The Mark and the Void

by Paul Murray

  ‘Go away,’ Grisha says.

  ‘What are you doing in here?’ The closet is just big enough for a mop and bucket, on the latter of which the quant is sitting.

  ‘Maths. You are not understanding.’

  ‘On the walls?’

  His shoulders snap up and down. I gaze around me at the algorithmic scrawl that covers the cupboard’s interior. Even the ceiling has been inscribed with tiny pinched print, and with a shiver I think again of the Texier painting: the proliferation of minute brushstrokes, tiny bricks in a huge altarpiece to Nothing.

  ‘Everyone’s gone,’ I say. ‘Howie, everyone.’

  He ignores this, continues his calculations.

  ‘The fund’s finished,’ I tell him, and when he doesn’t respond to this either, push a little harder: ‘It was all a fraud. A Ponzi scheme. I imagine the money Howie paid out to the investors was the money he was getting from new clients. Everything else he took for himself.’

  Scritch-scratch goes the pen, filling the wall with infinitesimal signs.

  ‘He didn’t use your model,’ I say gently. ‘Do you understand? You, your providential antinomies, you were just props. None of it was real.’

  ‘None of this is reality!’ Grisha rejoins, with an impatient wave at everything outside the cupboard. ‘Only this!’ He taps vehemently on the walls with his pen.

  ‘The instrument?’

  He scowls, scrubs his shaggy head, muttering under his breath; then, twisting quickly, as if he is about to rise and strike me, he says, in a high, querulous voice, ‘You peoples are thinking you can use maths like slave! Do this, do that – I laugh at you, ha! ha! ha! You are like shadows who think they can direct the sun!’

  He stops, looks over my shoulder. Someone is standing in the doorway. It’s Howie’s Bulgarian dealer. In his hand is an ice pick. We don’t move; we don’t even breathe. He has lost his sunglasses; for a long moment he stares at us with incomprehensible eyes. Then he turns away. A moment later, from down the hall, we hear rampaging noises, terrorized cries.

  ‘Come to Life,’ I tell Grisha. ‘It’s not safe here.’

  ‘Life,’ Grisha repeats mockingly.

  ‘Everyone’s down there.’

  ‘Dance while you can, little shadow,’ he says softly, returning to his equations. ‘Dance in the light.’

  AgroBOT staff are the only customers in Life Bar; the semi-darkness and sticky floor seem a better fit for us in our degraded state than Transaction House.

  ‘Claude, Claude…’ Liam English, far drunker than their short time in the pub would seem to allow, half-stands to greet me. ‘Asseyez-vous, Claude. What’ll you have?’ Pulling a wad of notes from his pocket, he stumbles off without waiting for an answer.

  ‘Check it out, Claude.’ Jocelyn Lockhart points at the plasma screen on the wall. ‘Miles has been taken in for questioning.’

  The screen shows the silver-haired head of Royal Irish jauntily strolling into a police station, where, the newsreader informs us sonorously, he will be questioned for up to thirty-six hours.

  ‘New minister making his presence felt,’ Dave Davison comments.

  ‘Bollocks,’ Joe Peston says. ‘Miles is sat in there watching Home and Away while the coppers bring him fish and chips. It’s all just a show for the little people.’

  ‘I can’t believe that that fucking clip joint is still trading and we’re going under,’ Gary McCrum says darkly.

  ‘Maybe Porter should have moved the HQ to Ireland,’ Jocelyn says.

  ‘Fuck Porter.’

  ‘Here, Claude, have you seen Howie?’ Ish asks me. ‘There were some people in here looking for him.’

  I shake my head, ask what’s happening with Barclays.

  ‘Nada,’ Gary says. ‘They’re still in talks. I’m not holding my breath.’

  ‘I heard Porter’s not even there,’ Dave says. ‘It’s that little guy again. The co-global head of whatever.’

  ‘I’ll say this for Porter, he’s a cool customer.’ Jocelyn sighs, topping up his beer. ‘His bank goes down the tubes and he doesn’t break a sweat? I mean, he must have a ton of preferred stock, right? What’s that going to cost him? And still he’s nowhere to be found.’

  At this, Ish starts; then she sinks slowly back into her chair, her expression somewhere between perplexity and horror, as if she’s struggling with some demonic conundrum whose solution leads straight to the charnel house. On the TV over her head, the news cycles on: a car burning in a street in Oran, the new Irish finance minister announcing four new jobs at a toilet-brush factory, floods in Bangladesh, in Prague, in Cork, the AgroBOT press conference again, with the caption Death: look at the upside.

  The sun begins to set. More bodies appear in the doorway’s pocket of golden dusk and, with the same half-ironical, half-hopeless smile, make their way over to our table. Traders, analysts, salesmen, back office: people I’ve never spoken to, people whose names I don’t even know. The eschatological atmosphere, the sense that beyond our little ring of survivors – illuminated now by candles the barman has set down on the grouped tables – darkness prevails, brings to mind those medieval books in which a small band of travellers, fleeing plague or disaster, take refuge in a waystation and pass the night exchanging tales.

  ‘Remember the time the fire alarm went off, and then when we went back inside, it went off again?’

  ‘Remember that intern Howie kept giving extra accounts to? And he took all that meth, and tried to jump out the window?’

  ‘Remember the time the fire alarm went off?’ says Torquil Quinn, just arrived, taking off his scarf. ‘And then when we went back inside, it went off again?’ He is surprised by the muted reception this gets.

  ‘Well, lookit,’ Dave Davison sums up, ‘whatever happens, we can’t complain. We’ve had a good run of it.’

  ‘AgroBOT is a great bank,’ Liam English concurs emotionally, prodding the table with his index finger so the glasses shake. ‘A great bloody bank. And if it goes down because we had the guts to take a chance and do things counterintuitively, there’s no shame in that.’ Then, noticing through his whiskey fog that this hasn’t had the galvanizing effect he intended, ‘Though it won’t go down,’ he adds.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about moving on anyway,’ Joe Peston says. ‘Maybe it’s time to give something back.’

  Heads nod, and the conversation turns to restoring old boats, teaching underprivileged children, other long-cherished dreams whose hour may at last have come. Then Liam English’s phone rings. Instantly silence falls across the table. Liam makes a show of indifference, looking at the number, appearing to think it over. ‘Rachael,’ he says, picking it up at last. ‘Yeah … okay … right … okay, grand. I will, yes. Okay.’

  He puts the phone down, lifts his glass, sips, gasps with satisfaction. Finally he becomes aware of the many eyes staring at him. ‘So Barclays have passed,’ he says.

  There is an audible, collective gasp, followed by a long, wintry nothing.

  ‘So that’s it,’ Jocelyn Lockhart says bitterly.

  ‘I just bought a Jaguar!’ Brent Kelleher moans. ‘Now I’m going to be one of those people who go around the supermarket checking which is the cheapest muesli?’

  ‘There could still be a buyout,’ Terry Fosco pleads. ‘Like, by someone else.’

  ‘Who’s going to be dumb enough to buy eight billion dollars’ worth of radioactive Greek shit?’

  On the TV screen over the bar, the new Minister for Finance, toilet brush in his hand, perorates soundlessly from a podium. Around our table, too, silence reigns. No one mentions the underprivileged or boat restoration.

  ‘Fuck it!’ Dave Davison exclaims. ‘We can’t spend our last fucking night sitting round feeling sorry for ourselves!’

  ‘You’re right!’ Gary McCrum joins in. ‘We’re AgroBOT! If we’re going to go down, we should do it in style!’

  ‘VD’s?’

  ‘Let’s roll!’

  In the blink of an eye, we are in
our coats, the prospect of one last blowout on expenses lending us superhuman speed. I catch Ish’s eye; she shrugs, not wanting to go home any more than I do, and gathers up her belongings.

  Gary waves his hand superfluously at a long line of static cabs and topples into the one at the top; Ish and I pile into the back seat of the next one, Kevin into the front. ‘Follow that car,’ he says, pointing. The driver, African, heavy-set, regards me questioningly in the mirror, but doesn’t speak.

  As soon as we’re off, Ish grips my arm, leans into me and says in a low, urgent voice, ‘Something about this isn’t right.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Think about it – if we didn’t know we were carrying all this Greek debt, how did anyone else find out?’

  ‘Eh?’ I say again.

  ‘The rumours, where did they come from? Someone spread this story around to drive down our share price. But if Danforth had parcelled up the Greek debt and hidden it so cleverly that even our own due diligence didn’t spot it, who could that have been?’

  Alcohol sloshes around my brain, and weariness, and grief, all of them crying out against yet more abstraction. But Ish is insistent. ‘It would have to be someone who knew what Danforth had done, right?’

  ‘Such as who?’

  ‘Such as, for instance, Danforth’s former CEO.’

  This wakes me up. ‘What are you saying? Porter started the rumours?’

  ‘Doesn’t it make sense? He knows Agron’s unwittingly carrying a ton of toxic securities. He buys them out for fuck all and sends our share price through the roof. Then he puts it about that we’re carrying the debt. The whole deal is set up for one colossal short.’

  ‘That would be insider trading.’

  ‘I’ll say. It’d be the greatest insider trade of all time. What would he make from it? Tens of millions? More?’

  ‘Porter wouldn’t bring down his own bank.’

  ‘Wouldn’t he? For a hundred million dollars?’

  ‘He’s got ten times that in stock options.’

  ‘Maybe he did it for a billion dollars, then. Or,’ a fresh thought strikes her, ‘maybe he’s got a plan to save the bank, once he’s pulled off his short. Meaning he can cash in twice.’

  ‘You’re crazy,’ I tell her, and turn to the window. Porter makes billions, someone else makes billions, it’s legitimate, it’s not – who cares? Who cares about any of it?

  We continue in silence for a moment. In the passenger seat, Kevin is telling the taxi driver how much he enjoys black music.

  ‘I heard the Ark closed down,’ Ish says.

  ‘Yes. Weird coincidence.’

  ‘Probably for the best,’ she says, placing her hand on mine. ‘Don’t you think?’

  ‘You mean because of my unrequited love.’

  ‘I mean, it feels like all of this – maybe it came at the right time. We have a chance to get out now, while we’re still young. Do something with our lives.’

  ‘Restore old boats?’

  ‘Something that actually helps people.’

  ‘Personally, I’m sceptical about the helping-people thing,’ Kevin pipes up from the front. ‘The whole “Look at me, I’m such a good person” bit. We could all spend our lives scrubbing oil off fucking seagulls, you know? But where would that get the world, ultimately? If everybody was altruistic, there literally wouldn’t be anyone left to help. And meanwhile all the stuff that needed to be done wouldn’t get done.’

  ‘I take it you’re planning to stay in banking,’ Ish says.

  ‘Society needs selfish people,’ Kevin says. ‘We’re the ones who keep the whole thing moving forward. Anyway, you can’t change who you are. If you’re a boa constrictor, there’s no use trying to be a sheepdog. There’s no sense in saying, “I’m tired of choking small animals to death, instead I think I’ll round up sheep for a living.” It just won’t work.’

  There is a honk: from the taxi in front, Dave Davison and Mike Purzel are mooning us. Kevin chortles, gives them the finger.

  ‘I don’t think of you as a boa constrictor,’ I tell Ish.

  ‘Thanks, Claude.’

  ‘Though what about your mortgage? If you are planning on helping people.’

  Ish considers this. ‘Sometimes I wonder if I just got that mortgage so I didn’t have to ask myself why I was working in some shitty bank.’

  The car inches through the traffic in fits and starts. Rain deluges the windscreen, rain slicks the streets; rain has taken over this town, like a Mafia gang rolled in from some nightmare metropolis.

  ‘What about you, Claude?’ A street lamp in the window gives her a momentary, rain-diffused halo. ‘What will you do?’

  I don’t know what I will do. I don’t have a plan, or an ideal to pursue. My love story is over; after tomorrow, the bank will be gone too, and I will probably never see any of these people again, and there will be no sign that the last two years ever happened. Apart from the money, of course; the money will still be there, piled up in my account, like those towers of hoarded newspapers they find in old people’s houses after they die.

  ‘I suppose I will look for another position,’ I say. ‘I hear Goldman are looking.’

  I am conscious of her disapproval, but for a moment she doesn’t speak; the back-seat silence is filled by the slur of the tyres on the wet street, the muffled thrum of the city.

  ‘On Kokomoko they have this legend,’ she says at last. ‘Of a tribe that left the gift circle. And this tribe, every time they go out in their boats they catch a full net of fish, and every time they dive to the seabed they find the most beautiful shells, and every time they fight in a battle they win. And if you’re starving, or you need allies for a war, or a necklace for a dowry, in the middle of the night these tribesmen will appear at your bedside, and they’ll offer you whatever you want. But the thing is, once you take it, you’ll never be able to pay them back. Your food, your possessions, the clothes on your back – they’ll keep coming and coming, in the middle of the night, and sooner or later they’ll take your mother, your daughter, your whole family – carry them away to their island, that no one ever returns from.’

  Shff shff, go the wipers on the windscreen; traffic-light red dazzles over the glass.

  ‘The anthropologists think it’s got its roots in history. The slavers used to sail out from Torabundo around the archipelago, trying to get the islanders to take on loans. Particularly if the fish catch was down. The islanders didn’t really understand what loans were – they were used to just giving each other what they needed, so they fell into these enormous debts. The slavers would take their children as “security” until they paid them back. And their parents’d never see them again. So these legends arose sort of like warnings. If you leave the gift circle, if you take the zombie gold, then you’re already dead.’ Leaning forward, she taps the driver on the shoulder. ‘Let me out here, please.’

  I do not conceal my dismay. ‘Aren’t you coming to VD’s?’

  She shakes her head. ‘Have a lap dance for me, eh? See you tomorrow for the grand finale.’

  She steps out into the rain; the door shuts, and the taxi shrieks back into motion.

  Kevin cranes his head around. ‘I’ll tell you one thing I won’t miss, that’s stories about those sodding islanders. Some bunch of oddballs who don’t even wear trousers, telling us we’re dead?’ He turns back to the front. ‘When I’m dead, you’ll know all about it,’ he says. ‘You can expect a very volatile market that day, my friend.’

  From the basement door red lights flash, and a deep percussive rumbling issues. ‘All right, mate?’ The bouncer checks me with his hand. ‘Where ye comin’ from?’

  ‘Life,’ I tell him.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ He scrutinizes Kevin and me with pale hobgoblin eyes.

  ‘Our colleagues are inside,’ I say. ‘Agron Torabundo.’

  His eyes narrow; I wonder momentarily if he is one of our shareholders. ‘Tell your pals in there to cool it,’ he says.

  The whole of Ag
roBOT seems to be downstairs, sweat rings under their armpits, faces simultaneously grinning and aghast, like soldiers on furlough from some terrible war. Kevin prods me, points to where Jurgen is waving at us from a table. ‘You have made it at last!’ he hollers as we stumble out of the melee. ‘I am thinking you will never be coming!’

  He appears oddly relaxed, even jovial, as if we were at our Christmas party; he shunts along the banquette so we can squeeze in beside him, orders us drinks from a passing nymph. Chris Kane is at the table as well, telling the fire-alarm story to some people from Sales. Around us, the mood has intensified from gloom into a kind of morbid bacchanal. Champagne bottles pack the tables like skittles; suited figures process continuously to the bathroom in twos and threes, while others are led away by silver-knickered houris to the cubicles at the back of the club. House beats pound at my body. I take a bottle from the nymph’s tray, debate interiorly as to whether or not I should stay. And then –

  ‘Something wrong, Claude?’

  ‘I thought I saw…’ It feels almost too absurd to say out loud; but as the mass of bodies around us reconfigures itself, just for a second the face reemerges.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Porter.’

  ‘Porter?’ Jurgen’s laughter is more kindly than mocking. ‘I think perhaps in Life Bar you are drinking many Jägerbombs.’

  He’s right, I think; and then the crowd kaleidoscopes again, and once more I see him, by a little door in a distant corner, as if on his way in or out. The light is dim, and people keep getting in the way, but how can it be anyone else? The snow-white hair, the golden skin, the famous jawline that has triumphed in innumerable boardroom battles? And the man he is deep in talk with, don’t I know him too – small, spry, silver-haired, a gleam in his eye – isn’t that Miles O’Connor?

  ‘Hmm, I am not seeing either of them.’

  Pushing Jurgen aside, I jump from my seat and hurry towards the corner. As I get closer it seems other figures flicker out of the darkness – the little Portuguese man who had haunted the Minister – and there, isn’t that Howie? And, and Walter? But my way is blocked again and again, colleagues stepping in front of me to clasp me in beery embraces or take my picture with their phones, and by the time I reach the corner, neither Porter nor Miles nor any of the others is anywhere to be seen.