Claire Kilroy - The Devil I Know

‘Why?’ I asked.

Laughter. They thought I was joking.

‘Now,’ McGee continued, ‘given how much property we’ve added to our portfolio this quarter, we’ll have to issue commercial bonds to cover it.’

Commercial bonds. More debt. McGee didn’t have any money left and yet he refused to fold. I recognised the compulsive behaviour of an addict. This wasn’t a boardroom. This was a betting shop. McGee needed to join the programme. They all needed to join the programme. But first they had to hit rock bottom. You couldn’t help them. They had to help themselves. I put down my pen and folded my arms.

My mouth was sour with the taste of coffee. The girl in the pinstripe suit brought in a fresh pot on the hour and the men obediently contemplated her backside, for this ritual was a duty, it was being part of the team.

I took the opportunity to catch Hickey’s eye. ‘I think we should leave now,’ I told him quietly, and he threw me this imploring, panicked look: don’t ruin this for me, please . It wasn’t the wealth that Hickey was after, I saw then, or not only the wealth, but also the opportunity to sit at the big boys’ table, to be on the other side of the fence for once in his life. Can I leave the Minister with you, Dessie? You can a course, Mr McGee!

McGee summoned another map onto the screen and slid his glasses down his nose to peer at us over them, nodding gravely as if yes, it was true: he was divulging the blueprint of a top-secret military base. ‘This, gentlemen, is the real target. We’re onto the hard stuff now.’

Shanghai.

More food appeared when darkness fell, as well as a brace of bottles of Brunello di Montalcino. McGee made a show of blowing the dust off the labels to demonstrate their vintage. He had tried to fill my glass and I had covered it with a demurring hand. ‘You’ll take a drop,’ the man insisted, and Hickey had shot him a warning look, shaking his head as if I were a volatile animal to be handled with caution. McGee had backed off. The wine was rich in tannin and it blackened their lips. I could smell it on their blackened breaths, their blackened hearts, their blackened souls. All of them laughing in a medieval display of mettle and Hickey laughing loudest of them all, having discovered the dark art of the calculator. What I cannot remember is anything being funny.

‘My colleagues inform me that you’ve placed a bid on a site on the Pudong skyline,’ M. Deauville commented some hours later when I left the boardroom to accept his call. Tocka tocka, tocka tocka : messages were criss-crossing the World Wide Web like shooting stars. The news had travelled fast. This was big. I had known it was big. M. Deauville had known it too. Perhaps he had been testing me earlier. Seeing what I was made of. Seeing if I would go all the way.

It was maybe two or three in the morning by then and my eyes hurt. McGee had suggested a ten-minute break, so I had located an unlocked office at the end of the corridor in which to take the call. I closed the door and slid down its length to the floor, grateful for the respite of the darkness. There were twelve men drinking around that table. I wanted bitterly to make it thirteen.

‘It’s hard,’ I told M. Deauville, struggling to control my voice.

‘I know.’

I gazed at the workers scattered throughout the floors of the building opposite. So many of them although it was the middle of the night, their faces gaunt in the glare of the computer terminals at which they stared so intently that they barely registered the cleaning staff working around their sedentary forms, servicing them like drones in a beehive. Tocka tocka they pattered into their keyboards, for all of us were wired into a universal network, monitoring each other’s activities across the globe. ‘I know,’ M. Deauville repeated. ‘I know it’s hard.’ He sounded more alert than when we had spoken at lunchtime. It must have been a new day in his part of the world. Son of the morning.

‘Regarding the Pudong site,’ I said, wrenching my faculties back to business matters, ‘we are presently waiting to hear whether our bid has been accepted.’

Tocka tocka : the ivory ball skipping along the spinning roulette wheel. It settled in a pocket of black.

‘ Bona fortuna , Tristram,’ M. Deauville said and rung off. Only then did I register that our brief conversation had been conducted in Latin. Bona fortuna . M. Deauville had given me his blessing. And that, looking back on things, was the turning point.

*

The earth rotated and returned the sun to us, bringing with it a startling revelation. The men were padding around the boardroom in an exhausted delirium by then, the mark of the plague still staining their lips. Calls had been made across the world. Contracts were being drawn up in various international financial institutions. Things had started to happen. We had already flipped one of the hotels in London and shifted a shopping mall in Dubai, extracting value of over €100 million from those two transactions alone, every cent of which we moved like a stack of poker chips onto the Pudong site, stationing our army at the mouth of this most strategic of ports.

And then what? Then we waited. Close of business in Shanghai wasn’t for another half hour yet. A call had been promised. The phone was set out in state by McGee’s right hand. We could do no more.

It had been such a busy night that we did not know what to do with this idleness. We kept an ear out for the phone, trying not to. We kept an eye on the row of clocks, trying not to. Dublin, Dubai, Shanghai; not London, New York, Tokyo as of old. The axis of world power had shifted. I lifted a slat in the blinds to squint out at the shimmering river. It was another beautiful day and everyone had a headache.

Hickey and I had by that point thrown all our projected profits from the Claremont site, combined with an additional €128 million in loan notes issued by Castle Holdings, into the centre of the boardroom table, forming one of those columns in the cluster of poker chips that had been placed on the square marked ‘Shanghai’ and I was praying for us to win, I was pleading for us to win. Every fibre of my being was focused on that outcome. Bona fortuna . That’s when I experienced the startling revelation: that maybe McGee was right. Maybe wealth could be created out of debt and fortunes amassed overnight. Hickey sat with his hairy forearms on the table, his shirtsleeves rolled up past his elbows, his tie tossed over his shoulder in a manner he possibly considered debonair and sweat stains as big as dinner plates under his armpits. If this worked, he would become an extremely wealthy man. Wealthy enough to buy the Castle and Environs out from under my father several times over, to buy any castle he wanted. A millennium-old order would be overturned in a matter of months.

And if it didn’t work?

The telephone rang. Silence in the boardroom, twelve grown men pretending they weren’t there while the thirteenth listened carefully. ‘Thank you, Mr Guo,’ said McGee. He replaced the receiver in its cradle and held it there like the throttle lever of a jet engine, forcing his will down the line all the way to Shanghai.

‘Gentlemen,’ he finally addressed us, ‘I have kept you very late. Go home to your wives and apologise on my behalf. Tell them that while they slept you earned tens of millions each overnight.’

Hickey got to his feet and I got to mine. Everyone gravitated towards the head of the table, towards McGee. Laughter again only altogether different in quality. This was the shrill, unguarded laughter of disbelief.

‘So you signed a contract to purchase the north County Dublin farm that morning?’