Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

This constitutes a major change in BOT’s direction.

Before the crash, every bank had to have at least one Russian physicist on its payroll. The bulge brackets would go on safari to St Petersburg and return with whole university departments, setting them up in grim dorms to remind them of home, where they would sit gloomily eating pirogi and scrawling in refill pads.

Sir Colin, our former CEO, saw this, as he saw so much of the twenty-first, twentieth and indeed nineteenth century, as so much modern flim-flam. He didn’t believe investment banks ought to be trading for themselves at all — how could that not lead to a conflict of interest? — and the idea of betting the house on equations which nobody in the entire operation understood except for some depressed-looking Vlad in a pirogi-stained vest he thought simply unhinged.

‘But that’s what makes it counterintuitive, see?’ Howie is particularly excited by the new arrival. ‘Nobody’s doing this stuff right now.’

‘They’re not doing it because it didn’t work,’ I point out.

‘Crazy Frog, you think the first aeroplane worked? You think the first telephone worked? The first shot of penicillin —’

‘I get the point.’

‘This guy is a visionary, Claude. He’s out there, out in the fucking Siberian tundra, staring at the fucking sun and seeing — seeing —’

‘Seeing what?’

‘Seeing the shit that’s going to take us to the next level.’ Howie leans closer, lowers his voice. ‘He’s been telling me about his PhD. Providential antinomies. Ever heard of them? Of course you haven’t, they haven’t been used for three hundred years. But guess what, Grisha here’s discovered some way of applying them to bond yields.’

‘To do what?’

Howie flaps his hand in irritation. ‘ I don’t know. What they do isn’t the point. The point is that this time we’re the ones doing the crazy paradoxical rocket-science shit. This tiny, insignificant little bank has, through a fluke of history, got a split-second start on the big boys. That’s what Porter’s counterintuitive strategy’s about, see? If we wait for them to grow their balls back, they’ll wipe us out. But if we take advantage of that head start, and do all the things that right now they’re afraid to do — who knows how far we can go?’

Grisha has been given his own office, a small, cramped box room behind the Sales Department with just a desk and a whiteboard — no TV, no Bloomberg, not even a phone. He doesn’t seem to mind; he spends most of his time out on the plaza, apparently talking to the pigeons.

‘Look at that,’ Howie says approvingly, gazing down from the window. ‘Mad as a nail. How can he not make us a fortune?’

Porter’s memo coincides with a golden streak for the bank such as I have never experienced before. Every call we make, every pitch, every trade, every merger, buyout, bond issue, comes off as smoothly as a case study in an economics textbook. Europe teeters ever closer to the brink of some unimaginable financial apocalypse, whole streets in Greece burn, and here the zombies by the riverside grow in number as the Royal Irish recapitalization, as predicted, fails completely, the fresh infusion stripped away by international speculators — but our share price leaps up, and up again; the whole world is long BOT.

Yet to me these successes seem somehow insubstantial. Without Paul there, everything has begun to slide out of focus; and the longer he is gone, the worse it gets. Figures blur on the screen, clients’ voices merge into one another. I’m waylaid by memories, things I haven’t thought about in years, a game of tarot in my aunt’s kitchen, my mother taking my hand as we cross the Pont des Arts.

Perhaps it’s to combat this that I find myself returning again and again to the Ark to watch Ariadne dance her pas de seul between the tables. How alive she is, how embedded in her day! Even when she’s daydreaming, standing still, she seems to throw off energy, invisible waves that ripple outwards to catch up the people around her. Will she catch me up too? If the two strands of our story come together, might the writer come back in order to tie the knot?

‘Doing some reading?’

‘What? Oh — yes — beginning the Royal Irish accounts.’

‘But this is not accounts.’ Jurgen fishes out the book stuffed under the stack of ledgers. ‘ De Part et d’Autre , François Texier. Another novel?’

‘Philosophy,’ I say gruffly, cheeks crimsoning. ‘It’s … I thought it would be useful, for something I am planning to do.’

‘Very good,’ Jurgen says. But he does not leave; instead he parks himself upon the adjoining desk, gazes out for a moment at the rain and then says, ‘You know, Claude, an artist is not like a banker.’

I open a folder, highlight a raft of redundant files.

‘It is in an artist’s nature to be mercurial,’ Jurgen continues. ‘Do you know this word, “mercurial”? It means prone to rapid and unexpected change, as liquid mercury is in the barometer.’

‘I am familiar with it,’ I say. The files yield up pale blue, translucent images of themselves, as if I am extracting their ghosts and transporting them to some electronic afterlife.

‘It is a good word,’ Jurgen says.‘Mer-cur-i-al. It is what Stacy calls Bobo the clown in Paul’s book — have you reached this part, where Stacy breaks up with Bobo?’

‘Of course,’ I mutter.

‘Bobo, as a clown, is constantly searching for new jokes and new sensations. Stacy, as a health and safety officer, wants order and regularity. Their two lifestyles are completely different. This is why she terminates their relationship.’

‘She does that in Chapter 5,’ I object. ‘But then at the end she realizes she’s still in love with him.’

‘I stopped reading after Chapter 5,’ Jurgen says. He broods over his folded arms for a moment. The recycling bin flashes indigo as the files are subsumed and resurrected as empty space. ‘I suppose the thing to remember is that it is only a book,’ he says, getting up. ‘Not real life.’

On Tuesday morning, my team has a meeting with Cornerstone, one of several American private equity firms currently occupying the city’s five-star hotels. The market believes Ireland will soon go the same way as Greece: bankruptcy, riots, decades of national bondage. Value investors like Cornerstone are gambling the opposite. Operating on the principle that the moment of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, they sift through the wreckage of Irish society, checking out shopping malls, stud farms, golf courses, whole estates of houses, businesses that can’t stay afloat and, of course, the loan books of faltering Irish banks.

We meet them at the hotel. There are three of them, tanned, sockless, in open-necked shirts and Patek Philippe watches, exuding an air of amused, joshing serenity. I do a surreptitious check for any giveaway tattoos. Many American bankers are ex-military — bland-faced, blue-eyed, faultlessly courteous men who went directly from their tour of Iraq or Afghanistan to MBAs in Wharton and Harvard. Indeed, the head of Cornerstone, General John Perseus, was one of the top commanders of the original invasion of Iraq; I suppose when you have seen an entire country being shelled to oblivion, holding your nerve during a bear run on the stock market does not present a major challenge.

Cornerstone are interested in Royal Irish. That they have chosen to consult us about them is quite a feather in our cap. This morning, though, I cannot get the pitch straight in my head. ‘Excuse me — let me just, ah …’ I awaken my laptop screen, squint at the spreadsheet. Numbers swim between the columns, decimal points dancing about like fleas. ‘Ah …’