O’Connelly looked at his watch, it was getting late, he had fixed lunch with Liam Clancy on the other side of the river in a small restaurant nearby to Saint Sulpice.
It was a brisk ten minute walk to the Marco Polo where a table had been reserved. He was the first to arrive and ordered a glass of Champagne to sip as he looked through the notes he had jotted down that morning on his phone.
Ten minutes later, just as he was starting to worry, Clancy appeared looking a little flustered as he struggled out of his coat and handed it to a waiter.
“Hi Pat, sorry I’m late, you mentioned it was by a church and I was at the wrong one.”
O’Connelly laughed.
“Don’t worry you’re here now. What’ll you have to drink?”
Clancy looked at his friends glass and nodded.
“Looks good, I’ll have the same.”
The subject on everybody’s lips that Monday morning was Charlie Hebdo, a crime against the free press, which amongst other things had put France’s lame duck president on a pedestal. For Hollande and his Prime Minister the tragedy was like manna from heaven. The week before they were in the dumps, everything they touched seem to go wrong. Then on Wednesday morning January 7, the terrorists attacked, and by the end of the week Hollande was plebiscited for his handling of the crisis.
Paris – Quartier St Sulpice
“Did you go to the march?”
“No, I don’t like that kind of thing. Politicos crying crocodile tears whilst the other poor fucks are laying dead on a mortuary slab.”
Clancy nodded, he was still young.
“So how’s our golden boy, still jetting around the world?”
Before Clancy could reply his phone vibrated.
“Sorry Pat,” he said clicking on his inbox with an air of nonchalant importance, “seems urgent.”
“Jesus!” he exclaimed with a start, reading the message again. It was a mail from head office in London, addressed to all personnel, announcing the resignation of Michael Fitzwilliams and the merger of INI with City & Colonial.
O’Connelly looked on bemused as Clancy, whose eyes were fixed on his iPhone, read and reread the text. It was signed by a new chairman, a certain Sir Alec Hainsworth, someone he had never heard off.
“What’s up? Another terrorist attack?”
“Jesus, it’s worse than that. We’ve been taken over.”
“The bank!”
“The bank. I hope I’ve still got a job.”
Clancy looked deflated. He cursed himself for not looking at the morning news. He had been too occupied untangling himself from the arms of a new girlfriend he had been shagging the night before at her studio flat in Vincennes.
Distractedly he wondered who he should call. He worked directly under the orders of Pat Kennedy, who was in Hong Kong where it was evening time.
“Let’s order Liam, then you can explain it to me,” said O’Connelly as the waiter appeared.
Clancy tossed back his Champagne and pointing his finger at the glass asked the waiter for a refill.
“Sorry Pat, this situation is totally unforeseen. I don’t understand what the fuck’s going on.”
The lunch was spoilt, the conversation difficult, desultory, as Clancy slumped back into his seat overcome by the thought of impending disaster. What should have been a joyfully, boastful, reunion, was spoilt as memories of a depressed Dublin pub flooded back.
He had joined INI three of years before after a difficult period of self imposed exiled in Spain. At the end of 2009, he had been unceremoniously dumped from what was then the Irish Union Bank in Dublin, where he had worked as an up and coming trader. The Irish Union, part of Fitzwilliams’ banking group, had taken a serious hit when the first wave of the financial crisis struck Ireland’s happy go lucky shores.
Now, just after recovering his golden boy aura, this, whatever it was, happened. He was out on a limb and because of his link to Kennedy he would probably be ditched again. That English bastard Hainsworth, or whatever his name was, would surely be wanting to make cuts.
Later that afternoon he was due to return to London on the Eurostar and the following evening scheduled to fly to Hong Kong and Shanghai to met with Pat Kennedy and a group of Chinese investors.
That was now up in the air.
It was always the small guys who paid went things went wrong, he thought as he tried to console himself. It was like that in 2008. He like his fellow traders had done what they had been told to do. In his short career as a trader, Clancy had received no instructions or specialised training in compliance, ethics or market regulations, either internally or externally. He had simply done what every other trader had done in trading rooms, wherever they were in the financial world, using strategies and procedures that had existed prior to his arrival and which continued to be used even after the debacle.