Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

Pornography , the word pops into my mind. I am still hoping he will break off, crack a grin, tell me Gotcha! ; but on the contrary, it only gets worse.

‘Jesus, Claude, I think I’ve got it. How about this for a twist. When you get to the last page of the book, Bloom goes, “I can now reveal the murderer was … YOU!”’

‘What?’

‘“YOU!”’ he says again, pointing his finger at my chest, almost beside himself with excitement.

‘Me?’

‘You, like, whoever’s reading the book. Think about it, who’s the very last person the reader will suspect of committing the crime? Herself, right? Imagine how she’s going to feel when the detective says, “It was YOU!” And we could have like a 3D finger pointing out of the page!’

‘How can the reader have committed a crime in a fictional world to which she has no access?’

‘That’s a minor detail,’ he says. ‘Anyway, why should the reader get off the hook? She’s as guilty as anybody. Don’t you see? This turns the whole crime genre on its head! It’ll be huge!’

He returns to his scribbling, giggling to himself all the while; he doesn’t notice as I slip out of the room.

In the kitchen, I find Clizia placing a bucket under a drip. ‘You have a little leak?’ I say, though the leak is more of a stream, descending steadily from a grey mass in the ceiling.

‘Oh, this old place!’ Clizia says gaily. Then, glancing at the bedroom, with the same false smile, she says, ‘He’s forgotten about the review?’

‘I think it’s given him some interesting new ideas!’ I say. We both laugh, though I am not sure why. ‘And you?’ I inquire. ‘Your ankle, it is better?’

‘Vot?’ she says, still smiling.

‘When you spoke on the phone earlier, to your coach, I thought …’ Clizia looks at me uncomprehendingly. ‘Never mind,’ I say.

‘Bye bye, Claude,’ Remington, now drawing a large multicoloured R, sings from under her feet.

‘Goodbye, my friends,’ I say, in the kindly fashion of the family doctor in a nineteenth-century play. ‘I will see you both very soon, I’m sure.’

I am halfway down the corridor when she catches up with me. ‘Frenchman!’

I turn. The smile is gone; her fingers are tight around my flesh. ‘He will write the book this time — won’t he?’

What can I tell her?

‘Of course,’ I say.

A dark-skinned boy runs into a crystal-blue sea. A man in a suit hands his passport to a ticket agent. The boy leaps from the water with a shell in his hand, a plane lifts into a powder-blue sky. A young woman sits cross-legged on the sand, boring a hole in the shell. More shells lie in a pile at her feet. She and the boy turn at the sound of a motor. It is the man in the suit, speeding over the waves in a powerboat. The boat runs up on the beach. The boy leads the man to the spot where the woman sits. The man opens his briefcase and takes out a thread. The woman smiles, and begins to string the shells on to it.

Agron Torabundo , a voiceover says. Not global. Planetary .

‘It’s testing really well,’ Skylark Fitzgibbon says, folding closed the screen. ‘In European and American markets.’

Be careful what you wish for, isn’t that what they say? Ish has got what she wanted: plans are in motion to ‘save’ Kokomoko. Already sea walls are being constructed, sand imported to replace what’s been taken; this Skylark Fitzgibbon, who emerged from the Marketing Department last week like a kind of Barbie-shaped Erinys, sends us regular updates on the golf course, now to be located at the northern end of the island in an area she refers to variously as ‘almost uninhabited’ and ‘effectively uninhabited’.

‘One last thing: what do you think those shell necklaces would retail for? I know they’re not for sale, but if they were, does eighty-five dollars sound right? Ballpark?’

A paranoid mind might suspect that all of this had been put together specifically to torture Ish. Every email, every peppy chat with Skylark, visibly reduces her, as if some verdant last fragment of her own simpler, happier past were being surgically excised. But there is nothing she can do.

My computer has been returned; getting back to work, I find the world in its customary state of turmoil. The impending investigation of money-laundering by a major British bank is causing havoc on the FTSE. In Greece, a bomb in an Athens bank has killed three tellers, one of them a pregnant woman; investors respond by buying up German bunds. The euro is in crisis, America is in crisis, the market is on the brink of meltdown yet again, like a hysterical ex-lover who keeps calling you up, threatening suicide.

Ireland, on the other hand, is weirdly calm. Economically, the situation is worse than ever, but the Minister’s death seems to have functioned as a kind of pressure valve. Thousands attend the state funeral, and as the encomiums keep coming, public anger is diverted to other, less disruptive emotions: pity, guilt, a kind of defanged, non-specific regret. The marches peter out; awkward questions about the Royal Irish report dry up; the abusive calls and sinister black faxes, which I had been receiving in a steady stream, dwindle almost to nothing; and one morning I arrive at work to find Jurgen standing at the window with a mug of coffee and a contented air, like a man surveying a pile of freshly chopped logs. At first I can’t see what’s giving him so much satisfaction. Then I realize. The quay is bare; the zombies are gone. It looks as if the pavement has been scoured to ensure not a trace of them remains, though down in the water, fragments of placards, bottles and items of clothing bob forlornly.

‘Police?’

‘Local people taking matters into their own hands.’ His smile is as sheer and white as a cliff face. ‘The Irish understand what needs to be done.’

I think about Ariadne’s friend with the dreadlocks, try to summon up some spark of triumph. Nothing comes. Instead I feel as if she’s been banished too, scrubbed away from my world, even though I can see her, just about, through the dawn-dazed glass of the Ark.

AgroBOT rampages on. The acquisition of clearing house Parsifal is completed, that of TerraNova asset management almost. Kevin points proudly to a Wall Street Journal article calling the bank ‘omnivorous’. An inspirational memo from Porter notes that ‘a stitch in time saves nine’; our subsequent long position in Time Warner, where in a shock move Bastian Stich is appointed CEO the following week, pays off handsomely. Our stock rises; people revise their bonus expectations upwards; there is talk of moving into a new premises. Champagne is drunk, cigars are smoked, lap dances enjoyed; the rain-logged sky is a rag soaked in chloroform, pressing relentlessly down on the city.

Then everything changes.

‘What’s this shit?’ Gary McCrum says, staring at his terminal.

No warning, no explanation; just a small but noticeable decline in our share price.

Liam English plays it down. ‘Regression to the mean, that’s all. Market valuation’s been increasing for six months straight, there was bound to be an adjustment sooner or later.’

‘This isn’t an adjustment, it’s a nosedive.’

‘It’s not a nosedive,’ Liam says irritably. He looks off into space, tugs on his tie as though pumping it for information, then concedes, ‘Look, there’s a certain amount of rethinking going on out there about counterintuitiveness. It’s the usual story — you do something new, everyone else piles in, there’re some bad deals, the market panics. As the originators we might be carrying the can for more than is fair. It’ll pass.’

He huffs back to his office and closes the venetian blind; but through the apertures we detect, or imagine we detect, the blue glow of an electronic cigarette.