The Mark and the Void: A Novel

by Paul Murray

  ‘Mmm.’ I stare at the screen and batter a random series of keys.

  ‘Like a streak of lightning.’ She chuckles to herself, and then, abruptly, she stops. ‘Wait a second … are you after her? Were you in there trying to chat her up?’

  ‘I am not “after” anybody,’ I say irritably.

  ‘Is that what all this put-my-life-in-a-book stuff is about?’ she asks. ‘You’re trying to get with Ariadne? That’s her name, isn’t it? Ariadne?’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Ariadne,’ Ish repeats, as if she’s talking to herself, and then, ‘There’s nothing to be embarrassed about, Claude. She’s gorgeous. And she seems really cool too, like a real free-spirit type.’ She notes this with a kind of sadness, as though she were watching Ariadne through the bars of a cage. ‘Though I wouldn’t have thought she’d be the kind of girl you’d go for.’

  ‘I’m not “going” for anyone,’ I snap; I experience a sudden, vehement wish for her to go away, because now I too can see the bars of the prison we are both incarcerated in, and my plan to escape seems foolhardy, laughable, like trying to dig your way out of a cell with the stirrer from a semi-skimmed latte.

  ‘Okay, whatever you say,’ she shrugs. ‘Anyway, FYI, I have a date tomorrow night.’

  ‘What are you telling me for?’

  ‘No reason,’ she concedes, and turns to her computer.

  * * *

  This afternoon’s episode has left me with serious doubts. Paul’s intervention not only ruined a promising conversation with Ariadne, but I can’t even console myself with the thought that it might have inspired him to write; instead, it seems only to have reawoken memories of his hare-brained business plan.

  Now I find myself torn. After today’s demonstration, the wisest course of action is surely to cut my losses and abandon the project. At the same time, the more I find out about Paul’s life, the more responsible I feel for him. Clizia’s permanent fury now makes perfect sense. To marry an artist and find yourself chained instead to a professional lost cause, whose efforts range from monetizing isolation to outright theft – isn’t that a betrayal just as bad as the one that brought her here? When she signed up to work as a waitress and instead found herself contracted to a lap-dancing club? Would it be any great surprise if she were looking for a way out?

  The rain comes down all day, and the next morning it is heavier still, turning the plaza into a dismal game of hopscotch, figures in black shoes and trench coats leaping and splashing their way to shelter. At the zombie encampment, one of the tents has collapsed, and the undead scurry about with tape and buckets.

  ‘What’s going to happen to them when Royal Irish gets shut down?’ Gary McCrum says, looking out the window. ‘Will they all just leave?’

  ‘I suppose. Royal’s the zombie bank, after all.’

  ‘Shame.’ Gary McCrum scratches his belly. ‘They bring a bit of life to the place.’

  ‘They’re zombies, Gary.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  The government has had a number of days to digest our report, but so far no action has been taken on Royal. The Minister gives a brief statement this afternoon, but it’s just the same threadbare phrases again: Royal is open for business, Ireland’s fundamentals are sound, the IMF is not moving in. Behind him stands the little Portuguese man I saw in Rachael’s office; he listens to the Minister with lowered eyes, as if to a eulogy at a funeral.

  Dark days for Ireland, and Greece, and almost everybody else; but at BOT the good times continue to roll. The market has responded positively to our quixotic takeover bid for Agron; the American bank’s board of directors is reportedly receptive, as, no doubt, a beached whale would be receptive to being put back in the sea; an underwriter has been found, and Porter Blankly’s old friend the Caliph has offered BOT a line of credit to the tune of several billion.

  ‘I still don’t understand how this is supposed to work,’ Ish says. ‘Agron is huge. We’re small. If we borrow all this money to buy it – won’t we be over-leveraged? Like, massively?’

  ‘This is in fact the whole point,’ Jurgen says. ‘Porter’s strategy is to distribute BOT’s connections so widely across the global marketplace that we become systemically necessary, that is, too big to fail.’

  ‘So they can’t let us go down, because then all of the people we’ve borrowed from would be pulled down with us,’ Kevin glosses.

  Ish still seems unconvinced. ‘It sounds like putting on a suicide belt so that no one will bump into you on the subway.’

  ‘That is quite a good comparison,’ Jurgen agrees. ‘We are hoping BOT’s high market standing will persuade the other subway riders to fund a particularly large and explosive suicide belt.’

  To ensure a quick turnaround, the deal will be done here in Dublin, where at least some of the extraordinarily complicated legal requirements can be brushed under the carpet. Corporate has been assigned extra offices in a building in the neighbouring block; extra staff are being flown in from New York.

  On the ninth floor of Transaction House, meanwhile, where until a few months ago a property company had its offices, new doors with code-locks are being hung, expensive new desks and chairs delivered, thrillingly white new whiteboards fitted to the walls. Details are scant as yet, but it is believed that the activity has to do with Porter’s other prong: to take BOT deeper into the abstract, developing new financial instruments that will ensure profits no matter what is happening in the so-called real world. Howie’s name is on the door of the corner office; he is taking Grisha with him, and a hand-picked team of junior analysts.

  ‘Those guys are going way out.’ Kevin is seeking to alleviate the heartbreak of being passed over for the team by acting as a kind of ninth-floor John the Baptist, making sonorous prophecies about their work whenever the opportunity arises. ‘Waaaay out.’

  ‘But what are they actually doing?’ Gary McCrum asks.

  Kevin shakes his head. ‘All I know is that there’s some heavy fucking maths involved.’

  ‘I heard Porter was giving them a hedge fund,’ Jocelyn Lockhart says.

  ‘I heard that too.’

  ‘I heard it was a hedge fund, only more counterintuitive.’

  ‘That’s one thing you can count on.’ Kevin slings his foot over his knee and swivels in his chair. ‘Whatever it is, it’ll be majorly counterintuitive.’

  ‘And is Rachael involved in it too?’

  ‘Rachael,’ Kevin snorts.

  When we are alone, Ish tells me that Howie asked her to be on his team.

  ‘What? Why didn’t you mention this before? What did you say?’

  She doesn’t reply for a moment; a sudden blast of sun through the venetian blind throws tiger-stripes of shadow across her face. ‘I said no.’

  ‘No?’ I am confused: in our world, when an opportunity is presented, you take it. ‘I don’t expect you to make the slog here forever. Howie is the growing star. He will bring you with him.’

  Ish shrugs, sips from her water bottle. ‘Maybe I’m happy enough making the slog,’ she says. ‘Anyway, it sounds like cobblers.’

  ‘Did he tell you what they were doing?’

  ‘Some sort of a fund all right. He said it was going to transform Western civilization. But it’s Howie, Claude. He’s a bullshit artist.’

  ‘Porter doesn’t think he’s a bullshit artist. Kevin told me New York’s started bringing him in on strategy meetings.’

  ‘That bloke’s never had a strategy in his life that didn’t involve putting his dick up some poor unwitting bastard’s arsehole.’

  ‘Well, in their eyes he is a genius.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ish says disconsolately. ‘Who knows, maybe he is.’ She turns back to her terminal. ‘Bend over, world. Here comes another genius.’

  The Financial Times posts an article by a former head of the German Bundesbank about the future of the euro. He likens the currency’s situation to that of Tinkerbell in Peter Pan. There,
the fairy is brought back to life when all the children in the world who believe in magic clap in unison. ‘In Germany, however, the public and politicians are determinedly sitting on their hands. It is not that they do not believe in magic; rather, they do not believe the other, naughty children should benefit from that magic. They would rather the fairy die, and teach the other children a lesson. Therefore it is not a sentimental judgement to say that the currency may die from a want of love.’

  The naughty children in this case being Greece. While the protestors fulminate fruitlessly through the streets, the country’s future is being rewritten by the IMF.

  ‘What are they going to do?’

  ‘Sell off national resources. Cut services. I’d guess most public sector workers will be fired. Pensions will be gone, taxes will double, and so on. Until the books are balanced again.’

  ‘Meaning, until the Germans get their money back,’ Ish says sardonically.

  ‘The Greeks got huge development grants from the European Union,’ Jurgen insists. ‘Many billions of euros, which they used to build swimming pools on their roofs and have a ten-year tax holiday.’

  ‘How did they persuade anyone to give them anything?’ Kevin asks. ‘If their economy’s so batshit crazy?’

  ‘Porter Blankly,’ Ish says. Kevin looks quizzical. ‘The Greek government paid Blankly’s old bank Danforth Blaue three hundred million dollars to fiddle the accounts and shift their debts out of sight,’ she explains. ‘So on paper they looked legit.’

  ‘That was legal?’

  ‘Danforth got their money,’ Ish says with a shrug.

  ‘The EU are big boys,’ Jocelyn Lockhart says. ‘If Danforth cooked the books they should have spotted that for themselves.’

  ‘Didn’t the head of the EU also use to work for Danforth?’ I remember.

  Wheels within wheels; but it’s not our place to make moral judgements, only to forecast where this information will drive the market. Right now it resembles an enormous, international game of keep-away, with money taking flight from any company that so much as booked a junket to that side of the Mediterranean. But there is plenty of scope for things to get worse. A bet against togetherness is never a bad option, financially speaking.

  I come out of a meeting on Grand Canal Dock that afternoon to see I have missed a call from Paul; after a certain amount of debate with myself, I call him back.

  The phone is answered by a high voice. ‘Pinaco Sooshin?’ it says.

  ‘Excuse me?’ I say.

  ‘What?’ says the voice.

  I realize I recognize it – ‘Remington?’

  The response is a loud thudding in my ear; then in the background I hear Paul’s voice say, ‘Don’t just throw it on the floor, Remington, Jesus,’ and Remington’s squeaky apology.

  ‘What is Pinnacle Solutions?’ I say when Paul picks up the phone.

  ‘Our conversation the other day got me thinking,’ he says. ‘Maybe we gave up on Hotwaitress too easily. I talked to Igor and we decided we’d put a few feelers out, see if it was worth having another try.’

  So, my worst fears have been realized.

  ‘I should send you a copy of the prospectus. I bet you know lots of people who’d love to get in on the ground floor of something like this – hey,’ his voice becomes loud and sharp, ‘if that paper clip gets stuck there, I’m not pulling it out. Sorry, Claude, where were we? You were interested in having a look at the prospectus?’

  ‘No, I am simply returning your call,’ I say, although now I wish I hadn’t.

  ‘Oh, right. Well, listen here, I’ve been pretty swamped with Hotwaitress the last few days, but I did find time to speak to your waitress friend this morning, and that whole mix-up the last time, that’s all been squared away.’

  ‘Squared away?’ I stop right there on the street; I feel a surge of omnidirectional gratitude, like a patient being given the all-clear. ‘How did you manage that?’

  He laughs. ‘That’s my job, right? Think of it as an editorial intervention.’

  ‘But what did you say to her?’

  ‘It’s not important what I said. The point is, if you want to try again with her, you can do it with a clean slate.’

  ‘That is very good news,’ I say – and yet a sliver of doubt keeps niggling away at me. ‘Although a clean slate – you cannot simply erase her memory…’

  ‘I explained it to her, that’s all. I went in and casually brought you up and asked if she’d noticed you acting oddly lately. Then I told her you’d just been diagnosed as bipolar.’

  I stop again, this time without the all-consuming sense of well-being. ‘Bipolar?’

  ‘Yeah, when you think about it it’s really the only explanation that makes sense.’

  ‘But … but…’ For a moment I can do little more than splutter. ‘But the whole point was to stop me from looking like a madman,’ I manage at last. ‘How can you call it a blank slate, if she thinks I am some kind of lunatic?’

  ‘I said you were bipolar, not that you were a lunatic. Everybody’s bipolar these days. It’s practically à la mode! At the very least, it’s not contagious. Or wait – is it contagious?’

  This seems to me the exact opposite of a clean slate.

  ‘I’m telling you, Ariadne’s fine about it. And from a narrative point of view, it’s strong. Gives you a bit of edge, you know? So now we can move on to the next chapter. I’ve had a few ideas for what we might do…’

  Can it hurt to hear what he has to say? ‘Go on.’

  ‘This time, instead of creating a whole new persona, I think we should work with what’s there. Find out your good points and build on them. Now, the fact is that most of the qualities women look for in a man are ones you don’t have. Are you tall? No. Are you handsome? I might not be the best judge, but I would have to say no. Are you brave? That would be a tough sell, given that the last time Ariadne saw you, you were fleeing in terror. But you do have one thing that sets you apart: wealth.’

  ‘I told you before, Ariadne isn’t impressed by money,’ I say, with a certain amount of frustration. ‘If she was, why would I need you?’

  ‘I’m not saying you should go in there in a fur coat and stuff a fifty down her cleavage. But nobody’s immune from money. It’s a matter of how you present it.’

  ‘Present it?’ I say, simultaneously suspicious and intrigued.

  ‘Wealth means money, and money means power, and power means transforming one situation into another situation. And waitresses, I’ve learned from my extensive research, are all waiting to be transformed. This one wants to be an actor, this one wants to be a dancer, this one wants to be a children’s book illustrator. While you’re sitting there eating your cheesecake and fantasizing about her, she’s dreaming of the day someone gives her her big break.’

  ‘Modern life is being somewhere else,’ I remember.

  ‘Exactly. Being a waitress is all about not being a waitress. Ariadne’s a perfect example. She wants to paint, but she spends her days kowtowing to people who’d burn down the Louvre if they thought there was a buck in it. She’s crying out for someone to recognize her talent and set her free. That’s where you and your money come in. Suddenly you’re not a grasping, malevolent banker anymore. You’re a sensitive, art-loving, bipolar-but-not-overly-so Frenchman who wants to be her benefactor.’

  ‘Her benefactor,’ I repeat, trying out the word. ‘How would I become her benefactor?’

  ‘Well, how about you tell her you’re thinking of opening a gallery? A gallery devoted to feminist art. You want to exhibit her, in the meantime you’re going to bankroll her painting. She can’t believe her ears! It’s what she’s been dreaming about all this time – the regular customer who reveals himself to be the guy with the magic wand. So she goes and paints, and for a while you stay in the shadows, being munificent and mysterious. But then at last you arrange to meet her, and you confess that being around her amazing paintings has made you realize you’ve got all these other, deeper feelings f
or her. Which is practically true! You’re just tweaking the chronology a little bit.’

  ‘It sounds like I am paying her to love me,’ I say, flipping my ID at the Transaction House security guard.

  ‘What are you talking about? It’s a classic love story. Two people from different walks of life, who realize they each hold the key to the other’s dream. It’s straight out of Hollywood.’

  ‘But if your idea is that she will love me only because she feels obligated…’

  ‘Grateful, Claude. Grateful. What’s wrong with that? In many ways it’s like a traditional marriage. You protect her financially. She rewards you with love. Everybody wins.’

  I decide I can work on the moral mechanics later. The truth is that I am quite taken by his art-gallery idea. But how would it work?

  ‘Don’t worry about those details for now. That’s all Act Two stuff. Just buy her a few dinners, show her your chequebook, make encouraging noises. See how it goes.’

  ‘Hold the lift!’ A tanned arm thrusts itself between the closing doors, followed by a patent-leather pump with a charm bracelet dangling over it. ‘Hey Claude! Oh, you’re on the phone, sorry.’ Slowly but inevitably I feel myself turning bright pink, as though Ish has caught me engaged in some crime.

  ‘Well,’ I say to Paul. ‘That is most satisfactory. I will proceed as instructed, and revert to you –’

  ‘One more thing,’ Paul cuts in. ‘She’s going away.’

  ‘Ariadne?’ I blurt; and then, more quietly, ‘For how long?’

  ‘She told me she’s going back to Greece for a fortnight. She’s leaving tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ I blurt again. Beside me, Ish is examining her phone in the way one does when one is pretending not to be listening in.

  ‘Yeah. So, look, I said you might call in, just to put the whole you-being-mad thing to bed once and for all. But it’d need to be – actually, I suppose it’d have to be this afternoon.’

  ‘How can I see her this afternoon?’ I demand, feeling Ish’s eyes flick on to me and back again and experiencing a wave of irrational fury.