Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

‘I’ll say. It’d be the greatest insider trade of all time. What would he make from it? Tens of millions? More?’

‘Porter wouldn’t bring down his own bank.’

‘Wouldn’t he? For a hundred million dollars?’

‘He’s got ten times that in stock options.’

‘Maybe he did it for a billion dollars, then. Or,’ a fresh thought strikes her, ‘maybe he’s got a plan to save the bank, once he’s pulled off his short. Meaning he can cash in twice.’

‘You’re crazy,’ I tell her, and turn to the window. Porter makes billions, someone else makes billions, it’s legitimate, it’s not — who cares? Who cares about any of it?

We continue in silence for a moment. In the passenger seat, Kevin is telling the taxi driver how much he enjoys black music.

‘I heard the Ark closed down,’ Ish says.

‘Yes. Weird coincidence.’

‘Probably for the best,’ she says, placing her hand on mine. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘You mean because of my unrequited love.’

‘I mean, it feels like all of this — maybe it came at the right time. We have a chance to get out now, while we’re still young. Do something with our lives.’

‘Restore old boats?’

‘Something that actually helps people.’

‘Personally, I’m sceptical about the helping-people thing,’ Kevin pipes up from the front. ‘The whole “Look at me, I’m such a good person” bit. We could all spend our lives scrubbing oil off fucking seagulls, you know? But where would that get the world, ultimately? If everybody was altruistic, there literally wouldn’t be anyone left to help. And meanwhile all the stuff that needed to be done wouldn’t get done.’

‘I take it you’re planning to stay in banking,’ Ish says.

‘Society needs selfish people,’ Kevin says. ‘We’re the ones who keep the whole thing moving forward. Anyway, you can’t change who you are. If you’re a boa constrictor, there’s no use trying to be a sheepdog. There’s no sense in saying, “I’m tired of choking small animals to death, instead I think I’ll round up sheep for a living.” It just won’t work.’

There is a honk: from the taxi in front, Dave Davison and Mike Purzel are mooning us. Kevin chortles, gives them the finger.

‘I don’t think of you as a boa constrictor,’ I tell Ish.

‘Thanks, Claude.’

‘Though what about your mortgage? If you are planning on helping people.’

Ish considers this. ‘Sometimes I wonder if I just got that mortgage so I didn’t have to ask myself why I was working in some shitty bank.’

The car inches through the traffic in fits and starts. Rain deluges the windscreen, rain slicks the streets; rain has taken over this town, like a Mafia gang rolled in from some nightmare metropolis.

‘What about you, Claude?’ A street lamp in the window gives her a momentary, rain-diffused halo. ‘What will you do?’

I don’t know what I will do. I don’t have a plan, or an ideal to pursue. My love story is over; after tomorrow, the bank will be gone too, and I will probably never see any of these people again, and there will be no sign that the last two years ever happened. Apart from the money, of course; the money will still be there, piled up in my account, like those towers of hoarded newspapers they find in old people’s houses after they die.

‘I suppose I will look for another position,’ I say. ‘I hear Goldman are looking.’

I am conscious of her disapproval, but for a moment she doesn’t speak; the back-seat silence is filled by the slur of the tyres on the wet street, the muffled thrum of the city.

‘On Kokomoko they have this legend,’ she says at last. ‘Of a tribe that left the gift circle. And this tribe, every time they go out in their boats they catch a full net of fish, and every time they dive to the seabed they find the most beautiful shells, and every time they fight in a battle they win. And if you’re starving, or you need allies for a war, or a necklace for a dowry, in the middle of the night these tribesmen will appear at your bedside, and they’ll offer you whatever you want. But the thing is, once you take it, you’ll never be able to pay them back. Your food, your possessions, the clothes on your back — they’ll keep coming and coming, in the middle of the night, and sooner or later they’ll take your mother, your daughter, your whole family — carry them away to their island, that no one ever returns from.’

Shff shff , go the wipers on the windscreen; traffic-light red dazzles over the glass.

‘The anthropologists think it’s got its roots in history. The slavers used to sail out from Torabundo around the archipelago, trying to get the islanders to take on loans. Particularly if the fish catch was down. The islanders didn’t really understand what loans were — they were used to just giving each other what they needed, so they fell into these enormous debts. The slavers would take their children as “security” until they paid them back. And their parents’d never see them again. So these legends arose sort of like warnings. If you leave the gift circle, if you take the zombie gold, then you’re already dead.’ Leaning forward, she taps the driver on the shoulder. ‘Let me out here, please.’

I do not conceal my dismay. ‘Aren’t you coming to VD’s?’

She shakes her head. ‘Have a lap dance for me, eh? See you tomorrow for the grand finale.’

She steps out into the rain; the door shuts, and the taxi shrieks back into motion.

Kevin cranes his head around. ‘I’ll tell you one thing I won’t miss, that’s stories about those sodding islanders. Some bunch of oddballs who don’t even wear trousers, telling us we’re dead?’ He turns back to the front. ‘When I’m dead, you’ll know all about it,’ he says. ‘You can expect a very volatile market that day, my friend.’

From the basement door red lights flash, and a deep percussive rumbling issues. ‘All right, mate?’ The bouncer checks me with his hand. ‘Where ye comin’ from?’

‘Life,’ I tell him.

‘Oh yeah?’ He scrutinizes Kevin and me with pale hobgoblin eyes.

‘Our colleagues are inside,’ I say. ‘Agron Torabundo.’

His eyes narrow; I wonder momentarily if he is one of our shareholders. ‘Tell your pals in there to cool it,’ he says.

The whole of AgroBOT seems to be downstairs, sweat rings under their armpits, faces simultaneously grinning and aghast, like soldiers on furlough from some terrible war. Kevin prods me, points to where Jurgen is waving at us from a table. ‘You have made it at last!’ he hollers as we stumble out of the melee. ‘I am thinking you will never be coming!’

He appears oddly relaxed, even jovial, as if we were at our Christmas party; he shunts along the banquette so we can squeeze in beside him, orders us drinks from a passing nymph. Chris Kane is at the table as well, telling the fire-alarm story to some people from Sales. Around us, the mood has intensified from gloom into a kind of morbid bacchanal. Champagne bottles pack the tables like skittles; suited figures process continuously to the bathroom in twos and threes, while others are led away by silver-knickered houris to the cubicles at the back of the club. House beats pound at my body. I take a bottle from the nymph’s tray, debate interiorly as to whether or not I should stay. And then –

‘Something wrong, Claude?’

‘I thought I saw …’ It feels almost too absurd to say out loud; but as the mass of bodies around us reconfigures itself, just for a second the face re-emerges.

‘Who?’

‘Porter.’

‘Porter?’ Jurgen’s laughter is more kindly than mocking. ‘I think perhaps in Life Bar you are drinking many Jägerbombs.’

He’s right, I think; and then the crowd kaleidoscopes again, and once more I see him, by a little door in a distant corner, as if on his way in or out. The light is dim, and people keep getting in the way, but how can it be anyone else? The snow-white hair, the golden skin, the famous jawline that has triumphed in innumerable boardroom battles? And the man he is deep in talk with, don’t I know him too — small, spry, silver-haired, a gleam in his eye — isn’t that Miles O’Connor?