Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

Only Bank of Torabundo stayed away. Our chief executive, Sir Colin Shred, was deeply sceptical about Royal. He thought they were over-invested in a single sector, he thought that sector was heading for a crash. But Royal’s share price had risen astronomically — 2,000 per cent in seven years — and our clients were howling at the fortunes they were missing out on. It was clear to me within a few weeks of starting at BOT that if I could change Sir Colin’s mind, many people would be grateful to me.

I decided to set up a meeting with Royal’s CEO, Miles O’Connor, to talk through his figures and long-term strategy. But this proved far from easy. As head of the best bank in the world, Miles was a man much in demand. Businessmen and governments alike clamoured to learn his secrets; he was flying all over the world, dispensing wisdom. I had almost given up hope when Bruce Gaffney, a salesman I knew at Royal, called to tell me that if I came to the Shelbourne Hotel that night he could get me five minutes — no more.

Royal’s AGM had been that morning and an air of jubilation filled the hotel lobby, along with wafts of cigar smoke that drifted in through the revolving doors. When he began at Royal, then an inconsequential boutique, Miles had targeted the rugby clubs both for staff and for clients; the atmosphere tonight was that of a locker room, loud with backslapping and hur-hur-hurring; the waitresses were having a hard time. I spent what seemed like many hours on the margins of things, having the same desultory conversation about the French scrum over and over again. Any time I caught a glimpse of Miles, he was at the centre of a cluster of men who hung on his every word like barfly apostles. Then, out of the blue (or had Bruce, unbeknownst to me, intervened?), I found myself thrust up against him.

I had not expected to like him, but I did. Moments after meeting me, the leader of one of the world’s most successful banks was calling me a ‘sound cunt’ and asking what I was drinking! After working in Paris, where everything was swamped in protocol and 23-year-old men conducted themselves like mouldering dukes, I found this refreshing to say the least. He was slight, silver-haired, foxy, quite unlike the meaty second-row types he liked to surround himself with; he was smoking a fat cigar, which in the reception room of one of Dublin’s oldest and costliest hotels was even more against the rules than it was elsewhere. He had a mischievous sense of humour.

‘Take a look, Claude,’ he said, pulling his phone from his pocket. ‘What do you make of this fella, eh?’ I looked at the phone. On the screen was a picture of a glossy black stallion. ‘His name’s Turbolot,’ Miles said. ‘We’re thinking of appointing him to the board.’ His frank black eyes regarded mine. I gazed back at him dumbly. Slapping my stomach with the back of his hand, he hooted with laughter. ‘Your face! Jesus Christ!’

He knew Sir Colin didn’t care for him. He didn’t seem to mind; instead he found it quite natural. ‘He’s a Brit. He hates to see the Paddies getting ahead. To him, that’s the lunatics taking over the fucking asylum. But the tide has turned, Claude, that’s what he needs to accept. Do you know what we did last week? Bankrolled a consortium to buy the Chichester Hotel from the Duke of Edinburgh. The Irish are buying up the Queen’s fucking back garden! Of course the old guard don’t like it.’

‘He thinks you’ve taken on too much risk,’ I told him; I realized that with him I could speak directly. ‘He thinks you’ve left yourself exposed if the market turns.’

Miles dismissed this with a wave of his cigar. ‘Look, Claude, he’s your boss, I don’t want to speak ill of him. But Sir Colin’s a fossil. He’s the remnant of an empire that’s spent the last hundred fucking years slowly sinking into the sea. Ireland is different. It’s small, it’s young, it’s versatile. And because in Ireland we’re not wedded to a whole lot of empty protocol, we understand that when change happens, it’s big! And it’s fast! There isn’t time to run all your decisions past Risk and Treasury and whoever else. Your job is to get the money out to the fella who’s going to use it, ASA-fucking-P, and there’s an end to it. He doesn’t want to be hassled by some prat with a diploma looking for fucking pie charts and breakdowns and all that. He wants to make something happen. He wants to do a fucking deal. Now the question is, are you going to help him?’

He looked me straight in the eye, smoke pumping from his mouth in industrial quantities, sweat beading on his brow, his bow tie slightly askew. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you’re here to ask me how it all works, and I’m just going to tell you the truth, which is that I don’t have the faintest fucking notion. Sometimes I feel like the dog that woke up with two mickeys — I know it’s a good thing, but I’m fucked if I know how it happened. I’ll tell you this, though: the Irish have been everybody’s bloody slave long enough. It used to be whenever I’d go to the airport it’d be full of young people shipping off to Australia or New York for whatever gammy bit of work they could get. Now when I go the airport I see them coming back. Coming home, because they can have a better life here. I know it’s all supposed to be about the bottom line. But I’m proud of that, I’m bloody proud. You’ll have another?’

He pointed at the half-empty glass in my hand; before I could reply, he had disappeared and a fresh pint materialized. It took me a moment to realize that was the end of the interview. But when I thought about it, what more analysis did I need? He was right, wasn’t he? Maybe on paper the bank looked vulnerable — but that was only if you believed in the old way of doing things. The world was changing. Switch on the television, you saw ordinary people being turned into superstars overnight. Why shouldn’t Miles and his developers do the same for Ireland? Why should they be weighed down by the relics of the past? History was being rolled back, ancient oppressions undone; did it matter if the bank’s loan book outweighed its deposits?

To Sir Colin it did. He rejected my request to issue a ‘Buy’ recommend for Royal; he declined to hear the presentation I’d put together. Later I heard that was when the board of directors began to mass themselves against him. But of course he was right. Looking through Royal’s loan book now is like swimming through a drowned world, the numerical ruins of hotels and houses, of malls and towers and temples, all buried under blue-tinged, airless fathoms of debt; the city is being sold off piece by piece, for bargain-basement rates, and the airports are full of people saying goodbye.

‘You are ready to order?’

‘Not yet, thank you, I am waiting for someone.’ I speak offhandedly, without quite looking at her.

‘Okay,’ Ariadne says gaily. ‘Call when you want me.’

I watch her glide away, divert her course at a raised finger, lavish her smile on two men in iron-grey suits who don’t know quite what to do with it. Outside, a steam of ricocheting droplets hovers over the plaza. For the last week the rain has been almost continuous; in the office we have all become experts in its different personae and gradations — can predict the worst of downpours, gauge the gaps that will allow us a coffee run. More than once I have dreamed that the Ark has come unmoored and floated away with me in it.

‘Checking out the arses, eh?’

I look up. Bruce Gaffney, my Royal Irish contact, is grinning down at me, emitting his familiar emphysemic-dog laugh, hcchh hcchh hcchh. He peels off his raincoat, parks himself across the table from me. ‘I wondered why you wanted to meet in this kip. Now I get it. How’s tricks, Claudius? What can I do you for?’