by Paul Murray
‘He needs a couple of pages first – just the basic set-up, to show the finance people. But once that’s done, he’s pretty sure he can scrap the previous advance and set up a whole new deal.’
‘Debt forgiveness, eh?’
‘They won’t pay much. But get this. Just a few days after I saw you, I got an email from this investment company, asking about buying the apartment for cash.’
‘This apartment?’
‘Yes! I told them straight up it’s got structural problems. They didn’t seem to care. Cyrano Solutions, you ever heard of them?’
‘No, but there are all kinds of foreign investors in town, buying up property.’
‘I couldn’t find anything about them online. It sounded kind of shady to me. But then the next thing I know we get this huge whomp of money into our account! I mean just like that! And these people say we can wait and move out whenever. Isn’t that crazy? Like I wouldn’t say our troubles are over, exactly, but I’ll be able to keep writing full-time, at least till I’ve got a first draft. After that maybe I can get a few gigs on the side, reviews, that kind of thing – you know, now that I’ve got my bona fides again.’
‘That is wonderful.’ I clink his plastic glass. ‘Congratulations.’
‘Thanks. We were sailing pretty close to the wind this time. Sometimes I even thought … well, why dwell on it. Suffice to say, it’s nice to have some good news for a change. And a lot of it’s down to you.’
‘Me?’ I say, through a mouthful of butterfly cake.
‘You assaulting Banerjee did me no harm at all. He didn’t say it, but I got the distinct impression Dodson’s been wanting to hit him with a sculpture for a long, long time. I reckon I could have given him the ABC after that and he still would have published it.’
‘Au contraire, it is your talent.’
‘So the question now is how to end it,’ Paul says, as in a far corner of the room a synthesizer polka starts up and the children dance around. ‘Dodson thinks he’s got to rob the bank.’
‘The banker?’
‘He says it’s the only ending that makes sense. After everything that happens.’
‘I see,’ I say, a cold spiral of metal coiling up from my gut.
‘So I wanted to run something by you. I know you said robbing an investment bank was basically impossible. But I’ve been reading about this guy in France, this Pierrot – you’ve heard of him?’
‘Of course.’
The children are jumping up and down now, the noise so thunderous it almost drowns out the music.
‘He breaks into the back office in the middle of the night, forges some papers, transfers his clients’ money into his own account. Couldn’t that work here?’
The music stops abruptly: the children freeze.
‘Pierrot got caught,’ I say.
‘He got greedy. He did it over and over. What if our guy only does it once? And he takes the money from some really evil client, so it wouldn’t seem so much like stealing?’
I stroke my chin; my fingers feel like ice. ‘It’s true, if he put the money into a third party’s account it would be almost impossible for the bank to get back,’ I say, forcing the words through numb lips. ‘And maybe, if he was lucky, the client wouldn’t find out till their end-of-year returns. Still, it would only be a matter of time.’
‘In theory, though, you could have it so that by the time the client finds out they’ve got away?’
‘“They”?’
‘The banker and the waitress.’
I feel a curious jolt, as if the world has slipped from its wheel. ‘What about her boyfriend?’
‘She doesn’t have a boyfriend,’ Paul says, erasing him with a single wave of the hand. ‘Maybe the banker thinks she has a boyfriend. And that’s what makes his sacrifice authentic? But then he finds out the truth, using a bespoke waitress surveillance system. Although Dodson’s not 100 per cent about that part either,’ he confesses.
‘Dad, we need you for pass-the-parcel…’ Remington appears at his father’s elbow.
‘Oh, right – but in principle, that’d work? The back-office thing?’
They get away; a happy ending. ‘Yes, I think that would work very well.’
‘Dad.’
‘All right, all right. Hey, try the dinosaur cake, Claude, it’s unbeatable!’
He is pulled away. Left by the table, nibbling on dinosaur cake, I think about what he said. Could they really escape, the banker and the waitress? Is there still somewhere in the world the bank wouldn’t find them?
‘You look like one of the musical statues.’
I turn around. Clizia has materialized beside me. ‘Just daydreaming,’ I tell her. ‘Enjoying the party?’
‘I should get back to the office. But I’m worried that if I move I will stand on somebody.’
‘They’re tougher than they look,’ she says with a laugh. Her hair is tied back, and instead of her usual micro-skirt she wears a tracksuit, liberally adorned with food smears and tiny fingerprints; the bruising around her eye has faded almost to nothing.
‘Things are better?’ I say.
She shrugs. ‘If he finishes book.’
‘What about you? How are your … travel plans?’
She shrugs again, though not without a smile. ‘We’ll see. For now, everything is good.’
‘No more volleyball.’
‘I pay off boss.’ She waits a moment after relaying this information, then says, ‘Don’t you want to know how?’
‘Hmm, Paul mentioned that you’ve sold the apartment?’
She looks amusedly into my eyes, and for a moment our gazes criss-cross, glancing off one another like bright swords in a duel. Then she takes my hand. ‘Come, before you leave, there’s someone I want you to meet.’ She scans the partygoers, then locates the one she is looking for, beside the refrigerator: a small, olive-skinned boy, with a blue stripe on the bridge of his nose and pink daubs on his cheeks.
‘This is one of Remington’s friends from school,’ she says. ‘Tell Claude your name, darling.’
The small child looks up at me. He does not speak: he does not need to. His eyes are a brilliant, luminescent green, like light through the trees of some Olympian forest.
‘I think maybe you know his mother,’ Clizia says innocently. ‘She works in a café near your bank?’
‘Ah – oh – is that right?’ I stammer.
‘It closed … but then it opened again.’
‘I see.’
‘Someone gave them a whole lot of money.’
‘Is that so? Good for them.’
‘But they don’t know who he is.’
‘Well, that’s the business world, so impersonal…’
Clizia touches my arm, leans in to me and says, ‘You’re a good man, Claude.’
‘Me? Oh, you mean the ant farm?’
‘There are not many good men. So few that sometimes we forget even to look for them. We are too busy trying to pick out the best of the bad men.’
I continue to make fish-out-of-water gestures of incomprehension, which Clizia continues to ignore.
‘Oscar’s mother will be coming to collect him in about half an hour,’ she says absently, stooping to pick up a little girl who has collided with the dustbin. ‘If you are still here, you can all walk back together?’
Ariadne? Here? With no more tricks, or ploys, or misunderstandings? For an instant it seems that life and story are merging at last into one, everything I hoped for coming true … but then my phone begins to ring, and I remember it’s already too late for that.
‘Where are you, Claude?’ Rachael’s secretary is at the other end of the line.
‘I had a meeting.’
A compact, merciless hammering of keys. ‘I can’t see anything in your diary.’
‘Yes, it was … unscheduled.’
‘You’re needed back at the office.’
‘With regard to something in particular…?’
‘Just get back here,�
� she says.
I step out of the lift to find the office submerged in a kind of silent panic, a frantic gloom that envelops everything like a fog. Through windows, around corners, senior management can be seen having agitated conversations, then hurrying off in different directions. I go to my desk, moving calmly, as if I am being watched.
The man in black is in Liam English’s office, interviewing staff.
‘One of the accounts got tapped,’ Gary McCrum says in a low voice.
‘Whose?’ Jocelyn Lockhart says. ‘How much was taken?’
Gary McCrum shrugs.
‘What’s going to happen?’ Kevin asks.
‘They’re talking to everyone,’ Gary says. ‘But I reckon they already know who it was.’
‘Who? And … how?’
‘And how’s he supposed to’ve done it?’
‘I heard there was some security fuck-up the night of the margin call,’ Brent ‘Crude’ Kelleher says. ‘A bunch of doors got left open. Including back office.’
‘They think someone went in there?’
‘They found something on the floor the next day.’
‘I heard that too,’ Terry Fosco joins in huskily, spinning round in his chair. ‘I heard they found a Goldman Sachs business card.’
‘I heard it was a USB key,’ Dave Davison says from the water cooler, ‘and on it there was a virus the IT people had never seen before.’
‘It was a sweet wrapper,’ Thomas ‘Yuan’ McGregor says. His eyes are bleary: he has been summoned from his bed.
‘A sweet wrapper?’
‘What, back office don’t eat sweets?’
At that moment, the office door opens and everyone falls silent. An apparatchik from Sales emerges, looking pale and traumatized. He glances at us, then steps quickly away, fingering his collar. Liam English comes to the threshold with Rachael and the man in black. Rachael is holding a clipboard, in a cursory way that makes it look like a prop. The man in black looks over the room; his eyes, quite without life or expression, pause on me …
‘David Davison,’ Rachael calls.
‘Fuck,’ Dave mutters, getting to his feet.
‘You think it was him?’ Kevin says breathlessly, once the door closes. ‘Dave?’
‘They’re talking to everyone, you tool,’ Gary says.
‘Well someone’s in for it,’ Jocelyn says, then rolls back to his desk.
The others follow suit; I turn to my terminal, where the numbers scroll across my screen, twittering among themselves like birds, amidst a general silence so taut you could punch a hole in it –
The lift doors open. Ish bounces across the floor, autumn air clinging to her coat. ‘Hey, guess what! The Ark’s reopened!’
‘Oh yes, I saw that,’ I say, smiling at her queasily.
‘Want to come and have a look?’
‘I don’t think anyone’s supposed to leave.’
‘They’re interviewing alphabetically. They won’t get to us till midnight. Come on, Claude, a coffee at least…’
My limbs are heavy as stone; I don’t think I have the strength to go anywhere, except maybe to hide under my desk. Ish, however, won’t take no for an answer.
‘Pretty mental, isn’t it?’ she says in the lift. ‘You think it’s true? Someone’s pulled a Pierrot?’
I shrug, burble nothings.
‘I heard it was the Dublex account,’ she says, and then, ‘Where’d you go earlier?’
I tell her about the birthday party, and Paul’s good news.
‘For real this time? He’s not trying to knock the place off again?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Sounds like someone’s beaten him to it, anyway,’ Ish remarks.
I thought I’d feel better once I got into the fresh air. Instead the dread only seems to intensify, sparking in my hair and teeth and fingertips.
‘Claude!’ Ariadne throws her arms around me when we step through the door. ‘We’re back! Can you believe it?’
‘Yes, it’s very good,’ I stammer at her weakly.
‘An investor comes out of nowhere, give us everything we needed. We don’t even know who he is! I thought maybe it’s someone you called?’
‘One of my clients? Hmm, no, no, I don’t think so…’
She seats us, gives us menus, scampers away again. Ish gives me a long look. ‘All coming up roses for your mates today, isn’t it?’
I wrinkle my forehead perplexedly. ‘“Coming up roses…”?’
She laughs. ‘All right, never mind.’
The Ark is aglow. The light seems warmer, the smells sweeter than ever before; the waitresses beam at each other as they pass with their trays. Even the customers seem enlivened, swiping their phones with a flourish, adding winks and grins to their presentations, treating themselves to an extra sachet of artificial sweetener. But the celebratory atmosphere only makes me feel more remote, like I’m a hole that’s been cut out of the page.
‘So tell us about this book, then,’ Ish prompts. ‘It’s the same set-up as before? All about you?’
‘Well, about a fictional Everyman,’ I say. ‘Working in a bank.’
‘And what’s the story?’
‘Paul has not decided yet,’ I say with difficulty. ‘But he is thinking that perhaps the banker … ah … robs the bank.’
‘Robs it?’
‘Yes…’ On the tabletop, my phone flashes awake a moment, then darkens again. ‘Yes, only … only…’
‘He fucks it up,’ Ish says.
My eyes snap up. Ish looks back at me expressionlessly.
‘He leaves something behind,’ she says. ‘They’re on to him straight away.’
I gulp, cover it up with a sip of coffee that makes me gag in turn. ‘That seems to be how the story’s going,’ I admit.
Ish’s kind eyes study me with concern. ‘Bit of a downer, eh? As an ending?’
‘It’s probably more realistic,’ I say stoically.
‘Couldn’t there be a twist or something?’
‘What sort of a twist?’
Ish looks down at her hands for a long time. ‘How about he’s got a mate?’
‘Who does?’
‘The banker. He’s got a mate, and his mate’s got – she’s got something the bank doesn’t want anyone to see.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like a report,’ she says. ‘On a flash drive.’
Everything freezes. I feel my mouth drop open, my eyes stare like they’re going to pop out of my head.
‘He told her to get rid of it, but she didn’t,’ she continues. ‘And the day the government’s about to approve the bailout, she sends it to the newspapers.’
A shaft of sea-light tumbles through the window, flashes from the last blonde streaks in her hair. The strangest sensation steals over me, as if an invisible sun, hidden for decades behind an eclipse, were for the first time coming into view.
‘If people knew what the bank had been up to, might be tricky to justify bailing it out, mightn’t it?’ she muses. ‘And without the bailout … well, it’s goodbye bank.’ She glances over her shoulder in the direction of Transaction House, as if half-expecting to see it crumbling into dust here and now.
‘She’d lose her job.’ I am barely able to speak.
‘She’d lose her job of being an arsehole,’ she says. ‘She’d probably be grateful.’
I flop back in my chair. The space around me has taken on a wild, kinetic feel, as if it’s gained an extra dimension.
‘Why?’ I say.
‘Eh?’
‘Why does she do it?’
‘Why did you do it?’ she returns. My cheeks flare; she softens. ‘Some things are too big to fail, aren’t they?’
Outside, the rainbow flag cracks in the wind; the blue air seems to tinkle, as if with secret chimes. ‘Thank you,’ I say.
‘Just seemed like a better ending,’ she says.
‘So what would you do next?’
‘It’s not me, is it, it’s the cha
racter.’
‘Okay, what does the character do? In the epilogue? I can tell Paul.’
‘I don’t know … maybe she takes up anthropology again. Goes back to the island, lives with the tribe, tries to help stop them being washed away.’
‘That would work.’
‘Then she meets a handsome island chieftain and falls in love.’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s tall, has a nice body.’
‘Of course.’
‘And he’s really good at racquetball.’
‘Let me write this down.’
‘What about you, Claude? What happens to you?’
Before I can reply, Ariadne appears at the table with a plate of baklava. ‘You want to try?’ she says. ‘I have changed the recipe.’
She waits while we dig in with our spoons.
‘Fuck,’ Ish says. ‘This is incredible.’
‘Nostimo,’ I agree. ‘Very nostimo.’
‘That’s because this time I use Greek honey,’ Ariadne says; then adds, looking at me, ‘Once you taste it, always you will be coming back for more.’
With that, she dances away again. Ish raises an eyebrow.
‘What?’ I say.
‘You need to ask her out.’
‘In the book, you mean?’ I say. ‘Or in real life?’
Ish grins at me over her cup.
‘That’s up to you, mate,’ she says. ‘That’s up to you.’
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Simon Prosser, Mitzi Angel, Anna Kelly and Caroline Pretty for their invaluable editorial work; to Natasha Fairweather for her support and insight; and to all at United Agents. Thanks to Donna Tartt for her inspired early reading. Thanks also to Anna Ridley, Cliona Lewis, Patricia McVeigh, Neil Stewart, Mark C. O’Flaherty, Tim Jarvis, Ronan Kelly, Jonathan Hanly, Jon Ihle, Stephen McGovern, Adam Kelly, Sarah Bannan and Linda Fallon. A big ευχαριστώ to Viviana Miliaresi for all of her help. Thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland, An Chomhairle Ealaíon, for their financial assistance. Miriam and Sam – for real life, my love and gratitude to you always.
A Note About the Author
Paul Murray was born in 1975 in Dublin. His debut, An Evening of Long Goodbyes (2003), was short-listed for the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. His second novel, Skippy Dies (2010), was short-listed for the Costa Novel Award, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named one of Time’s Top 10 Fiction Books of the year. You can sign up for email updates here.