinsurance firm, an asset management company in Tokyo or Sydney or Lahore. No one working there will ever have seen the Ark or know anything about it, except as a figure on a spreadsheet; the lease is doubtless administered by someone just like me, wishing he was elsewhere, sending off the rote email while dreaming of another waitress in another café …

  Day turns into night. There is nothing to do, but we stay at our desks until the New York market closes, in the hope that some magical buyer might appear, pay off our debts and let us keep our jobs. That doesn’t happen, so we move our operations to Life, where we sit in anxious silence around a table, nibbling trail mix; then somehow it is morning again, and cleaners in orange uniforms are hoovering about my feet.

  The day does not start well. Excelsior announce they will not roll over a hundred-million-dollar loan due to be repaid tomorrow; in New York, two sets of lawyers move into AgroBOT HQ – one drafting documents for any potential third parties that might come forward with a rescue plan, the other preparing papers for bankruptcy. ‘And that’s the good news,’ Gary McCrum says.

  Word from Oran is that the Caliph has been overthrown.

  ‘Overthrown, dismembered, and fed to his own dogs,’ Gary clarifies.

  ‘But … how? Wasn’t he in some hideout with his bodyguards?’

  ‘It was the Imperial Guard that did it,’ Jurgen explains. ‘Apparently they were unhappy about the extent of the coalition’s bombing campaign.’

  ‘And this has been verified?’

  ‘See for yourself,’ Gary says. He takes out his phone and shows us a video of a bearded man weeping in terror as a carving knife is brought to his neck –

  ‘Turn it off,’ mutters Ish.

  ‘We have not spoken to the bodyguards,’ Jurgen says, ‘but our sense is that the line of credit is no longer on the table.’

  ‘So what are our options?’ Jocelyn Lockhart asks.

  ‘We don’t have any options,’ Gary McCrum says grimly. ‘We’re finished.’

  ‘But we’ve done nothing wrong,’ Brent protests. ‘A whole bank can’t go down because of a bunch of unsubstantiated rumours, it doesn’t make any sense!’

  ‘Ordinarily I would agree,’ Jurgen says. ‘However, the thing about these unsubstantiated rumours is that they are true. We have learned that among our recent acquisitions is several billion euros of now-worthless Greek debt.’

  Stunned silence, then, as Jurgen seems content to leave it there, someone does the necessary: ‘Why … would we buy … several billion euros of Greek debt?’

  ‘That is an interesting question,’ Jurgen says, like a medical professor discussing an anatomical curiosity in a textbook. ‘The answer seems to be that we did not know we were buying it. In a spirit of counterintuitiveness, it appears that due diligence was rushed through. Furthermore, this debt had been carefully concealed within several layers of shells, swaps, special purpose vehicles, like a computer virus that waits inside another file.’

  ‘Concealed by who?’ Jocelyn says. ‘The Greek government?’

  They have always seemed too inept and lazy to come up with this kind of machination.

  ‘Not exactly. If you remember, just before they joined the EU, the Greeks hired Danforth Blaue to cover up the enormous holes on their balance sheet.’

  Another silence. Jurgen smacks his lips together, as if he has just enjoyed a particularly delicious snack.

  ‘So…’ Slowly Ish puts it together. ‘Danforth Blaue took this toxic debt and hid it away, and then we came along and bought it?’

  ‘Someone else bought it, and then Agron bought them, and then we bought Agron,’
Jurgen says.

  ‘All that glitters isn’t gold,’ Kevin says, shaking his head. ‘Porter’s memo,’ he explains, seeing our baffled faces. ‘That must be what he meant.’

  ‘Buying Agron was Porter’s idea, you fool,’ Gary snaps.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, if he had actually known it wasn’t gold, surely he would have just not bought it, instead of sending everyone some unintelligible riddle about how we shouldn’t buy it and then buying it.’

  ‘Maybe he was testing us,’ Kevin says. ‘You know, like God.’

  ‘Wait a second,’ Ish says. ‘Porter was CEO of Danforth Blaue. If Danforth’s responsible for us buying a bunch of toxic crap that looks like it’s going to drag us under – doesn’t that mean that Porter’s just pulled a huge con on Porter? He’s basically bankrupted himself?’

  ‘Fuck.’ Jocelyn Lockhart rubs his jaw. ‘Poetic justice.’

  ‘The great genius,’ Gary says sardonically. ‘No wonder he’s keeping his head down.’

  ‘It is true that the takeovers have not worked out exactly as planned,’ Jurgen says. ‘However, it would be a mistake to write off Porter’s strategy too soon. The very scale of AgroBOT’s impending collapse means that it cannot be allowed to happen. Thanks to his expansions, we are so big now that if we go down, an untold number of trading partners and counterparties will be pulled down with us, bringing the entire global banking system grinding to a halt. In a matter of hours, money will stop coming out of ATMs. In two or three days, there will be no food left on the supermarket shelves. By the end of the week, petrol will have run out, followed shortly by electricity. Within a month, the very fabric of civilization will have totally collapsed. We have seen in many movies what the consequences will be. Gang of cannibals will rove the ruined highways. Families will shiver in the darkness of sewers. Strange, millenarian cults will perform human sacrifices to artefacts once taken for granted by us and now worshipped as gods. Ordinary public sector workers will now wear dog collars and Mohawks, and drive futuristic, weaponized vehicles powered by paraffin. An endless metaphorical night will swallow the Earth, although in practice the current diurnal system of sunrise and sunset should continue unaffected.’

  Somewhere in the middle of this we have forgotten why it constitutes good news.

  ‘Because it means that the market has no choice but to refinance us!’ Jurgen says, with a shrill, falsetto laugh. ‘Porter’s acquisitions policy has been underwritten by nothing less than civilization itself! So you see, this is no more than the storm in a teacup! What is everyone so worried about?’

  He glides away, repeating this last phrase to himself like a mantra.

  ‘He’s putting an awful lot of faith in this too-big-to-fail thing,’ Jocelyn Lockhart says slowly.

  ‘Did I ever tell you about my Aunt Nelly?’ Ish says. ‘She was always bragging that her tits were too big to fail. Every Saturday night she’d go out without so much as a lick of lippy on. “Don’t need it,” she’d say. “Got these.” Then one day she was leaning over her fishpond and she fell in.’

  ‘She drowned?’

  ‘No, but when they brought her to Emergency, that’s where she met my Uncle Nick.’

  The morning grinds on, white-bitten and slow as a glacier. We sit stiff-backed at our desks, row upon row, like children in some terrorized classroom, and whenever the lift doors open, we all whip round in unison, each expecting, though we don’t admit it, to see a cohort of security guards troop out: Reinaldus, Esteban, Timoleon, the same surly men we’ve nodded to as they sat slouched in Reception on so many mornings, now transformed – stalking through the office, distributing boxes, rousing us from our desks, like stuporous, torpid jungle cats who one day find the door to their cage left open and instantly reassume their true natures, the contempt in their eyes telling us everything we need to know …

  ‘We have enough capital to trade till the end of the day.’ Liam English tries to make this sound positive.

  ‘And after that…?’ A circle of chalky faces, like some ghostly Greek chorus.

  ‘After that, ah, we’d be looking for either a buyout or a government intervention.’

  ‘Except nobody wants to intervene,’ Jocelyn says.

  ‘But what about civilization?’ Kimberlee asks. ‘The apocalypse? Don’t they care about the apocalypse?’

  Liam explains that the market consensus is that AgroBOT is not too big to fail after all, only almost too big to fail – a crucial difference.

  ‘So nobody’s going to die,’ Gary says.

  Liam shakes his head.

  ‘But tomorrow’s Casual Day,’ Kimberlee says sadly. ‘We can’t close on Casual Day, it’s always such a laugh.’

  ‘Casual Day would be one of the less significant movers in global capitalism,’ Liam tells her.

  ‘And where’s Porter, in the middle of all this?’ Brent Kelleher erupts. ‘Hasn’t he got anything to say? Shouldn’t he give some bloody account of himself, before they send him off into the sunset with his fifty-million-dollar severance package?’

  ‘There’s not a lot Porter can do,’ Liam says. ‘If there’s going to be a rescue, it’ll have to come from outside.’

  So it’s back to the wait. Dave Davison reads the racing pages; Thomas ‘Yuan’ McGregor arranges pebbles on his mouse mat. Knots of panic become interfused with a weird, blissed-out lethargy, the kind of light-headedness you get when the oxygen is running out. From the window, I can see the shutters are down on the Ark, making it look like a sarcophagus; I keep imagining Ariadne is trapped inside, have to stop myself from running to help …

  ‘Three feet high and rising, eh, Claude?’ Ish says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The river.’ Below, filthy water is frothing ever closer to street level.

  ‘The Liffey has never burst its banks.’ This is what I hear people telling each other in supermarket queues.

  ‘Yeah, well, banks have been known to fail, haven’t they?’ She doesn’t sound overly concerned; in fact, she’s been quite blithe since the prospect of AgroBOT’s imminent destruction emerged, possibly because Skylark Fitzgibbon and all mention of golf courses disappeared around the same time. This seems disloyal: I feel a surge of anger, but before I can say anything Kimberlee appears and hands me a piece of paper.

  ‘Fax for you, Claude.’

  ‘You don’t have to keep bringing them,’ I say. But she’s already gone.

  ‘Someone still loves you, eh, Claude?’ Ish says, pinching my arm.

  Mike Purzel comes running in. ‘Barclays is looking into a buyout.’

  Everyone jumps out of their seats and crowds around him; then Liam English comes out of his office, and they leave Mike and gather around him instead. Liam confirms that Barclays has made contact. Cheers resound through the room. ‘Talks are at a preliminary stage,’ Liam warns, but he doesn’t object to following further developments from the pub.

  ‘Are you coming?’ Ish is halfway out the door.

  ‘In a minute.’

  I remain at the window, looking at the fax in my hand. At the top, somebody has carefully printed, FAO Claude Martingale. Then follows the now-familiar block of assiduous blackness. It occurs to me that instead of an attempt to use up ink, you could read it, if you wanted, as a story – the story of Claude, the real one, with which the version I’d hoped for, Ariadne, love, adventure, all that, has been overwritten. Because even if a buyout materializes and the bank is saved, the Ark will still be gone, won’t it? And Ariadne with it? Leaving me with nothing but the present, the never-ending present, on which to inscribe myself over and over, in letters that are skyscraper-high …

  A man is standing in our office. Stubby, moustachioed, he stares directly at me. Where have I seen him before? ‘Looking for Howard Hogan,’ he says. He speaks in an even, courteous tone, but specks of sweat glisten on his temples, and the brilliant-white collar of his shirt digs deep into his pink neck. It is the man we saw when Ish and I visited Howie’s fund, I realize –
the chortling fellow who left the bag full of banknotes.

  ‘Upstairs,’ I say, jabbing at the ceiling. ‘Ninth floor.’

  ‘Doesn’t seem to be anyone there,’ the man says. His tone remains steady, but his eyes boggle at me, seize me by the lapels and shake me.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you,’ I tell him. ‘This is Agron Torabundo Bank. Agron Torabundo Credit Management is a separate enterprise.’

  He stares at me another moment, then seems to wilt: a merchant prince stripped of his belongings, lost among savages. A door opens and in rush the two burly men who accompanied him on the ninth floor that day. He raises his eyebrows; they shake their heads. He emits a low gurgle as if inside him something were being throttled. Without another word he turns on his heel and heads for the lobby, phone pressed to his ear.

  When he is gone, I climb the stairwell to the ninth floor. A fire extinguisher has been used to break down the door. Inside, the beautiful artwork is gone, as well as most of the furniture. None of the staff seems to be here either, though a residue of panic remains etched in the air, conjuring images of rushing bodies, boxes hastily filled …

  On Howie’s desk, an empty bottle of whiskey sits by a sticky glass. One edge of the keyboard is sprinkled with powder. I touch a key and the screen comes to life: a game of Tetris, coloured blocks piled claustrophobically all the way to the top. The ledgers that line the shelf on the back wall are all empty, the drawers likewise, except for a pair of pink panties and a biography of Steve Jobs. I find myself thinking of Paul’s red notebook, page after page filled with cartoon penises.

  Hearing a noise, I leave the room and turn a corner to find Tom Cremins and Brian O’Brien hard at work, one feeding documents into the shredder, the other smashing up hard drives with a hammer. They look up momentarily but don’t speak to me. Beyond them is a wall safe, empty; beside the safe is another door. No one answers when I knock; in fact there is no sense the room has ever been occupied. No files, no phone, no stationery or computer clutter the beautiful maple desk; the softest veil of dust lies over everything, like a protective covering. In the corner, however, is a large cupboard. On a hunch I turn the handle.