Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

Nevertheless, we must take no chances. ‘As we have seen in the last weeks, the public mood is unpredictable. Prior to next week’s vote, it is more than ever important that the contents of your original report on Royal Irish are forgotten. The IT Department has taken the liberty of destroying all related material on your hard drive and on the AgroBOT servers. You will do the same with any files on external drives or your own machine.’

‘All right.’

‘I must tell you, Claude, you have impressed a lot of people with your handling of this matter. Yes, with the initial report you have badly miscalculated. But after that, you have made the case to the media very convincingly.’

‘You mean I lied.’

‘Sometimes for the greater good it is necessary to bend the truth a little. For a society to prosper, it’s the strong, not the weak, that must be protected. The journalists will not understand this, of course. But those who know are not forgetting your contribution. You have a bright future here at AgroBOT, very, very bright.’

He returns his gaze to the window. Across the water, the white sky glows in the unfinished windows of the Royal HQ, blind eyes shining through a concrete mask. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’

I am too surprised to reply.

‘True, it does not look like much now,’ Jurgen considers. ‘But in a few years, the housing market will recover, unemployment will fall, and the Irish will be clamouring once more for high-interest loans to fund their four-wheel drives and shopping trips to New York. At this point I am predicting our new acquisition will prove very lucrative.’

‘You mean the whole thing will happen all over again.’

‘Yes, it will happen all over again. But this time we will be prepared.’ He looks out at the river, the static cranes, the office blocks, as if any moment all of it will turn into money … ‘Life is so fucking beautiful,’ he says.

The market loves the coup de théâtre of the Royal Irish buyout: although the Irish government hasn’t yet signed off on the deal, AgroBOT’s share price has already begun to climb. In the days that follow, the bank’s credit rating is upgraded, and then upgraded again; the Wall Street Journal runs a feature on Porter Blankly, with a picture of the CEO smoking a fat cigar and the quote, ‘When they say you’re over-leveraged … that’s when you buy another bank.’ According to this article, the deal was clinched over a round of golf with Ireland’s political elite, in which Blankly, who flew in directly from New York and had not slept in thirty-six hours, made a par 5 in two shots before sinking a putt for an eagle 3. The rumour within AgroBOT is that Howie and Grisha were responsible for the details; although investors are demanding an investigation into the collapse of their ninth-floor fund, word is they’ve already been spirited to New York to sit at Porter’s right hand. None of this may be true; still, visitors to the Uncanny Valley report that Rachael spends most of her time these days by the window, gazing out towards the sea, like a lonesome maiden waiting for her sailor to come home.

Does it need to be said that nobody follows through on his vows to leave banking and take up shoemaking, orphan husbandry, semi-professional paragliding, whatever else? Kevin is given a permanent contract; a solicitors’ firm specializing in liquidation opens an office on the ninth floor; Skylark Fitzgibbon reappears in the form of a barrage of publicity pictures from Kokomoko, showing the first shipments of topsoil arriving onshore, rich loamy mounds that will become the greens and fairways of the golf course, smiling islanders beside her in blue Agron Torabundo T-shirts.

‘So Blankly got away with it.’

‘Got away with what?’

‘Cashing in twice.’

‘Not this crazy conspiracy theory again.’

‘I’m just saying.’

No one else is saying; everyone is just grateful to be back to work. And within a very short time, a matter of days, life is just as it was. Or almost.

‘Who is that man, Ish?’

‘What?’

‘The man, there, coming out of Liam’s office.’

‘Oh, the dude in black?’

‘He’s a new employee?’

‘Hmm, I think he’s from Compliance.’

‘Compliance?’

‘Yeah, I heard there’s been someone snooping around the last couple of days, asking questions.’

‘What about?’

‘Beats me. Wouldn’t reckon it’s got anything to do with us.’

‘No, no, of course not.’

‘You going somewhere, Claude?’

‘Yes, I have a, um, meeting. If anyone’s looking for me … ah …’

‘Don’t worry, I never saw you.’

The door doesn’t open so much as implode at my knock, giving way to a seething mass of small children, who run back and forth and bump into one another in an exemplary display of Brownian motion.

‘Thanks for coming,’ Paul says, wading through them with me to the relative safety of the kitchen table. ‘Sorry about the short notice. We weren’t going to do anything, but then Clizia’s game got cancelled, so …’

‘It’s my pleasure,’ I say. ‘It’s not every day that someone turns five.’

‘Thank God for that. Here, let me see if I can …’ He cranes over the swarm and plucks out his son, who is panting with excitement and partially covered with a recent meal. ‘Look who it is, Remington! It’s your Uncle Claude!’

‘Happy burp-day,’ I say, handing him my present.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s an ant farm,’ I explain. ‘Where ants live.’ I help him remove the wrapping paper to reveal the plastic window through which ants may be seen running up and down tunnels with small objects in their mouths, occasionally stopping to flail antennae with other ants. The resemblance to the Financial Services Centre seems to me indisputable.

‘Is Roland in there?’ Remington asks.

‘Hmm, there are certainly some ants that might be related …’

‘Let’s take them out!’

‘Maybe later,’ his father says hastily, removing the box from the boy’s hands and putting it on a high shelf. Remington shrugs and rejoins the anarchy. ‘So I have news,’ Paul says to me.

‘Oh yes?’

‘Yeah. Dodson called.’

The first thing I think of is Banerjee. ‘He’s pressing charges? Or — my God, he’s not dead, is he?’

‘Relax, Banerjee’s fine, they’re all fine. No, he was calling about the book.’

‘What book?’

‘ My book. He thinks it’s got legs. He wants to publish it.’

‘He wants to —?’ I feel a soar of elation, though also a certain amount of confusion: there do seem to be a number of loose ends to this news, for example that there is no book.

‘There’s no book now,’ Paul corrects me. ‘But after hearing our proposal that night Robert says it’s all right there.’ His voice takes on a loftier tone, adding, ‘He says it’s the book I was born to write.’

‘He says Anal Analyst is the book you were born to write?’

‘He’s not 100 per cent sure about the title,’ Paul concedes.

‘Well,’ I say, attempting to take this in. ‘And you don’t … that is, in the past you have had some doubts about writing. The modern audience, competing technologies, that kind of thing.’

‘Cold feet, that’s all that was,’ Paul says dismissively. ‘Does the blackbird sing for an audience? Does the sun rise in the hope that some douche’ll take a picture of it on his phone? I just needed someone to believe in me. That’s what I’ve been waiting for, all this time.’

‘I believed in you,’ I remind him.

‘I know, I know.’

‘Clizia believed in you.’

‘Yeah, well, someone who’s professionally qualified to believe in me, I mean.’