The Mark and the Void

by Paul Murray

  ‘Dad…’ Remington is rubbing his eyes with his fists.

  ‘Okay, buddy, we’ll be home soon.’ He hoists the boy up, letting his small head fall on his shoulder. ‘Listen, Claude. I appreciate what you were trying to do back there, with Dodson. For the record, though, if there’s one thing people want to read about even less than a French banker, it’s a novelist struggling to write his new book.’

  ‘If I ever pretend to submit a book proposal again I will keep that in mind.’

  ‘Seriously, I know you mean well, but you’re box-office poison,’ he says. Then he adds, ‘I’m sorry it didn’t work out.’

  ‘Me too,’ I say.

  We reach the quays. The wind batters us as we cross the river; below us, the water foams seawards, throws spume up over the walls to deluge the bronze figures of the Famine sculpture and their modern-day doubles a few yards away, the city’s cadaverous addicts, huddled in the negligible shelter of the trestle bridge, while from the roof of the Custom House the golden statue of Commerce looks over the city.

  ‘What will you do now?’ I say, when we get to the far side.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he admits. ‘I’d go back to Myhotswaitress, but right now I need something that’ll bring in money, like, tomorrow.’

  ‘How much is it you’re looking for?’

  ‘More than you’ve got, Claude.’ He says it with a smile, as if he wants to reassure me, as if I might have felt compelled to pay off his mortgage for him, had I the funds, though this isn’t something that really happens, is it, even between friends? Not in the real world?

  ‘We’ll muddle through somehow,’ he says, ‘we always do.’ At that moment there comes a bleep from his pocket; with his free hand he takes out his phone. ‘Well, there’s some good news,’ he says, reading the message. ‘Clizia’s won her volleyball game. That means they’re through to the final.’

  ‘How wonderful,’ I say, as my lungs fill up with cement.

  ‘You know, win or lose, I think she’ll be glad when it’s finally over. All these late nights?’ He chuckles to himself. ‘And the other night she got an elbow right in the face, swelled up into a massive shiner.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, betraying no emotion.

  ‘The point is, I suppose I should look on the bright side. I might be unemployed and broke and about to be evicted, but I still have my family, right? I mean, in some ways I’m probably the richest man you know.’

  ‘Definitely,’ I say, looking away to where the river, gorged with the night’s rain, charges triumphantly, like an army putting its enemies to rout.

  We shake hands, make vague promises to meet again; then Paul turns, child in his arms, towards the north. I stand and watch him disappear into the waves of rain – seeming to walk right out of the world, as if there were no more of his story left to play out.

  Continuing down the quay, I discover a Carambar in my pocket. The joke on the wrapper is the George Clooney one again. On my phone, a baffled message from Ish, asking if these crazy stories about AgroBOT buying out Royal Irish are true; several humorous texts from co-workers, increasingly incoherent as the celebrations go on; a long voicemail from Walter Corless, ranting that the Caliph still owes him money. He makes no mention of AgroBOT’s death and resurrection, as if the events of the last two days had never happened. Maybe, from his perspective, they never did.

  I delete the message, turn the phone off.

  What happens to the banker? Nothing happens to the banker. The banker is paid to be a person to whom nothing happens.

  Walking across the plaza, I see an A4 page in a plastic protector taped to the metal shutter of the Ark, thanking the café’s customers for their loyalty and wishing them well. A customer: that’s all I amounted to in the end. Her customer, Paul’s customer, someone who pays his money, takes his goods and then walks away.

  Now the glass citadel of Transaction House rises before me, shimmering through the rain like a ghostly privateer; I think about Ish’s tribe, scouring the waves for souls to make away with. Tomorrow we will be back in business: I can hardly bear to think about it.

  As I pass the door, though, something stops me, pulls me back. What is it? The security desk is unmanned, the lights are off, all is in darkness. Yet some strange energy emanates from within, tugs at me with invisible fingers. Without knowing why, I push the door and find that in all the excitement it has been left ajar.

  Inside, the strange pressure only grows; and as I climb into the lift I feel the same tension a surfer must feel, stalking barefoot over the shingle while a storm brews above the waves – still hidden in clear skies but there to touch, an electricity that crackles along the surface of the water, a blanket of static beneath which every drop buzzes.

  I step out onto the sixth floor.

  No one is here – no Asia team, no frantic interns, no midnight strategists building some invincible trade; I walk through the desks feeling like a visitor from the future, a tourist in some bureaucratic ruin. On my desk I see Walter’s cheques and bank drafts, the ones he gave me a couple of days ago, still sitting there, uninvested. I never did anything with them; with the bank going down, there hadn’t seemed a point.

  Is there a point now?

  Am I going to do this?

  Somewhere out in the night a clock strikes thirteen.

  The next day the storm has lifted; the office is filled with sunshine. It slants through the windows in great radiant sheets, burnishing white shirts to such a brightness that from certain angles the room appears to be filled with angels, floating about their heavenly station, reciting beatific litanies of numbers.

  ‘I still don’t get it,’ Ish says. ‘I thought we were going bust. How can we buy a bank if we’re going bust? And why would we want to buy Royal Irish?’

  ‘Optics,’ Gary McCrum says, sucking a choc ice, leafing through a watch catalogue. Now that we’re being rescued, everyone’s acting like they expected it all along.

  ‘Okay, for the last time,’ Jocelyn says heavily. ‘Everyone knows Royal Irish is dead in the water, right? But the government’s been afraid to let it go under, because the whole world’ll hear about it and no one’ll ever put their money in this country again. So a buyout like this suits them perfectly. They can proclaim the bank’s been cleaned up enough to sell on, Royal’s absorbed into a well-respected firm, its name is never spoken again, everyone gets on with their lives.’

  ‘But what’s in it for us? Why would we buy Royal, if it’s such a basket case?’

  Because we’re not really buying it, is the answer. The doomed investments, the enormous book of bad loans, the copious lawsuits as well as Walter’s festering 25 per cent stake have all been quietly parcelled up and transferred to a government agency. ‘Basically, all we’re buying is the name, and the HQ building there.’ Jocelyn jabs his thumb at the monolithic edifice on the far quay, presently invisible behind the window-dazzle.

  ‘And we’re getting it for practically nothing,’ Gary adds. ‘The site alone’s worth twice what we’re paying.’

  But still. Isn’t AgroBOT broke? What about all that Greek debt? Well. This is the clever part of the deal. At the heart of its extremely complicated mechanics is a swap: in return for taking the PR millstone that is Royal off their hands, the government has agreed to exchange all of AgroBOT’s toxic waste for guaranteed state bonds.

  ‘They’re just going to take it from us?’ Ish says incredulously.

  ‘I’m not sure they know what it is,’ Jocelyn says.

  ‘They know,’ Gary contradicts him.

  ‘Then why would they take it?’

  Gary lifts up his watch catalogue, puts his feet on the desk. ‘Not their decision anymore, is it?’ he says, rolling the stick of his choc ice with his tongue.

  Whose decision is it? The IMF, the EU, the ECB? Some other conglomeration of acronyms? That is not for us to know. The bottom line is that our balance sheet will be clean again and AgroBOT made whole; and the Irish people – along with their unstaffed
hospitals, their potholed roads, their overstuffed classrooms, medieval prisons, dying pensioners – will become the proud owners of six billion euros’ worth of, as Jocelyn likes to call it, radioactive Greek shit.

  This doesn’t go unremarked upon. Though the government tries to spin it as a happy ending for Royal Irish, many commentators see the AgroBOT bailout for what it is, and are asking why Ireland has been lumbered with rescuing a bank that is not itself Irish, nor European, nor, when it comes down to it, in the northern hemisphere.

  A more pressing point is that Ireland simply cannot afford to take on AgroBOT’s debts. The deal, if it’s voted through, will effectively bankrupt the country. So why are they doing it?

  ‘My surmise is that taking on AgroBOT’s debt is the condition of Ireland receiving aid from higher up,’ Jurgen says.

  ‘So they’re deliberately bankrupting themselves so they can get a handout from Europe? How does that make any sense?’

  ‘You are perhaps making the mistake of judging Irish actions by an external standard.’ Jurgen’s smile has the same brilliant opacity as the sunlight in the window. ‘You must remember that unlike the French, the British, the’ – with a little cough – ‘Germans, the Irish have never commanded their own empire. For the greater part of their history, they have been the subjects of foreign powers. Of course, we must go through the motions of equality und so weiter. But the fact is that the Irish are at root a slave race. We have seen this during their brief period of good fortune, when they are acting like the servant who has found the key to the wine cellar while his master is away. Even then it is clear they are not fit to be rulers of themselves. And they do not wish it either. This is why, although it seems to you and me the terrible injustice, they will carry their new debt without grumbling, even with gratitude.’

  ‘They’ll be … grateful? For paying off AgroBOT’s debt?’

  ‘Exactly so. Do not forget, Claude, this is a country until very recently ruled by priests. Thanks to them, the Irish already believe they are born in debt, a terrible debt of sin which they can never pay in full. A people like this is more comfortable wrapped in chains. For this reason, I am believing the deal will pass through parliament without issue.’

  Nevertheless, we must take no chances. ‘As we have seen in the last weeks, the public mood is unpredictable. Prior to next week’s vote, it is more than ever important that the contents of your original report on Royal Irish are forgotten. The IT Department has taken the liberty of destroying all related material on your hard drive and on the AgroBOT servers. You will do the same with any files on external drives or your own machine.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I must tell you, Claude, you have impressed a lot of people with your handling of this matter. Yes, with the initial report you have badly miscalculated. But after that, you have made the case to the media very convincingly.’

  ‘You mean I lied.’

  ‘Sometimes for the greater good it is necessary to bend the truth a little. For a society to prosper, it’s the strong, not the weak, that must be protected. The journalists will not understand this, of course. But those who know are not forgetting your contribution. You have a bright future here at AgroBOT, very, very bright.’

  He returns his gaze to the window. Across the water, the white sky glows in the unfinished windows of the Royal HQ, blind eyes shining through a concrete mask. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’

  I am too surprised to reply.

  ‘True, it does not look like much now,’ Jurgen considers. ‘But in a few years, the housing market will recover, unemployment will fall, and the Irish will be clamouring once more for high-interest loans to fund their four-wheel drives and shopping trips to New York. At this point I am predicting our new acquisition will prove very lucrative.’

  ‘You mean the whole thing will happen all over again.’

  ‘Yes, it will happen all over again. But this time we will be prepared.’ He looks out at the river, the static cranes, the office blocks, as if any moment all of it will turn into money … ‘Life is so fucking beautiful,’ he says.

  The market loves the coup de théâtre of the Royal Irish buyout: although the Irish government hasn’t yet signed off on the deal, AgroBOT’s share price has already begun to climb. In the days that follow, the bank’s credit rating is upgraded, and then upgraded again; the Wall Street Journal runs a feature on Porter Blankly, with a picture of the CEO smoking a fat cigar and the quote, ‘When they say you’re over-leveraged … that’s when you buy another bank.’ According to this article, the deal was clinched over a round of golf with Ireland’s political elite, in which Blankly, who flew in directly from New York and had not slept in thirty-six hours, made a par 5 in two shots before sinking a putt for an eagle 3. The rumour within AgroBOT is that Howie and Grisha were responsible for the details; although investors are demanding an investigation into the collapse of their ninth-floor fund, word is they’ve already been spirited to New York to sit at Porter’s right hand. None of this may be true; still, visitors to the Uncanny Valley report that Rachael spends most of her time these days by the window, gazing out towards the sea, like a lonesome maiden waiting for her sailor to come home.

  Does it need to be said that nobody follows through on his vows to leave banking and take up shoemaking, orphan husbandry, semi-professional paragliding, whatever else? Kevin is given a permanent contract; a solicitors’ firm specializing in liquidation opens an office on the ninth floor; Skylark Fitzgibbon reappears in the form of a barrage of publicity pictures from Kokomoko, showing the first shipments of topsoil arriving onshore, rich loamy mounds that will become the greens and fairways of the golf course, smiling islanders beside her in blue Agron Torabundo T-shirts.

  ‘So Blankly got away with it.’

  ‘Got away with what?’

  ‘Cashing in twice.’

  ‘Not this crazy conspiracy theory again.’

  ‘I’m just saying.’

  No one else is saying; everyone is just grateful to be back to work. And within a very short time, a matter of days, life is just as it was. Or almost.

  * * *

  ‘Who is that man, Ish?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The man, there, coming out of Liam’s office.’

  ‘Oh, the dude in black?’

  ‘He’s a new employee?’

  ‘Hmm, I think he’s from Compliance.’

  ‘Compliance?’

  ‘Yeah, I heard there’s been someone snooping around the last couple of days, asking questions.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Beats me. Wouldn’t reckon it’s got anything to do with us.’

  ‘No, no, of course not.’

  ‘You going somewhere, Claude?’

  ‘Yes, I have a, um, meeting. If anyone’s looking for me … ah…’

  ‘Don’t worry, I never saw you.’

  The door doesn’t open so much as implode at my knock, giving way to a seething mass of small children, who run back and forth and bump into one another in an exemplary display of Brownian motion.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ Paul says, wading through them with me to the relative safety of the kitchen table. ‘Sorry about the short notice. We weren’t going to do anything, but then Clizia’s game got cancelled, so…’

  ‘It’s my pleasure,’ I say. ‘It’s not every day that someone turns five.’

  ‘Thank God for that. Here, let me see if I can…’ He cranes over the swarm and plucks out his son, who is panting with excitement and partially covered with a recent meal. ‘Look who it is, Remington! It’s your Uncle Claude!’

  ‘Happy burp-day,’ I say, handing him my present.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s an ant farm,’ I explain. ‘Where ants live.’ I help him remove the wrapping paper to reveal the plastic window through which ants may be seen running up and down tunnels with small objects in their mouths, occasionally stopping to flail antennae with other ants. The resemblance to the Financial Servic
es Centre seems to me indisputable.

  ‘Is Roland in there?’ Remington asks.

  ‘Hmm, there are certainly some ants that might be related…’

  ‘Let’s take them out!’

  ‘Maybe later,’ his father says hastily, removing the box from the boy’s hands and putting it on a high shelf. Remington shrugs and rejoins the anarchy. ‘So I have news,’ Paul says to me.

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Yeah. Dodson called.’

  The first thing I think of is Banerjee. ‘He’s pressing charges? Or – my God, he’s not dead, is he?’

  ‘Relax, Banerjee’s fine, they’re all fine. No, he was calling about the book.’

  ‘What book?’

  ‘My book. He thinks it’s got legs. He wants to publish it.’

  ‘He wants to –?’ I feel a soar of elation, though also a certain amount of confusion: there do seem to be a number of loose ends to this news, for example that there is no book.

  ‘There’s no book now,’ Paul corrects me. ‘But after hearing our proposal that night Robert says it’s all right there.’ His voice takes on a loftier tone, adding, ‘He says it’s the book I was born to write.’

  ‘He says Anal Analyst is the book you were born to write?’

  ‘He’s not 100 per cent sure about the title,’ Paul concedes.

  ‘Well,’ I say, attempting to take this in. ‘And you don’t … that is, in the past you have had some doubts about writing. The modern audience, competing technologies, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Cold feet, that’s all that was,’ Paul says dismissively. ‘Does the blackbird sing for an audience? Does the sun rise in the hope that some douche’ll take a picture of it on his phone? I just needed someone to believe in me. That’s what I’ve been waiting for, all this time.’

  ‘I believed in you,’ I remind him.

  ‘I know, I know.’

  ‘Clizia believed in you.’

  ‘Yeah, well, someone who’s professionally qualified to believe in me, I mean.’

  It strikes me that Robert Dodson believed in him the last time, and he just never submitted the book, but I decide not to press the point. ‘And he will give you some money, as well as belief?’