Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

Jurgen takes us aside to pass on a rumour of another acquisition.

‘Another one?’

Jurgen nods. ‘Porter is looking at asset management firms, also at one of the large clearing businesses.’

‘Didn’t he just buy a bank?’ Ish says. ‘Like, don’t we still have a few payments to make on that?’

‘On the face of it, yes.’ Jurgen lifts off his glasses and polishes them with a handkerchief. ‘It comes back to the strategy of counterintuitiveness. As we are all aware, this has been a great success. However, BOT’s competitors have started to act counterintuitively as well, meaning that we need to be even more counterintuitive, perhaps even to the point of being counter-counterintuitive.’

‘Isn’t that the same as being intuitive?’

‘That is the question we need to answer. Porter has a team of quants working on it as we speak. For now, he believes that relentless and indiscriminate expansion remains the best policy for the bank. Soon we will be established across the system to such a degree that our future will be secured, no matter what.’

‘Unless something counterintuitive happens,’ Ish says, but Jurgen has spotted an ex-colleague and bustled away. She turns back to me, laying her hand on my forearm solicitously. ‘How are you doing tonight, Claude? Are you holding up okay?’

‘I think so,’ I say, surprised. ‘I have only had two drinks.’

‘No, I mean, you know, after your waitress.’

‘Oh, that.’ I feel my heart plummet, like a lift with a snapped cable. ‘I have hardly thought about it.’

‘That’s good,’ she says, but she keeps staring at me sympathetically and patting my arm, as if I were a child with a grazed knee. ‘So what’s Paul got planned for the Story of Claude now?’

‘I have dropped all that,’ I say tersely. ‘It was a silly idea.’

‘Oh, right,’ she says. She makes an oar of her finger, scoops it along the inner rim of her cocktail glass, which is frosted with cream. ‘No, because I just thought, I mean in a book, when the guy’s in love with someone out of his league or whatever and it doesn’t work out, what often happens is he realizes he’s had feelings for someone else all along.’

‘Someone else?’

‘Yeah, except, you know, he only realizes now.’

I give this some thought. ‘Does that happen in books?’

‘It does in the ones I read,’ she says, a little defensively.

‘To me the scenario does not sound plausible. How does he only realize now? Love is not like an illness, gestating in your body before you begin to feel sick. In my experience, if you are in love, you know it straight away.’

‘Yeah, that’s true, I suppose,’ Ish says.

‘Attraction is a conscious thing. If you’re attracted to somebody, you are aware of it.’

‘Right, fair point,’ she says.

‘If you have not thought about this person in that way before, it’s because you are not attracted —’

‘Might just pop up to the bar,’ Ish says, jumping to her feet. ‘You want anything?’

Actually, I might fit in another drink — but she has already gone!

I wait for her to come back, but after a few minutes there is still no sign; however, I notice Kevin signalling me furiously from the balcony and go outside to find Howie, Grisha and two of their initiates from the mysterious ninth floor, Tom Cremins and Brian O’Brien. With the exception of Grisha, all of them are smoking Montecristos — Montecristos are like Skittles in BOT these days. Brian O’Brien has something in his hand, and his body is wound back as if poised to hurl it over the balcony.

‘We’re throwing phones!’ Kevin squeaks at me excitedly.

‘Do it! Do it! Do it!’ the others chorus. With a grunt Brian O’Brien whips his arm forward. The little silver oblong flies out of his hand; we watch it twist in and out of the darkness, like a leaf falling from a tree. Then it is gone, into the depths of the river.

‘A new winner!’ Tom Cremins cheers.

‘Let’s do watches,’ Brian O’Brien says. Kevin suddenly looks alarmed. Fortunately for him, at that very moment a dark shape materializes in the doorway: the Bulgarian, features impassive as runes on a stone.

‘About bloody time,’ Howie says. The two of them disappear inside.

With the game suspended, there is a silence. Clouds of cigar smoke swirl around the balcony like the atmosphere of some toxic planet, masking and unmasking the faces of my former colleagues.

‘So how’s it going?’ I ask. ‘The fund?’

‘We can’t talk to you about that,’ Tom Cremins snaps.

‘Of course, of course.’ Although it has almost the same name, Agron Torabundo Credit Management is a separate entity to the bank, and the border between the two is strictly patrolled. A keypad and an iris-scanner have been mounted at the fund’s door; the lift’s operation has been adjusted so that BOT employees can no longer go directly from the sixth to the ninth floor, but must instead go to the ground floor first, or take the stairs. ‘But to speak generally — you are happy? You have found investors?’

Tom Cremins and Brian O’Brien exchange a captured-spy look. Heat beats down from the outdoor lamps. Grisha chomps Bombay mix obliviously in the corner; the crunching from his mouth is the only sound.

‘Fund’s doing great, Crazy Frog.’ Howie’s back, visibly rejuvenated by his meeting with the Bulgarian. He stoops to relight his cigar; smoke seethes from the corners of his mouth, curls back over his head. ‘Thirty million in investment already, client meetings coming out our assholes, all dying to give us two million minimum stake and a commitment to fuck off and leave us alone to make money for them.’

‘Hmm, but it is a hard time to launch a new fund, no?’ I suggest. ‘With the market so volatile, so much risk …’

Howie tokes on his cigar. Behind him Tom and Brian stand tensed, as if waiting for the word to fall on me and beat me senseless. ‘Real risk has nothing to do with volatility,’ Howie says. ‘Real risk is stupid investing decisions. Model we’re using, every time someone does something stupid, we make a profit. So we’re doing pretty well.’

‘What is your model, Howie?’ Kevin asks, wide-eyed. ‘Is it counterintuitive?’

‘Come up with two million euro and we’ll tell you,’ Tom Cremins says, but Howie checks him with a half-lifted hand. He gazes at Kevin a moment; a thousand tiny fires seem to burn in his fragmented irises. Kevin gulps, and hops nervously up and down, like a flea at a job interview.

‘I suppose you could say that,’ Howie says, going to the little table and pouring a whiskey for me, then another for himself. ‘Your traditional hedge funds exist to make money in poorly performing markets, so as far as that goes, we’re a hedge fund. But we’d be taking more of a radical line. The way we see it, investment, in the conventional sense of the word, is finished. Look at the last ten years. We’ve had a technology crash, a housing crash, not to mention a financial crash that nearly sent the world back to the Stone Age. Oil, gold collapsing, Europe coming apart, even the Swiss franc can’t be trusted. Where does the smart man invest if investment doesn’t work any more? What’s the one reliable area of growth in the twenty-first century?’

‘Technology?’ Kevin says.

‘Inequality,’ I say.

‘Bingo.’ Howie wags his cigar at me. ‘You know what the Gini coefficient is, Junior?’

‘It’s, ah, what they use to measure the gap,’ Kevin stammers. ‘Between rich and poor.’

‘Right. And it’s going through the roof. From our undead friends over there’ — he tilts his glass at the zombie encampment across the river, where dim lights with coloured halos shine from inside the tents — ‘you’ll know that a tiny number of very rich people, including fat-cat bankers like us, are sucking up a bigger and bigger percentage of the wealth. And that gap will continue to widen, because with all our extra capital we go and buy up all the assets, so that for instance when Chang working down there in Spar needs somewhere to live, he has to rent his house from me, meaning that I’m getting most of his wages too.’ He pauses, puffs on his cigar; the coal glows brazier-bright, everything around it seeming to grow commensurately darker. ‘Now, provided you’re me and not Chang, that’s good news. But if you are Chang, then not only is your slice of the pie shrinking, but there are also more and more Changs trying to get a bite of it. Every year there’s another hundred million people on the planet, and that is making things very fucking volatile. Look at all this trouble in Oran. We’re told it’s Islamic fundamentalists. But the real reason is there’s been a baby boom, followed by a famine. These people haven’t been able to feed their children in six months. No wonder they’re getting cranky. And this is just the start. As populations rise, as resources dwindle, as infrastructure’s destroyed by hostile climates, we’re going to see some really needy folks out there. And that need — not oil, not weapons, not food, even, but need — that right there is the last reliable asset.’