The Mark and the Void: A Novel Read online

  We turn to the TV, where the crawl tells us that a few minutes ago a Texan congressman, protesting government threats to take away the oil industry’s billion-dollar subsidies, doused himself in gasoline in the House of Representatives and set himself on fire. A brief, almost unprocessable image flicks on screen, a writhing, suited silhouette at the centre of a ball of incandescent light, while horrified figures with tans and elaborate hairstyles clamber around him powerlessly.

  ‘The Texans are talking about seceding from the Union,’ Gary McCrum says happily. ‘The dollar’s sunk like a stone.’

  And not just the dollar. In the resulting turmoil, Dexter’s, the ratings agency, has downgraded the investment rating of the world’s safest security from AAA to AA. What the repercussions for the rest of the world will be, no one can tell; but for BOT, it means one very, very, very lucrative trade.

  ‘Betting against T-bills.’ Joe Peston shakes his head in admiration.

  ‘Extremely counterintuitive,’ Jurgen notes. ‘Essentially, Howie has combined two inspirational memos into one unstoppable supermemo.’

  ‘But how did Blankly know?’ Kevin asks. ‘How did he know all this stuff was going to happen?’

  ‘That’s why they’re paying him the big bucks,’ Gary says, clapping him on the shoulder.

  ‘Yeah,’ Kevin says, turning towards the window and gazing up, as if Porter Blankly might be circling among the clouds out there, like Superman.

  Official celebrations are scheduled for the following evening; tonight Kevin, Ish and I are trapped in the office, labouring to finish the report on time. The sixth floor empties and the lights in the buildings around us wink out one by one; the inky near-black of the sky only adds to the sense that we are literally submerged in Royal’s accounts, a labyrinth of debt with some terrible wrongness at the centre of it that at times I catch a glimpse of but never for long enough to lay hold of …

  ‘He’ll get the idea,’ Ish says, meaning the Minister. ‘No way he’ll chuck any more money at them after reading this. Best thing at this stage’d be just to shove them off a cliff.’

  At 4 a.m. I mail the completed document to Rachael and Jurgen, then go back to my apartment to sleep for a couple of hours before returning to the office. Thankfully, the next day is relatively quiet, apart from a mid-morning meeting with Walter, most of which he spends complaining about the cost of port capacity in Belgium, where Dublex is shipping the cement they can no longer use in Ireland after the collapse of the construction industry. As I’m about to leave I ask him whether he has money in Royal Irish. He stares at me a moment, then says, deliberately, ‘I have no holding in that bank.’ I tell him that’s good news, as it’s about to lose whatever minimal value it still has. He doesn’t respond to this; he’s hiding something, but then businessmen are always hiding something, particularly at his level, where the meticulous world of contracts and accounts and due diligence dissolves, and international commerce reveals itself to be an ethereal matter of nods, winks, unspoken understandings.

  As soon as evening falls, I set off for Paul’s apartment to hear his initial ‘plot outline’.

  A commotion is issuing from inside. He answers the door as soon as I knock, his expression grave. ‘Remington’s ant escaped,’ he tells me.

  ‘Oh,’ I say.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ he says, chivvying me over the threshold, ‘we don’t want it getting out.’

  Obligingly I step in –

  ‘Stop!’ Paul shouts, frantically waving his arms and staring at my feet. I do as I am told, waiting on the spot for further instructions.

  The scene in the apartment is chaotic. Cupboard doors have been flung open, tins emptied, drawers pulled out, hideous Ectovian rugs overturned. Clizia, dressed only in a towel, is on her hands and knees, calling ‘Roland! Roland!’ into the darkness under the couch. The ant’s owner, meanwhile, is standing in the doorway opposite, a stubby, bellowing fountain of grief.

  ‘It’s the damnedest thing,’ Paul says, getting down on all fours. ‘That ant lived like a king. A nice cosy breath-mint box. A delicious sugar cube all to himself. Why would he run away?’

  ‘I suppose a cage is a cage, no matter how opulent,’ I reflect.

  ‘In retrospect I may have made the air holes too big,’ Paul reflects. ‘Well, I hope he’s happy, breaking a little boy’s heart like that. The poor kid’s been crying for so long I’m worried his body’s going to run out of liquids. Here, I’ll go this way, why don’t you check in there.’

  The bathroom is clouded with fragrant, Clizia-inflected steam, which makes it both hard to see anything and rather disconcertingly intimate. The small space is dominated by a Jacuzzi, black and gargantuan, like a hippopotamus backed into a broom closet; cluttering the damp rim are tubes of creams and lotions, many with the ends cut off so the remnants can be scraped out. A toilet, also black, looms menacingly out of the mist. I cannot see any ants, but reaching for the door handle I find myself grasping instead a pair of knickers that hang from it. They are sheer and stringy, almost to the point of dissolving in my hand; I feel embarrassed even being in the same room as them, and hurry out again, only to discover the way back blocked by Clizia, her towelled rear pointed up to me and her nose pressed to the floorboards in the manner of some impossibly sexual aardvark. ‘I’ll just take a look in here,’ I say in a high voice, and push through the door on my left.

  I am in the master bedroom. It features the same Babylonian trappings as the rest of the apartment – velour drapes, gilt sconces, ornate architrave – but here they are almost invisible, because everywhere I look, there are books: stacked double on shelves, crammed into cases, piled in towers that reach almost to the ceiling, resembling nothing so much as the walls of a child’s fort, a meticulously constructed and intrinsically doomed attempt to keep the world at bay. A laptop sits on a desk by the window, the manufacturer’s logo rotating and distending anamorphically; I regard it with a certain degree of temptation, wondering whether my story may already be taking shape there. Then I notice something on the desk itself – a numbered sticker in the corner. This must be the writing desk that Clizia pawned! Paul has redeemed it! My heart leaps. For why would he do that, unless he intended to write?

  The thought that my plan for him is already having an effect gives me high hopes for his plan for me. I look again at the laptop. Surely under the circumstances it wouldn’t be wrong to have a very quick glance at what he’s doing? Given that I’m providing the material and the financing? Just a peep, a sneak preview as it w—

  ‘Oh God!’ Reeling back from the computer, I slip on a paperback and fall backwards onto the floor; a tower of books pounces gleefully on top of me.

  ‘Research! Research!’ cries Paul, running in from the next room and diving between me and the computer screen, although the image has already seared itself indelibly into my brain. ‘That’s a separate matter I’ve been looking into,’ he tells me, clearing fallen books from my chest, ‘for a potential – hey!’

  ‘What’s going on in there?’ Clizia yells from the next room.

  ‘I’ve found him!’ Paul calls, crouching down in a corner.

  ‘You found him?’ Remington comes rushing in, with Clizia behind him; she levels a single, reductive glance at me, still supine on the floor, then looks away.

  ‘See for yourself.’ Paul rises to his feet and opens his cupped hands. ‘Look, Remington. Who do we have here?’

  Remington glances down into his hands and snuffles. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, it’s Roland, see? Look, he’s waving his little leg at you. Hi, Remington!’

  ‘That isn’t him.’

  ‘What do you mean? Who else would it be?’

  ‘A different ant.’

  ‘It’s not a different ant, take a listen – Roland, is that you?’ Paul brings the conched hands to his ear, then says, in a high-pitched voice, ‘Yes, it’s me all right.’ He lowers his hands again to address the ant. ‘We’ve all been very worried about you,
Roland, where have you been? I went away to see my AUNT! That’s very funny, Roland, but next time let us know in advance, okay?’

  ‘It’s not him,’ Remington gurgles through incipient tears.

  ‘It is him!’ Paul remonstrates. ‘Of course it’s him!’

  ‘It’s not,’ Clizia chimes in.

  ‘Whose side are you on?’ Paul says.

  ‘It’s not even an ant,’ she says exasperatedly. ‘It’s a spider.’

  Paul examines the tiny creature crouched in his palm. ‘So it is,’ he says. ‘Actually it looks a little bit like your mother.’

  ‘My mother would cry bitter tears if she knew that I have shackled myself to a man who cannot even tell an ant from a spider,’ Clizia attests.

  ‘Let’s try and think positively about this,’ Paul says. ‘Remington, how would you like a brand-new pet spider?’

  From his wails it is evident that Remington would not like this very much.

  ‘What if we pull a couple of its legs off?’ Paul says in an undertone to me. ‘Think that’d fool him?’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better just to find Roland?’

  ‘Forget it,’ Paul says. ‘That ant is history.’ Hearing this, Remington’s howls double in volume.

  Clizia gazes from one of us to the other in utter disgust, then, picking up her son, ‘Come on, Remington, you help Mama dry her hair,’ she says, and carries him, still bawling, to his bedroom. The door slams behind her. Paul and I find ourselves in silence.

  ‘So,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah,’ Paul says. ‘Well, look, thanks again for helping with the search. I’ll let you know if there are any new developments.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I say. ‘But while I am here, maybe we should have a quick discussion of the plan.’

  ‘The plan?’

  ‘The plan you were devising – for me and Ariadne?’

  ‘Oh, that,’ he says, face clouding.

  ‘We had arranged to talk about it tonight, if you remember.’

  ‘Right, right, of course – I’ll be perfectly honest, Claude, what with the whole Roland situation, this place has been kind of a madhouse.’

  I do not follow. ‘When did Roland escape?’

  ‘About half an hour ago. But it’s been brewing for a couple of days now.’

  ‘I see,’ I say, though this is not quite true. ‘So we are slightly behind schedule.’

  ‘Slightly,’ Paul says.

  ‘Well, perhaps we should review what we have so far.’

  ‘Yeah, you know, as an artist, I’m not entirely comfortable with showing work before it’s ready. But rest assured, I’m making serious headway with your story.’

  ‘Ha,’ Clizia comments, sweeping out of the nursery like a svelte, ironical bush fire.

  ‘Pay no attention to my wife. I’m giving this my fullest attention.’

  ‘If you are paying him to look at whores on the computer, then I can confirm that he gives it his full attention,’ Clizia says. She looks at the clock, swears, then clips off into the bathroom.

  ‘Are you going somewhere?’ Paul asks. Clizia barks something fierce but unintelligible from the other room. ‘What?’ he shouts back.

  She reappears in a tracksuit with a nylon sports bag on her shoulder. ‘Volleyball try-outs.’

  Paul looks nonplussed.

  ‘I have told you twenty times,’ Clizia says. ‘There is try-out tonight for volleyball team. Cleaners’ league.’

  ‘I don’t remember you mentioning –’

  ‘That’s because you don’t listen to anythink I say!’ she shouts back, with surprising vehemence. ‘Too busy wasting time with the idiot plans!’

  ‘It’s not an idiot plan,’ he says. ‘Jesus, Clizia, you complain when I’m not working, then when I am working you’re standing around all the time making sarcastic remarks –’

  ‘Working, ha,’ she says, taking a hairbrush and furiously attacking her hair.

  ‘Yes, working, we’re not in Ectovia now, people have jobs other than peeling potatoes and digging mass graves –’

  A whimper emerges from Remington’s room; she throws her arms up. ‘I’m going to be late!’

  ‘I’ll take care of him,’ Paul says. ‘Go to your try-out.’ She stomps off without saying goodbye. ‘Sorry about that,’ he says to me as the door slams shut. ‘She’s been kind of tense lately.’

  ‘She doesn’t approve of our arrangement.’

  ‘She doesn’t approve of much that I do, Claude. I wouldn’t worry about it.’

  The nursery door opens and Remington pads out. ‘Dad, can we play Rainbow Mystery Epic?’

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be asleep?’

  ‘Just for a minute? I’ll be Pikaboom, Number One Rainbow Collector. You be Purple Aqualing.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’

  ‘Now steal my rainbows.’

  ‘I’m going to steal your rainbows!’ Paul roars. Remington shrieks, and runs off behind the couch. His father turns to me wearily. ‘So anyhow, there’s the progress report.’

  ‘I see.’ I stroke my chin. ‘Well, I imagine it takes a little while to find your way into a project. Let’s meet again in a few days’ time, when you’ve had more time to think. Why don’t you come over to my apartment? We can have dinner, and afterwards we will be able to talk undisturbed.’

  ‘That’d be great, Claude. I’ll have everything locked down by then, I promise.’

  I suppose I should be disappointed, but as I let myself out I am tingling with excitement. The symbolism of the redeemed writing desk seems to me incontrovertible; I make my way down the hall, lost in happy fantasies of rescuing his career (and quite possibly his marriage).

  And then something calls me from them. It is so subtle that at first I can’t tell what it is or even which sense has perceived it, but with every onward step it grows stronger. Perfume: the same heady scent that gilded the edges of the steam in the bathroom now dances languorously through the stale air of the hallway. On the landing, it becomes denser, more insistent, directing me to follow it down the stairwell … but then I notice something else. In the dust beneath the plastic sheeting that closes off the unfinished rooms are fresh footprints – two different kinds, one set (trainers?) going in, another set (heels?) going out.

  I push aside the plastic sheet, step onto bare planks. Everything is dark; perfume pours from the doorless entrance to the right. I follow it, stepping through the frame into the shell of an apartment. The light of the city moon shines through the window to bleach the unsanded floorboards. In a corner lies the nylon sports bag, inside it the tracksuit, trainers and top that Clizia wore when she left the apartment. I’m sure there is a perfectly reasonable explanation, but I can’t think of it. Nor can I think why she would bathe, or wash her hair, or put on those scandalous knickers before a volleyball game. I stand by the window for what seems a long time, but the answers don’t present themselves; there is only the opaque shimmer of the night and the city, and her perfume wrapping itself round and round me, purring like a cat.

  Life is so loud that it takes a few moments to realize it is almost empty. Everyone is packed into one little corner where the BOT celebrations are in full swing. ‘Rachael’s started a tab,’ Ish explains, pointing to where the Chief Operating Officer stands deep in conversation with Howie. Outside the bank, she appears even more like a hologram, the digital reprise of something happening far, far away.

  ‘If I was Howie, I wouldn’t drink anything that she’d bought me,’ Joe Peston says.

  ‘Rachael doesn’t see him as a threat,’ I say. ‘A deal like that makes everyone look good.’

  ‘I don’t know, Claude,’ Gary McCrum says. ‘If Porter wants to keep him at BOT he’d better come up with something pretty special. And Rachael’d better hope it’s not her head on a plate.’

  Word of Howie’s spectacular coup has passed beyond BOT and into the greater financial world. Trading forums are alight with it, investment bloggers ballyhoo it, Howie’s name bounces thro
ugh time zones from one continent to the next. Many commentators see the trade as a vindication of Porter Blankly’s controversial counterintuitive approach: in an article entitled ‘Wrong about Wrong?’, Bloomberg praises Blankly’s discounting of data and logic as ‘a Copernican revolution in active credit management’. Today saw a whole series of similarly counterintuitive positions around the world, traders betting against the market, common sense, their own best instincts.

  ‘Such bullshit,’ Ish grumbles.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The whole thing was a fluke. It’s totally obvious.’

  ‘A fluke?’ Kevin squeaks. ‘He solved the riddle, Ish!’

  ‘I don’t think that even was a riddle,’ Ish says. ‘What do you think, Claude? Do you think Porter Blankly genuinely knew what was going to happen with the guy setting himself on fire? Or was it all one big coincidence?’

  I shrug. ‘I know what we’ll be telling our shareholders.’

  Jurgen appears with a fresh bottle of champagne. He tops up our glasses, then raises his own. ‘Exciting times,’ he says, ‘and more is on the way.’

  ‘Word is that Agron is happening,’ Joe Peston says to Jurgen.

  ‘Agron is happening?’ I say.

  ‘Agron is on,’ Jurgen confirms.

  ‘What?’ Ish says.

  ‘Barely here a month, and already he’s moving on Agron,’ Gary McCrum says. ‘Now that’s a chief executive.’

  ‘Look, people keep saying “Agron” over and over and I have no idea what it means,’ Ish says.

  ‘That is unusual,’ Jurgen says, ‘as the potential Agron bid has been mooted in the last two issues of Torabundo Times, the in-house bulletin that is printed out weekly for your personal consumption.’

  ‘You read that thing?’ Ish says.

  ‘What do you do with it?’ Jurgen says.

  ‘I use it to line the parakeet’s cage,’ Ish says.

  Jurgen takes a tiny pad from his shirt pocket and makes a note.

  Agron is the Agronomical Bank of Wisconsin. It began life in the 1930s as a small savings and loan, offering succour to farmers affected by the Dust Bowl. However, in the 1990s it began a series of mergers and takeovers, beginning with US investment bank Close Weintraub, then spreading its tentacles across both oceans to devour a Belgian commercial bank, a Swiss reinsurance firm, an Australian gold mine, as well as a host of other, more esoteric investments.