1

A Boat Ride

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

Albert Camus

 

 

‘Claude?’

‘Yes?’

‘What are you doing under your desk?’

‘Me?’

‘You’re not hiding, are you?’

‘Why would I be hiding?’ I say. I wait a moment, hoping that this will satisfy her, but her feet remain where they are. ‘I am looking for my stapler,’ I add.

‘Oh,’ Ish says. On one ankle, between her patent-leather pumps and the hem of her skirt, I glimpse a slender chain from which several small animal charms dangle. Now a pair of brown brogues approaches over the fuzzy blue carpet tiles and comes to a halt beside Ish’s pumps.

‘What’s happening?’ I hear Jurgen say.

‘Claude’s looking for his stapler,’ Ish says.

‘Oh,’ says Jurgen, and then, ‘But here is his stapler, directly on the desk.’

‘So it is,’ Ish says. ‘Claude, your stapler’s right here on your desk!’

I clamber to my feet, and look down to where she is pointing. ‘Ah!’ I say, attempting to appear pleased and surprised.

‘Are you coming for lunch?’ Jurgen says. ‘We are going to the hippie place.’

‘I’m rather busy,’ I say.

‘It’s Casual Day!’ Ish exhorts me. ‘You can’t eat at your desk on Casual Day!’

‘I have a meeting with Walter this afternoon.’

‘Come on, Claude, you can’t live on Carambars.’ She grabs my arm and starts tugging me.

‘All right, all right,’ I say, reaching for my suit jacket, pretending not to notice the disapproving eye she casts over me as I put it on.

Ish studied anthropology back in Australia; Casual Day, one of the few rituals we have at Bank of Torabundo, is something she takes very seriously. For most of the staff a pair of well-pressed chinos and perhaps an undone top shirt-button will suffice, but Ish is wearing a low-cut top fringed with tassels, and a long, multicoloured skirt, also with tassels. She has even topped up her tan for the occasion, a deep greasy brown that makes it look like she has smeared her body with pâté. This image, when it occurs to me, immediately makes me nauseous, and as we descend in the lift my stomach dips and soars like a fairground ride. I dislike Casual Day at the best of times; today it spurs my paranoia to new and queasy heights.

‘Is Kevin coming?’ I say to distract myself.

‘He went on ahead to try and get a table,’ Ish says.

‘This whole place goes mental on Casual Day,’ Jurgen says.

At every floor the lift stops and we are joined by more people in pressed chinos with their top shirt-button undone, squeezing in beside us, sucking up the air. The crush makes my heart race: it’s a relief to step through the double doors of Transaction House and into the fresh air – but only for a moment.

Pastel waves of identically clad bodies are converging on the plaza from every direction. I scan the approaching faces, the bland gazes that beat against mine. Amid all the smart-casualwear a figure in black should be easy to spot – but that means I too am an obvious target, and in a freezing flash I can picture him making his way through the sea of bodies, a cancerous cell swimming in the innocent blood.

‘Thinking of getting a bidet,’ Ish says.

‘For the new apartment?’ Jurgen says.

‘Wasn’t something I’d thought of initially, but the bloke from the showroom called up and said because I’m going for the full suite they can throw in a bidet for half price. The question is, do I want a bidet? You know, at this stage I’ve got my toilet routine pretty much worked out.’

‘You do not want to feel like an alien in your own bathroom,’ Jurgen agrees. ‘I suppose Claude would be the expert. Claude, how much of a benefit do you think the addition of a bidet would be?’

‘Do you think French people do nothing else but eat baguettes and sit on their bidets?’ I snap. Out here I am finding it hard to hide my nerves.

Jurgen starts telling Ish about a special toilet he has had imported from Germany. I tune him out, return to my search. Above my head, monochrome birds wheel and swoop, like scraps torn from the overcast sky. How long has it been now? A week? Two? That’s since I first became conscious of him, though when I think to before that, I seem to find him there too, posed unobtrusively at the back of my memories.

There’s no discernible pattern to his appearances: he’ll be here one day, somewhere else the next. In the gloom of morning, I might see him by the tram tracks as I make the brief, synaptic journey from my apartment building to the bank; later, bent over a pitchbook with Jurgen, I’ll glance out the window and spot him seated on a bench, eating sunflower seeds from a packet. In the deli, in the bar – even at night, when I stand on my balcony and look out over the depopulated concourse – I will seem to glimpse him for an instant, his blank gaze the mirror image of my own.

The Ark is in sight now; inside, I can see the waitresses gliding back and forth, the customers eating, talking, toying with their phones. Of my pursuer there is no sign, yet with every step the dreadful certainty grows that he is in there. I stall, with a clammy mouth begin to mumble excuses, but too late, the door is opening and a figure coming straight for us –

‘Full,’ Kevin says.

‘Balls,’ Ish says.

‘They’re saying fifteen minutes,’ Kevin says.

Jurgen looks at his watch. ‘That would give us only twelve and a half minutes to eat.’

‘Oh well,’ I say, with a false sigh. ‘I suppose we must go back to –’

‘What about that new place?’ Ish says, snapping her fingers. ‘Over on the other side of the square? You’ll like it, Claude, it’s French.’

I shrug. So long as we are moving in the opposite direction to the Ark, I am happy.

The ‘French place’ is called Chomps Elysées. An image of the Eiffel Tower adorns the laminated sign, and on the walls inside are photographs of the Sacré-Cœur and the Moulin Rouge. Nothing about the menu seems especially Gallic; I order a mochaccino and something called a ‘panini fromage’, and while Kevin the trainee offers his thoughts on Ish’s lavatorial options, I sit back in my seat and try to relax. Be reasonable, I tell myself: who would be interested in following you? Nobody, is the answer. Nobody outside my department even knows I exist.

This thought doesn’t cheer me quite as I intend it to; and the panini fromage, when it comes, only makes matters worse. It is not that the cheese tastes bad exactly; rather, that it tastes of nothing. I don’t think I have ever tasted nothing quite so strongly before. It’s like eating a tiny black hole wrapped in an Italian sandwich. There is no way food this bad would ever be served in Paris, I think to myself, and experience a sudden stab of homesickness. How far I have come! How much I have left behind! And for what? Now with every chew I feel the emptiness rising inside, as if, like a kind of anti-madeleine, the panini were erasing my past before my very eyes – severing every tie, leaving me only this grey moment, tasting of nothing …

I approach the counter. The waitress’s scowl appears authentically Parisian, but her accent, when she speaks, denotes the more proactive hostility of the Slav.

‘Yes?’ she says, not pretending that my appearance has made her any less bored.

‘I think there has been a mistake,’ I say.

‘Panini fromage,’ she says. ‘Is French cheese.’

‘But it is not cheese,’ I say. ‘It’s artificial.’

‘Artificial?’

‘Not real.’ Prising apart the bread for her inspection, I point at the off-white slab sitting atop the melancholy lettuce. It resembles nothing so much as a blank piece of matter, featureless and opaque, before God’s brush has painted it with the colour and shape of specificity. ‘I am from France,’ I tell her, as if this might clarify matters. ‘And this is not French cheese.’

The girl looks at me with unconcealed contempt. You are not supposed to complain in restaurants like this one; you are not supposed to notice the food in restaurants like this one, any more than you notice the streets you hurry through, latte in hand, back to your computer. The screen, the phone, that disembodied world is the one we truly inhabit; the International Financial Services Centre is merely a frame for it, an outline, the equivalent of the chalk marks of a child’s game on the pavement.

‘You vant chench?’ the girl taunts me. I raise my hands in surrender and, cheeks burning, turn away.

Only then do I realize the man in black is standing right behind me.

Around us, the café has returned to normal life; the sullen girl rings up another panini, the office workers drink their uniquely tailored coffees. I goggle at Ish at the nearby table, but she doesn’t seem to notice – nor does anyone else, as if the stranger has cast some cloak of invisibility over us. Blinding white light pours through the open door; he gazes at me, his eyes a terrifying ice-blue.

‘Claude,’ he says. He knows my name, of course he does.

‘What do you want from me?’ I try to sound defiant, but my voice will not come in more than a whisper.

‘Just to talk,’ he says.

‘You have the wrong man,’ I say. ‘I have not done anything.’

‘That makes you the right man,’ he says. A smile spreads slowly across his chops. ‘That makes you exactly the right man.’

 

 

His name is Paul; he is a writer. ‘I’ve been shadowing you for a project I’m working on. I had no idea you’d spotted me. I hope I didn’t alarm you.’

‘I was not alarmed,’ I lie. ‘Although these days one must be careful. There are a lot of people very angry at bankers.’

‘Well, I can only apologize again. And lunch is definitely on me – ah, here we go.’ The waitress appears, dark and genial as her counterpart in the fake French café was blonde and cold, and sets down two bowls of freshly made sorrel soup. We have crossed the plaza back to the Ark, and this time found a table.

‘I can see why you like this place,’ he says, dipping a hunk of bread into his soup. ‘The food’s fantastic. And I love all this nautical stuff,’ nodding at the portholes, the great anchor by the door. ‘It’s like going on a boat ride.’ He purses his lips and blows on the bread; he doesn’t appear to be in any great hurry to tell me why we are here.

‘So you are a writer,’ I say. ‘What kind of things do you write?’

‘A few years back I wrote a novel,’ he says, ‘called For Love of a Clown.’

This prompts a faint ringing at the back of my mind – some kind of prize…?

‘You’re thinking of The Clowns of Sorrow by Bimal Banerjee, which won the Raytheon. My novel came out around the same time, similar enough subject matter. It did all right, but when the time came to begin the next one, I found I’d hit a kind of wall. Started asking myself some really hard questions – what’s the novel for, what place does it have in the modern world, all that. For a long time I was stuck, really and truly stuck. Then out of nowhere it came to me. Idea for a new book, the whole thing right there, like a baby left on the doorstep.’

‘And what is it about?’ I ask politely.

‘What’s it about?’ Paul smiles. ‘Well, it’s about you, Claude. It’s about you.’

I am too surprised to conceal it. ‘Me?’

‘I’ve been studying you and your daily routine for a number of weeks now. It seems to me that your life embodies certain values, certain fundamental features of our modern world. We’re living in a time of great change, and a man like you is right at the coalface of that change.’

‘I do not think my life would make a very interesting book,’ I say. ‘I feel I can speak with a certain amount of authority here.’

He laughs. ‘Well, in a way that’s the point. The stories we read in books, what’s presented to us as being interesting – they have very little to do with real life as it’s lived today. I’m not talking about straight-up escapism, your vampires, serial killers, codes hidden in paintings, and so on. I mean so-called serious literature. A boy goes hunting with his emotionally volatile father, a bereaved woman befriends an asylum seeker, a composer with a rare neurological disorder walks around New York, thinking about the nature of art. People looking back over their lives, people having revelations, people discovering meaning. Meaning, that’s the big thing. The way these books have it, you trip over a rock you’ll find some hidden meaning waiting there. Everyone’s constantly on the verge of some soul-shaking transformation. And it’s – if you’ll forgive my language – it’s bullshit. Modern people live in a state of distraction. They go from one distraction to the next, and that’s how they like it. They don’t transform, they don’t stop to smell the roses, they don’t sit around recollecting long passages of their childhood – Jesus, I can hardly remember what I was doing two days ago. My point is, people aren’t waiting to be restored to some ineffable moment. They’re not looking for meaning. That whole idea of the novel – that’s finished.’

‘So you want to write a book that has no meaning,’ I say.

‘I want to write a book that isn’t full of things that only ever happen in books,’ he says. ‘I want to write something that genuinely reflects how we live today. Real, actual life, not some ivory-tower palaver, not a whole load of literature. What’s it like to be alive in the twenty-first century? Look at this place, for example.’ He sweeps an arm at the window, the glass anonymity of the International Financial Services Centre. ‘We’re in the middle of Dublin, where Joyce set Ulysses. But it doesn’t look like Dublin. We could be in London, or Frankfurt, or Kuala Lumpur. There are all these people, but nobody’s speaking to each other, everyone’s just looking at their phones. And that’s what this place is for. It’s a place for being somewhere else. Being here means not being here. And that’s modern life.’

‘I see,’ I say, although I don’t, quite.

‘So the question is, how do you describe it? If James Joyce was writing Ulysses today, if he was writing not about some nineteenth-century backwater but about the capital of the most globalized country in the world – where would he begin? Who would his Bloom be? His Everyman?’

He looks at me pointedly, but it takes me a moment to realize the import of his words.

‘You think I am an Everyman?’

He makes a hey presto gesture with his hands.

‘But I’m not even Irish,’ I protest. ‘How can I be your typical Dubliner?’

He shakes his head vigorously. ‘That’s key. Like I said, somewhere else is what this place is all about. Think about it, in your work, you have colleagues from all over the place, right?’

‘That’s true.’

‘And the cleaning staff are from all over the place, and the waitresses in this restaurant are from all over the place. Modern life is a centrifuge; it throws people in every direction. That’s why you’re so perfect for this book. The Everyman’s uprooted, he’s alone, he’s separated from his friends and family. And the work that you do – you’re a banker, isn’t that so?’

‘Yes, an analyst at Bank of Torabundo,’ I say, before it occurs to me how strange it is that he knows this.

‘Well.’ He spreads his hands to signify self-evidence. ‘I hardly need to say how representative that is. The story of the twenty-first century so far is the story of the banks. Look at the mess this country’s in because of them.’

Ah. I begin to understand. ‘So your book will be a kind of exposé.’

‘No, no, no,’ he says, waving his hands as if to dispel some evil-smelling smoke. ‘I don’t want to write a takedown. I’m not interested in demonizing an entire industry because of the actions of a minority. I want to get past the stereotypes, discover the humanity inside the corporate machine. I want to show what it’s like to be a modern man. And this is where he lives, not on a fishing trawler, not in a coal mine, not on a ranch in Wyoming. This’ – he gestures once again at the window, and we both turn in our seats to contemplate the reticular expanse of the Centre, the blank façades of the multinationals – ‘is where modern life comes from. The feel of it, the look of it. Everything. What happens inside those buildings defines how we live our lives. Even if we only notice when it goes wrong. The banks are like the heart, the engine room, the world-within-the-world. The stuff that comes out of these places,’ whirling a finger again at the Centre, ‘the credit, the deals, that’s what our reality is made of. So, with that in mind, can you think of a better subject for a book – than you?’

*   *   *

Essentially, he tells me, the process would be a more intensive version of what he has been doing already: following me around, observing at close quarters, focusing, as much as is possible, on my work for the bank.

‘What would I have to do?’

‘You wouldn’t have to do anything,’ Paul says. ‘Just be yourself. Just be.’ He glances at the bill, takes a note from his wallet and lays it on the plate. ‘I don’t expect you to make a decision like this on the spot. To lay yourself out for a perfect stranger – that’s a big thing to ask. I wish I could say that you’d be handsomely rewarded, but right now all I can offer is the dubious honour of providing material for a book that might never get published.’ He cracks a grin. ‘Still, I bet the girls in the office’ll be interested to find out you’re a character in a work of fiction.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Think about it – Heathcliff, Mr Darcy. Captain Ahab, even. Women go nuts for them.’

‘Although those characters are imaginary,’ I say slowly.

‘Exactly. But you’ll be real. Do you see? It’s like you’ll be getting the best of both worlds.’

As if to bear out his words, the beautiful dark-haired waitress flashes me a smile as she glides past.

My head is spinning, and it really is time for me to get back to the office. But there is still one question he has not answered. ‘Why me? There are thirty thousand people working in the IFSC. Why did you choose me?’

‘To be honest, that’s what caught my eye initially,’ he says.

‘That? Oh.’ I realize he’s pointing at my jacket, which I am in the course of slipping back on.

‘The black really stands out, especially with the tie. Most people here seem to go for grey. Must be a French thing, is it?’

Yes, I say, it’s a French thing.

‘Makes you look very literary,’ he says. ‘And when I got closer I could see you had a certain … I don’t know, a sensibility. I got the impression that you were different from the others. That you weren’t just going through the motions. That you were searching for something, maybe. It’s hard to explain.’ He rips a scrap of paper from a little red notebook and scribbles down his number. ‘Look,’ he says. ‘I could be completely wrong, but I think there’s a really important book to be written about this place. And I think you’d be perfect for it. If it doesn’t feel right to you, for whatever reason, I promise I’ll disappear from your life. But can I ask you at least to think about it?’

*   *   *

‘Here he is!’ Jurgen says as I enter the Research Department. ‘We were beginning to think we must send out the search party!’

‘Where d’you disappear to?’ Ish inquires, through a mouthful of paper clips.

‘Nowhere,’ I shrug. ‘I ran into someone and went for a coffee.’

‘Casual Day.’ Jurgen shakes his head. ‘Anything can happen.’

Kimberlee comes in from Reception. ‘Claude, Ryan Colchis called about some numbers on a Ukrainian outfit you were digging up for him.’

‘Okay,’ I say.

‘And Walter’s PA called to say he’s coming in.’

‘There goes your weekend,’ Ish says.

I sit down at my terminal, confront the wall of fresh emails. Already the writer and his strange proposal are beginning to seem distant and unreal, one of those hazy episodes you can’t be sure you didn’t dream. And yet the familiar objects of the office have acquired a curious sheen – appear to resonate somehow, like enchanted furniture in a fairy tale that will dance around the room as soon as you turn your back.

‘Hey, has Claude heard the news?’ Kevin calls from his desk.

‘What news?’ I say, with a curious feeling of – what, synchronicity? As though someone is looking over my shoulder?

‘Blankly’s the new CEO,’ Ish says. ‘Rachael’s office just sent down word.’

‘Blankly got it,’ I say. ‘Well, well.’

‘Things will be changing, Claude,’ Jurgen says. ‘This is the whole new beginning of the Bank of Torabundo story.’

‘Yes,’ I say, and then, ‘I should call Colchis.’

‘Are you feeling better?’ Ish catches my arm. ‘You looked a bit off earlier.’

‘Yes, yes, I just needed some air,’ I tell her, but she is not deterred: she continues to scrutinize me.

‘Are you sure?’ she says. ‘You seem, I dunno, different somehow.’

‘Claude is never different,’ Jurgen says, clapping me on the shoulder. ‘Claude is always the same.’

‘Yeah…’ Ish wrinkles her nose thoughtfully; and I turn my eyes to the screen, as if I have a secret to keep.

 

 

The Pareto principle, also known as the 80–20 rule, is one of the first things you learn in banking: for any given area of life, 80 per cent of the effects come from 20 per cent of the causes. Thus 80 per cent of your profits come from 20 per cent of your clients, 80 per cent of your socializing is with 20 per cent of your friends, 80 per cent of the music you listen to is from 20 per cent of your library, etc. The idea is to minimize the ‘grey zone’ that devours your day, the 80 per cent of your reading, for instance, that yields only 20 per cent of your information.

Walter Corless is very much aware what side of the rule he’s on. He knows he is the wealthiest and most powerful man you have ever met, and as such he demands 100 per cent of your time and attention. A meeting with or even a call from Walter is like some supermassive planet materializing in your little patch of space – blocking the sun, overwhelming your gravitational field, so that you can only watch as the entire structure of your world goes hurtling off to rearrange itself on his. He started off selling turf from the back of a flatbed truck; thirty years later, he is chairman and CEO of one of the biggest construction companies in the British Isles. Even the worldwide slump hasn’t hurt him: while his peers put all their chips into housing, Dublex diversified into transport, logistics and, most profitably, high-security developments – military compounds, fortifications, prisons – which, as unrest sweeps across Europe and Asia, constitute a rare growth area. That a company he named after his daughter now builds enhanced interrogation facilities in Belarus gives a good indication of the man’s attitudes to business and life in general. (That daughter, Lexi, now runs a string of nursing homes known informally as the Glue Factory.)

His driver calls me shortly after six; I go outside to find Walter’s limo parked – in contravention of all of the Centre’s rules – on the plaza in front of Transaction House. Walter is sprawled across the back seat. He stares at me as I squeeze into the fold-down seat opposite him, breathing heavily through his nose. He is a dour, grey-faced man, who looks like he was dug up from the same bog he got his first bags of turf. Newspaper profiles refer to his ‘drive’ and his ‘focus’, but these are euphemisms. What Walter has is the dead-eyed relentlessness of the killer in a horror movie, the kind that lumber after you inexorably, heedless of knives, bullets, flame-throwers. Though his fortune runs into the billions, and he employs a team of accountants in tax havens around the world, he still enjoys calling on his debtors personally, and the pockets of his coat are always full of cheques, bank drafts, rolls of notes in rubber bands. Sometimes he’ll present me with a fistful, with instructions to invest them in this or that. This is not strictly my job, but then Walter doesn’t care what my job is; or rather, as our biggest client, he knows that my job is whatever he says it is.

Tonight he wants to ask my thoughts on a tender. Dublex has been approached by the interior ministry of the Middle Eastern autocracy of Oran to fortify the private compound of the Caliph.

‘They are expecting trouble?’ I ask.

Walter just grunts. He knows, of course; he has specialists in every conceivable field, but he still likes to canvass opinions from as wide a spectrum as possible before making a decision, in order, Ish says, to maximize the number of people he can yell at if something goes wrong. ‘Is there money in this fucker’s pocket, is what I’m asking you,’ he says.

‘It’s one of the biggest oil producers in the region. I imagine his credit is good,’ I say.

Walter scowls. I tell him I’ll look into it, and he signals his approval by changing the subject, launching into a familiar tirade about ‘regulations’.

When we are done, I return to my apartment, where I can finally start investigating the mysterious writer in earnest. Searching online, I discover that the novel he mentioned, For Love of a Clown, is real; an image search confirms, in a picture that shows him shaking hands with a giant papaya at something called the Donard Exotic Fruits and Book Festival, that its author and the man who approached me are one and the same. His Apeiron page has two customer write-ups, both negative: the first compares his clown-themed novel unfavourably to Bimal Banerjee’s The Clowns of Sorrow, and gives it a rating of two snakes and a cactus; the second offers no rating at all, and consists solely of the line ‘On no account should you lend money to this man.’ Beyond that, there is nothing. As far as the wider world is concerned, for the last seven years he might as well not have existed – which is consistent with what he told me about hitting a wall.

I go onto my balcony, try to look out with the eyes of a novelist. My apartment is in the International Financial Services Centre, a stone’s throw from the bank. The city centre lies upriver; if I lean over the rail, I can glimpse the Spire, jutting into the darkness like a radio transmitter from the heart of things, but it’s only on rare evenings, when the wind is blowing in a particular direction, that I hear its broadcasts – the whoops, the screams, the laughter and fights – and even then only faintly, like the revelry of ghosts. Usually, when night has fallen and only a few lights remain, chequering the dark slabs of the buildings, it is easy, looking over the deserted concourse, to believe the world has upped stakes and gone, followed the baton of trade west, leaving me here alone.

Before I came here I knew little about Dublin. I had an idea it was famous for its dead writers; I remembered the name of the river from arguments in school over whether it’s Liffey or Lethe the singer floats down in ‘How to Disappear Completely’. I entertained vague notions about Guinness and authenticity.

It turned out to be very different from what I expected. At university, I had read about the virtual, the simulated world that abuts and interpenetrates our own – ‘real without being actual, present without being there’, in the words of the philosopher François Texier. I didn’t think, after graduating, that I would require the concept again; I certainly never dreamed I’d find myself living in it.

That said, there is some argument as to whether the International Financial Services Centre is truly part of Dublin. It lies only a few minutes’ walk from O’Connell Street, but the locals don’t come here; many of them don’t even seem to know it exists, in spite of the torrents of capital that flow into it every year. It was built twenty years ago as a kind of pacemaker, an ingenious piece of financial and legal technology embedded in Dublin’s thousand-year-old body. A jumble of stumpy glass buildings, it stretches along the river like a pygmy Manhattan, on what used to be docklands. Its main function is to be a kind of legal elsewhere: multinationals send their profits here to avoid tax, banks conduct their more sensitive activities with the guarantee of a blind eye from the authorities. Many of the companies here have billions in assets but no employees; the foyer of Transaction House is crowded with brass nameplates, all leading to a single, permanently empty, office. They call this shadow-banking, and the IFSC is a shadow-place – an alibi that will say you are here when you are not, and cover your presence when you don’t want to be seen.

Could you really set a book in such a place? In a city that is not a city? Filled with people who are paid not to be themselves? He says he wants to find the humanity inside the machine, to track down the particular amid the golden abstractions; he says he can see something different about me, and standing on the balcony I thrill at the thought that I might see it too. But what if he’s wrong? What if he holds up the mirror, and nothing is there?

*   *   *

Jurgen shares none of my reservations. ‘An author?’ he exclaims, when I mention it casually after the Monday meeting. ‘A real-life author? And he wants to put you in his book?’

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘You?’ Kevin the trainee says.

I shrug. ‘It seems that I just … fit the bill, is that the phrase?’ (In fact I know perfectly well it is the phrase.)

‘Do you think he’ll put us in it as well?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I will ask him.’

‘Doesn’t it sound a bit weird?’ Ish is more circumspect. ‘Some bloke following you around, writing down everything you do?’

‘What’s weird is that it hasn’t happened before,’ Kevin says. ‘When you think about it, there ought to be a lot more novelists wanting to write books about banks.’

‘But he’s not planning to slag us off, is he?’ Ish says. ‘You know, say we’re all wankers and fat cats and so on.’

‘He told me it was going to be a balanced account of life in a modern investment bank,’ I tell her. ‘He said he wanted to find our hidden humanity.’

‘It is about time bankers were recognized by the art world,’ Jurgen says. ‘Given that we buy most of the actual art, it is frustrating to be continually misrepresented by it.’

‘So are you going to do it?’ Ish asks.

‘I haven’t decided,’ I say.

‘You have to do it!’ Kevin expostulates. ‘Tell him I’ll do it if you don’t want to.’

‘As your superior, I think you should do it, Claude,’ Jurgen agrees. ‘Though of course the final decision remains with you.’

He adds that, while I am making up my mind, he will ‘get the ball rolling’ by running it by the Chief Operating Officer; before I can protest, he has trundled away. Maybe Rachael will say no; I decide to put it out of my mind until I hear back.

I return to my desk, feel the familiar thrill in my viscera as I sit down in front of the terminal. Here is the market: the whole world represented in figures, a tesseract of pure information. The media like to portray bankers as motivated purely by greed, but this is not quite accurate. There are those who do it for the money, it’s true – who like miners or deep-sea divers bury themselves miles below the surface of things, far from the light and everything they love, in order to return laden down with riches. But there are others who do it for the god’s-eye view; those for whom the map has become the territory, for whom the market’s operations as represented on the screen appear more complex than life itself, deeper and more intricate, bringing their own vertiginous intelligence to the brute facts of the world in the same way that a painting of a landscape magnifies its beauty by placing in a frame of consciousness the thoughtless doings of nature. For these latter sort, the highs of the best drugs are shadows next to the exhilaration they get from the shifting fields of numbers: rice growers in Henan, car manufacturers in Düsseldorf, pharmaceutical research firms in Cork and Montevideo, condensed, compressed, interacting with each other in ways of which they themselves have no conception, like molecules hurtling and dancing and colliding under a microscope.

Ish is an anomaly – not of the god’s-eye-view sort, but not especially interested in money either, other than what she needs to pay for her apartment, which she bought off the plans during the boom at a price she now admits may have been extravagant even for an investment banker.

‘Any word from the Uncanny Valley?’ she asks me now.

‘You are sitting here beside me, you know there is no word.’

‘Oh, right.’ A moment later she pipes up again. ‘Hey, Claude?’

‘If this is again a question about the book, the answer is “I don’t know.”’

‘It’s not about the book, it’s about the movie of the book.’

‘…’

‘Well, if they make a film of it, will I get a say in who plays me? I mean, I don’t want them to pick some old boot?’

The morning drags on with no response from Rachael. Shortly before noon, however, a shadow looms up behind me.

‘Crazy Frog, what the cock are you telling custies about Tarmalat?’

‘I am telling them that Tarmalat is carrying heavy exposure to Greek sovereign debt,’ I reply, ‘and there’s no way they’re going to hit their target.’

‘I’m trying to sell them Tarmalat, you fucking dunce!’ The muscles in his neck, which are extensive, bunch out like the mast lines of a ship at full sail. ‘I’ve got two hundred of the cunts going at twelve and a quarter.’

‘My source says their income’s down nearly 30 per cent on this same period last year. A write-down of Greek debt can cost them a hundred million. Your customers will thank you for sparing them.’

‘That’s not going to get us commission, is it?’ He scowls. ‘Fucking Greek pricks,’ he mutters. ‘Why couldn’t they stick to … what is it Greeks are good at again?’

‘Um, inventing democracy?’ Ish suggests.

‘They’ve been dining out on that one for a long time,’ Howie retorts.

Howie Hogan does not look like a genius. Twenty-five, and hitting the gym hard every day, he still has a childish doughiness to his features, giving him the appearance of one of those overfed, unimaginative rich boys who see the world as a kind of third-rate in-flight movie, to which they will pay attention only until they reach their real destination. This is, in fact, exactly what he is. But he is also BOT’s star trader. Beside mathematical acuity, sharp reflexes and an ability to get people to buy things they don’t want, Howie is gifted with almost total emotional dissociation. Other traders freak out, crack up, crash and burn; Howie’s only reaction, win or lose, is to smirk. I am fairly sure he smirks in his sleep. What is he doing here? He should be in London, at one of the bulge brackets, making ten times what he does at BOT; but some indiscretion in his past – details of which none of us has ever been able to establish – means he must get to the top the hard way.

Having chastised me for undermining sell-side, he would normally have lumbered off by now; instead he’s still hovering. ‘What’s this fucking bullshit I’m hearing?’ he says at last.

‘Close & Coulthard’s merger has been held up by the CMA,’ I say. ‘I IM’d you.’

‘No, about someone writing your autobiography.’

‘Oh, that.’

The smirk flickers. ‘Who the fuck would want to write a book about you?’ Howie says.

‘An author,’ I say expressionlessly.

‘For your information, he thinks Claude would make the perfect Everyman,’ Ish pitches in.

Howie laughs. ‘Everyman!’ he repeats. ‘Who’s that, the world’s most boring superhero?’

‘Isn’t there a harassment hearing you need to be at?’ Ish says.

‘Look out, supervillains! Everyman’s super-spreadsheet has the power to bore you to death!’ Howie struts away, still cackling. ‘Claude in a book! Who said the French have no sense of humour?’

‘Don’t mind him, Claude, he’s just jealous,’ Ish says.

‘Do people say the French have no sense of humour?’ I ask her.

‘Of course not,’ she says, patting my hand.

I return to my work, but this brief conversation has been enough to reawaken my fears. Howie is right. I don’t have a story; I don’t have time to have a story; I have organized my life here precisely in order not to have a story. Why would I want someone following me around, weighing me up, finding me lacking? I take out my wallet, unfurl the scrap of paper on which Paul scrawled his number, but before I can call him and pass on my regrets, Jurgen approaches from the direction of the meeting rooms.

‘Claude! Good news!’ He grins at me with excitement. ‘Rachael has given the okay for your book project.’

‘Oh,’ I say, surprised.

‘You must call your author right away!’ he exhorts me.

‘I will,’ I say.

‘Right away,’ he repeats.

‘Yes,’ I say.

He stands there, waiting. Without even wanting to, I see him as an outsider might: take in his pocket protector, his hideous tie, his strange plasticated hair that never seems to grow any longer. Is he happy? Lonely? Bored? Do any of these terms even apply?

‘First I have a small errand to do,’ I say. I go to the lift and hit the button for the ground floor. As I descend, I turn the decision over in my mind. He’s not writing a book about me, I remind myself. He’s shadowing me for research purposes. I am a highly successful employee at a highly successful bank. There is no reason to fear that he will find my life boring or empty.

The lift doors open. The security guards glance over, then away again almost immediately. Outside, the air is perfectly still. Workers clip back and forth in the windows of the buildings around me, a silent image of productivity. Yet across the river, the grey shell of Royal Irish Bank is populated only by seagulls, and just last week a German bank two floors below us imploded; we watched from above as the erstwhile employees filed out through the double doors – blinking in the light, clinging to cardboard boxes full of mouse mats and ficuses, casting up their eyes at the bright opaque windows as if to a land that was lost to them …

Paul answers on the second ring.

‘It’s me,’ I say. ‘Claude.’

There is a curious echo to the line, as if someone is listening in, and I have the strangest sense he already knows what I am going to say … but the sound of his voice is warm and human, not the voice of a god or an omniscient overseer. ‘How are you, buddy?’

‘I am well, thank you. I’m calling to tell you that my boss has given the green light for your project.’

‘Fantastic!’ His delight sounds genuine, which produces a proportionally opposite effect in me, as I consider the fall for which he is setting himself up.

‘So what exactly do you need me to do now?’ I say.

‘Like I told you, Claude, I don’t need you to do anything. Just be yourself.’

‘All right.’

‘I promise, it won’t be intrusive. You’ll barely notice I’m there.’

‘Very good.’

‘You don’t sound too excited.’

‘No, no, I am,’ I say; but then, impetuously, add, ‘It is not very dramatic, you know.’

‘What’s that?’

‘What we do in the bank, it is quite complex and technical. If you are looking for colourful characters, for exciting things to happen, it may seem rather … I do not know if it will give you what you need.’

Laughter comes back down the line. ‘Don’t you worry about that. I’m the artist, okay? It’s my job to go in there and find the gold, wherever it’s hidden.’

‘You think there will be gold?’ I say.

‘I’m sure of it, Claude. I’m sure of it.’

 

 

To me, of course, it is unquestionably dramatic; to me, to anyone working in banking, the last two years have been like the Fall of Rome, the French Revolution, the South Sea Bubble and the moon landing, all rolled into one.

For half a decade – since, in fact, the previous financial crisis, which at that point represented the greatest destruction of capital in history – the world had been living on borrowed money. Wages went down, but credit was cheap; you were getting paid less, but borrowing the money to replace your car, take a holiday, buy a new house, was easy. The banks themselves were borrowing money at enormous rates, taking it from megabanks in Europe and lending it out again at a nice margin to you with your car, to the entrepreneur with his start-up, to the developer with his housing estate. As for the governments, they were content to let this happen, because everyone was so happy with their cars and holidays and houses; and of course the governments too were borrowing hugely to fund the services that workers’ taxes no longer paid for.

In short, the whole world was massively in debt, but it didn’t seem to matter; then, suddenly, almost overnight, it did. Someone, somewhere, realized that the global boom was in fact a pyramid scheme, a huge inflammable pyramid waiting to catch light. Investors panicked and began to pull their money out of the megabanks; the megabanks desperately began to call in loans from the regional banks, the regional banks called in loans from their customers, the customers called in loans from their trading partners, or tried to, though all of a sudden no one was answering their phones.

The consequences of this cataclysmic freeze-up of credit are still unfolding. Around the world, banks have been falling like ninepins, illustrious financial dynasties blown away like smoke. In the United States, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers are among the major casualties, while in Ireland the high-street banks are still trading only after a government bailout. That bailout, in turn, has triggered a catastrophic series of events: factories shutting down, homes repossessed, mass emigration – nearly four hundred thousand people from a country with a population less than half the size of the Paris metropolitan area. Every day on the news there is another horror story: the pensioner who’s been living on pigeons; the horses whose owners can no longer afford stable fees and have turned them loose to wander the byways, slowly starving to death. Nothing the politicians do seems to help; in Greece, in Spain, in Portugal, in Italy, public fury mounts, and revolution is in the air.

Buy to the sound of cannons, sell to the sound of trumpets, the saying goes. If you have positioned yourself correctly, there is a lot of money to be made.

*   *   *

At 4 a.m. I give up trying to sleep. I have a cup of coffee, then cross over to use the gym in the basement of Transaction House. Two traders on the Smith machines are anticipating how BOT strategy will change with the new CEO in charge – bragging about how much money they will make once they’re ‘off the chain’, how ruthlessly they will ‘fuck’ rivals from other banks.

Upstairs, Thomas ‘Yuan’ McGregor and his Asian Markets team are already at their desks; I take advantage of the early start to read through the headlines, the latest prognostications of doom for Europe. The sun creeps through the window; faces appear in the lobby, still puffy with sleep. Slowly at first, then in a flurry, the day’s small rituals begin: the tray of coffees delivered by the rain-speckled intern; the baffling jokes in the inbox amid endless emails flagged URGENT, HIGH PRIORITY, READ IMMEDIATELY; the collective groan at the sight of the courier with his package of amendments, redos, overnight changes of heart. As 8 a.m. approaches, the tension mounts. Positioning themselves for the market opening, traders call constantly, looking for updates, price-sensitive developments, anything that will give them the edge over the invisible hordes doing exactly the same thing, here and across the water. Soon the entire research floor is speaking intensely into phones, everyone completely oblivious to everyone else, eyes fixed instead on screens or on that empty point in mid-air where so much of life now takes place. It seems you can actually feel the market, straining like a dog on a leash for the moment trading begins.

The first couple of hours pass in a blur; after that, things begin to relax a little. I have arranged to meet Paul at ten. Ish and Jurgen want to come downstairs with me, but I prevail upon them to stay where they are. ‘He wants to see my life as it is every day,’ I say. ‘Everything must be natural.’

‘All right,’ they say reluctantly, and slouch off in the direction of their desks.

Riding down in the lift, I am surprised at how nervous I feel. It’s the same kind of anxiety that used to spring up years ago, as I made my way to a rendezvous with some girl I had fallen in love with, knowing that today was the day I had to make my feelings clear, knowing simultaneously that I wouldn’t do it. And when the lift doors open and I find the foyer empty, the lurch of despair is familiar too.

I check my phone, but there is no word. Has he changed his mind? Was he merely having some fun at my expense? I hover by the doors, pretending I don’t notice the security guards glare at me from their desk. And then I see him, hurrying over the rainy plaza, and just as it did at the appearance of Sylvie or Valou or Aimée or the others, I feel my heart soar.

He smiles at me brittlely, apologizes for being late; he looks almost as nervous as I am. I tell him not to worry, and bring him over to the security desk. There are various forms for him to fill in; then he is told to stand still while the guard photographs him, takes his fingerprints, scans his iris. For a long moment we wait in silence as the guard stares at a screen we cannot see. Then he sighs, and there is a clunking sound, and he reaches down to produce Paul’s pass.

‘Thought that guy was going to ask for a blood sample,’ Paul says as we turn away for the lift.

‘Ha ha, yes,’ I say.

The lift takes a long time to arrive. Finally the doors part, and I press the button for the sixth floor. ‘We are on the sixth floor,’ I say, redundantly.

‘Right,’ Paul says.

We ascend. I search about for some fact or detail that might be useful to him, or at least break the silence.

‘Otis,’ I say.

‘Excuse me?’

‘The lift. It is manufactured by Otis. They are one of the most famous lift producers.’

‘Yes.’

‘That does not necessarily mean they are the best, of course. Still, this particular lift has in my experience always been very reliable.’

‘That’s good to know.’

‘I presume that Otis was the name of the inventor. Though it might have been simply a name he made up … perhaps you know?’

‘No, I can’t say I do.’

‘There is the option of the stairs also,’ I add. ‘But usually I take the lift.’

‘Right,’ he says.

Ah, quel con! I’m half-expecting that when we reach the sixth floor he’ll thank me for my time and ride back down to the ground again. It’s with some relief that I find Ish and Jurgen standing in the lobby, pretending to have an intense conversation about the potted plant by Reception.

‘It’s that fine line between watering it too much and not watering it enough,’ Ish is saying; then a hush falls as we step inside. The two of them stare expectantly at the two of us, and my anxiety gives way to an upsurge of pride.

‘Ish, Jurgen, this is Paul,’ I say to them carelessly. ‘He will be my shadow in the office for the next few weeks. Paul, may I introduce to you my colleague Ish, and Jurgen, the Financial Institutions team leader.’

‘Hello,’ Paul says.

We all smile at each other awkwardly for a minute – then, just as I am about to lead him away, Ish asks Paul quickly, as if she cannot help herself, ‘Are you really a writer?’

‘For my sins,’ Paul says.

‘Wow,’ Ish murmurs.

I roll my eyes at Jurgen, only to see an identical expression of schoolgirlish reverence. ‘A writer!’ he says. ‘It must be so exciting!’

‘Beats working, I suppose,’ Paul says.

‘Ha ha, I hear that!’ Jurgen says. He looks down at his shoes and then adds casually, ‘In fact I am being a little disingenuous, as I know something about being a writer myself, from my work for Florin Affairs, the journal of medieval economics – perhaps you have heard of it?’

Paul makes a show of racking his brains.

‘It is not to be confused with Forint Affairs, which is the journal of the Hungarian currency.’

‘Right,’ Paul says.

‘If I may say so, you have made an excellent choice of subject,’ Jurgen goes on. ‘Bank of Torabundo is one of the most fascinating institutions in all of capital allocation. And Claude is one of its most valued employees.’ He pauses, then turns to Ish. ‘Though all our employees are valued,’ he says.

‘I’m Claude’s best mate in this dump,’ Ish volunteers. ‘Which is funny, because people say that Frogs and Ozzies don’t get on? ’Cos the Frogs are all, you know, Shmuhh-shmuhh-shmuhh, and the Ozzies are all, Wa-hey! But we get on like a house on fire, don’t we, Claude?’

I picture the flames, the screaming. ‘Yes,’ I say.

‘Anyway, if you want to know his secrets, you know who to come to!’

‘Claude’s got secrets?’ Paul eyes me with a half-smile.

‘There’s his drawer of Carambars,’ Ish says. ‘That’s the tip of the iceberg.’

‘We should definitely talk,’ Paul says.

‘I will show Paul the rest of the office,’ I tell them meaningfully.

‘If you’re writing about him, you have to put me in the book too, ha ha!’ Ish calls after us. ‘Only if you do, say I’m a size eight, ha ha!’

I tug him away. Eyes glance over at us with carefully prearranged expressions of indifference as we cross the room; it seems everyone has heard about the visitor. ‘So this is the research floor,’ I tell him, gesturing broadly at the clocks on the walls, the muted televisions, the cubicles crowded with screens, phones, paperwork.

‘Where’re all the guys shouting at each other?’

‘The traders work upstairs, on the seventh floor, but we’re in contact with them all day. Part of our job is to provide them with information on the securities they’re trading in – the key drivers affecting share price, any relevant developments in the sector…’

‘Is that Torabundo?’ Paul points to a print hanging by one of the southerly windows, a verdant square of lush forests and effulgent sunshine. ‘It’s an island, right?’

‘It is basically an extinct volcano in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,’ I say. ‘A big extinct volcano with an extremely benevolent tax climate.’

‘Ever been?’

‘No. The headquarters are registered there, but most of our operations are directed from New York. So, as I was saying, our role here is to study the market on behalf of our traders, and also to advise the clients of the best investment strategy –’

‘Someone’s got some pretty interesting desk ornaments,’ Paul says, eyeing the cornucopia of shells, feathers, figurines and other relics that festoon the cubicle next to mine.

‘Yes, those belong to Ish,’ I say, experiencing simultaneously a flush of gratitude that he finds something in our environment interesting, and a pang of jealousy that it should be Ish. ‘She spent a couple of years travelling around Oceania.’

‘How’d she end up here?’

‘I believe she started at the bank shortly after she split with her fiancé. She will no doubt tell you the story herself.’

‘Came here to forget, eh?’ Paul says, as he examines a shark’s jawbone. ‘Like the French Foreign Legion.’ He turns to me. ‘What about you, Claude? You here to forget too?’

I flinch inwardly, but keep my expression neutral. ‘You can make the argument that we have all come here to forget,’ I say. ‘Although in most cases before anything has actually happened to us.’

‘Nice,’ he murmurs to himself, and taking from his back pocket his little red notebook, he jots down the line.

‘So, if you look at this terminal here,’ I say, pretending I have not noticed, ‘you will see the very latest market information. And this one –’

‘You know what, Claude, I don’t want too much detail, it’ll overload it. Why don’t you just get back to what it is you do. I’ll pick it up by watching you. It’s better that way.’

‘Are you sure?’ I say dubiously.

‘Please,’ he says, with an ushering gesture towards my chair. ‘Just forget I’m here.’

‘Right,’ I say, taking my seat and feeling, foolishly, as if I am an astronaut strapping himself into the cockpit of a rocket. Paul crosses the room and sits in an unoccupied chair; here – from a distance of about twenty feet away – he crosses his legs, lays the pad on his lap, affixes his eyes on me and waits.

‘So I will continue with my morning call-around,’ I turn to tell him. ‘This is when we give our clients the state of play in the market and the movement we are expecting –’

‘Honestly, I’ll pick it up.’

‘Yes, of course. Sorry.’ I summon a deep breath. Just be, I tell myself.

Around me my colleagues are making their own calls, each passing on his own predictions for his own particular specialism – oil, utilities, telecoms. Clients pay tens of thousands for this daily service, but usually we go straight through to voicemail, so I’m taken aback when someone actually picks up.

‘Hello?’ he says.

‘Hello? Ah –’ I have forgotten who I called.

‘Is that Claude?’

‘Ah … oh, hello’ – possibly it’s Jim Chen? ‘Hello, Jim?’

‘Hello,’ he says, not contradicting me. Relief courses through me, until I realize I have also forgotten what I wanted to say. ‘It’s about the market,’ I say. That seems a safe bet.

‘Yes,’ Jim Chen says.

But what about the market? My mind has gone completely blank.

‘Ah, I am just getting some news over the wires, I’ll call you back,’ I say.

‘Okay, whatever,’ Jim Chen says.

I put down the receiver. My shirt is soaked in sweat.

‘Claude,’ a voice calls across the room.

I revolve my head to see the silhouette of Paul against the window.

‘You’re trying too hard,’ he says.

‘I know,’ I say.

‘Stop thinking about it.’

‘This is not so easy as it looks,’ I say.

‘Just pretend I’m not here. In fact, you know what, I’ll go and roam around for a while, give you a chance to get into your stride. Is there a coffee machine around here somewhere?’

I give him directions to the canteen.

‘Do you want anything?’

‘No, thank you,’ I say. Paul passes out of sight. Idiot! I chastise myself. Just be! Just be, can’t you? Yet even when he’s left the room the pressure is almost unbearable. I send an email to Ish and Jurgen, begging them to find time for lunch this afternoon. Then the phone rings. It is Geolyte, one of my clients. The board has called an emergency meeting for this afternoon after hearing rumours of an incipient takeover bid. How robust are its finances? Will it be able to fight off its attackers? For an hour and a half I am continuously on the phone, during which time I quite forget to be. Then, with a start, I remember. I look around hastily; from his chair, Paul nods at me, and toasts me with his paper cup.

*   *   *

Before we know it, it is lunchtime, and Paul and I are back in the lift, going down. ‘Everything is all right?’ I ask. ‘You are not finding it too dull?’

‘Are you joking? It’s perfect.’

We push through the double doors.

‘So many people,’ Paul marvels.

‘Yes, the spectacle can be a little overwhelming,’ I agree. The plaza is a sea of suits and twinsets, identically dressed men and women milling about like the CGI crowd in some blockbusting movie, there to portray the mundane reality that will be shattered when Godzilla’s foot comes down; although as the companies this particular crowd spends its days working for constitute some of the most powerful forces in the world, it’s perhaps closer to the truth to say that we are Godzilla. This seems to me a rather clever thought; I try to think of some way of introducing it into the conversation. ‘Have you seen the film Godzilla?’ I ask.

‘No,’ Paul says.

Of course he hasn’t! He is an artist! Why would he waste his time with such pabulum?

‘Why do you ask?’ he says.

‘The lunchtime crowd here sometimes reminds me of Godzilla,’ I say.

‘Oh,’ Paul says. The red notebook remains in his pocket.

Jurgen, Ish and Kevin are already in the Ark.

‘You come here a lot,’ Paul observes, taking his seat.

‘It’s the only restaurant in the whole Centre you can get freshly prepared organic food,’ Ish says.

‘That’s why it’s usually empty,’ Kevin says. ‘That, and the art.’ He points to the canvas that hangs over our table, an enormous abstract that loosely resembles a crossword puzzle having sex with a pie chart.

‘Simulacrum 12,’ Paul reads from the label underneath. ‘Ariadne Acheiropoietos – wow, what a name. You’d hardly need to actually paint at all with a name like that, it’s like an artwork in itself.’

‘I wouldn’t call that painting anyway,’ Kevin says.

‘Right, and you’d know,’ Ish says.

‘Simulacrum 40,’ Paul reads from the label of the painting at the next table, then leans back to squint at the adjacent alcove. ‘Simulacrum 59 – are they all called Simulacrum? What’s that about?’

‘Obviously the work of someone with mental health issues,’ Kevin says. ‘Probably all the organic food. You can’t eat that much quinoa and stay normal.’

There is a small throat-clearing noise: we look up to see the waitress has materialized at the table.

It’s the same girl who served Paul and me on Friday, dark-haired, olive-skinned, rangy without quite being tall. ‘Ready to order?’

‘I’ll have the quinoa,’ Ish says. ‘And so will he,’ she adds, pointing to Kevin.

When the waitress has gone, Jurgen asks Paul if he is getting good material.

‘I’m still finding my feet,’ Paul says. ‘It’ll take a few days, I suppose.’

‘The world of banking is full of complexity,’ Jurgen agrees. ‘But once you have understood the basics, you will find a story as exciting as any thriller. Look at Bank of Torabundo. Three years ago we were the little minnows. Now we have become the big fish on the block.’

‘I read something about that,’ Paul says. ‘What happened?’

‘A lot of our competitors were badly damaged by the financial crisis. Some collapsed entirely; others, judged too big to be allowed to fail, were given huge government bailouts. But BOT came through it untouched.’

‘How come?’

‘We managed to avoid exposure to toxic investments. Our CEO at the time was deeply suspicious of complex derivatives, and forbade us to take big positions in those markets.’

‘Or property,’ Ish said. ‘He didn’t like the look of the global property market, so that’s another bullet we dodged.’

‘The result, anyway, is that the bank has been, as one might say, “punching above its weight”.’

‘You must be pretty grateful to your CEO,’ Paul says.

‘Yes,’ Jurgen says. ‘Although he has just been fired.’

Paul looks surprised. ‘Fired?’

‘Yes, his conservative stance cost the bank a lot of investors.’

‘Even though he was right?’

‘There is a happy medium,’ Jurgen says.

‘Between right and wrong?’

‘Sir Colin’s a smart guy,’ Kevin says, ‘but definitely on the cautious side.’

‘In some ways he belonged to an earlier era of banking,’ Jurgen concurs. ‘It is true that his sceptical attitude saved BOT from financial catastrophe. But once we had survived, the board felt a more audacious leader was needed in order to press home our advantage. The new chief executive was appointed only a few days ago. His name is Porter Blankly.’

Even speaking his name seems to quicken the atmosphere; our eyes glitter, as if we were sharing some magical secret.

‘Sounds familiar,’ Paul says, frowning.

‘He is quite a celebrated figure,’ Jurgen says. ‘He joined BOT from Danforth Blaue, which you may remember was one of the biggest casualties of the crash.’

‘It needed a fifty-billion rescue package from the US government,’ Kevin chips in eagerly. ‘Then it was bought for a dollar by Takahashi Group.’

‘This is the guy you made your new CEO?’ Paul appears confused. ‘Isn’t that like pulling the captain of the Titanic out of the water and asking him to skipper your catamaran?’

‘He has proved he is a man not afraid to take chances,’ Jurgen says seriously. ‘Sir Colin was very much a traditionalist. He had the classic view of the merchant or investment bank as a go-between, bringing together companies and investors for a fee. But in recent years, many investment banks have begun trading for themselves. That is, instead of just acting in their customers’ interests, they also bet on the market with their own money using complicated financial instruments called derivatives.’

‘A derivative is a contract derived from an underlying asset,’ I explain, seeing Paul’s look of bewilderment. ‘An asset being something you own – your house, your car, and so on. Instead of buying or selling the asset itself, a derivative allows you to do other kinds of deals based on it.

‘For example, one simple kind of derivative is an option. This is a contract that gives me the right, but not the obligation, to buy something from you for an agreed price at an agreed date in the future. I am calculating that when that date comes, the price will be more than our agreed price.’

‘Isn’t that just a bet?’ Paul says uncertainly.

‘If you do it in the bookie’s, it’s a bet,’ Ish says. ‘If you pay some twenty-three-year-old in an Armani suit two hundred grand to go to the window for you, it’s a derivative.’

‘Because there is no limit to how often derivatives can be sold back and forth, the market for them is astronomically bigger than the market for actual things. In fact, no one knows how big it is.’

‘And these derivatives are what your Sir Colin didn’t like the look of?’

‘Exactly. Wall Street banks were using instruments so complex that almost nobody understood how they actually worked. When their bets turned bad, they lost literally trillions of dollars. Sir Colin’s instincts were on that occasion proved right. However, the BOT board…’

‘… wants to give it another shot,’ Paul concludes, with a smile.

‘There is a feeling that things are different this time,’ Jurgen says.

‘Our share price has jumped three points since the news came out about Blankly,’ Kevin says. ‘A lot of people in the office are talking about buying in now. Take out a loan, even; if the price keeps going up at this rate, you’d make it back in a couple of months.’

‘Perhaps it is Fate that has brought you here at this time,’ Jurgen tells Paul. ‘To capture the bank at the moment of its metamorphosis from minor player into unstoppable banking force.’

‘And nobody’s worried about, say, history repeating itself?’ Paul asks.

‘History has already repeated with the last crisis,’ Jurgen says firmly. ‘We do not think there will be any more repeating.’

 

 

After the strangeness of that first day, we quickly find our rhythm. I learn to work unselfconsciously; Paul, for the most part, observes in silence. Often, in fact, he leaves me to my own devices, as he walks around the office, making notes in his pad, occasionally taking pictures with his phone. Whatever fears I had – that I would be required to perform, or emote, or any of the things I came here to avoid – are quickly banished; he is at pains not to intrude on me any more than he has to.

Unfortunately, not everyone is respectful of the artistic process.

‘I have begun reading your book,’ Jurgen says, adding, in case there is any confusion, ‘For Love of a Clown.’

‘Aha,’ Paul says.

‘I am loving the character of Stacy. She is based on somebody you know?’

‘No, I made her up.’

‘Her little nephew Timmy, he is driving her crazy!’ Jurgen laughs. ‘Always he is getting into mischief. Stacy will be glad when her sister comes back from her research trip.’

‘Yeah,’ Paul says.

‘I wonder if she will commit to her promise to bring Timmy to the circus,’ Jurgen says, frowning. ‘Always she is making excuses.’

‘Obviously she is going to bring him to the circus,’ I say scathingly, when Paul is out of earshot. ‘How else are they going to meet the clown?’

‘That is a good point,’ Jurgen concedes.

‘If they didn’t go to the circus, there would be no book! It would end on page fifteen!’

‘Yes,’ Jurgen says, flicking through his copy as though to ascertain that it does, in fact, have words right up to the last page.

Ish is even worse. She gives Paul constant updates on her progress through the novel; sometimes I hear her reading chunks of it back to him. On other occasions, she will relate anecdotes from her life before the bank, cornering him in order to show him the innumerable pictures of her ‘travels’ with Tog, her awful ex-fiancé.

With me he speaks almost exclusively of the bank and its doings – the fees we charge, how much one of my research notes might sell for, the minimum assets a client must have in order to be taken on by BOT, and so on. He says he wants to understand my work completely before looking at any other aspects of my life.

This suits me perfectly well; when you work a hundred hours a week there are few other aspects to see. Even at the weekend, you remain on call; there might be a golf game with a customer, or a VP will dump a client on you at the last minute, needing analysis on a potential buyer for a Sunday board meeting. Occasionally I’ll get a call from someone I knew in La Défense, visiting on business or posted here with one of the big French banks; I will go to a bar with them and listen to them complain about how bad the food is, how hard it is to sleep with Irish girls; I will find myself seeing them through my father’s eyes – their slick hair, their pointed shoes – and wonder if this is what he saw when he looked at me. But in general, investment banking is not an industry that fosters close relationships. Friendship exists here in a purely contingent way, on the basis of a mutual coincidence of wants; even to people you like, it’s best not to reveal anything that might be used against you.

‘It sounds so cynical,’ Paul says.

‘As long as everyone understands those are the rules, it does not cause any issues.’

‘And even of Ish you’d say this?’

‘I’d say it’s something she needs to learn.’

Paul watches me with a kind of veiled amusement, rocking gently in his chair.

‘So what’s the point of it?’ he asks.

‘The point?’

‘Why put yourself through all this? Why starve yourself of a life? Just to make money, is that it?’

‘Howie says that if you have to ask why, then you are in the wrong game.’

‘But what do you say?’

He waits, notebook in his lap. It is dusk: fluorescent lights stud the darkening sky outside like imitation jewels.

‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘It’s just to make money.’

 

 

‘I wonder what he’s like,’ Ish says. ‘You know, what his life is like.’

I don’t reply. A couple of heavyweight Spanish banks, rumoured to be facing significant write-downs on non-performing property loans, are being aggressively targeted by speculators; the effect is rippling outwards to affect the entire sector, unravelling Europe’s latest bid to stabilize itself.

‘I bet he lives in a huge mansion,’ Ish says. ‘With a pool. And a Bentley. And in his garden, he’s got those – you know those bushes, where they’ve shaped them into animals?’

‘Topiary.’

‘Topiary,’ Ish repeats dreamily, as if pronouncing the name of some mythical land. ‘What do you think, Claude? Has he said anything to you?’

‘No.’ I say it in a bored voice, but the truth is that I too yearn to learn more about Paul’s life. He gets to work at eight, he leaves around six; beyond that I know almost nothing. ‘Do you think Billy Budd knew where Melville lived?’ he’ll say if I press him. ‘Do you think Emma Bovary knew what Flaubert did all day?’

‘I suppose not,’ I concede.

‘I want you to act as if I’m not there. The less you know about my life, the easier that’ll be.’

‘Have you got to the part yet where the clown brings Stacy and Timmy backstage at the circus?’ Ish says now.

‘No,’ I say.

‘It’s so beautiful,’ she says. She sits smacking her gum for another minute. Then she gets up. ‘I think I’ll go and ask him how he thought of that scene.’

‘I wish you would stop distracting him.’

‘Who says I’m distracting him?’

‘He is trying to work on his project. And you have a report to finish.’

Ish tiptoes around behind me, then crouches down and whispers into my ear, ‘I think the real problem is that someone’s jealous.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You’re jealous!’ she exclaims, straightening up.

‘Who’s jealous?’ Jurgen says, passing by.

‘Claude’s jealous of me talking to his boyfriend,’ Ish says.

‘Paul is not my boyfriend,’ I say.

‘Look what I have,’ Jurgen says, and takes from his briefcase a hardback copy of For Love of a Clown. ‘A first edition. And it’s signed!’ I open it to the title page, where Paul has crossed out his name and written, ‘For Jurgen … With irie, Paul.’ I look up at him blankly. ‘Irie?’

‘It is a reggae reference,’ Jurgen says. ‘I have been telling Paul about my old reggae band.’

‘I didn’t know you had a band,’ Ish says.

Jurgen nods. ‘Back in Munich. Gerhardt and the Mergers. Mostly German-language covers, but we had original numbers too. We were regarded as being one of the best reggae and rocksteady crews on the Bavarian financial scene.’

‘Were you the singer?’ Ish asks.

‘No, that was Gerhardt. He was at the time the number one risk analyst at Morgan Stanley. Our rhythm section came from the Credit Suisse Syndicated Lending Department. Then there was me, on guitar and mortgage-backed securities.’

Their conversation fades out; I remain entranced by the inscribed page. I have never seen Paul’s handwriting before. It is sprawling, straggly, like briars over a tombstone. Unprompted, an image appears in my head: the author at a cherrywood table, his hand moving across the page, depicting the minutiae of our lives in thickets of ink. For the first time it strikes me: we are being narrated.

Ish snaps her fingers. ‘Let’s bring Paul to Life tonight! That way we can find out more about him, and it’ll give him a chance to see our crazy side!’

I groan and rub my eyes. ‘There is work to do,’ I say. ‘Am I the only person who cares about work?’

‘That’s a great idea,’ Jurgen says. ‘Do you think he’ll come?’

‘Of course he’ll come,’ Ish says. Bending one foot up to her knee, she begins to hop around, arms upstretched to the ceiling tiles and the fluorescent lighting. ‘Sorry, Claude!’ she declaims. ‘But no one person can own Paul! He belongs to everyone!’

‘I will go and ask him now,’ Jurgen says, and he walks away, singing to himself, ‘Mach dir keine Sorgen, über die Dinge…’

‘Like the air!’ Ish hops back towards her desk. ‘Like birdsong! Like sunshine!’

 

 

To my surprise, Paul accepts the invitation. Now the issue becomes making it out of the office. It has been another bad day – a very, very bad day – for Ireland on the markets. The two ailing Spanish banks have caused a panic across the whole continent, with investors scrambling to pull their funds out of any bank felt to be vulnerable – which includes all the major Irish institutions. The worst hit, Royal Irish, lost a million for almost every minute of trading, and every time I put on my coat another frantic client calls, wanting to know if the government will step in to save it. But the Minister has yet to make a statement – in fact, no one seems to know where the Minister even is.

Just after six o’clock, I am summoned upstairs by the Chief Operating Officer; exiting the lift on the seventh floor I walk straight into an enormous Garda. My mind floods with a whole new order of panic. Have we been robbed? Is the building under siege?

The secretary appears in the doorway and motions me impatiently into the corner office.

‘Ah, Claude, there you are.’ Whatever turn of events has brought a policeman into her foyer doesn’t seem to have bothered Rachael. But then, Rachael is imperturbable. No matter the time of day or state of the market, she always looks immaculate – streamlined, frictionless, like a virtual avatar of herself. Her hair is perfectly blonde, her skin perfectly white, her very presence has been buffed to a sheen as smooth as a mirror. People say she slept her way to the top, but it is literally impossible to imagine her having sex with Sir Colin or anyone else; others like to say she has a USB port instead of a vagina, and that her husband uses her to charge his phone, which seems marginally more plausible.

Four men are in her office, crowded uncomfortably on couch and chairs with cups and saucers balanced on their knees. ‘Gentlemen,’ Rachael says, ‘allow me to introduce Claude Martingale, one of our most talented analysts.’

I turn to the seated men and experience one of those cognitive shocks specific to meeting in real life someone long familiar from a screen. For the last two years, ever since the collapse of Lehman Brothers finally ignited the bonfire that was the Irish economy, the Minister for Finance has appeared almost nightly on the TV news, where he has always seemed measured, controlled, on top of the situation. In the couple of seconds it takes him to half-rise and greet me, it is frighteningly clear that this confidence is a veneer no thicker than the film of make-up applied backstage. Up close, unmediated, he seems actually to embody the country’s dire condition. Shadows devour his features, beads of moisture cling morbidly to the grey folds of his skin; his courtly, reasonable bearing is belied by great dark rings around his eyes. I had heard he was unwell: when I lean in to shake his hand I am hit by a stench so deathly I have to fight the instinct to recoil.

Rachael introduces the two men on either side of him as the Secretary General of the Department of Finance, and the Second Secretary at the Department in charge of banking policy. One is fat, one is thin; both wear glasses and the pursed, dismissive miens of civil-service lifers. Nearest the door is a fourth man, small with lugubrious eyes and a sallow complexion reminiscent of yellowing pages. He does not look Irish, but Continental – Portuguese, maybe, or Corsican. Rachael does not tell me his name, and he does not introduce himself; in fact he does not speak at all during the meeting, just remains in his corner, semi-translucent, staring at the Minister with those dolorous, unblinking eyes.

Rachael closes the door and turns to me brightly. ‘The Minister has dropped by to speak to us –’

‘Informally,’ the fat secretary interjects.

‘– to speak to us informally about the current, ah, uncertainty in the Irish banking sector.’ Rachael cannot hide her delight at this coup; she is positively glowing. ‘Minister, Claude has advised several major international investors in relation to Irish banks.’

The Minister opens his mouth into a strange gaping smile and wags it at me, like a grandfather who has had a stroke and is incapable of speaking. Then, as if this effort has caused some internal upset, he hastily brings a handkerchief to his mouth.

‘Claude, perhaps you could explain a little more what it is you do,’ Rachael prompts me.

‘Certainly,’ I reply, and begin to paint a broad picture of my role – namely, to dig through the loan books, deposit books and unexploded assets of distressed or defunct Irish banks, looking for anything ignored or undervalued that an external capital provider might take an interest in.

‘Picking off the good stuff for the vultures,’ the thin secretary translates.

I smile courteously. ‘Even the vultures have to be persuaded to invest in Ireland at the moment.’

He sniffs; it is the fatter secretary who speaks next.

‘Obviously the reason we’re here is Royal Irish,’ he says. ‘We’ve sunk a lot of money into it, quite apart from the guarantee, and at this stage we thought things would be turning around.’

‘They were turning around,’ the thin man corrects him. ‘Up until a couple of days ago. But now because of these bloody Spanish we’ve got investors pulling their money out again, and it’s starting to look like it’ll need another recapitalization.’

‘Obviously there are very good reasons for keeping the bank open,’ the fat man says, slinging a foot across his knee. ‘It’s of systemic importance, obviously. And we want to send the message to our international friends that Ireland’s financial sector is in perfect health and ready to do business. At the same time, we can’t just keep paying and paying.’

‘So I suppose what we want,’ the thin man says airily, ‘is to get a fresh perspective on the situation vis-à-vis Royal Irish. Our advisers tell us core capital ratios have been returning to acceptable levels, and that once it gets over this, as it were, hump, it should be able to return to profitability without further government assistance. We’d like to know, beyond the current situation, where you might see the bank’s position in six months, a year.’

The Minister grins mechanically and works his jaws by way of endorsing this, a blast of fetid air issuing as he does so.

All eyes are now on me, but I am not sure how to proceed. Things have not been turning around at Royal Irish; Royal Irish has been haemorrhaging money for months, first investors’ money, then taxpayers’ money. The general rule in banking is to tell the client what he wants to hear – that way, if you’re wrong, he’s less likely to hold you to blame. But to claim that Royal Irish can keep going for another week, let alone six months, would be like saying Louis XVI is alive and well and will shortly be resuming his kingly duties. It is finished as a going concern; surely they know that?

The men are waiting. I glance over to Rachael. She draws a thoughtful breath: a weirdly synthetic gesture, like a doll opening and shutting its sightless eyes. ‘Maybe you could give us a broad idea of what a return to profitability might look like,’ she says, with a meaningful nod.

I think for a moment, then start talking in vague terms about the volatility of the market, how nobody knows what will happen, how some Irish brands are certainly undervalued. It all depends, I say, on the wider recovery in Europe. If things stabilize, and if Royal genuinely do have capital reserves, and if they pursue a particular strategy, and divest themselves of their toxic assets, then yes, in that scenario they could get back on their feet. Each of those ifs would require a miracle, but the secretaries seem pleased with what they hear. They ask some follow-up questions, using financial jargon that makes no sense; the Minister, meanwhile, gazes down at his lap. He appears to be picking skin from his fingers; it comes away in loose white skeins, which flutter down to the floor. Then he leans over to the thin secretary and gurgles something in his ear.

‘Yes,’ the secretary says, and turns to Rachael. ‘There’s a new man in charge here? This fellow Blankly?’

‘Porter Blankly, that’s correct. He’s based in New York, of course.’ She addresses this to the Minister, who is gazing up at her with a kind of prayerful desperation. ‘But I speak to him almost every day. Porter is – well, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you he’s an inspirational figure. He believes that if you can get the market on your side, anything is possible.’

The secretaries seem pleased with this too. They whisper together a moment. The Minister grins at us, a crunching sound issuing from his mouth along with a fresh gust of fetor – he is eating raw garlic, I realize; he has been peeling skin from a clove he clutches in his left hand.

‘Thank you, Claude,’ Rachael says. Taking my cue, I stand up and shake hands with the visitors again. The Minister has his handkerchief pressed to his mouth again; above it his shell-blue eyes roll wetly at me, as if signalling desperately, There is a man trapped in here!

*   *   *

‘I don’t get it. What did he want you to do?’

It’s Friday night; we are leaving the building at last.

‘Reassure him. Make him feel he has made the right decision to recapitalize Royal Irish. Tell him they can still get back on their feet.’

‘And they can’t?’

‘At this stage Royal Irish doesn’t even have feet.’

‘Just an arsehole,’ Ish grumbles.

‘You mean Miles?’ Paul says. If any one person can be held responsible for Ireland’s current state, it is Royal Irish’s CEO, Miles O’Connor, who made some forty billion euros of loans to property developers that then went bust – although next on the list would be the Minister himself, who has committed the country to paying off all of the money that Royal and the other banks owe. It’s hard to understand. In France, where if someone misses a coffee break there is a national strike, a scandal like this would have shut down the streets. Yet the Irish seem able to absorb any amount of punishment without complaint – like the drunk at the bar you expect any moment to topple off his stool, who instead keeps throwing back shots, his massive inebriation having become a kind of self-perpetuating system, a kind of replacement gravity …

Just as I am thinking this, I hear Ish say, with a note of alarm, ‘Whoa! That guy looks a bit the worse for wear!’

That’s putting it mildly: the gentleman in question, wearing a dark wool suit, has a bloody red socket where his left eye ought to be and a withered claw instead of a hand. We stop and watch as he lurches over the plaza and across the bridge, where he is greeted by five or six other similarly cadaverous figures.

‘Zombies,’ Jurgen says.

The zombies have raised a tent on the riverbank opposite, around which they stagger, gesticulating at the traffic with authentically decomposing hands.

‘What’s this about?’ Paul says.

‘That building there was supposed to be Royal Irish’s new headquarters,’ I tell him, pointing to the concrete shell on the far side of the river. ‘They had just started construction when the crisis hit.’

‘Why the costumes, though?’

‘A zombie is what you call a bank that’s still trading even though it’s insolvent.’ The first revenant has produced a placard that reads DO NOT FEED THE ZOMBIES and is waving it about.

‘They’re saying that if the bank is finished, the government shouldn’t be giving it any more taxpayer money.’

‘But why would they give it more money?’ Paul asks. ‘If it’s dead in the water?’

‘They’re in denial. They still think it can be saved.’

‘Huh,’ Paul says, as one of the zombies’ arms falls off and under the wheels of a truck.

‘The Financial Services Centre brings in a lot of money,’ Ish says. ‘But the reason it does is that all of these international banks and funds and special purpose vehicles and God knows what else can come here and do whatever it is they want to do and they know they’ll be left alone. It’s a bit like a red-light zone, see?’

‘So…’ Paul is not quite making the connection.

‘So if a bank goes bust, it’s like if a hooker dropped dead. Suddenly there’s ambulances coming in, health authorities wanting to do blood tests, news crews demanding to know what’s happened. Even if you, Mr Sex Tourist, aren’t worried about catching whatever it is killed her, still, it’s not feeling so private anymore. So you quietly pack your bag, and the next day you’re off to Luxembourg or Liechtenstein or the British Virgin Islands, or wherever it might be.’

‘You mean the Irish government want to cover it up because it’s bad for business.’

‘Who knows? Maybe they genuinely think Royal Irish is salvageable. Stick a few more billion in there, close your eyes and hope for the best.’

‘It is what in the bank we call “magical thinking”,’ I add. ‘It is more prevalent than you might expect.’

Paul gazes at the cavorting zombies, the great financial memento mori that is the unbuilt bank hanging over the grey river. ‘They’re going to need it,’ he says.

 

 

And here is Life, dark and full of strangers, yelling at each other from their private intoxications like monkeys screeching through the bars of their cage. Music booms all around, prohibiting conversation at anything less than a shout; battalions of drones, haircuts modelled after the heroes of the day, neck their fizzy lagers, their syrupy alcopops, and perform the minimal courting rituals required before they have sex with each other. The bar’s style is classic Celtic Tiger – white armchairs with zebra throws, ubiquitous mirrors, large unseated area, palpable air of incipient violence – like a cross between a hairdresser’s and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Nevertheless, Life is the closest thing the Financial Services Centre has to a local. This is where the real information is exchanged: who’s getting paid what, who’s hiring, who’s on the way up/down/out; tips for good schools, good builders, good mechanics, good tailors, good divorce lawyers.

The name is a pun – Life is Gaelic for Liffey, the river that splits the city into north and south (and, broadly, rich and poor) – and gives rise to many more puns (‘I hate Life’, ‘After a few drinks Life won’t seem so bad’, and so on), which we make instead of finding somewhere less repugnant. On Friday nights, patrons will typically skip dinner in order to start drinking sooner – unthinkable in Paris; get stuck beside Ish and you will first be treated to what seems an unending series of humorous cat videos, then, as the hysterical laughter dies away, find yourself attempting fruitlessly to comfort her as she rehearses yet again the break-up of her relationship, before lurching off into the night with whichever opportunist has bought her last drink.

Tonight the turbulence on the markets has lent an extra edge of mania to the proceedings, as employees of the many banks not currently punching above their weights contemplate the idea that this time next week they may be out of a job, and reach desperately for a lifebelt.

‘Think the brunette there’s taken a shine to you, Kev,’ Gary McCrum, Utilities analyst, says.

Kevin turns to look. The dark-haired girl at the end of the adjoining table glances up and away again. She has delicate hands, eyes with a little too much white in them, a disorientating air of weightlessness, like a dress on a clothes line flapping in the wind.

‘Totally checking you out,’ Dave Davison, Commodities, confirms.

Kevin scrutinizes the brunette dubiously, like a diner in a restaurant examining the lobsters in the tank. ‘Is she hot?’

‘Is she hot? She’s right there in front of you!’

‘I’ve looked at so much porn I can’t tell anymore if IRL women are good-looking or not,’ Kevin confesses. ‘I have to imagine if I saw her on a screen would I click on her.’

‘IRL?’ I ask Dave Davison. ‘This means Ireland? Irish women?’

‘In real life, Grandad – here, Kev, look at her through my phone. See? She’s an eight, easy.’

‘Well, a seven,’ Gary says.

‘Maybe she is more of a seven,’ Dave concedes.

‘Pff, I’m not wasting a drink on a seven,’ Kevin says, and turns his back on the brunette, who dips her eyes woundedly into her lap, then reaffixes herself to her friends’ conversation, throwing her toothy smile about the room betimes like a cracked whip.

‘I used to feel that way about sevens,’ Dave says sadly. ‘Then I got married.’

‘Those two are really hitting it off,’ Jurgen says to me, nodding over to where for the last half an hour Paul and Ish have been deep in conversation.

‘I hope she is not telling him anything too personal,’ I say.

‘Such as her theories about where it all went wrong with Tog?’ Jurgen says.

‘Yes.’

‘Or the time she got diarrhoea in China?’

My eyes widen. ‘You think she’s telling him the Yangtze riverboat story?’

Maybe I should go and check, I decide; but someone is blocking my path. It’s Howie, arriving with Tom Cremins, Brian O’Brien and a couple of other traders, all carrying glasses of single malt whiskey. They crowd in beside us; the girls at the next table swivel their heads towards ours once more, like lovely, money-tropic flowers.

‘Hear you had a little chat with the government today,’ Howie says to me. ‘What’d he tell you? Are they going to recap Royal?’

‘He didn’t say.’

‘He must have said something.’

‘He actually didn’t,’ I say, recalling with a twinge of horror the Minister’s grinning, terrorized aphasia. ‘Anyway, even if I knew, I couldn’t tell you – you know I couldn’t tell you,’ raising my voice as he starts swearing at me, ‘it’d be insider trading.’

‘Crazy Frog, if they locked up everyone in this town who’s insider trading, there’d be no one left on the fucking inside.’ Howie plonks his glass down on the table, making the ice cubes jingle. ‘Someone ought to be making money out of this eurozone shit-show. This whole fucking week has been a disaster on every conceivable level, like getting raped by a guy with a tiny cock.’ The eavesdropping girls flinch, but don’t stop staring; Howie’s attention, however, is already elsewhere. ‘Is that the writer?’ Pushing past me he taps on Paul’s shoulder and asks him the same question. Paul turns with a slightly confused smile. ‘What the fuck are you doing writing a book about this guy?’ Howie demands, gesturing at me.

‘Ah –’ Paul says, looking startled.

‘He’s not a player. He’s a research analyst. It’s like you’ve gone to Silverstone and you’re watching the mechanics. I mean, do what you want,’ Howie sniffs. ‘It just sounds like a boring book, that’s all.’

‘Well, you see, in a way that’s the –’

‘There is crazy shit going down right now,’ Howie interrupts. ‘I mean world-historical craziness. You should be speaking to the traders. Or the hedge funds. If I had a hedge fund, I’d be shorting the shit out of the whole of Europe. And in six months I’d be a billionaire.’

‘You’re talking about the –?’

‘The whole continent’s fucked. The politicians don’t know what to do. All that can save it now is a war.’

‘A war?’ Kevin hiccups.

‘That’s the way it’s heading. France, Italy, Spain are all watching their economies go down the tube, Germany’s there with its arms folded, saying, “Don’t expect anything from us.” There’s all the ingredients for a war, right? And it would stop all the, you know, the bollocks.’

‘War,’ Paul repeats, scribbling in his red notebook.

‘War’s a good thing. What stopped the Great Depression? World War Two. Or look at the Baghdad Bounce. NASDAQ crashes, the economy’s assholed, till the US invades Iraq and the stock market goes up 80 per cent. Capitalism needs war. Besides, war’s what made Europe great. The whole reason their currency’s in the toilet is you’ve got a bunch of bureaucrats in charge, trying to pretend the last thousand years of history never happened. Acting like Europe’s all just one big happy family, singing and holding hands like a bunch of fucking Smurfs. And they wonder why everyone’s lining up to short them! Would you invest in a Smurf economy?’

‘I wouldn’t,’ Kevin says.

‘No way,’ Howie says, but his eyes are suddenly vacant and he peers back and forth as if he can’t remember what he’s doing here.

At that moment, Tom Cremins pulls his sleeve. ‘We’re going,’ he says.

‘Yeah,’ Howie says, and drains his glass. He turns to Paul once more. ‘When you get tired talking to this joker, come and see me,’ he says. ‘I’ll show you stuff that’ll have you haemorrhaging from every orifice.’

With that, he and the traders bounce off, their conversation a blizzard of acronyms and stomach-turning sexual references, like a Scrabble game at a gang bang.

‘Interesting guy,’ Paul says thoughtfully. I watch him watch Howie barge his way through the drunken, suited bodies, feeling the same pang I might have at a school dance, seeing the girl I adored bloom at the attentions of some handsome delinquent. Then, as if he senses my unhappiness, Paul turns to me, and with an enthusiasm that strikes me as false says, ‘But then, you’re all interesting! I just had a great conversation with your friend here. Did you know she studied anthropology? I thought you bankers were all rocket scientists.’

‘That’s just the traders,’ I say. ‘My background is philosophy – François Texier, do you know him?’

Paul shakes his head.

‘In fact he might be a useful person to think about for your book,’ I say. ‘He had many fascinating ideas about simulacra, and the derealization of modern life.’

‘Derealization?’ Paul repeats, with a half-smile.

‘Yes. He was interested in a Buddhist concept called sunyata, or voidness. According to this sunyata, reality as we perceive it is an illusion. We see the world as divided up into objects – this glass, this table, this person. But in fact, these are merely snapshots of processes that are in a constant state of change, all parts of a great intermingling flux.’

‘That does sound pretty derealizing,’ Paul admits.

‘Actually, the derealizing comes as an attempt to cover over this notion of flux,’ I say, excited to feel these thoughts coming to life in my mind again. ‘To a culture centred on the individual, the idea that we are all just transitory surface effects on some great sea of emptiness has not been popular. Texier’s argument is that most of Western civilization has been an attempt to build over the void with huge, static systems of thought, religious, economic, scientific, that divide everything into facts, each with its own specific place. We call it analysis, but really it is escape. Or as he puts it, “We write the encyclopedia to explain the world, and then we leave the world to live in the encyclopedia.” The simulacrum is a kind of a derivative of these –’

‘Oi! What’s going on here?’ Ish arrives with a tray of drinks. ‘You know the rules, Claude. Friday night – no Frenchness!’

‘I’m just explaining that we have all come to banking from different disciplines,’ I say.

‘Kevin here was halfway through a medical degree,’ Ish says. ‘Imagine, he could actually have been useful to somebody.’

‘Doctors don’t make shit these days,’ Kevin says.

‘It used to be the smartest people didn’t always want to be the richest people,’ Paul says.

‘Maybe the smartest people got smarter,’ Kevin returns.

‘I’m not going to spend the rest of my life at it,’ Ish says. ‘I’ve still got a box of my old clothes at home. As soon as I get my next bonus, I’m going to chuck my whole wardrobe of daggy work shit straight into a skip and fuck off to the Pacific. It’ll be like Corporate Ish never existed.’

‘What about your apartment?’ I say.

‘Oh yeah.’ Her face falls. Turning to Kevin she says, ‘Here, want to buy an apartment? It’s got a bidet.’

‘Property’s finished,’ Kevin says. ‘I’m putting all my money into global pandemics.’

As midnight approaches, I see Paul put on his coat.

‘The end of your first week,’ I say. ‘It is all going well?’

‘Sure,’ he says – but I detect a hesitation.

‘Only…?’

‘It’s nothing,’ he reassures me. ‘I’m just trying to figure out how it all hangs together.’

‘If you have questions, maybe I can help.’

At first he blusters nothings, then he pauses, looks at me, as if deciding whether to take me into his confidence: ‘I feel like I’m missing something,’ he says. ‘I’ve got the characters, what you do, the rhythm of the day. But I still – I feel like I’m not getting to the heart of things, you know?’ I must look very worried, because he claps me on the shoulder. ‘It’ll come. Maybe I just need to change my focus a little bit.’

‘We will see you on Monday?’ I say.

‘Of course.’ He grins. ‘Have a good weekend. You’re off-camera! Let your hair down.’

Not long after, the lights come up; Life begins to empty, its pinchbeck promises having slipped away, as always, through the cracks of the night.

We gather our things and make our way outside. I am deep in thought: what Paul said about missing something bothers me, and as if picking up on that, Jurgen says, ‘So he has told you what’s going to happen?’

‘Happen?’

‘In the book.’

‘We know what is going to happen in the book,’ I say. ‘It is about me, a modern Everyman, experiencing a typical day.’

‘Yes, but there will be some kind of story also?’

‘That is the story,’ I say.

‘That is the story?’

‘Yes.’

‘You, sitting at your computer, writing research notes about banks.’

‘That’s right.’

Jurgen says nothing to this.

‘It’s not supposed to be one of those books where things happen,’ I explain. ‘It’s about discovering the humanity in ordinary lives.’

‘Oh,’ Jurgen says.

There is another silence.

‘It’s not going to be boring,’ I say.

‘Of course not,’ he says.

Around us the Centre looms, darkened and empty like a Perspex necropolis. I think again of Paul’s parting words, and anxiety quickens in my sinews once more. ‘Did he say anything to you?’ I turn to Ish. ‘What were you talking to him about for so long?’

‘He was asking about the Torabundo archipelago. I travelled around there a bit with Tog back in the day. She pauses, then says, ‘I reckon he’s got something planned for you.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like … I don’t know … maybe you fall in love.’

‘I’m not going to fall in love,’ I say categorically.

‘In a book this is exactly the kind of thing the main character will say right before he falls in love,’ Jurgen says.

‘Yeah,’ says Ish. ‘Plus, you’re French. You lot practically invented love. French kissing. French letters. It’s the whole French thing.’

‘How would you feel if I said the “whole Australian thing” was kangaroos and tinnies and daytime soap operas?’

‘That is the whole Australian thing, Claude. Why do you think I left?’

‘Yes, well, then you will understand that not everyone fits into the national stereotype.’

‘I certainly do not think that when people speak of the “typical German”,’ Jurgen chuckles, ‘they are imagining a crazy man who loves reggae music, and writes articles about medieval economics while listening to reggae music on his computer!’

‘My point is that adventures, escapades, dramatic reversals, falling in love – these are the hackneyed tropes that Paul’s trying to get away from,’ I tell Ish, though I am perhaps trying to persuade myself as much as her. ‘He wants to depict modernity as it genuinely is.’

‘Love’s not hackneyed,’ Ish says obstinately.

‘What does love have to do with this place?’ I throw my arms up at our surroundings, great glass panopticons surveying all the other panopticons. ‘I am serious, what does love have to do with anything we do all day long?’

‘Well, that’s what he’d better work out,’ Ish says. ‘If he wants anyone to read his book.’

‘There are plenty of good stories without love.’

‘Like what?’

I think for a moment. ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.’

We have emerged onto the quay. Over the river, beneath the concrete skull of the unfinished headquarters, the zombies sleep in silence.

‘Just because you don’t have it doesn’t mean you don’t need it,’ Ish says, staring into the dark water. ‘Every story needs love. Even at the bottom of the sea.’

 

Over the weekend, Forbes publishes a long article about our new chief executive, Porter Blankly. The accompanying photographs show a man in his sixties, with the craggy, portentous good looks of the star of a Hollywood Bible epic, and white hair in a sculpted wave, like a roll of ice cream caught mid-scoop. In every picture he is shaking hands with someone, as if that’s all he does for a living; anyone in the industry will know that each of those handshakes represents a game-changing new synergy, a market stampede, and a multimillion-dollar windfall for his shareholders. The piece is titled Blank to the future, and it runs as follows:

Four years ago this summer, Porter Blankly achieved a dream he had cherished since childhood: He became a billionaire. Subprime mortgages were booming, and Danforth Blaue, a bank once perceived as a starchy also-ran, was thanks to his leadership right at the heart of the action. The day stock options took his wealth on paper to the magical ten figures, Blankly celebrated with a quiet dinner at home with his wife and legal team. Then he bought eight stories of the Empire State Building.

Porter Blankly has always dreamed big. Hailing from a hardscrabble town of blue-collar laborers, many of them employed on his father’s private railroad, he was spotted as a teenager by a scout for Harvard’s varsity golf team. He dropped out of ‘Old Crimson’ after only a year to play full-time, and although a shoulder injury cut short his professional career, his experiences on the courses of the 1960s were formative. This was a time of ferment in the Massachusetts golf scene. Ideas and books by the young firebrands of the new conservative movement were being passed around – as well as other material. ‘[US Ryder Cup team captain Don] Hartford turned up one day with a sheet of blotter acid,’ Blankly recalled later, ‘and everything changed. The fairways were rainbows, the holes were mouths, speaking to you. You’ve heard about crazy golf – at that time all golf was crazy. People were showing up in sunglasses, without ties … everything was being questioned.’

The potent cocktail of fiscal conservatism and perception-altering drugs would shape an entire generation. Many of the figures Blankly encountered at that time went on to become key figures in politics, banking, and in the nascent world of computing, into which they carried the revolutionary concept they had learned on the fairways – that reality was plastic and could be molded as they saw fit.

Though he never completed his degree and had no training in finance, arriving in Wall Street Blankly found his +2 handicap much in demand. He was taken under the wing of the legendary Walter Wriston of Citibank, and, as he quickly came to dominate in interbank and pro-am tournaments, effectively given an open brief. At the time the major banks were plowing money into Latin American dictatorships, but Blankly, never one to follow the crowd, instead staked his money on a then little-known warlord in the Middle East. The bet paid off: While Wall Street lost a fortune when their dictators were deposed, Ahmed bin-Ahmed, as he was then known, went on to become the Caliph of the oil-rich state of Oran, and today remains one of Blankly’s biggest financial backers and closest personal friends.

Tragedy was to strike at the end of the 1970s, when his wife of only six months, heiress Cressida Heinz-Boeing, committed suicide, but Blankly bounced back, taking a position at Drexel Burnham as the junk bond boom began. This was the age of the so-called ‘Masters of the Universe,’ when traders made millions from peddling mountains of practically worthless bonds; Blankly soon became famous for his aggressive acquisitions strategy and his colorful private life, dating a string of models, and being photographed in New York’s hottest nightspots.

Yet behind the scenes, he was under considerable pressure. The collapse of the junk bond market following the indictment of his boss and close personal friend Michael Milken left him with personal losses of over ten million dollars. A greater loss was soon to follow with the suicide of his second wife, Caspian Dupont. Reeling from this double blow, Blankly spent some time in the financial wilderness. According to friends, he thought seriously about leaving banking and beginning a new career, possibly in restoring old boats. However, the dearth of professional-level golfers in the major houses soon had Wall Street beating a path to his door. He returned to Citi in the early 1990s, where he remained a divisive figure – beloved among employees for his inspirational memos, but attracting controversy for his refusal to indulge what he called the ‘mania’ of that time for political correctness. He drew fire for remarking to a reporter that, with regard to Wall Street management structure, ‘women on top [was his] least favorite position’; less than a week later, he found himself in hot water again after accusing African-American golfer Tiger Woods of stealing his wallet at a fundraising event.

This was a challenging time for Blankly, one which in later years he would refer to as ‘the toughest hole.’ His venture capital firm, Tourniquet, which had invested over a billion dollars in websites aimed directly at dogs, cats, and other pets, was wiped out by the Internet crash, while on the home front his third wife, Fanfarla Pinochet, survived only ‘by a miracle’ after accidentally dropping a toaster into her bath (the couple divorced later that year).

But he was to bounce back with the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Now with hedge fund Elite Capital Partnership, Blankly is widely believed to have put in a huge order for gold in the seconds after the first plane hit. By the time the second tower fell two hours later, the price of gold had already risen almost 20%. In the chaos that followed, this single transaction is believed to have resulted in almost unthinkable profits for a small number of investors, including Blankly’s long-time friend the Caliph of Oran; although no records of the trade exist, Blankly was very soon headhunted by Danforth Blaue, where he became the most highly remunerated CEO in the world. Within a year he was delivering record profits through heavy investment in subprime mortgages. He featured on the cover of Fortune, and in the accompanying interview told the reporter that ‘we are in a new paradigm of growth now that cannot be stopped.’

This paradigm did stop shortly afterwards, however, and with the collapse of the subprime housing market, the subsequent ‘credit crunch,’ and worldwide losses of trillions of dollars, Danforth Blaue was saved from annihilation only by a last-second government bailout. Public anger toward industry chiefs like Blankly, who throughout his career had criticized politicians for any attempts to regulate Wall Street’s activities, was exacerbated by the discovery that Danforth had in fact been betting heavily against the toxic subprime assets they sold their clients. It then emerged that billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money handed over to rescue the firm had been used not only to pay huge bonuses to the failed bank’s executives, but also for a Hawaiian-themed ‘rescue party,’ which featured a live performance from rapper Fugly B of his 2008 hit ‘Bag It and $plit (F*** you B*****s)’ as well as a swimming pool filled with banknotes. Worse, not long after the bailout a lifesize bronze statue of himself that Blankly was having delivered by crane to his office was dropped onto a bus of special-needs students visiting Wall Street for the day. While none was injured, Blankly’s job was felt to be untenable and he stepped down, with a further ‘leaving bonus’ of $33 million and a replacement bronze statue.

Though Blankly had been pilloried by some for ‘turning reality into a fruit machine’ via complex financial instruments of which he himself had little understanding (cf. the leak of his highly embarrassing memo re ‘hoosits’ and ‘whatsits’ for collateralized debt obligations and synthetic collateralized debt obligations respectively), others took a more nuanced view. Following his departure from Danforth, Blankly – still a ‘scratch’ golfer with famously soft hands – was approached with several different job offers, including Special Advisor to the Treasury, Chair of Professional Ethics at Harvard University, and President of the World Bank. It is no surprise, however, that the man who once said he had ‘capital allocation in his blood’ opted in the end to return to investment banking. Previously helmed by Sir Colin Shred, best known for his outspoken views on the Windsor knot, Bank of Torabundo emerged from the crisis punching above its weight and hungry for fresh ideas on loan portfolio management. A statement to shareholders said that Blankly’s brief was to radicalize the bank’s MO and leverage its sound financial fundamentals into market share. Potential joint ventures or other strategic combinations have not been ruled out, though Blankly has refused to comment on rumors that the bank will begin trading on its own account, or that he is seeking to set up a hedge fund within the firm itself.

About his own role in a financial collapse which in the US alone has cost more than the New Deal, the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the 1980s Savings and Loan Crisis, the invasion of Iraq, and the total cost of NASA including the moon landings, all added together and adjusted for inflation, Blankly is unrepentant. ‘We were wrong about a lot of things. But don’t forget about all we got right. We helped people to borrow more money than anyone ever thought possible, and with that borrowed money, they went out and bought their dreams. Yes, they fell far, but only because they had soared so high – higher than the human race had ever gone before, high enough, almost, to touch the face of God.’

‘One thing’s for certain,’ Jurgen says, putting down the magazine. ‘The days of thinking inside the box are over.’

‘He sounds like a nutter,’ Ish says.

‘They are not paying him to be sane,’ Jurgen says. ‘They are paying him to innovate solutions and then monetize them.’

‘He sounds like my Uncle Nick,’ Ish says.

‘Excuse me,’ Jurgen says. ‘But having heard several stories about your Uncle Nick, I am satisfied that he and Porter Blankly bear no resemblance to each other.’

‘Have I told you about the time he bought the bag of ferrets?’ Ish says.

‘Doesn’t sound like he’s a big fan of lady bosses,’ Jocelyn Lockhart says. ‘Bet Rachael’s shitting it.’

‘You’d better watch your back too, Ish,’ Gary McCrum advises.

‘I wonder if he’ll send us an inspirational memo,’ Kevin says. ‘It’s so exciting!’

Paul hasn’t arrived yet, but I set the Blankly article aside for him. That’s not the only thing awaiting his attention this Monday morning. Jurgen plays a song for us on his phone, which he tells us he recorded with his old reggae band, Gerhardt and the Mergers.

‘As the lyrics are in German, I will give you a synopsis. The song is called “Banking Babylon”. It tells the story of a Rastafarian who comes to the big city in order to look for a loan. However, the bank manager, who is white, turns down his application.’

‘Why?’ Ish says. ‘He’s a racist?’

‘At first it appears a straightforward case of racism. However, as the song goes on, we discover there is more to it than meets the eye. The bank manager has legitimate concerns about the Rastafarian’s ability to repay the loan. Specifically, he believes the Rasta wants to use the money to buy “ganja”, and not as start-up capital for a small business as he is claiming on his application form. So you see, it is overturning your preconceived notions.’

Ish and I agree that this is a very unusual angle.

‘That was the unique selling point of our band, the Mergers,’ Jurgen says. ‘As four white men working in highly paid private-sector jobs, we were able to give both sides of the story. This is evident in the very title of the song. In Rastafarianism, “Babylon”, which according to the Bible has enslaved the Jews for many centuries, is regarded as the site of all evil. But in fact, ancient Babylonian society was highly sophisticated. Indeed, with the Hammurabi Code, the Babylonians could be regarded as the forefathers of modern banking. That is something few reggae songs give credit for.’

Ish, for her part, has brought in some anthropological material about the island of Torabundo. ‘Turns out to be pretty interesting,’ she says. ‘So, the Polynesians have been there for thousands of years, just minding their own business, canoeing back and forth between the other islands in the archipelago. Then, in the seventeenth century, the British arrive and start raiding the islands and carrying people off to use as slaves. The building that eventually became Bank of Torabundo, that was the headquarters of the whole operation.’

‘It was quite common for empires to station their slave trade in the New World,’ Jurgen says. ‘As it was no longer tolerated in Europe. It became a sort of offshore industry.’

‘Could be pretty good for the book, though, eh?’ Ish says. ‘Like this big fancy bank’s origins are sending slaves off to dig up pigeon shit.’

‘Scratch beneath the surface of any great power and you will find slavery,’ Jurgen says equanimously. ‘The Romans. Alexander the Great. This very city, in Viking times, was the biggest slave market in Europe. In fact, Irish slave girls became units of currency for a time.’

‘They used girls as money?’ Ish says, horrified.

‘Ireland did not have any precious materials – gold, silver – for export,’ Jurgen says. ‘So for international trade they used slave girls, or cumals. I believe one cumal was worth approximately three cows.’

‘That explains a lot about Irish men,’ Ish says, looking darkly at Jocelyn Lockhart, who’s taking a call on the other side of the cubicle. ‘A lot.’

‘My point is that slavery has always been a part of the business world,’ Jurgen says. ‘But what is to be gained by dwelling on the past, or unpleasant aspects of the present? Most people would prefer to think about happy, upbeat things that reflect our twenty-first-century outlook, such as smartphones, or casual sex with attractive strangers.’

‘Yes, but Paul wants to show what’s beneath all that,’ Ish says. ‘Such as slaves.’

Jurgen taps his pen against his teeth. ‘Hmm, I do not think it will be necessary to bring this particular detail to Paul’s attention.’

Ish squints at him. ‘You’re not censoring me?’

‘Of course not. I am simply advising you, as your superior, that this is not the kind of information the average Joe Bloggs reader is interested in. I know, because I have asked myself, as the average reader, if I am interested in reading about the bank’s origins in slavery, and the answer I have come back with is a resounding “No”.’ He issues a decalorized smile. ‘Now, time to work. Claude, please review this report for Mellon. The statistical information seems underdeveloped.’

He tosses a heavy folder onto my desk. I wait till he’s gone, then hand it to Ish, who hands it to Kevin. ‘Put in more pictures,’ she tells him.

*   *   *

Seven o’clock becomes eight becomes nine, with no sign of Paul. I try to work, but find it hard to concentrate; in fact, I have been fretting all weekend. What did he mean when he said he wasn’t getting to the heart of things? The bank’s whole purpose is to get away from the heart of things – to turn things into numbers, then those numbers into imaginary things, then to divide up the imaginary things into pieces to be bought or sold, swapped or hedged, back and forth, again and again, until the underlying reality they emerged from is entirely forgotten. He knows that; it’s what drew him to the subject in the first place. So what’s the real issue? If he thinks something’s missing – does he mean me?

His eventual appearance, shortly before eleven, does nothing to reassure me. He is pale, tired, preoccupied; I give him the Forbes article, but he puts it aside with barely a glance.

‘Something is bothering you.’ There is no sense ignoring it.

‘It’s just a little more complicated than I expected,’ he says. His smile, meant to put me at ease, only flags his own frustration. What can I do? I offer to make him a flow chart showing the different departments and their various tasks; I ask if he wants to go over the analysts’ assessment methods again, price/earnings ratios, free cash flow, and so on. No, no, he shakes his head, it’s not that.

‘So what is it?’ I ask, with my heart in my mouth.

‘It’s the money,’ he says at last.

‘The money?’

‘If it’s a book about banking, ultimately it has to be about money, right? But I don’t…’ he trails off, knits his brows. ‘I don’t see anything. You do all these deals, you get paid all these fees, and it’s all just…’ He makes a poof! gesture with his hands.

‘Ah,’ I say. ‘Maybe you need to visit the back office.’

‘Back office?’

‘The administrative part of the bank. It’s where they do the paperwork, record into the system all of the trades, underwritings, bond issues, and so on, put the actual money into the accounts.’

This seems to awaken his interest. ‘How come I haven’t heard of it till now?’

‘There is a Chinese wall between it and the rest of the bank.’ Seeing his blank look, I clarify: ‘That just means that access is barred to us. In case someone is tempted to sneak in during the night and change the records, cover up a bad trade or losing ticket, even re-route funds into an unauthorized account.’

‘Right, right,’ Paul says, frowning again and opening his red notebook to jot this down. ‘So you can’t go in there?’

‘From our side, no. The doors are locked. But I’m sure you can get clearance, if you are looking around only for your book.’

He asks me if I will make the arrangements. This turns out to be difficult, and not just for reasons of security. There is a strict hierarchy to investment banking, of which back office lies at the very bottom, below even lawyers. Suspecting, accurately, that the analysts and traders look down on them (just as the M&A bankers look down on us), back office are notoriously unsympathetic to requests for help. My banking career started in the back office, however, and this gives me a certain amount of currency among them. Eventually, Paul gets his tour.

When he returns, however, his mood seems even worse. He takes out his notebook and sits by the window, but he writes nothing, instead just stares balefully out over the river. Then, though it’s not even 4 p.m., he gets up and leaves. He doesn’t say goodbye.

 

 

That evening, the Minister gives a press conference to announce further exceptional liquidity assistance, that is to say, money, for Royal Irish Bank. On the TV screen, he has regained his air of command, though he grips the lectern with both hands, as if anticipating the torrent of fury that will come back at him; sitting on the dais behind him I spot the little sallow man, staring at the Minister as before, like some horror-movie psychic demonstrating mind control.

‘I don’t get it,’ Kevin says.

‘You’re not the only one.’ Since the news came out, the zombies have been beating a drum by the unfinished HQ, with motorists honking their horns in solidarity.

Not long after the announcement, we discover the reason for the Minister’s clandestine visit the previous week. He has commissioned BOT to write a special report on Royal Irish Bank.

‘Essentially, they are worried that more recapitalization will be needed,’ Jurgen says. ‘A lot of taxpayers’ money has been put into the bank. Now they are getting nervous that the bank’s executives have misrepresented its return to health.’

‘Fucking right,’ Ish says. ‘Talk about make-up on a corpse.’

‘They don’t have advisers already?’ I ask.

‘Up until last week they were being advised by Gerson Clay,’ Jurgen says. ‘However, as you are aware, Gerson have gone bust.’ He pauses to allow himself a brief moment of gloating. ‘I need hardly tell you that this is a highly prestigious commission.’

‘Good job, Claude!’ Ish ruffles my hair.

‘Is it going to be a lot of work?’ Kevin says.

‘Most of the work’ll be deciding how much we can get away with charging them,’ Ish says. ‘Poor old Minister, he hasn’t got a clue. If we told him to buy a really big mattress and stuff all the country’s money in it, he’d go and do it.’

‘We will not be advising the government to put the country’s money in a mattress,’ Jurgen says. ‘Rachael is keen that we find a positive angle. A way forward which will produce the most favourable outcomes for the major players.’

News of the government commission, as well as our rival Gerson Clay’s demise, buoys the whole office. I have my own reasons to be glad. Royal Irish was the centre of the great Ponzi scheme that was Ireland’s property market, with one hand doling out money to the developers who built the apartments, housing estates and mansions, and the other doling it out to the people who wanted to live there, neglecting, at every point, to establish whether anyone was in a position to pay it back. This report, directed right into the heart of the national folly, will surely give Paul what he needs to root his novel.

When the writer arrives at the office next morning, however, he is not alone. A man is with him: a great, hulking creature almost seven foot tall, with a sloping forehead and brawny, knotted forearms that extend from an ill-fitting nylon shirt. Paul introduces him as Igor Struma, poet, professor of contemporary art and member of the celebrated Vladivostok Circle.

‘He’s going to be helping me with some of the more conceptual stuff,’ Paul explains. What exactly this means I am not sure, but for the rest of the day, instead of observing me and my colleagues, the two of them spend their time muttering in secluded corners, or slinking around the office, making inscrutable gestures – knocking on walls, poking at ceiling tiles, tracing with their fingers mysterious vectors from the floor, behind computers, up to the power supply.

I have a bad feeling about this Igor. One cannot say what a poet ought to look like, of course, any more than one can say what a murderer ought to look like – but he definitely looks more like a murderer than a poet. He smells bad in several different ways at once, like curdled milk in a public lavatory, and when I type his name into the search engine, a red VIRUS WARNING!!! sign flashes up immediately on the screen, and a moment later a member of the IT team bursts into the office, demanding to know what I’ve done.

The others do not seem to share my reservations. Jurgen, on the contrary, is positively ecstatic. ‘Two famous writers! We have almost enough to start the salon!’

‘But what is he doing here? Has anyone checked his credentials?’

‘Paul asked him to help out with the book,’ Ish says. ‘You said yourself he was having a few problems. This is a good sign. You don’t want him to pull the plug on the whole thing, do you?’

‘Of course not. I am just confused. If Paul is writing a book about me and my work here, why is he spending all his time with some poet?’

‘This is the artistic process,’ Jurgen says, with a shrug. ‘Who are we to question it?’

I do not want to obstruct the artistic process, but when I see Igor, under Paul’s supervision, making a gun-shape with his thumb and finger and boring an imaginary hole into the wall, it is hard not to think the novel is being dismantled before my very eyes.

Later that day, Paul invites me to the Ark for lunch, with his helpmeet nowhere to be seen. ‘I thought I should fill you in a little on Igor’s role,’ he says, as the waitress guides us to a table. ‘You’re probably wondering what he’s doing here. I’m writing the book, you’re the subject, what am I doing bringing a third party into it?’

I make a stock gesture of innocence, as if the thought had never crossed my mind.

‘The fact is that while the romantic image is of the writer working away in solitude, it’s often much more of a collaborative activity. Every writer has his strengths and weaknesses. It’s quite common to draft in a colleague to help out with elements you’re less sure about.’

I have heard about such practices in other art forms, but I confess that I had not encountered it in literature before.

‘It’s kind of a trade secret,’ Paul says.

‘Can you give me an example?’

‘An example … well, I suppose the most famous partnership would be J. R. R. Tolkien and Ian Fleming.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh yes. When Tolkien was putting Lord of the Rings together he was great at working out, you know, the ancestral backgrounds of the elves and so forth, but in terms of plot, he was hopeless. So he brought in someone who did know about plot: his old friend Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond. The whole magic-ring thing was Fleming’s idea. In the original version Tolkien was just going to have the hobbits and the elves reciting poems to each other.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ I say.

‘Similarly Tolstoy, when he was writing War and Peace, found the Peace parts no problem, but he really got stuck when it came to War. So he got in touch with an up-and-coming young naval officer called Winston Churchill.’

‘Winston Churchill co-wrote War and Peace?’

‘Just little bits here and there. Details. Like I say, writers generally prefer not to talk about it.’

‘And what is Igor’s specialism?’

‘Places. He’s a master. Big places, small places, indoors, outdoors. He can do mountain ranges and lakes; he could write a paragraph about a broom cupboard that would have you bawling your eyes out. I suppose you could say he has an intuitive grasp of structure.’

‘Which you feel has evaded you in the bank,’ I say.

‘Exactly. It’s an unfamiliar environment – to be frank, not one that readily yields up its inner poetry.’

‘That’s true,’ I concede.

‘So I thought, okay, time to call in the expert. Given that I have this incredible access – which I am so, so grateful for – I might as well take advantage of it. So Igor’s going to be concentrating on the location details. The character stuff, plot, all that will still be me.’

This does make sense. ‘And you have known Professor Struma for long?’

‘That man taught me everything I know,’ he says simply.

‘Oh…’ I say, struggling to conceal my surprise. Perhaps I have misjudged him.

At that moment the door opens; Paul waves and Igor lumbers, creaking, towards us. He takes off his ancient rain mac, releasing a cloud of pungent inner odours, and gives the waitress his order with a dry, smacking mouth; he stares after her as she leaves, like a cat watching a pigeon.

‘So I was just telling Claude something about the collaborative process,’ Paul says.

‘There is nothing wrong with collaborating,’ Igor says, rather confrontationally.

‘I mean in the book. You’re going to help me out with the book.’

‘Eh?’ Igor says.

‘The book,’ Paul repeats. ‘Set in the bank. The tale of the Everyman.’

‘Oh yes, yes,’ Igor says. ‘Everyman, James Joyce, real life.’ His bloodshot eyes swivel over to me. ‘You are the Frenchman,’ he says. ‘Paris.’

‘That’s right,’ I say uncomfortably.

Igor stares at me without speaking, his head weaving ever so slightly from side to side. ‘Lately I have watch excellent film about Paris,’ he says. ‘In this film, three horny guys are going there and diddle many French prostitutes. Title of film is, Ass Menagerie II: French Connection. You have seen?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Is sequel to first Ass Menagerie.’ He thinks about this, then adds, ‘Though story is very similar.’ He retreats into a prolonged, cacophonous cough, a sound like shovelling coal.

‘So Igor was wondering whether he might be able to see some floor plans of the bank,’ Paul says.

‘Floor plans?’ I say, surprised.

‘To help him with his descriptive passages,’ Paul says.

I glance over at Igor. He glares back at me with his basilisk eyes. I don’t know what to say; then, to my relief, the waitress comes along with his coffee, and he is distracted once again by her departing posterior. ‘Very nice,’ he comments, and then asks Paul a question I don’t quite catch, but which sounds something like, ‘Have we got a file on her?’

Paul clears his throat in a way that might or might not be artificial, then says, ‘So maybe I should explain a little more about Igor’s process –’

‘I am sorry,’ Igor cuts in, ‘I must move seats. I cannot look at this fucking painting any longer.’

With much clattering, he rises and drags his chair to the opposite side of the table, so that his back is to the offending artwork.

‘Simulacrum 18,’ I read from the label. ‘Our friend Ariadne Acheiropoietos again.’

‘So the way Igor likes to work –’ Paul persists.

‘Oh, Jesus Christ, this one is even worse!’ Igor says, discovering he has moved seats only to find himself staring directly at Simulacrum 33.

‘Is everything all right?’ the waitress asks, hurrying over.

‘He’s just having a strong reaction to the art,’ Paul explains.

‘I feel like I have fingers in my brain,’ Igor laments, rubbing his eyes.

‘Oh,’ the waitress says. ‘Well, let me know if you need anything.’ She beats a retreat to the kitchen.

‘So about these floor plans,’ Paul says.

But Igor has turned his gaze to me again. ‘What does this mean, this simulacrum?’ he demands. Is he serious? Didn’t Paul say he was a professor of contemporary art? Or is he trying to catch me out?

‘It is a term from philosophy,’ I say reluctantly. ‘It means a bad copy or false image of something.’

‘Why are they covering the wall with fucking simulacrums, in this place where people are trying to eat?’ The reptilian stare bores into me again.

‘Ah,’ I stammer, ‘well, I imagine the artist is making some comment about fakes and counterfeits. Maybe by calling her painting Simulacrum she is pointing to some much bigger falseness in the world around us. “Art is the lie that shows us the truth”, didn’t someone say this? Though I am sure you know more about it than I do.’

For a moment I think I have satisfied him. Slowly he sets down his cup and appears lost in contemplation. Then he leans over the table. ‘Are you calling me a liar?’ he says, in a low, guttural voice.

And I see he has curled his fingers into a fist.

 

 

Back at the bank the situation only gets worse. ‘He keeps poking at the ceiling,’ Gary McCrum complains. ‘Prodding at it with some sort of a rod, right over my head.’

Joe Peston storms over. ‘That fucking Russian of yours unplugged my terminal!’

‘He’s researching a novel,’ I tell them both.

Computers are interfered with, files misplaced. Kimberlee approaches me in a state of disquiet to report that she sat down at her computer only to find Igor under her desk, apparently sniffing her seat. ‘He is examining the structure,’ I say. But the truth is that I have no idea what he is doing. As for Paul, he barely speaks to me; he is too busy lifting furniture, pulling up floor tiles, taking paintings from the walls and staring at the blank pale spaces that are revealed. When I approach him, he snaps at me, or nods without listening. Whatever has eluded him about BOT until now, Igor’s appearance hasn’t helped find. In the short time he has been here, he has aged visibly.

‘It’s not your fault,’ Ish says. It’s the next morning; we are in the canteen with the door closed, eating cereal bars. It feels strange to be hiding from our own narrator. ‘It’s what Jurgen said. The artistic process. Writing a book is hard. That’s all.’

‘Maybe a bank isn’t the right setting for a novel.’

‘Well, he’s got to make it the right setting, hasn’t he?’ Ish says. ‘That’s his job, not yours.’

‘I keep thinking he should’ve written about Howie. Cocaine, hookers, multimillion-dollar trades.’

‘He didn’t want that, Claude. He wanted an Everyman.’

‘It could be that he has not found the right one.’

‘You’re crazy!’ Ish exclaims. ‘You’re a brilliant Everyman.’

‘You think so?’

‘Definitely.’ She nods. ‘I’ve been watching you, Claude, and you’re doing a great job.’ She squeezes my hand in hers. ‘Just be yourself,’ she says. ‘Anyone would want to read a book about you.’

I am touched by her words, but it is increasingly clear that my non-life in Dublin has defeated Paul’s powers of representation – that there is simply not enough here for his art to gain a foothold. And when I emerge from the canteen, the final blow descends. Liam English, the head of the department, calls me over. ‘Look at this,’ he says. On the other side of the room, Igor is holding the water cooler steady while Paul balances on top of it, unscrewing the vent over the air conditioning, apparently with the intention of inserting some kind of camera into the interior. I try to make light of it, remarking on the incredible concentration that artists bring to bear on things that we take for granted, such as air vents. ‘Wrap it up,’ Liam English says.

I wait until Igor is not around, then approach Paul at the desk he has commandeered. He is scribbling in the red notebook, which he now shuts and covers with his hand. ‘Yes?’ he says.

‘Lunchtime,’ I say.

He casts about him, looking for an excuse to refuse me, but he can’t find one and reluctantly rises from the desk.

I don’t know how significant it is that the very same waitress seats us at the very same table where we had our first conversation. It mightn’t necessarily mean that we have come full circle. Yet how changed he is from the ebullient, garrulous figure who stepped into my life that day! Now he barely speaks; when our food comes, he merely picks at it.

‘You are not happy,’ I say.

‘What?’

‘You are not happy with the project.’

‘I’m perfectly happy,’ he says. ‘I’m deliriously happy.’

‘You have not said a word to me all day.’

‘Maybe I just don’t feel like talking.’

‘I don’t believe that is why.’

‘Oh, you can read my mind now?’

‘It’s obvious things are not working.’

Paul puts his hands on top of his head and lets out a long, slow, whistling sound. ‘I told you, there’s a structural issue. We’ll figure it out, if you’ll just get off my case.’

‘My boss wants you to finish your research.’

This at least produces a reaction. He bangs his palms on the table. ‘What?’

‘He says it’s becoming disruptive.’

‘That’s crazy!’ Paul protests. ‘Who are we disrupting?’

‘Everyone,’ I say with a trace of sadistic pleasure, then regret it. He is beyond crestfallen; he looks utterly sick. ‘Maybe I can talk to him, win you an extra day or two,’ I say. ‘But only you. Igor must go.’

‘Okay,’ he mutters. ‘Thanks.’

I watch him for a moment, his thoughts visibly in disarray. ‘What happened?’ I ask.

Something in him seems to give: he sets down his fork, gazes back at me starkly. ‘There’s nothing there, Claude,’ he says. ‘I can’t find anything there.’

Now it is my turn to feel sick.

‘I knew it wouldn’t work,’ he reflects. ‘Deep down I knew it.’

‘There must be something we can do,’ I say. ‘Some way to salvage it.’

‘I don’t see what, if your boss is kicking me out,’ he says.

‘There must be something.’

He sighs, puts his head in his hands. He stays like that for a long time. Then he lifts his head again. ‘Unless,’ he says.

‘Unless what?’

‘Unless…’ He stares at me, studying my face, as if trying to read something there. ‘Unless we change the angle,’ he says at last.

‘Change it?’

‘Right now I’m seeing two serious, two very serious problems with the book. The first is that nothing happens. There’s no story there. In the past a novel didn’t always need a story. You could just make it about a day in somebody’s life. But that was when life meant people, movement, activity. You guys in front of your screens all day long, selling each other little bits of debt – it’s a whole different order of nothing. I know there’s a big story behind it, I know the bank is expanding and growing and so on, but I can’t see any of that. It’s like a hurricane, you know? It’s this incredibly powerful entity, storming all over the world, levelling everything in its path, but at the eye of it, where you are, it’s just … it’s just a void. A dead space.’

I nod bleakly; this does not seem an unreasonable assessment.

‘And obviously that affects our Everyman,’ he says. ‘Which is problem two. Readers like to feel a connection with the characters they’re reading about. Visit a book club, that’s all they talk about. I loved Pip, I adored Daisy, Yossarian is so funny, we all hated Snowball. But with you – there’s just not enough showing up on the page.’

‘Oh,’ I say.

‘I know there’s more to you than some anonymous salaryman. But from the reader’s perspective, it’s not so clear. Unless they see some evidence to the contrary, my fear is they’ll see a banker and immediately think the worst.’

‘Yes,’ I say, seething with embarrassment.

‘Look,’ he says, ‘it’s not irremediable. We just need to give your character more agency. We need to get him doing something.’

‘Like what?’

‘Something dramatic,’ he says. He looks down at his coffee, stirs it but doesn’t drink. ‘Everybody,’ he says slowly, ‘even the guy with the most boring job in the world, at some point finds himself in a situation where he has to make a choice. A choice between good and bad. That moment – when the clock strikes thirteen, when everything else drops away – that’s where we need to put you.’

Is it me, or as he says this does the air seem to tauten, to take on some tremulous energy? A cloud’s shadow rolls over the plaza; the dark-haired waitress stops at the window with her hands on her hips as the pigeons take flight.

‘For example,’ he says. He strokes his chin. ‘Okay, how about this. Rather than the Everyman just working in the bank, instead we have him rob the bank.’

‘Rob the bank?’ I repeat.

‘That’s right,’ Paul says, nodding.

‘Rob it?’ I say again, in case I have misheard.

‘Yes, rob it,’ Paul says.

‘This is Igor’s idea?’

‘No, it’s my idea. You can see where I’m coming from, right? It spices things up, gives the story momentum, as well as making your character a bit more attractive. Now you’re an outlaw, sticking it to the man!’

‘Yes, yes, I understand that.’ I dab my mouth with my napkin in case my expression gives me away. ‘But robbing a bank – is this really something that our Everyman would do?’

‘Why wouldn’t he?’ Paul returns. ‘Who hasn’t thought about robbing a bank?’

‘But nobody actually does it,’ I say. ‘It just doesn’t seem realistic.’

‘It’s not like I’m saying we send him back in time,’ Paul says testily. ‘He’s not breaking the laws of physics or anything.’

‘Nevertheless, it takes us far away from the authentic picture of modern life you wanted to create originally,’ I point out. ‘In fact it turns the story into exactly the kind of cliché you told me you wanted to escape. I am not trying to be negative,’ I say, seeing his face darken, ‘only, I don’t understand what kind of motivation our Everyman can have to do something as non-universal as rob a bank.’

‘Well, he’ll have motivation,’ he says. ‘I’m going to give him motivation, if you’d just let me finish.’

‘I’m sorry, please continue.’

Paul begins to speak and then stops, staring furiously into his coffee cup.

‘Because already the Everyman is paid very well for work that is quite legal,’ I clarify. ‘So it is difficult to imagine what will make him do something very risky like this.’

‘What if he wants something his money can’t buy,’ Paul says.

‘He wants to rob the bank to get something money can’t buy?’

Paul swears under his breath. ‘Okay, how about – how about he falls in love.’

‘In love?’

‘Yeah, with a … with a waitress. That girl there, for instance.’

We both turn to look. The dark-haired waitress is on the other side of the café, placing dirty crockery onto a tray; her long ebony tresses are tied up in a bun, from which a ballpoint pen pokes.

‘See, we need to be making better use of the resources we have. Fictionally speaking, someone like her is pure gold. She’s sultry, she’s exotic, she’s a struggling artist. A woman like that, as soon as she appears the story’s bumped up a couple of gears.’

‘She’s an artist?’

‘Well, yeah.’ He stares at me as if I am an imbecile, then points around the room at the various Simulacra.

‘Those are hers?’ I look over at the waitress again, then back at him. ‘She’s Ariadne Acheiropoietos? How do you know?’

‘Because I asked her.’

‘Oh.’ I sit back dizzily.

‘See? It’s a good twist, isn’t it?’

I am thinking of the many uncomplimentary things my colleagues and I have said about her paintings while she was standing right beside us.

‘So our lonely, bored, overpaid banker runs up against this beautiful but impoverished painter,’ he goes on, warming to his new theme. ‘He finds they have something or other in common – it doesn’t matter what it is, French philosophy, say. Next thing he knows, he’s fallen head over heels in love with her. He’s breaking out of his sterile world of numbers, experiencing feelings he hasn’t had in years. But how’s he going to win her heart?’

I find I am gripped in spite of myself. ‘How?’

Paul spreads his hands summatively. ‘By robbing the bank.’

The intrigue dies away again. ‘I am not sure I see the connection.’

‘You don’t think robbing a bank will get her attention?’

‘There must be easier ways to do it,’ I say. ‘What about their shared interest in French philosophy?’

Paul rolls his eyes heavily. ‘Jesus, Claude, a woman like that, every dude who comes in here is going to be hitting on her. He needs to bring out the big guns. So how about this? He finds out her father – her father’s going to die unless he gets a vital operation. But it’s an extremely expensive operation, so expensive that even the banker doesn’t have enough money to pay for it. So he robs the bank. I know it sounds unrealistic on the face of it,’ he continues, before I can object. ‘But in terms of showing his inner life, it’s actually more realistic, do you see what I mean? She inspires him. She’s everything he’s not. She believes in things, in art, in love, in life! He looks at her, and he sees a chance to begin again!’ He’s gazing across the room at the waitress, his cheeks flushed, as if it is he, in fact, who’s being brought back to life. ‘From talking to her – because she’s Greek, so we can put in all the stuff about the financial crisis, what it’s done to her home and her family – the Everyman begins to become aware of all the injustice he’s part of. He’s not going to take it anymore! He’d rather rob the bank and risk going to prison than see the woman he loves suffer another minute. Suddenly we’ve got a hero we can get behind!’

He falls silent, poring happily over the empty space of the café as if seeing the story enact itself in front of his eyes, until at last I clear my throat; he looks up, startled, then waves his hand. ‘Well, anyway, those are just the broad strokes,’ he says. ‘The real question,’ his voice lowers; resting his elbows on the table he clasps his hands tightly together, as if warding something away, ‘is how he robs the bank.’

He looks at me expectantly.

‘How?’ I repeat.

‘If you were in that position, where you wanted to pay for an operation for Ariadne’s dying father, what would you do?’

‘Probably I would speak to the head of department about an advance on my bonus.’

Paul exhales sharply. ‘No, if you were robbing the bank, Claude.’

I give the question some thought. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘If I can be honest, since he decided to rob the bank, I have felt more and more estranged from our Everyman.’

‘Claude –’ With a murderous expression, Paul lifts his arms above his head, like an orchestra conductor at the thunderous apex of some violent symphony; then he lowers them again and slumps back in his chair, and he says, in a wan, tired voice, ‘I’m not going to lie to you. I need this. It’s been a long time since Clown. I need this book, and this book needs a story, and right now it doesn’t have one.’

I blink back at him. I want to help him, but his story no longer makes sense to me.

‘It doesn’t have to be your character, even,’ Paul says with a touch of desperation. ‘Say there’s a very wicked banker in there. That guy, what’s his name, the arsehole from the bar, he wants to rob the bank. What does he do?’ He is pale now, and his voice has a dry, prickly quality, like a fabric charged with static electricity. ‘I suppose what I’m asking you is, where’s the safe in this place?’

‘The safe?’

‘The safe.’ His eyes are locked on mine; his fingertips bounce up and down on the tabletop.

‘Well, there is no safe,’ I say.

‘What?’ He puts his hand to his ear, as if he were a long way away.

‘There is no safe,’ I repeat, louder.

‘There’s no safe?’

‘No,’ I say.

Paul stares at me for a long moment. Then he glances over his shoulder to the table by the window where Jurgen has just sat down with one of the senior managers. ‘I get it,’ he smiles, giving me a wink. ‘Classified information. Okay, put it this way, then: Where isn’t the safe?’

This ontological riddle throws me. I contemplate it for a long time, before replying slowly, ‘Well, I suppose it isn’t everywhere.’

Paul stops smiling and kneads his brow. ‘Look, when I ask where isn’t the safe, I mean where is the safe. When you say there is no safe, what is it exactly that you mean?’

‘I mean there is no safe,’ I say.

He exhales a long, thin breath, his body at the same time seeming to drift a little to the side. ‘So where,’ he says softly, ‘do you keep the money?’

‘There is no money,’ I say.

‘There is no money,’ Paul repeats, nodding. And then, ‘What kind of bank has no money?’

‘A merchant or investment bank,’ I say.

Paul goes very quiet. He lifts his coffee cup to his mouth, but his hand is trembling so hard that he lowers it again without it reaching his lips. ‘Oh,’ he says.

‘You must remember that unlike a high-street bank, an investment bank does not take deposits from customers. Instead we fund our operations primarily with short-term or even overnight borrowings.’

‘Right,’ Paul whispers.

‘Of course, we don’t like to talk about this, because it means that we’re a lot less secure than we pretend. In fact we are all just twenty-four hours away from a funding crisis! This is investment banking’s “dirty little secret”!’

‘Ha ha,’ Paul’s laughter is low and hoarse, as if he had a rope around his neck. ‘So now the question we have to ask ourselves is, given that it’s an investment bank, with no money on the premises, how is he going to rob it?’ He looks at me with eyes half-dazed and half-desperate. ‘That’s the question we have to ask, isn’t it?’

I chew on my knuckles thoughtfully. ‘I fear it will be difficult for our Everyman,’ I say.

‘It will?’

‘Very difficult.’

‘Right,’ Paul says. For a long moment he doesn’t say anything else or even look at me; he merely sits in his chair, twitching.

‘But there are other ways for you to spice up the story,’ I say, realizing that I have made him even more discouraged than he was already. ‘For example, maybe there is a fire in Transaction House, and I am the Bank of Torabundo fire warden, so I must make sure everyone escapes.’

‘That’s a good idea,’ Paul agrees, rising unsteadily to his feet. ‘A very good idea.’

‘Or we could keep the love story with the waitress and the French philosophy, but leave out the robbery.’

‘Yes,’ Paul says. ‘That’s worth looking at.’

‘And meanwhile my character is dealing with the ongoing crisis in the eurozone – nobody knows how much the currency will depreciate, it is a very tense situation –’

‘Yes, there’s certainly a lot to think about,’ Paul interrupts in the oddly wispy voice into which he has lapsed. I have the strange impression there is less of him, as if over the course of the lunch little pieces of him have been stolen away, like twigs taken by birds as they build their nest, one by one by one … ‘Sounds like I’d better get back to the drawing board! Tell you what, I’m going to take the rest of the afternoon off to think about these suggestions of yours.’

‘Frankly, I think the book will be much better this way,’ I say. ‘The bank robbery idea was perhaps a little de trop, like we say in French.’

‘It probably was,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking. Well – see you tomorrow.’

‘See you tomorrow,’ I say.

 

 

But Paul does not come in tomorrow; nor does he appear the next day. The weekend goes by without word from him; Monday morning turns into Monday afternoon and still there is no sign.

‘Maybe he has writer’s block,’ Kevin says.

‘Maybe his muse has deserted him,’ Jurgen says. ‘This is what happened to Gerhardt, the leader of my reggae band, Gerhardt and the Mergers. After his receptionist transferred to head office in Frankfurt he did not write a single song.’

‘I am his muse,’ I point out. ‘I have not deserted him. I am waiting for him right here.’

‘Yes, it is perhaps the less familiar situation of the artist deserting his muse,’ Jurgen says, frowning.

‘I wouldn’t worry about it, Claude,’ Ish says. ‘Didn’t you say he was doing plot changes?’

‘He was trying to think up new directions for the book.’

‘There you go then,’ she says. ‘These things take their own time. You can’t push the river, that’s what my Uncle Nick always tells the people in the dole office.’

In fact, Ish is almost as eager to see Paul herself, in order to share a discovery she has made about the island of Torabundo. ‘Today it’s basically the Financial Services Centre, only on a beach and with bigger spiders – but it used to be part of this really famous kula ring.’ She looks at our blank faces. ‘The gift economy? Malinowski, Marcel Mauss, all that?’

‘Are you having an acid flashback?’ Kevin says.

‘Gift economies are how everything worked before we had markets,’ she explains. ‘Instead of buying things from each other, people would just give each other what they needed. You give me a calabash of milk, I give you a shell adze, you pass the adze on to my cousin, I share the milk with your grandmother, and so on, and so on.’

‘You are talking about barter,’ Jurgen says. ‘The system that existed before money was invented and people no longer had to carry around adzes looking for someone to swap them with.’

‘Not barter. They didn’t exchange things. They gave things. Whenever anthropologists travelled to places where people still lived like that – without markets, I mean – instead of barter they found these gift circles. And one of the most famous examples was this island about a hundred miles from Torabundo, called Kokomoko. I actually went there with Tog a few years back, after we studied it in uni. A French anthropologist wrote a book about it. What she found was that people on Kokomoko didn’t hold on to anything. No one owned anything. Instead everything just cycled around constantly. Small things, like tools and food and clothes, but big things too. Kokomoko was famous for these beautiful necklaces, for instance, and they’d give them to the tribes on the neighbouring islands. Like, they’d sail over to Torabundo and there’d be a gifting ceremony with a big feast. But the Torabundans wouldn’t keep them, they’d sail on to the next island a few months later and pass the necklaces along to the tribe there. And that tribe would pass them on again, to the next island. And meanwhile there were other gifts from other tribes – cowries or arrowheads or whatever it might be – going from island to island in the opposite direction. That’s the kula ring. All of these islands, hundreds of miles apart, brought together by gifts.’

‘What was the point of that?’ Kevin says.

‘What was the point of what?’

‘Of just randomly giving each other things for no reason.’

‘Well, why do you buy a round of drinks in the pub?’ Ish says. ‘Why doesn’t everyone go up and buy their own drink?’

‘I have often wondered this very same thing,’ Jurgen says. ‘Financially speaking, the Irish mania for “rounds” makes no sense. Particularly if I am drinking a relatively inexpensive Pilsner lager, and I must be forking out for someone else’s costly whiskey and Coke. Even if they then buy me a beer, I still incur a net loss.’

‘Yeah, but that’s the point,’ Ish says.

‘That I incur a net loss?’

‘If I buy something from you, you hand it over and we both walk away and that’s the end of our relationship. That’s the market economy in a nutshell. But if I give you something, even if it’s just a drink that I know you’re going to get me back, then there’s a bond created between us that carries on into the future. Like, a social bond. So on these islands, gifts were a way of tying everybody together, like the different families, the different tribes, and so on. Not just them either, but the dead and the living too, because they believed that when you give a gift, a part of your soul goes with it, and joins with whoever else’s soul that gave it before. And at these feasts they’d recite the histories of the arm shells or the necklaces or the cowries or whatever it might be, and the stories of their ancestors who were still present in these magical objects. So instead of just walking out of the shop, they stayed connected, over generations.’

‘What if you didn’t want to stay connected?’ Kevin says.

‘Why wouldn’t you want to be connected?’

‘Because you don’t feel like handing over all your stuff.’

‘Look, say you’re living on an island in the Pacific, and your next-door neighbour needs an awl to tool some leather, and you’ve got an awl, you’re not going to keep it from him, are you? Because you know some time down the line you’ll need something from him, like food or a knife or a pair of shoes. Or just a friendly word, someone to look in on you if you’re sick. You know it’s important to preserve that relationship, in short.’

‘I’d just tell him to go to the awl shop and get his own,’ Kevin says.

‘Right, and for the rest of your life you wouldn’t talk to anyone around you and you’d just curl up every night alone with your awl, would you?’

‘I’d have a really good one,’ Kevin says.

‘I think what Kevin is saying,’ I interject, ‘is that we can see what they are trying to do with these networks of exchange. But they do seem to introduce a lot of unnecessary complication.’

‘Claude, we’re working in, like, the epicentre of unnecessary complication.’ She waves a hand at the glass towers, their thirty thousand inhabitants. ‘And what’s it all for?’

‘It is precisely to ensure that moneyed individuals can continue to stockpile wealth in peace,’ Jurgen says. ‘Without constantly being interrupted by neighbours and similar nuisances looking for awls and other goods.’

‘I wish you could see this place,’ Ish says wistfully. ‘Then it’d all make sense to you.’ She looks out the window, and for a moment her face takes on a radiance quite different from the cold grey early-morning light lifting in from the river. ‘Anyway the point is Torabundo dropped out of the kula ring to be an offshore tax haven, so now you’ve got the gift economy and its absolute diametrical opposite side by side. That’s bound to be something Paul can use, right? Like he could contrast the simple tribal island ways on Kokomoko with our miserable complex affluent ways. That sort of thing.’

Is that the kind of spicing up he meant? I keep coming back to our conversation in the café. At the time it made me angry (he spends weeks poring over my life, then tells me there’s nothing there?) but I’m starting to see the problem from his point of view. He wants to give an honest account of life in the International Financial Services Centre; but he also has a duty to frame some sort of a narrative, to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end. In a way, we face a similar dilemma with our clients. On the one hand, we commit to giving them an accurate account of what’s happening in the market. On the other, we know that an accurate account is too complicated to be of any use to them. And so instead we tell stories: turn companies into characters, quarterly reports into events, the chaos of global business into a few simple fables ending with a buy or sell recommendation which, if followed, will hopefully result in a profit. The truth is fine in principle, but stories are what sell.

The robbery is unfeasible on any number of levels (although he is not the first to suggest it: my father had often proposed a bank heist, though he also suggested I go in with a machine gun and ‘just shoot everyone’.) But the love story? On its own that would show the banker’s rich inner life, without requiring any major changes to the rest of the plot. Waiting for a client one morning, I watch Ariadne from behind a menu and weigh her up. Her limbs are long, her movements, as she glides down the narrow aisles of the restaurant, fluid and graceful; she carries herself with a sort of gladiatorial kindness, smiling implacably at all comers. And her eyes: from her complexion, I expect them to be brown, but instead they are a startlingly vivid green, like a stormlit sea, restive and electric. They continue to wrongfoot me every time I catch a glimpse of them – until she notices me staring, and smiles, and I blush and pretend I wanted to order another coffee.

*   *   *

Then something happens that puts the book out of everyone’s mind. A little after midday – 7.05 a.m., New York time – Ish jumps out of her seat. ‘I just got an email from Porter Blankly!’

A moment later, similar exclamations can be heard about the room. I look at my inbox. ‘I’ve got one too.’

Kevin comes rushing up. ‘Porter Blankly’s sent us all emails,’ he says.

‘It must be one of his inspirational memos,’ Gary McCrum says.

‘Fuck!’ Ish says.

‘Have you read it yet?’ Kevin asks.

‘I’m too excited,’ Ish says. ‘Claude, you open it.’

Tentatively, as if handling a live wire, I move the cursor over the envelope icon and click on it. The email consists of two words. ‘“Think counterintuitive,”’ I read aloud.

‘“Think counterintuitive,”’ Ish says.

‘“Think counterintuitive,”’ Kevin mutters to himself.

Around the office the phrase can be heard repeated over and over, like a murmurous breeze circulating between the cubicles.

‘Is that inspirational?’ Ish asks. ‘Do you feel inspired?’

‘I definitely feel something,’ Kevin says, frowning and assuming an odd posture, as though searching for his keys. Before there can be any further discussion, however, Jurgen appears to tell us that a very important email has just come in from Porter Blankly.

‘We know,’ Ish says.

‘Good,’ Jurgen says. ‘Rachael has been in touch to say that each department must submit one major counterintuitive strategy by the end of the week. Until further notice, counterintuitiveness should be considered your top priority.’ He is on the point of bustling off again, but Ish calls him back.

‘What does it mean?’ she says.

Jurgen pushes his glasses up his nose, surprised. ‘I have received only the same memo as you, but I am guessing it means that instead of bowing to the prevailing wisdom and following the herd, we will now be innovating exciting new outside-the-box-type alternatives.’

‘Oh,’ says Ish.

‘How counterintuitive does he want us to be, exactly?’ Jocelyn Lockhart asks.

‘How counterintuitive?’ Jurgen says.

‘Well, say if my intuition is telling me it would be a bad idea to punch you in the face. Does that mean I should punch you in the face?’

‘Or set fire to the computers?’ Gary McCrum chips in.

‘Or stop working now and go to the pub? You know?’

Jurgen strokes his chin thoughtfully. ‘These are good questions. Porter has not specified his parameters. Perhaps we should limit the counterintuitiveness to our respective fields for now, and later, if we find we are still bogged down in conventional, mainstream thinking, we can experiment with more radical options, such as face-punching.’

Initially the response to the new imperative is not entirely serious: free pizza is mooted, paid naptime, daily meetings before the markets open in order to study staff dreams for potentially important data. A couple of days later, however, the strategy becomes less abstract. That morning, Kimberlee the receptionist comes hurtling into the Research Department to tell us that a tramp is asleep in the supply cupboard. She wants to call security; the analysts, however, see an opportunity to demonstrate their machismo, and an Armed Response Unit is quickly put together in the shape of the Oil team leader, Brent ‘Crude’ Kelleher, and his mountain-biking cronies, Andrew O’Connor and Dwayne McGuckian. ‘How are you “armed”?’ Ish asks. In unison, the Armed Response Unit roll up their sleeves and begin copious flexing of biceps.

Not long after, though, they hurry back in, looking decidedly less intrepid. There is a tramp on the premises, they confirm; however, he is no longer asleep, or, for that matter, in the supply cupboard. A moment later, with a guttural roar, a ragged figure lurches in. He is tall and spindly, with blazing eyes and a voluminous thicket of black beard that gives him the look of a medieval mendicant, flagellating himself around Europe. Long streamers of duct tape hang from his shoulders; I can’t understand what he’s saying, but it is clear that he is very, very angry. He charges down the aisle between the cubicles in pursuit of the Armed Response Unit, who career out of Research into Sales; a moment later they reappear in the lobby, frantically jabbing the button for the lift, when its doors open and two enormous security guards jump out and dash after the tramp, who turns and speeds back towards his supply cupboard. Too late! We watch from our cubicles as the guards rugby-tackle him, bringing him crashing to the ground; then one of them springs up to kneel on his back, while the other one prepares to hit him with his baton. The tramp howls out some kind of unintelligible imprecation – and the guard stops, baton frozen in the air.

‘Deystvitelno?’ he says.

The tramp issues another screed.

The security guard climbs off his back and says something apologetic. Now the tramp rises to his feet and straightens himself. The first security guard says something to the second security guard. Then both the security guards start obsequiously dusting down the tramp, who stares away into the middle distance with an imperial hauteur. Through the glass of the lobby we see Liam English coming in our direction, fists clenched by his side; the Armed Response Unit follow after him, looking chastened. Liam English dispatches the security guards with a single jab of his thumb. Then he embraces the tramp.

BOT has a new employee. Grigory Erofeev, or Grisha as he prefers to be called, although he makes it clear that ideally no one would speak to him at all, has been flown in directly from Moscow’s Institute of Advanced Mathematics to head our new Structured Products Department, where he will come up with mind-bending combinations of currencies, futures, swaptions and other such entities, which the bank can sell on to clients and use on its own account.

This constitutes a major change in BOT’s direction.

Before the crash, every bank had to have at least one Russian physicist on its payroll. The bulge brackets would go on safari to St Petersburg and return with whole university departments, setting them up in grim dorms to remind them of home, where they would sit gloomily eating pirogi and scrawling in refill pads.

Sir Colin, our former CEO, saw this, as he saw so much of the twenty-first, twentieth and indeed nineteenth century, as so much modern flim-flam. He didn’t believe investment banks ought to be trading for themselves at all – how could that not lead to a conflict of interest? – and the idea of betting the house on equations which nobody in the entire operation understood except for some depressed-looking Vlad in a pirogi-stained vest he thought simply unhinged.

‘But that’s what makes it counterintuitive, see?’ Howie is particularly excited by the new arrival. ‘Nobody’s doing this stuff right now.’

‘They’re not doing it because it didn’t work,’ I point out.

‘Crazy Frog, you think the first aeroplane worked? You think the first telephone worked? The first shot of penicillin –’

‘I get the point.’

‘This guy is a visionary, Claude. He’s out there, out in the fucking Siberian tundra, staring at the fucking sun and seeing – seeing –’

‘Seeing what?’

‘Seeing the shit that’s going to take us to the next level.’ Howie leans closer, lowers his voice. ‘He’s been telling me about his PhD. Providential antinomies. Ever heard of them? Of course you haven’t, they haven’t been used for three hundred years. But guess what, Grisha here’s discovered some way of applying them to bond yields.’

‘To do what?’

Howie flaps his hand in irritation. ‘I don’t know. What they do isn’t the point. The point is that this time we’re the ones doing the crazy paradoxical rocket-science shit. This tiny, insignificant little bank has, through a fluke of history, got a split-second start on the big boys. That’s what Porter’s counterintuitive strategy’s about, see? If we wait for them to grow their balls back, they’ll wipe us out. But if we take advantage of that head start, and do all the things that right now they’re afraid to do – who knows how far we can go?’

Grisha has been given his own office, a small, cramped box room behind the Sales Department with just a desk and a whiteboard – no TV, no Bloomberg, not even a phone. He doesn’t seem to mind; he spends most of his time out on the plaza, apparently talking to the pigeons.

‘Look at that,’ Howie says approvingly, gazing down from the window. ‘Mad as a nail. How can he not make us a fortune?’

Porter’s memo coincides with a golden streak for the bank such as I have never experienced before. Every call we make, every pitch, every trade, every merger, buyout, bond issue, comes off as smoothly as a case study in an economics textbook. Europe teeters ever closer to the brink of some unimaginable financial apocalypse, whole streets in Greece burn, and here the zombies by the riverside grow in number as the Royal Irish recapitalization, as predicted, fails completely, the fresh infusion stripped away by international speculators – but our share price leaps up, and up again; the whole world is long BOT.

Yet to me these successes seem somehow insubstantial. Without Paul there, everything has begun to slide out of focus; and the longer he is gone, the worse it gets. Figures blur on the screen, clients’ voices merge into one another. I’m waylaid by memories, things I haven’t thought about in years, a game of tarot in my aunt’s kitchen, my mother taking my hand as we cross the Pont des Arts.

Perhaps it’s to combat this that I find myself returning again and again to the Ark to watch Ariadne dance her pas de seul between the tables. How alive she is, how embedded in her day! Even when she’s daydreaming, standing still, she seems to throw off energy, invisible waves that ripple outwards to catch up the people around her. Will she catch me up too? If the two strands of our story come together, might the writer come back in order to tie the knot?

*   *   *

‘Doing some reading?’

‘What? Oh – yes – beginning the Royal Irish accounts.’

‘But this is not accounts.’ Jurgen fishes out the book stuffed under the stack of ledgers. ‘De Part et d’Autre, François Texier. Another novel?’

‘Philosophy,’ I say gruffly, cheeks crimsoning. ‘It’s … I thought it would be useful, for something I am planning to do.’

‘Very good,’ Jurgen says. But he does not leave; instead he parks himself upon the adjoining desk, gazes out for a moment at the rain and then says, ‘You know, Claude, an artist is not like a banker.’

I open a folder, highlight a raft of redundant files.

‘It is in an artist’s nature to be mercurial,’ Jurgen continues. ‘Do you know this word, “mercurial”? It means prone to rapid and unexpected change, as liquid mercury is in the barometer.’

‘I am familiar with it,’ I say. The files yield up pale blue, translucent images of themselves, as if I am extracting their ghosts and transporting them to some electronic afterlife.

‘It is a good word,’ Jurgen says.‘Mer-cur-i-al. It is what Stacy calls Bobo the clown in Paul’s book – have you reached this part, where Stacy breaks up with Bobo?’

‘Of course,’ I mutter.

‘Bobo, as a clown, is constantly searching for new jokes and new sensations. Stacy, as a health and safety officer, wants order and regularity. Their two lifestyles are completely different. This is why she terminates their relationship.’

‘She does that in Chapter Five,’ I object. ‘But then at the end she realizes she’s still in love with him.’

‘I stopped reading after Chapter Five,’ Jurgen says. He broods over his folded arms for a moment. The recycling bin flashes indigo as the files are subsumed and resurrected as empty space. ‘I suppose the thing to remember is that it is only a book,’ he says, getting up. ‘Not real life.’

*   *   *

On Tuesday morning, my team has a meeting with Cornerstone, one of several American private equity firms currently occupying the city’s five-star hotels. The market believes Ireland will soon go the same way as Greece: bankruptcy, riots, decades of national bondage. Value investors like Cornerstone are gambling the opposite. Operating on the principle that the moment of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, they sift through the wreckage of Irish society, checking out shopping malls, stud farms, golf courses, whole estates of houses, businesses that can’t stay afloat and, of course, the loan books of faltering Irish banks.

We meet them at the hotel. There are three of them, tanned, sockless, in open-necked shirts and Patek Philippe watches, exuding an air of amused, joshing serenity. I do a surreptitious check for any giveaway tattoos. Many American bankers are ex-military – bland-faced, blue-eyed, faultlessly courteous men who went directly from their tour of Iraq or Afghanistan to MBAs in Wharton and Harvard. Indeed, the head of Cornerstone, General John Perseus, was one of the top commanders of the original invasion of Iraq; I suppose when you have seen an entire country being shelled to oblivion, holding your nerve during a bear run on the stock market does not present a major challenge.

Cornerstone are interested in Royal Irish. That they have chosen to consult us about them is quite a feather in our cap. This morning, though, I cannot get the pitch straight in my head. ‘Excuse me – let me just, ah…’ I awaken my laptop screen, squint at the spreadsheet. Numbers swim between the columns, decimal points dancing about like fleas. ‘Ah…’

The three private equity bros gaze at me amusedly, serenely, hands draped loosely between their legs in the enormous leather armchairs.

‘Of course, the pertinent data has already been set out for you in the accompanying file,’ Jurgen says, stepping in. ‘If you will turn to page four…’

‘Fail to prepare, prepare to fail,’ Kevin says philosophically as we are leaving.

‘What are you on about, pipsqueak? Claude had them eating out of his hand,’ Ish says.

Jurgen does not say anything, but when our car pulls up at the IFSC he waits for the others to climb out and then turns to me. ‘You know that as a managerial policy I do not believe in issuing threats or warnings,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ I say guiltily.

But there is no more; with that he gets out of the car, closing the door in my face.

*   *   *

‘Maybe you need someone observing you,’ Ish hypothesizes. ‘You know, like electrons.’

‘Electrons?’

‘What’s that thing about electrons? You know, that unless someone’s there looking at them they don’t stay in the one spot? Instead they’re just sort of spread out all over the place?’

‘I have been working as an analyst for years without anyone observing me,’ I say.

‘Maybe you didn’t know you were an electron.’

‘I’m not an electron,’ I say.

It is late; we are among the last ones left in the office. Outside, arrayed in the darkness, the buildings with their sparse panes of light look like monolithic dominoes waiting to fall.

‘You’ve tried calling him?’

‘Hundreds of times.’

Ish tocks a pencil against her teeth. ‘I wonder what happened,’ she says.

‘It is obvious what happened,’ I snap. ‘He realized the novel wasn’t going to work.’

‘Why wouldn’t it work?’

‘Why?’ I can’t contain my anger any longer. ‘Because what we do is – empty! Meaningless! No one in the world could find it interesting, unless they were being paid!’

‘You don’t know that’s what happened. Wouldn’t he have said something, if he was just going to drop the whole thing? Like, why would he just disappear?’

I limit myself to another glower, push my brain to engage with the wall of numbers on the screen.

‘Those new directions you said he was thinking about,’ Ish says. ‘What were they, exactly?’

‘What were they?’ I repeat.

‘Like, maybe there’s a clue there. To what might have happened to him.’

She gazes at me ingenuously. I have a momentary vision of Ariadne stepping towards me, cupping my face in her hands, bringing her lips to mine, and experience a brief stab of pain.

‘He didn’t have anything concrete,’ I say.

She falls silent again. On her desk sits an ever-growing mountain of papers she’s waiting to show to the writer – articles about her gift-island, photocopies from textbooks, Polaroids of her younger self, skinny, smudged, beaming, with her arm around various stocky topless tribespeople – like ingredients for a spell, as if she believes he might be able to summon her up out of her own past.

‘Could it be,’ she says at last, ‘he wants you to find him?’

‘I told you, he does not answer his phone.’

‘No, I mean, track him down. You said he was thinking up new directions for the book. Maybe this is it. This is what happens.’

‘The writer is in the book?’

‘Yeah, and the banker has to help him. Like in that film, you know, with that guy.’

Find him: for some reason, the idea has never occurred to me before, as if the traffic between his life and mine could only ever be one way. It has, I must admit, a certain resonance. But how would we find him? He projected himself into our world without betraying any hint of his own, in spite of our best efforts.

‘Maybe there’s a clue in here.’ Diving into her bag, she pulls out For Love of a Clown and starts flicking through it. ‘Does he mention any neighbourhoods? Can you remember?’

I frown. Mostly the clown is travelling around in a caravan, or pitched up in a field with the rest of the circus, though there is a memorable scene near the end, when the clown comes to Stacy’s house and honks his nose outside her window –

‘Wait a minute,’ Ish says, opening the book up again to the very first pages. ‘Of course there’s a clue in it. Look, the publisher’s address is right here. Asterisk Press, Cromwell Road, London. They’ll know where he is.’

Genius! I seize the phone there and then, but Ish reminds me that it’s the middle of the night. ‘Right, right,’ I agree, setting it down again but remaining on my feet, full of nervous energy. I look at Ish, swivelling gently in her chair. ‘Well. I suppose we should go home.’

‘I suppose so,’ Ish agrees.

‘Thank you for helping,’ I say.

‘I’m in the book too, don’t forget,’ she says. ‘I want to find out what happens.’

 

 

That night sees the worst riots yet in Athens. While the new Greek government huddles inside the Old Royal Palace, Zegna Square is alight. Cars burn like pagan fires, gunshots streak through the black sky; masked protestors and masked police come together with a thunderclap that can be felt in the chest even thousands of miles away. Next morning, I have nervous clients on the line as soon as I turn on my phone, and at 10 a.m. I see Walter’s limousine pull up outside. Nobody from his office calls me; they just assume I will know he is there, which, to my embarrassment, I do.

In the back seat, Walter is livid. What are those gobshites doing over there? Will their fucking shambles of a government last the week? If it falls, and Greece tells its creditors to go to fuck, what then? I tell him that his investments have been spread across a wide portfolio precisely to protect them from this kind of shock, and that in fact Dublex will most likely benefit from the increased volatility in terms of security contracts. It’s the same speech I gave him a few weeks ago when the Spanish banks teetered, and a few weeks before that when it was Portugal on the brink. Every time his fears are harder to dislodge, as if he can see the flaming torches massed outside his house.

‘I don’t see what he’s so worried about,’ Kevin comments when I return. ‘It’s not like he’s going to run out of money, whatever happens.’

‘The more you have, the greater your fears of losing it,’ Jocelyn Lockhart says. ‘Classic human psychology.’

‘In Somalia, you worry about an empty rice bowl,’ Gary McCrum concurs. ‘In the suburbs, you worry about burglars running off with your flat-screen TV. But if you’re a billionaire – what would it take for a billionaire to lose everything?’

‘I don’t know,’ Kevin says.

‘Well, Walter fucking knows. I guarantee you, Walter lies awake every night, conjuring up whatever kind of Boschian nightmare you’d need to make any serious dent in his fortune. Defaulting Greeks are just one pixel of the fucking IMAX screen of unrelenting carnage that’s the inside of that man’s head.’

‘That’s why serious players never quit while they’re ahead,’ Jocelyn says. ‘They’re always rushing off to make more billions to protect the billions they have already. Looking for that little bit more that’ll make them bulletproof. But then that’s just more for them to worry about. It’s a vicious circle, see?’

‘So…’ Kevin looks deeply troubled by this information. ‘Are you saying … they shouldn’t bother? They’d be better off not being rich?’

‘No, I’m saying they need to tighten their focus,’ Jocelyn says. ‘If you’re worried about the apocalypse, you want to be investing in two things and two things only: weapons and gold. And by gold I mean actual bullion you can hold in your hand, not some certificate. Then, when it all goes tits up, you’re ready. Fortress in the Swiss Alps with an underground generator and its own water supply, maybe three hundred mercenaries to take out any fammos who come looking to get in – sorted.’

‘“Fammos”?’

‘Yeah, from the famine, you know.’

‘An island would be better,’ Gary McCrum asserts. ‘With a self-sustaining farm.’

‘Oh, yeah, an island’s the ideal,’ Jocelyn says. ‘Though you’re probably going to have to cut back on your mercenaries a bit.’

‘Or get robot mercenaries?’ Kevin says.

‘Nice,’ Jocelyn says. ‘You should say that to Walter. He’d be well impressed.’

‘You think?’ Kevin says.

‘Might even sign you up for a place in the fortress,’ Jocelyn says. ‘You could look out the window and watch us all burn.’

Kevin beams, as though he would like this very much indeed.

*   *   *

At last a quiet moment presents itself. I use my mobile so the bank won’t record the call; the line is poor, and the girl who answers doesn’t seem to know anything about Paul. ‘You published his novel,’ I tell her. ‘For Love of a Clown, surely you know it?’

The girl tells me, rather peevishly, that it must have been before her time, then puts me on hold. A moment later a second voice, a man’s, comes on the line. He introduces himself as Paul’s editor. Warily, as if he suspects some kind of scam, he tells me that while Asterisk Press did indeed publish Paul’s first novel, they have had no contact with him for some time.

‘Really?’ This strikes me as strange. ‘He has not been in touch regarding his new book, the story of an Everyman working in a mid-tier investment bank?’

‘No,’ the editor replies. ‘We haven’t heard anything from him at all.’

‘Hmm,’ I say, and then, ‘perhaps you have an address where I can contact him?’

‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘We can’t give that information out to strangers.’

‘Yes, but I am not really a stranger,’ I explain. ‘You see, I am the Everyman whose adventures will appear in his next novel.’

He apologizes again, invites me to leave a message which he can pass on, though he adds that Paul has not replied to any correspondence for several years, so they don’t know even if the address they have is the right one.

A series of phone calls to literary magazines and institutions in Dublin proves scarcely more informative; of the few people who remember him, one insists that he is dead, and refuses to be persuaded otherwise even when I tell him I recently had lunch with him. Nevertheless, a picture begins to emerge. One acquaintance makes reference to the writer’s disappointment over the reception of Clown; several speak about a hostile review in the national press.

Once I retrieve this review, which is hidden behind a paywall, his retreat from the literary world becomes considerably less of a mystery.

‘“How can something so trivial feel so exhausting? Reading this deeply unfunny, unintentionally depressing book, one might be tempted to conclude that the novel, like the circus, has simply had its day, and that novelists have come to inhabit the same territory as the clown chosen here as protagonist – once-beloved figures so outmoded that they now inspire only pity and incomprehension.”’

‘Fucking hell,’ Ish says.

‘“Yet this book comes on the heels of Bimal Banerjee’s masterful The Clowns of Sorrow, in which the obsolescence of these forgotten jokers gives them a tragic grandeur, confronting us with the unbreachable gulf between ourselves and the past…”’

I fall silent, skimming down the page. Ish nudges me. ‘What else?’

‘There is a lot of stuff here about Banerjee continuing Joyce’s great hermeneutic project.’

‘What about Paul?’

Frowning, I read down to the last paragraph. ‘She thinks he should not write any more novels.’

‘Right, I got that.’

And it seems that, for many years, he took her advice. I think back to that first conversation, the ‘wall’ he said he’d hit with his work; now it appears in quite a different light. Yet these discoveries have brought him no closer, and we must resort to desperate measures.

‘What the fuck is that thing?’ Kevin says.

‘Telephone directory,’ I say.

‘Landlines?’ Kevin says. ‘Who still has a landline?’

‘I keep a landline for when I need to find my mobile,’ Jocelyn says.

‘We’ve got a maid to do that,’ Gary says.

There are ten men listed who have the same name as the writer. Whenever Jurgen isn’t within earshot, I go through them one by one. Over the course of the evening, I manage to make contact with a butcher, an upholsterer, a sound engineer, a data miner, and a retired army captain who served with the United Nations in the Biafran War. They know nothing about my Paul, yet I can’t shake the sense of them as facets of a crystal, different aspects of the same entity – the men he might have become in different circumstances, at a different time, with different choices.

As I put down the phone for the last time, I have one of those dizzy moments, the vertigo that comes when just for an instant you get an inkling of how vast the world is, how populous and unknowable … Then it recedes again and is gone.

‘What about that number there?’ Ish points to an uncrossed name at the top of the list.

‘It’s disconnected.’

‘That doesn’t mean there’s no one there. Think about it. If this was a book, where would the person you were looking for turn out to be? It’s always the place with the disconnected phone, right?’

She keeps prodding me until I look the address up. It turns out that 323 Superbia is only ten minutes’ walk from the Centre, and so, mostly to mollify her, I agree to pay it a visit.

‘When?’ she says.

‘Soon,’ I promise.

‘I can’t wait that long! The suspense is killing me!’

‘All right, all right.’

Taking the lift down to the plaza, I follow the tram tracks in the direction of the train station until I pass out of the Centre. And here, on the teeming road, are the Irish: blanched, pocked, pitted, sleep-deprived, burnished, beaming, snaggle-toothed, balding, rouged, raddled, beaky, exophthalmic; the Irish, with their demon priests, their cellulite, their bus queues and beer bellies, their foreign football teams, betting slips, smartphones and online deals, their dyed hair, white jeans, colossal mortgages, miraculous medals, ill-fitting suits, enormous televisions, stoical laughter, wavering camaraderie, their flinty austerity and seeping corruption, their narrow minds and broad hearts, their drunken speeches, drunken fights, drunken weddings, drunken sex, their books, saints, tickets to Australia, their building-site countryside, their radioactive sea, their crisps, bars, Lucozade, their tattoos, their overpriced wine and mediocre restaurants, their dreams, their children, their mistakes, their punchbag history, their bankrupt state and their inveterate difference. Every face is a compendium of singularities, unadulterated by the smoothing toxins of wealth and privilege; to walk among them is to be plunged into a sea of stories, a human comedy so rich it seems on the point of writing itself. For a moment I wonder, hopelessly, what the International Financial Services Centre can offer to compare – then I remember that this was his very point, that the storyless, faceless banks are the underwriters of all this humanity, that we are the Fates who weave the fabric of the day …

Coming from the Centre, with its clean lines and ubiquitous dress code, the chaos of detail is almost overwhelming; I take refuge in the map on my phone. It takes me off the thoroughfare and into a warren of flats and terraced houses. There are no cars, no people, just boarded-up windows, incoherent graffiti, detritus so random it seems deliberate. The further I go, the worse it gets, till the very molecules of the air and brickwork seem on the point of fraying, drifting apart to leave yawning rents of pure nothingness. And then, in the midst of this desolation, I come upon a large, glittering tower.

To say it appears out of place would be an understatement. It looks like a five-star hotel that has been stolen from some exclusive neighbourhood of Shanghai or Los Angeles and then dumped here. Gilt filigree gleams from the railings of the balconies; mosaics twinkle on the dark stone of the façade; a majestic eagle peers down from the distant rooftop. From one side of the building hangs an enormous hoarding. Beneath the marks of rain and dust, it shows in black and white two willowy girls with kohl-ringed eyes, gazing hungrily over basketball-sized wine glasses at a smirking young man in very tight jeans who has hoisted himself up to sit on the kitchen counter, car keys flung in some obscure invitation onto the table in front of him. All three figures balance sunglasses in their hair, as if life could, at any moment, become too radiant to behold. The strapline below them reads, SUPERBIA: ENTER BEAUTY.

The entrance door to the lobby is flanked by two stone effigies, one of which holds an intercom. There is no response from 323, or indeed anything to indicate the intercom is working. Impulsively, I try the door – and it gives way.

The lobby is full of silence and dust. Nymphs bathe in dust in an ornate fountain; dust cloaks the tall mirrors along the walls. Gaps have appeared in the Moorish tiling, and the nameplates of the metal letterboxes are empty.

The lift is not working so I mount the stairs in intermittent light. No sounds can be heard anywhere. Reaching the third floor, I make a left, but after a short distance run into a thick plastic sheet that hangs like a filthy veil from ceiling to floor. Pushing it aside, I can just make out a lightless corridor studded by pockets of deeper darkness, doorways to rooms, or the shells of rooms. From somewhere a sharp, scurrying noise issues. I hurry back the way I came, turn a corner, then another, then stop and try to orient myself – and realize I am standing outside apartment no. 323. Mostly as a formality, I lift my hand to knock, and then I hear a voice.

‘You pawned it?’ it says. And then again, ‘You pawned it?’

‘That’s right,’ says another voice, a woman’s.

‘Jesus, Clizia!’ The man sounds very like Paul, though his tone is different from any I have heard him use. ‘What am I supposed to work on?’

‘Work!’ the woman’s voice, fierce and heavily accented, crows. ‘You tell me the day you want to work, I go out and buy you brand-new one. Work, this is the big joke! Ha ha, I am laughing!’

His tone hardens. ‘Well, where’s the money, so?’

‘What money?’

‘The money from my damn writing desk, that’s what money.’

‘Is gone.’

‘Gone? You spent it? All of it?’ Heavy footsteps pound the floor. ‘On what? Lottery tickets?’

‘I bought food, idiot! I bought food, so we don’t starve!’

‘That’s great! And what are we going to do tomorrow? What are we going to do tomorrow, when the food’s gone and my desk is gone?’

‘Oh yes, tomorrow is when you were going to make the big moneys, I forgot.’

‘Well, what’s your plan, exactly? Pawn the floorboards? Pawn the, the damn oxygen in the air?’

‘I leave you, that’s what! I leave you!’

‘I wish you would leave me,’ the man roars back. ‘I wish you would leave me, then I could get some peace and quiet! I wish one of us had the courage to bring this nightmare to an end, so I could at least look forward to dying al— oh, hello, Claude.’

Somewhere around ‘nightmare’, the storming footsteps rapidly increased in volume, and now the door has been flung open and Paul and I find ourselves looking at each other. I don’t know which of us is more surprised, although he works quickly to compose his features, transforming swiftly from conjugal fury to boggling horror to mild bemusement. ‘I didn’t expect to see you,’ he says, in a tone of strained jollity.

‘I was just in the neighbourhood,’ I say, in a similar tone. For a moment we stare at each other through the masks of our untruths: then, realizing he has no choice, Paul makes an ushering gesture. ‘Won’t you come in?’

‘I don’t want to intrude.’

‘Don’t be silly – please!’

He ushers me into a lavishly appointed room, something like Tutankhamen’s tomb might have looked like if they had decided to bury him in a modern kitchen. Every inch abounds with design features – spotlights, LED displays, gold-plated knobs and rails and switches – that so bedazzle me it takes me a moment to register the young woman who stands behind the island. She has platinum-blonde hair and a simmering expression; her left hand is curled around a mug, in the manner of one about to lob a grenade. From the wall, the silenced television throws violently jumping light over her face.

‘Claude, this is my wife, Clizia,’ Paul says. ‘Darling, this is Claude, the man who’s been very kindly helping me out with my project these last few weeks.’

‘Charmed,’ the woman says sullenly.

‘You never told me you had a wife,’ I say to Paul in the joshing, avuncular tone we established a moment ago, though in the claustrophobic atmosphere it is fighting for its life.

‘And you,’ Paul says, wagging his finger at me humorously, ‘are not supposed to be here! I thought we’d agreed you didn’t need to know anything about my life.’

‘Yes, that’s true, but for the last couple of weeks you have not come to work –’

‘Ha,’ the woman says.

Paul turns to her. ‘Darling, do you mind?’

She shrugs, tosses her platinum locks, and then, with deliberate slowness, slouches over to the sink, where she pours herself a glass of water and, raising her chin over her long white neck, slowly drinks it, continuing to gaze at me as she does so. She is almost extremely beautiful. Her features, from a formal point of view, are perfect – large, oceanic eyes, exquisite cheekbones, a mouth that, though I have never seen a pomegranate, irresistibly recalls pomegranates, or some epic, perfect work of pornography. Yet there is a hardness to them, as though they had been carved from some material whose first allegiance was not to beauty – adamantine, titanium, industrial diamond. The same might be said for the aggressive curves of her body, today squeezed into an old-fashioned floral dress whose pastoral innocence they mock so relentlessly it seems almost cruel.

‘You did not come to work,’ I repeat, ‘and so I started to worry that … that – I’m sorry, something is watching me from under the table.’

‘Under the – oh, for God’s sake.’ Paul crouches down and addresses the owner of the eyes: ‘Damn it, Remington, what are you doing down there? Why aren’t you in bed?’

‘I am in bed,’ a high-pitched voice replies.

‘You’re not in bed, you’re under the table. I can see you quite clearly.’

‘This is my bed,’ the voice explains. ‘Because I’m a dog.’

‘You’re not a – just get out of there.’ Paul stretches his hand between the chairs and extricates a small boy with grubby knees. ‘How long have you been down there? Were you listening to Mummy and Daddy’s private conversation?’

‘Dogs hear things people don’t hear,’ the child says mysteriously.

‘Go to bed,’ Paul says. ‘Your human bed.’

‘Who is this?’ I ask.

‘This is my son, Remington,’ Paul says. The boy is slight and resembles his mother, though in a softer, more benign way, the sharp edges rounded out and the porcelain skin spangled with amber freckles.

‘I’m four,’ Remington says to me. And then, ‘Dogs can’t talk.’

‘Very nice to meet you,’ I say, shaking his diminutive hand.

‘Do you have any bones?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Bow-wow-wow-wow!’ Remington exclaims. ‘Dogs like bones!’

‘That’s enough, Remington – now, as to the novel, I’ve had some very –’

‘Dogs like barking! Bow-wow-wow!’

Paul turns to his wife with a pained expression. ‘Can’t you do something with him?’

‘Certainly, darling,’ Clizia says. ‘You want I take him to nursery? Or bring him for stroll around garden?’

‘Bow-wow-wow!’ barks Remington, tearing around the limited floor space. ‘Bow-wow-wow-wow-wow!’

Paul pulls his hands down his face. ‘I’m losing my fucking mind here.’

‘Why don’t I just ring for Nanny?’ Clizia says brightly. Her husband responds with an expletive, and in an instant, while I stand there in a paroxysm of embarrassment, the argument begins all over again.

‘Mum and Dad are always fighting,’ Remington whispers to me confidentially. ‘It’s because I’m bad.’

‘I’m sure you’re not bad,’ I say.

Remington pauses a moment, contemplating this; then he slaps his two hands over his eyes and will not reappear, no matter how I cajole.

Clearly the best thing is for me to go. But as I make my way out of the apartment – picking my way past Louis Quatorze chairs, black chandeliers, other signature excesses of the Celtic Tiger – something catches my eye. On a stack of loose papers scattered over an approximately desk-sized area of floor sits the red notebook. I flinch: it’s like seeing Excalibur resting in the umbrella stand, or the Maltese Falcon propping up a lowboy.

I glance over my shoulder. Clizia is issuing a torrent of foreign words that sound vaguely like backwards French; Paul is shouting that he will have her deported. I look back. The notebook calls to me like a siren from a rock, enjoining me to turn its pages. I know I shouldn’t; yet something is not right here, and it may hold the answer. Nobody pays any attention to me as I edge over and lift it from the floor. With a dizzying sense of anticipation and dread, I go to the first page.

It is blank.

I turn to the next page.

It is blank.

I begin to feel a queer sort of chill, like a draught blowing down the hallways of my being. Fuck you, Clizia is bellowing at Paul. Fuuuuuuuckkkk youuuu!

The next page, the one after, and the one after that – blank. The page following is filled with handwritten text: a single word, blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah, repeated to take up the whole page. Opposite it is a crude cartoon, a stick-man in the basket of a hot-air balloon. The stick-man wears a crown and holds a bag marked with a euro symbol in either hand. On the page after that, a doodle of a camel, then more pages featuring similar doodles, either of breasts or of erect penises, or of erect penises defiling the breasts in one way or another. Then I come to a sequence of what seem to be measurements. Measurements, diagrams that seem ominously familiar, and a few pages later, a heading in capitals: WHO’S OUR MARK?

‘Whoa-ho-ho, what are you doing with that?’ Before I can read any further, Paul has appeared and snatched the book out of my hand.

My head snaps back; my vision swims. WHO’S OUR MARK? The question jigs mockingly before me.

‘You know you’re not allowed to see that,’ Paul scolds, stowing the notebook in a drawer.

‘It’s empty,’ I say, though my voice seems to come from elsewhere.

‘Well, it’s just rough notes,’ Paul says. ‘A word here and there, aides-memoires, as you’d call them.’

‘Our conversations, our stories, the time you spent with us…’

‘All up here.’ He taps his head with an index finger. ‘Locked away in the vault, don’t you worry.’

I barely hear him. I feel like I’ve been drugged, and that line keeps flashing up at me. ‘Who is Mark?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You have written, WHO’S OUR MARK? What does this mean?’

‘Oh, that – that’s nothing, just an old idea I didn’t end up using –’

‘Perhaps you thought it might be a good name for the Everyman, before you met me,’ I reason faintly.

‘Yes, that’s exactly it,’ he agrees, guiding me towards the door. And it sounds plausible; yet I can still feel the question descending through me, WHO’S OUR MARK?, rearranging everything, like some powerful agaric hidden in a plate of food.

‘Now why don’t you head back home’ – he reaches for the door handle – ‘and first thing tomorrow I’ll come in and tell you all about this new direction I’ve thought up –’

WHO’S OUR MARK? Fragments whirl before my eyes, snatches of old films, Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Cagney – what are they saying to each other? I lean in to read the subtitles …

‘Claude?’

Rather than just working in the bank, instead we have him rob the bank.

‘Claude, is everything…?’

And up from the dark depths, silent and swift as a shark, the truth now surges into view. The mark: the patsy, the mug, the sucker. ‘Le gogo,’ I hear myself whisper.

‘What?’

‘C’est bon pour les gogos.’ The words come out without me knowing why; and as if I’d uttered a magic spell, or whatever is the exact opposite of a magic spell, in an instant I understand everything. ‘There’s no novel,’ I say.

‘What?’ He seems baffled. ‘What are you talking about? Of course there’s a novel!’

How I yearn to believe him! Yet even as I look at him he seems changed: the artist of the last weeks vanished, his place taken by this other man, furtive, contingent, mired in the trash of the everyday. It’s like when you find out your lover has been unfaithful: in one horrible instant everything she was to you, the whole beautiful enchantment, falls away, and you see her as she really is – mortal, machinating, tethered like everyone else to a little patch of space and time. And the worst of it is that you knew all along.

He is still making protestations of innocence. I let them wash over me. Everything is clear now, terribly, unforgivingly clear. The novel was simply a ploy, to win my trust and get him into the bank. From there he would have free rein to plan his theft. ‘And Igor – or whatever his name is – he is not an experimental poet.’

‘Well, I mean, not precisely –’

‘He’s a pest exterminator,’ Clizia says. ‘He is the brains of the operation,’ she adds sardonically.

‘You’re not helping – Claude, listen, we can still make this happen. Nothing has changed!’

He goes on: he entreats and implores, he issues a myriad of offers and possibilities. But the words have become meaningless, as if he were speaking another language. For a moment I watch his mouth gobble, without hearing what it says; then I rise to my feet. ‘I have to go.’

‘You don’t know what it’s been like for me these last years – the pressure I’m under…’

I trudge heavily back around the table. He lays a hand on my arm. ‘Look – it’s true, I needed something to tide us over. But just so I can finish what I’m working on. I’ve got something up my sleeve so big it’ll make all of us rich. Rich!’

I shake him loose and open the door, walk through the darkness to the stairwell.

‘There’s no need to involve the authorities!’ Paul cries after me, as I begin my descent.