Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

‘Whatcha readin’ there, Claude?’

‘Nothing. Old news.’

‘I saw you in the Ark.’ Ish is chewing one of their home-made cookies. ‘I was waving at you, but you didn’t notice.’

‘Ah-um …’ I swivel my chair away, busy myself shuffling documents.

‘You were talking to that waitress, and then you just took off, like a streak of lightning! What happened, she catch you sneaking a peek down her top?’

‘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 for ever. 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.’