Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

‘But this’ — I gesture around me at the computer, the office, the rooms and staff beyond, the external manifestations of the fund — ‘it’s not an Ark. It isn’t anything. It’s a fiction. A fairy tale.’

‘We’re in the business of fairy tales, Claude.’ He swirls his glass a moment, then says, ‘Did you know I started in stats? That was my undergraduate degree. In my final year, I did a paper on salaries-to-performance ratios in the City of London. One of the Big Five banks let me and a couple of friends come in and analyse the track record of their best traders. We spent a month going through five years of figures: the stocks they’d picked, the hits, the misses, the money they’d made and the money they’d lost. What we found was that a random selection would have given better results than their picks. One year one guy might be lucky, another year another might be lucky. But year-on-year consistency was close to zero. Meaning that if you’d pulled the stocks out of a hat, or had a monkey pick them by throwing darts at a board, in the long run you would have done better.

‘Anyhow, we go to the bank’s Chief Financial Officer with our findings. We’re expecting they’ll cause a stir. If there’s nothing more to it than blind chance, then the bank’s whole trading operation is a sham! So yeah, we’re pretty excited. And the CFO listens and says it’s a very interesting study. That night, he has one of his minions take us out on the piss — cocktails, strippers, the whole bit, and then we go back to college and that’s the end of that. Except that when I finish my degree I find I can’t get a job in London for love nor money. No one in the Square Mile will touch me, not to clean the fucking toilets. So it’s back to the Emerald Isle with my tail between my legs.’

He smiles up at me; I gaze back at him, not understanding.

‘It’s meaningless, Claude. All of this,’ he says, flicking a hand at the window, ‘and all of this,’ tapping the Bloomberg, ‘and everything you do and everything everyone like you does all day long in cities around the world — it’s meaningless. You don’t have the information to predict what the future will bring. Yes, you think you can make an educated guess. This whole trillion-dollar industry is predicated on the belief that clever men can make educated guesses. But it’s an illusion. In actuality, your educated guesses are just pissing in the wind. Statistically speaking.’

He rotates his tumbler on the glass-topped desk. ‘I guess the good news for us,’ he says, ‘is that people like illusions. They like strong narratives, they like good stories. The one about the brilliant CEO who makes tough decisions and turns the company around. The one about the clever man in the very expensive suit whose penetrating analysis can tell if the share price will go up or down. Even now, when everybody’s out for our blood, they still want to believe that we’ve got the answers. That someone’s got the answers. They’d rather believe that than the truth.’ He tosses back his whiskey. ‘In fact that’s about the one sure bet you can make. If it’s a choice between a difficult truth and a simple lie, people will take the lie every time. Even if it kills them.’

Halfway down the stairs I find Ish sitting on a step; from above, I can see dark roots growing through her blonde hair. I’m about to tell her what Howie more or less admitted — that Phase Two is a mirage, a trap for unwary investors, that nothing will come of it. But was that what he said? When I revisit the scene of only a moment ago, I find it has already become shifting, elusive, uncertain, as though the conversation had contained some hidden application, some proprietary software that now acts to shut down any memory of it, every detail, large and small, vanishing out of my mind even as I watch …

She wipes her eyes perfunctorily. ‘What’s this about Walter?’ she says.

Reluctantly, I tell her about the concealed stake in Royal, the rewritten report.

‘Fucking hell,’ she says, shaking her head.

Outside, night is setting in: across the river, the floors of the unoccupied office blocks fluoresce, a thousand cold fires blazing for no one.

‘I wish Rachael had fired me,’ Ish says. ‘Then I wouldn’t have had to find out about any of this. I would have felt like I’d done something noble. Instead of helping Howie turn the end of the world into a cash cow.’

‘It’s not as bad as you think.’

‘It is. It’s worse. Actual people are going to be affected by this. People who don’t know what a derivative is. People who don’t even have bank accounts. They’re going to wake up some morning and find they’re not able to buy food, because some genius five thousand miles away has found a new way to game the system.’

‘It won’t work. It can’t. It doesn’t make any sense.’

‘Nothing we do makes any sense. Doesn’t seem to stop it.’ She turns to look at me. ‘What kind of people are we, Claude? Like — what kind of people are we?’

‘None of this is your fault.’

‘I don’t know about that.’

‘If Howie hadn’t thought of it, someone else would. You were trying to help, that’s all.’

She snuffles, blows out her cheeks, then lets out a single bark of a laugh. ‘I did have my period,’ she says.

‘Excuse me?’

‘When I sent the email to Porter? And Howie was saying I must have had my period, to do something so emotional and mad? I did have it.’

‘It is not emotional and mad to want to help people,’ I tell her, but she doesn’t reply, just gazes out at the scraps of light on the river as they glister and disappear into the blue-black opacity of the night.

The Minister dies next morning. I’m taking a call when I see the news flash up on the terminal. Reflexively, I stand to check the big screen mounted on the wall; all around the office my colleagues do likewise, popping up over the dividers like so many Italian-suited meerkats.

The announcement is followed by a lavish package of biography and tributes, clearly put together weeks before: pictures of the Minister as a child, sitting on a donkey in knickerbockers; rasping footage of him as an ambitious young TD; fellow politicos voicing the usual saccharine platitudes.

‘Poor cunt,’ Jocelyn says.

‘Maybe now they’ll appoint somebody competent,’ Brent ‘Crude’ Kelleher says.

Jurgen watches, arms folded, from the back of the room; even when the obit comes to the Royal Irish scandal, and the controversial report, he remains utterly impassive.

The market is equivocal about the Minister’s death. The financial news is dominated instead by yet another banking scandal: a trader in a Parisian bank has embezzled an as-yet-unknown number of millions from a client account.

‘He was on the Delta One desk at Pécuchet, but he’d started out in back office and he knew all the security codes,’ Joe Peston says. ‘Sneaked in at night when all the drones had gone home, forged a whole load of documents signing the client’s money over to himself.’

‘Wow, old school,’ says Kevin. On the screen a bewildered-looking man in a black suit and black tie is being led in handcuffs to a police van.

‘The French press are calling him “Pierrot”,’ Joe says. ‘Because he’s all in black.’

‘The famous French sense of humour,’ Jocelyn says.

‘How much did he take?’ I ask.

‘Not a huge amount originally. Ten million or so from some mutual fund. They hadn’t even noticed, it was the crazy trades he was making with it that got him busted when Internal Compliance finally woke up.’