Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

The three private equity bros gaze at me amusedly, serenely, hands draped loosely between their legs in the enormous leather armchairs.

‘Of course, the pertinent data has already been set out for you in the accompanying file,’ Jurgen says, stepping in. ‘If you will turn to page four …’

‘Fail to prepare, prepare to fail,’ Kevin says philosophically as we are leaving.

‘What are you on about, pipsqueak? Claude had them eating out of his hand,’ Ish says.

Jurgen does not say anything, but when our car pulls up at the IFSC he waits for the others to climb out and then turns to me. ‘You know that as a managerial policy I do not believe in issuing threats or warnings,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ I say guiltily.

But there is no more; with that he gets out of the car, closing the door in my face.

‘Maybe you need someone observing you,’ Ish hypothesizes. ‘You know, like electrons.’

‘Electrons?’

‘What’s that thing about electrons? You know, that unless someone’s there looking at them they don’t stay in the one spot? Instead they’re just sort of spread out all over the place?’

‘I have been working as an analyst for years without anyone observing me,’ I say.

‘Maybe you didn’t know you were an electron.’

‘I’m not an electron,’ I say.

It is late; we are among the last ones left in the office. Outside, arrayed in the darkness, the buildings with their sparse panes of light look like monolithic dominoes waiting to fall.

‘You’ve tried calling him?’

‘Hundreds of times.’

Ish tocks a pencil against her teeth. ‘I wonder what happened,’ she says.

‘It is obvious what happened,’ I snap. ‘He realized the novel wasn’t going to work.’

‘Why wouldn’t it work?’

‘Why?’ I can’t contain my anger any longer. ‘Because what we do is — empty! Meaningless! No one in the world could find it interesting, unless they were being paid!’

‘You don’t know that’s what happened. Wouldn’t he have said something, if he was just going to drop the whole thing? Like, why would he just disappear?’

I limit myself to another glower, push my brain to engage with the wall of numbers on the screen.

‘Those new directions you said he was thinking about,’ Ish says. ‘What were they, exactly?’

‘What were they?’ I repeat.

‘Like, maybe there’s a clue there. To what might have happened to him.’

She gazes at me ingenuously. I have a momentary vision of Ariadne stepping towards me, cupping my face in her hands, bringing her lips to mine, and experience a brief stab of pain.

‘He didn’t have anything concrete,’ I say.

She falls silent again. On her desk sits an ever-growing mountain of papers she’s waiting to show to the writer — articles about her gift-island, photocopies from textbooks, Polaroids of her younger self, skinny, smudged, beaming, with her arm around various stocky topless tribespeople — like ingredients for a spell, as if she believes he might be able to summon her up out of her own past.

‘Could it be,’ she says at last, ‘he wants you to find him?’

‘I told you, he does not answer his phone.’

‘No, I mean, track him down. You said he was thinking up new directions for the book. Maybe this is it. This is what happens.’

‘The writer is in the book?’

‘Yeah, and the banker has to help him. Like in that film, you know, with that guy.’

Find him: for some reason, the idea has never occurred to me before, as if the traffic between his life and mine could only ever be one way. It has, I must admit, a certain resonance. But how would we find him? He projected himself into our world without betraying any hint of his own, in spite of our best efforts.

‘Maybe there’s a clue in here.’ Diving into her bag, she pulls out For Love of a Clown and starts flicking through it. ‘Does he mention any neighbourhoods? Can you remember?’

I frown. Mostly the clown is travelling around in a caravan, or pitched up in a field with the rest of the circus, though there is a memorable scene near the end, when the clown comes to Stacy’s house and honks his nose outside her window –

‘Wait a minute,’ Ish says, opening the book up again to the very first pages. ‘Of course there’s a clue in it. Look, the publisher’s address is right here. Asterisk Press, Cromwell Road, London. They’ll know where he is.’

Genius! I seize the phone there and then, but Ish reminds me that it’s the middle of the night. ‘Right, right,’ I agree, setting it down again but remaining on my feet, full of nervous energy. I look at Ish, swivelling gently in her chair. ‘Well. I suppose we should go home.’

‘I suppose so,’ Ish agrees.

‘Thank you for helping,’ I say.

‘I’m in the book too, don’t forget,’ she says. ‘I want to find out what happens.’

That night sees the worst riots yet in Athens. While the new Greek government huddles inside the Old Royal Palace, Zegna Square is alight. Cars burn like pagan fires, gunshots streak through the black sky; masked protestors and masked police come together with a thunderclap that can be felt in the chest even thousands of miles away. Next morning, I have nervous clients on the line as soon as I turn on my phone, and at 10 a.m. I see Walter’s limousine pull up outside. Nobody from his office calls me; they just assume I will know he is there, which, to my embarrassment, I do.

In the back seat, Walter is livid. What are those gobshites doing over there? Will their fucking shambles of a government last the week? If it falls, and Greece tells its creditors to go to fuck, what then? I tell him that his investments have been spread across a wide portfolio precisely to protect them from this kind of shock, and that in fact Dublex will most likely benefit from the increased volatility in terms of security contracts. It’s the same speech I gave him a few weeks ago when the Spanish banks teetered, and a few weeks before that when it was Portugal on the brink. Every time his fears are harder to dislodge, as if he can see the flaming torches massed outside his house.

‘I don’t see what he’s so worried about,’ Kevin comments when I return. ‘It’s not like he’s going to run out of money, whatever happens.’

‘The more you have, the greater your fears of losing it,’ Jocelyn Lockhart says. ‘Classic human psychology.’

‘In Somalia, you worry about an empty rice bowl,’ Gary McCrum concurs. ‘In the suburbs, you worry about burglars running off with your flat-screen TV. But if you’re a billionaire — what would it take for a billionaire to lose everything?’

‘I don’t know,’ Kevin says.

‘Well, Walter fucking knows. I guarantee you, Walter lies awake every night, conjuring up whatever kind of Boschian nightmare you’d need to make any serious dent in his fortune. Defaulting Greeks are just one pixel of the fucking IMAX screen of unrelenting carnage that’s the inside of that man’s head.’

‘That’s why serious players never quit while they’re ahead,’ Jocelyn says. ‘They’re always rushing off to make more billions to protect the billions they have already. Looking for that little bit more that’ll make them bulletproof. But then that’s just more for them to worry about. It’s a vicious circle, see?’

‘So …’ Kevin looks deeply troubled by this information. ‘Are you saying … they shouldn’t bother? They’d be better off not being rich?’

‘No, I’m saying they need to tighten their focus,’ Jocelyn says. ‘If you’re worried about the apocalypse, you want to be investing in two things and two things only: weapons and gold. And by gold I mean actual bullion you can hold in your hand, not some certificate. Then, when it all goes tits up, you’re ready. Fortress in the Swiss Alps with an underground generator and its own water supply, maybe three hundred mercenaries to take out any fammos who come looking to get in — sorted.’