Dominion Rising Bonus Swag

by Gwynn White

  Filip flinched from the implications of Leo’s argument. He didn’t do politics. He did math. “The laws of nature don’t change. And the eighty-twenty rule is one of them. Your assayers are wrong, that’s all.” It felt like heresy to say that. But the numbers admitted no other conclusion. “I’ll—I’ll prove it to you.”

  “You do that,” Leo said. “Prove it to me, or I’m out. I just can’t keep on eating these losses.”

  To Haus von Bismarck, 500,000 marks p/a was pocket change. Typical German, Leo didn’t even like ‘losing’ that much. Of course he didn’t.

  Filip pushed Boris’s beetle to and fro between his palms. The band played: “We’re all going to heaven. Heaven, heaven…”

  “No!”

  Anna von Bismarck stood on the edge of the dais, her hair loose, her slim body cocked like a gun. She jumped off the dais and ran to the stage, and because she was Anna von Bismarck, the band stopped playing.

  She seized the microphone. “It’s a lie,” she said hysterically. “No one’s going to heaven.” Feedback squealed. “There is no heaven! You aren’t saints, none of you! We’re all sinners! There is no way out! Wake up, you idiots! The Hunter will chase you down, and the Hounds of Hell will fight over your bones!”

  “Oh God,” Leo said. “And she was doing so well this weekend.” He scrambled to his feet. “Go away, Filip. And remember: I want proof.”

  An Hour Later

  “There’s only one thing for it,” Filip said. He was lying on his back, legs vertical against the wall of their hotel room, doing sit-ups. At home he did this with his baby son, Kiril, balanced on his feet. “Gotta go out there—umph—and get—phooo—documentary proof.”

  Boris sprawled in a wicker armchair, playing with the remote control of the television. “It’s all in the fucking prospectuses.”

  “No one—umph—reads them.”

  “I’ve read them. I’ve read hundreds of the fucking things.”

  “You’re you.” Filip flopped on his back. “Anyway, it isn’t all in the prospectuses.” He stared at a lizard on the ceiling. He was trying on a new way of thinking. “The numbers doesn’t tell us anything about the mortgagees themselves. Who are they?”

  “Who cares?”

  Filip decided he’d done enough sit-ups. They never reduced his girth, anyway. He stood up, and ducked as something flew past his head. Boris had thrown the remote control at the lizard on the ceiling, missing.

  “I was talking to a guy from the IMF,” Boris said. “They’re the ones rating this crap double-A, triple-A. So I asked him what’s in these fancy new ABSs. He said, ‘We’re trying to figure that out ourselves.’

  Filip nodded. “They’re just accepting the mortgage data from the issuers and rubber-stamping it. They don’t have the manpower to assay every one of the mortgagees themselves.”

  Boris lit a cigarette. Filip had seldom seen him so depressed.

  Salty wind swept through the room. Filip got himself a can of iced chocolate and a packet of mixed nuts from the minibar.

  Boris said suddenly, “If the market doesn’t crash on its own, we’ll just have to make it crash. Before we go broke.”

  “Yeah, and how’re you planning to do that?” Filip tipped nuts into his mouth and wandered out to the balcony. He heard the distant clamor of the Ascania party, or a different party, one of the parties to which the Orlovs would never be invited. They were minnows. Russian émigrés. Savants.

  And they were right.

  Four Days Later. May 23rd, 1989

  Filip had lived in Berlin all his life, but he had never before been out to the nomad encampments.

  The term ‘nomad encampment’ was BASI’s cute way of avoiding the term ‘slum.’ Whatever you called these districts, they sprawled for miles to the south and east of the capital, untrammeled by any natural obstacle. Garbage, dead animals, and industrial waste choked the canals dug by the long-dead, idealistic architects of the capital. Peering in horror from the car window, Filip saw a human corpse floating under a bridge.

  The people on the streets of the nomad encampments seemed indifferent to the filth around them. They picked their way around icy puddles in high heels and pointy boots, swaddled in fur and day-glo nylon mantles, sunglasses tilted defiantly to the overcast sky.

  Filip was riding with a credit assayer from the von Bismarck wealth department. Leo had arranged the ride-along, warning that this would be the last favor he did Filip. Proof, Leo had reminded him, I need proof.

  The nomad encampments were proof of something. Filip just didn’t know what.

  The assayer turned onto a street that seemed to be entirely under construction. Quickstone masons perched on scaffolding, monkeying with a newly planted forest of rattoons. The assayer parked behind a cement mixer. “Looks promising,” she shouted.

  “Where are we?” Filip shouted back. The construction noise competed with passing car stereos and what sounded like distant gunfire. An elevated highway arced through the sky like a concrete rainbow.

  The assayer stabbed a finger onto her map. “Here.”

  “Where’s here?”

  “Don’t know, don’t care. I follow my nose.”

  This podgy little woman was an assayer, less politely known as a saint-finder. The von Bismarcks had poached her from the IMF. They paid her to sniff out living saints and sell mortgages to them.

  They walked down the street to a stretch of completed houses. Cheap but not cheerful, quickstone rattoons had been trained into barrel-like profiles with braided roof ridges. Concrete cladding flaked off the exteriors so that the rattoons showed through. Improperly masoned, of course, quickstone would just keep on growing. The inhabitants had removed the doors and windows, presumably because their frames had warped, and replaced them with cardboard, planks, wadded rags.

  The assayer knocked on a plywood door. The man who came to it was brown. His flat nose and fuzzy hair, the same color as his skin, identified him as an African immigrant. So much for Leo’s “ordinary Germans.” The man spoke, however, in German. “C’n I do for you?”

  The assayer smiled. She radiated warmth and enthusiasm. “Correction, Mr—?”

  “Nogbu.”

  “Mr Nogbu. What can we do for you?” She let the question hang in the air for a second. “I’m so sorry. Let me introduce myself.”

  The words Haus von Bismarck had a magical effect on the African immigrant. His reticence vanishing, he invited the visitors in. Filip had to squeeze through the doorway, which was now just a gap between two rattoons. In another few years the house would be impossible to enter or get out of. The African’s family seemed to fill it. There was a reek of spicy food. The television in the corner did not belong; the white faces on the screen came from a different world.

  Filip and the assayer were given two out of the only three chairs in the house, and cups of stewed coffee.

  “I can see you’re honest, hardworking folk,” the assayer said. ”Do you have a corporate ID, Mr Nogbu?”

  “Me?” Nogbu laughed. “If I was a corporate bondsman, would we be living in this shithole?”

  Turned out the assayer did sympathy, too. “I’m just amazed no one’s offered you a helping hand before.”

  “Oh, they did. They did. And then they took it back, and her hand, too.”

  Nogbu beckoned to a young woman whose left arm, Filip now saw, ended in a stump. The scar of a mortgage that had gone bad. It made it worse that the girl smiled and shrugged, as if her disfigurement was just a graze.

  “Next,” Nogbu said, “they’ll come for her other hand. What we got, six months to catch up on our payments? So then it’s her right hand. After that, if we default again …” He drew a finger across his throat.

  “That’s terrible,” Filip said. “That’s just fucking inhuman.”

  Mr Nogbu shrugged. “You highborn folk’ve been doing it to each other for centuries. Now we got equal opportunity. Who’s complaining?”

  Filip opened his mouth and then closed i
t again. Under international securities law, your credit rating dictated your ability to raise capital by issuing bonds. If you issued bonds, you were theoretically exposed to penalties of amputation and execution in the event of default. But among the highborn, it never actually got to that point. Filip could not recall a single case where a court had imposed the death sentence for bankruptcy. Not for the last hundred years. Even the Wessex insolvency crisis of 1979, which had triggered the new default-insurance regulations, had ended bloodlessly, with a new monarch and a new revolving credit facility.

  As an entitled individual, there was always something else you could sell.

  But these people had nothing to sell at all. Except their bodies.

  “I’d be interested to know what rate they’ve got you on,” the assayer said. “Who’s your underwriter, by the way?”

  “Ascania,” the girl said. “He came from House Ascania. He showed us his brand and everything.”

  “Ten point two five,” Nogbu said proudly, as if he thought he’d gotten a pretty good deal out of the Ascania wealth division.

  “Ten point two five?” The assayer leapt up. She hurled her coffee cup to the floor, a dramatic gesture that got everyone’s attention, even though the cup was plastic. “Ten point two five? I’ll refinance you for seven point nothing.”

  Filip watched in awe as the whole family clustered around her, examining the von Bismarck brand on her shoulder, touching it and then touching their fingertips to their tongues as if they could taste her legitimacy. They gave less scrutiny to the documents that she produced from her briefcase. Nogbu, as principal borrower, and his daughter, as collateral, signed in several places. The girl printed her “signature” in block capitals. With the documents safely back in the assayer’s briefcase—“I’ll make copies at the office and mail them to you—” they shared a toast in beer that a child was sent to fetch from the corner store.

  Back in the car, Filip said, “Show me those documents.”

  He riffled through them. Almost all the blanks had been prefilled. Nogbu was credited with a five-figure income from “freelance employment.” The family’s new mortgage had a 7.0% interest rate, all right—for the next two years; after that it would float, tracking the “Sanctity Valuation Index,” which Filip had never heard of. He noted that the assayer had scribbled in the Collateral Assessment box: VG—OD. “Very good,” he translated out loud. “OD?”

  “One down. That’s a plus, for reasons that should be obvious to an expert like you.”

  It meant that House von Bismarck would not have to wait as long before collecting the girl’s major relics, her head and heart, which would be worth more than the hands.

  If she really was a living saint.

  “You didn’t assay her,” Filip said.

  “I didn’t have to. The Ascania guy already did.”

  “I want to see an assayal. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Tough. I just made my quota for the day. Come back with your own assayers. Or don’t you have any?”

  House Orlov did not. “I want to see you perform an assayal.”

  “What are you, deaf? I have to get back to the office and file this paperwork.” The woman turned onto a road that ran alongside a canal.

  “There was a time when people like you were polite to people like me,” Filip said. “But never mind that. How’d you like it if I told Leo von Bismarck that you just refinanced a one-downer for a two-year teaser rate, without even giving her a chance to read the fucking documentation?”

  “She couldn’t read. She could hardly sign her own name.”

  “That’s my point. You just murdered her, and she doesn’t have a fucking clue.”

  “Go right ahead, then. Make your complaint!”

  Filip heard a tremor in the assayer’s voice. “I’ll cut you a deal,” he said. “You perform an assayal for me, and I won’t—no, wait, wait! I’m not gonna ask you to assay a living saint. Nothing that tough. Just do a deader for me and we’ll call it a day. What say you?”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake. You got a deader handy?”

  Filip peered through the windshield. They were approaching the bridge. “As a matter of fact, I do. Right over there.”

  That Evening

  Two-year-old Kiril ran to meet his father. “Poooo! Daddy, stinkypoo!”

  “Right you are,” Filip said. “Daddy very stinkypoo. Daddy wants a shower and a stiff drink. Where’s your mother?”

  The hall of the Orlov mansion stretched into the dim distance, lights switched off to save on electric bills. The very walls smelled of quiet desperation. They couldn’t really afford to live in Zehlendorf, an elite district of Berlin near Wannsee. His wife, Elena, came down the hall wearing woolly gloves and two sweaters. She hurried to meet him, then stopped short. “Filip, you smell like…”

  “I smell like I’ve been wading in an open sewer in the nomad encampments, fishing a bloated body out of the water, and taking its relics with a borrowed misericorde,” Filip said. “Because I have.”

  “I won’t ask.”

  “Don’t.”

  Elena turned and shouted for the maid. “I assume that’s nomad encampment sewer water you’ve just tracked in.”

  “The good news is, it’s not on the seats of our car,” Filip said, winning a smile from Elena. She came of another old émigré family. Being married to her was like having another sister. “I got a ride home. Is Semyon around? His foot was bad this morning—has he taken a cure yet?”

  “No, he was putting it off until evening, but—”

  “Semyon!” Filip plunged upstairs, carrying the relics of the floater in a plastic bag.

  “You go too far, Filip,” Semyon said balefully, when Filip tracked him down in his room. “I’m not touching that thing. That’s disgusting.”

  Semyon was Filip’s cousin, the younger brother of Anton, the black sheep—and big earner—of the family. Semyon was a bit of a black sheep himself. But he was not a big earner. He spent most of his time in nightclubs, where he occasionally sold a Russian antique. He also traded Tsarist memorabilia with people who were unhealthily obsessed with the Great War—as Semyon himself was. Overweight, he had intractable gout, an ailment which he should have been ashamed of at the age of twenty-seven, but was not. He reclined with his foot up on a hassock, watching a war movie. Filip muted it.

  “Consider it your contribution to keeping us out of the gutter,” Filip said. “I won’t ask you to do anything else all year.”

  He knelt by Semyon’s hassock, holding the heart—the least offensive of the floater’s relics, since it had mostly bled out—in a virtue-proof asbestos glove. He tenderly removed Semyon’s sock and held the thing against the swollen foot, while Semyon stared past him at the television, biting his lip.

  “Well?” Filip asked after a couple of minutes.

  “Not a tickle. Is that thing supposed to be miraculous? Take it away, for God’s sake.”

  “She said it was miraculous. The assayer who looked at it for me. She should have just said it wasn’t. Then I’d never have known.” Filip stuffed the heart back into its plastic bag, gave it to the maid who’d followed him with a mop. “Put this in the incinerator.”

  “Never have known what, Filip?”

  “That she was a fraud. I knew it, I knew it. There just aren’t that many saint-finders in the world, and the IMF’s got all the really gifted ones. The great Houses aren’t assaying anything. They’re just guessing!”

  “Mind moving? You’re blocking the screen.”

  * * *

  After supper, Filip and Boris met in the library.

  “They want them to default,” Filip said. “Following her nose? Bullshit. She must’ve got hold of a list of Ascania initial defaulters. That’s where it’s got to: they’re stealing each other’s bad loans to feed the machine. So what happens when the machine stops, and spits out nothing but useless corpses?”

  “Our reinsurance notes pay out, and we win, that’s what,” Boris said.
His voice sounded loud and flat in the reading rotunda, amid dusty empty shelves where the family’s old books had been sold off. “If it happens in the next three months. Because that’s how long we’ve got until we can’t pay the carrying costs anymore, and, actually, we lose the house, because we put it up as collateral without telling anyone else in the family, remember.”

  “Yeah.” Breathe. “I was going to ask you about what you said on Ibiza.”

  “Which thing?”

  “Crashing the market.”

  “It’s just an idea.” Boris took a yo-yo out of his pocket and started to spin it up and down. “The great Houses have all insured each other against default …”

  “The Circle Jerk of Doom.”

  “Yeah, so I started thinking about that. Someone has to be insuring the insurers, or else they’d have to account for the risk. Like fuck are they doing that. No one’s reserving enough capital to account for not only their own risk but everyone else’s as well. Somehow, they’ve shuffled it off their balance sheets. So who’s eating all that risk? Whoever it is, they’ve got to be solid, and they can’t be a regular corporation, or they’d have to cover their risky assets with capital, and so on and on and on.”

  Filip shivered. It was cold in the library. Spring in Berlin meant refrozen lumps of snow in the shady angles of walls, crocuses and daffodils struggling to come up, and near-freezing nights that penetrated the walls of the Orlov mansion like they were made of quickstone rattoons with cardboard wadded in the gaps.

  For centuries previous to the Second World War, House Orlov had reigned over extensive lands at Karmanovo, near Moscow. They’d had their own castle. Thousands of serfs. (Not that Filip approved of serfdom, of course.) They’d had yeti herds, tin mines, and world-famous ski slopes. Then Rasputin I had overthrown the Romanov Dynasty, and the Orlovs, as Romanov loyalists, had had to flee, leaving everything behind.

  Two years from now, the Germans promised, a Romanov emperor would once again rule in Moscow …

  … and if Filip and Boris couldn’t turn this trade around, the Orlovs would be celebrating the restoration in a cardboard shack in the nomad encampments.