Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

‘He’s stonewalling us,’ Jocelyn Lockhart says.

‘You think something’s happening?’

‘There’s rumours going around.’

‘What sort of rumours?’

‘That we over-borrowed to pay for the Agron takeover. That our core assets are overvalued. That we’re broke, essentially.’

‘But … it’s not true, is it?’ Kevin says.

‘It’s just some hedge fund taking shots in the dark,’ Gary McCrum says. ‘Standard trash-and-cash. Liam’s right, it’ll burn itself out.’

Jocelyn shrugs. ‘We’ll see.’

I spend most of the day taking calls from clients and counterparties, listening to casual but pointed inquiries about trades and investments; I assure them that there’s nothing to worry about, that this is simply an anomaly, that by tomorrow everything will be back to normal.

On the contrary. Overnight, the temperature becomes a fever, and the next morning the calls begin before I even leave my apartment, slowly but inexorably rising in volume and anxiety over the course of the day, while the bank’s share price slowly but inexorably falls. We field the queries, we soothe the qualms, we placate and mollify to the best of our ability — but as our superiors aren’t telling us anything, this doesn’t amount to much.

‘Word is we’re over-leveraged.’

‘It’s mid-quarter, everyone’s over-leveraged.’

‘I heard we couldn’t make good on a deal.’

‘That’s bullshit.’

‘Don’t yell at me, I’m just telling you what people are saying.’

‘Come on, if we’d DK’d on a trade we’d know about it. It’d be all over the place.’

‘It is all over the place.’

‘I had a customer ask me today if we were still solvent. This is a guy I’ve traded with for years. I said yes but I’m not even sure we are.’

We are not sure of anything, except this: AgroBOT is under siege — a strange, metaphysical siege, in which lies beset truth.

The question of who began the attacks very soon becomes unimportant. In the market, it does not take long for rumour to become self-fulfilling. Spread a story, no matter how wild; if even a handful of shareholders believe it and sell their stock, a notional drop in value becomes an actual drop, the false narrative supersedes the true, people panic, the sell-off intensifies, the share price collapses, the hedge fund or whoever was behind the initial short makes a killing.

If a company’s fundamentals are strong, as ours are, this won’t happen; the rumours won’t stick, the attacks will abate, the short-sellers will give up, look for an easier mark elsewhere. It’s only a matter of time: that’s what we tell ourselves, that’s what we tell our clients. But we can feel the market as never before, a palpable entity, delving into our terminals, our trades, our collective past — an invisible hand, tapping the walls, looking for the weak spot.

I’m in the office till close to midnight, trying to talk away client jitters; I’m back again at 6 a.m., doing the same. As the minutes tick towards the opening of the market, the fear mounts, the pressure becomes almost unbearable, a hissing force that pushes against the eyeballs. Events roll silently in a band across the TV, messages ping on to my computer screen, Joe Peston and Dwayne McGuckian and Mike Purzel iterate numbers into their headsets, the telephones ring and ring and ring. The effort of defending the bank is visible on every face, and although the floor is as noisy as ever, it seems we can hear the silence beneath it, oceanically deep, oceanically cold.

And the loudest silence is Porter’s. In our hour of need, he seems to have vanished, leaving us with only more conjecture.

‘I heard he had another heart attack.’

‘I heard his wife tried to commit suicide.’

‘He wouldn’t stay out of the office for that.’

‘If you’d stop whining like little girls for a minute,’ Dave Davison’s bored baritone rises up from behind a divider, ‘then you’d realize the reason we haven’t heard from him is that he already has it covered. We’ve got an open line of credit with his buddy the Caliph. More than enough to carry us through some market hissy-fit.’

That’s true, but there is a hitch. Following his merciless quashing of the rebellion, the Caliph has been removed by his Imperial Guard to an undisclosed location while the last dregs of the uprising are mopped up.

‘It’s a delicate situation,’ Jurgen explains. ‘They are purging his ministries of any suspected sympathizers. For security reasons, the Caliph prefers to monitor this from a distance.’

‘And what about us? He can’t even pick up a phone?’

‘It is only a matter of time,’ Jurgen says.

Others are less optimistic.

‘Someone knows something,’ Howie says, watching the screen. ‘Someone’s got something on us.’

Business on the ninth floor has stalled. Howie’s investors, spooked by the sudden dip in our fortunes, refuse to believe his assurances that the bank and the fund are two separate entities; some of them are even demanding their money back.

‘I tell them, how can I give you your money back? I invested it. That’s what you paid me to do. It’s not like I put it a suitcase and buried it in the back garden.’ He has been down here most of the morning, Chinese wall notwithstanding; he claims he is trying to contain the contamination, though he spends most of his time kicking furniture.

‘What are the hedge funds saying?’ I ask him.

‘They’re saying we’re fucked, Claude. It’s not like it’s a secret. People are climbing over each other, trying to ditch their stock. Some crowd in California are betting a fortune we’ll be gone in less than a week.’

‘Less than a week?’

‘Why not? Bear went under in less than a week. Lehman went in less than a week. They were both much bigger than us.’

A chill of silence sweeps through the room, as if a door had been blown open by some soundless storm.

‘But why is this happening?’ I say. ‘What is it they think they know?’

‘They know AgroBOT’s a pissant operation run by people who don’t have a bull’s notion what they’re doing,’ Howie returns.

‘If it did go under …’ little Terry Fosco pipes up, ‘would that mean our shares’d be worthless?’

‘It won’t go under,’ Dave Davison insists. ‘I’m telling you, they won’t let it. They can’t.’

‘Though if it does,’ Gary McCrum says with a kind of bitter relish, ‘we won’t get a penny. We’ll be at the end of a long, long line.’

‘Where’s Porter?’ Kevin cries. ‘Why doesn’t he say something? Why doesn’t he do something?’

The same questions, the same unsatisfactory answers, hour after hour, like a torturous carousel; and in the background the edifice we thought indestructible is being steadily and invisibly dismantled, as if by ghosts. By now, most of the calls have dried up: clients no longer want reassurance; instead they seek to put as much distance as they can between them and us. New business is non-existent.

‘We’re like lepers out there,’ Howie fumes, sending another wastebasket flying. ‘We’re like Greece.’

One man remains unafraid of infection. Around lunchtime, Walter’s car pulls up outside. He doesn’t look like someone whose empire is on the brink of collapsing. Instead he looks like he’s swallowed it whole; he’s grown so bloated that to fit in the limo I have to sit with my knees practically up to my chin. I’m expecting an inquisition about the bank’s current performance, or a furious command to liquidate his investments, but he doesn’t even mention AgroBOT’s travails, just hands me the usual bundle of cheques. Hasn’t he heard? Or doesn’t he care? Maybe as Walter Corless he believes himself immune to the flying grit of circumstance; he writes his own story, which intersects with the wider world’s only as and when he desires it. Or maybe he, too, knows something we don’t.