Four minutes later, it happens, and Brunner and De Vries are staring over my shoulder. Just dumping Couper-Seidel has saved us about €10 million. The shorts have made us another €40 million. If we cash out now, the profit on the stock in Juarez Industrial and Ardhew will bring the total to something like €100 million.
In the purest bullshit of an industry founded on it, what I have just done is the kind of thing careers are made on. This morning I was a very good banker. Now I am touching the edges of financial godhead. I have entered the special space set aside for prophets and savants who understand where the money world is going before it goes there, for Michael Burry and George Soros, for others who don’t choose to be known by the wider public. Join that club and you almost automatically join another one, the one that has fifteen hundred members and more power, acting collectively, than any other force on earth. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s simply such a concentration of access and resource that it cannot help but carry weight. It requires no oaths of allegiance, because all that is already implied. It’s just wealth, but on a level that is to all intents and purposes an evolutionary change.
I can feel it, waiting for me: the new nationality that takes you when you have become pure money.
The shark eats three more companies before the end of the month, and I find I’m waiting for it, hanging by the screen like a nervous boyfriend, but in fact it never happens unless I’m there. It never even happens if I’m just looking the other way. It waits. Or rather, as I tell myself, the subconscious process in my head that has been kicked loose by my rampage, by my fear, by priapism and by my shark obsession, requires that I spend a given amount of time looking at the numbers before it shows me what is happening.
But I know it doesn’t. I don’t need to do anything except drink coffee and wait. I make money the way other men make urine.
I use the money to buy art. Art right now is a better bet in many ways than a bank, so long as you buy the right art and buy enough of it to avoid paying a ridiculous commission. It’s also a bullshit-based economy, so the terms of engagement are very familiar. I thought about wine, but you know what? I care about wine. Wine should not get shoehorned and abused by the market. Wine is old and respectable and erotic and human. I know Goldman once thought about buying Bordeaux – not the wine, the region, so they’d control supply – but they didn’t, and that is a good thing. Wine should not be a value counter in this game, no more than food. No more than healthcare or clean water. There are things that should be immune, and the people who don’t understand that distinction, the distinction between what is fair game and what is not: those are the people who should go to jail.
I hire a woman from Zurich called Miranda who specialises in finding underrated material and acquiring a corner on it, and she buys me almost the entire collection of some ageing rocker in London who’s fallen on hard times owing to a divorce. This includes a great quantity of South American folk art – and what she tells me are some extremely rare and undervalued duodecimal quipus, which I might actually find interesting – along with the best of some new work by a man named Berihun Bekele who painted flying saucer pop art in the 1970s. I have to assume she knows what she is doing. A few days later, there’s a splash piece in the New York Times about the man. He evidently got his mojo back working on a new computer game that everyone is supremely excited about. Note to self: get it. But also: doff the cap to Miranda, because the price of Bekele’s work has just added a few zeros. The nerds of Silicon Valley have gone nuts for his stuff.
We just turn around and sell most of the Bekeles straight to California, but I tell her to send me a selection, of her own choosing, to go on my walls. ‘Something I’d like, something you think will resonate for me.’ The first thing I unwrap is a quipu, what people sometimes call a ‘talking knot’. This is evidently a sort of Inca necklace-cum-tax return, and, presumably on the basis that I am a mathematician by training, she includes a sheaf of paperwork I do not read about how remarkable it is that it’s patterned in base 12 rather than base 10. The quipu itself, for all that someone has spread it out like a condor’s wing, looks like a neolithic two-way. I send it back and tell her to store it. Quipus are apparently hard currency to collectors, real blue-chip property, so it isn’t a poor choice financially, it’s just not my thing.
Next out of the bubble-wrap is a strikingly erotic nude of a Japanese woman reclining in some sort of courtyard; then a strange sub-Mondrian effort I don’t really give a shit about, but which is perfectly acceptable chin-scratching art; and finally I’m confronted with a seven-foot canvas wrapped in opaque brown paper around the plastic, which was apparently something Bekele painted as part of a challenge to the Khartoum School which is labelled in big black felt-tip letters over the packing tape with the single word GNOMON.
The joke works on a lot of levels. ‘Gnomon’ means ‘one in the know’, which is clever about art and about my financial mojo, but it also means something perpendicular, something that sticks out. Everything in the world, you will observe, ultimately pays homage to my erection. I imagine Miranda as a vigorous Swiss blonde with a skier’s legs, but she won’t tell me and she laughs when I offer to fly her in.
I glance at the printed description – MIXED MEDIA. Apparently there’s an actual metal gnomon, an architect’s tool, glued to the wooden board on which the whole thing is painted.
Unboxing art is even better than unboxing a new phone. It is bigger, more physical, and what is underneath has a rich oil and turpentine stink that is earthy and mouth-watering.
Carefully, with scissors, I undress my picture, and step back. Oh, yes. He sees clearly, this forgotten bad boy from Addis Ababa. He sees through time.
The gnomon is the fin, of course, and Bekele dreamed it very accurately, shaped the shallow arc of the head and body, the bulbous bullet shape.
It is swimming through inky electronic space, the sky above full of numbers in cathode ray green.
Gnomon is a picture of my shark.
That night, I buy drinks for an entire strip club. An Israeli dancer, the only one I’ve ever met and a former tank commander, sits naked on my lap and whispers in my ear.
She’s rather charming. I have never been so lonely in my life.
*
And so to bed, but clearly not to sleep, not in the company of Commander Ruth, the world’s most dangerous submissive, and anyway, who needs to dream of white ghosts and rows and rows of teeth every night? That will not leave you rested. Perhaps excess will, if you give it time and money. I try it on for size: more and more of everything. The good doctors of Athens will happily prescribe for a well-to-do patient the very latest in mood management and sleeping pills, of course, but recently I’ve come to believe that the best defences are still the natural ones. Over the next week I drink Armagnac from the sacroiliac crest of an heiress and Yquem from the suprasternal notch of a heptathlete. I hire in as many plasma screens as will fit in my party space and obtain pre-release copies of Bekele’s must-have video game – it’s called Witnessed, a sort of Orwellian Lara Croft tunnel-trawler with bleak, hypnotic landscapes that seem to watch you right back – and host the all-Greece launch party, with hot tubs. We play a marathon – the idea is to reach the level cap, be the first in the world. I have no idea if we actually achieve this in the end, but it’s a huge deal, with press, because this kind of thing makes money like cows make shit. Drunk and button-mashing as if this work of ludic art was a Missile Command coin-op from the eighties, I accidentally unlock an Easter egg in the game: the figure representing me slips through a hidden door into a kind of insane control centre, a room full of secrets. Apparently this demonstrates that I have mad skillz, because someone writes the words on my stomach in purple lipstick and sambuca.
There’s a rousing cheer, but I don’t think much about it because I’ve already dropped the controller to get another drink and then am otherwise engaged talking algorithms and UI add-ons with three owner-engineers from a software company in Berlin. I make
a note: coder women are my people and they are crazy hot.
In the corner of my eye I can see the game, my guests playing and playing. Everything is a camera in Witnessed, and the designer has done this creepy-as-shit thing where the software looks at your calendar and your recent emails and asks about them if you leave it alone for too long: surveillance simulating surveillance. Two of my guests have to make a hasty retreat after the system interrupts an argument about the relative buoyancy of David Hasselhoff and Erika Eleniak to ask, via the 21-foot plasma, if they’re sleeping together. My bad, my bad, and more bubbles for everyone. No, no, champagne – wait, you have a bubble machine? Bring it immediately!
When I have recovered, there’s an advertising convention in town, and of course we all know about ad executives, and then it’s Fashion Week and then a film festival, and if after a while at the extremes one suffers from issues of performance – a few weeks of this sort of behaviour will bring that on in a sixteen-year-old, never mind a guy in his thirties stressed unto mania and in any case in moderately iffy cardiovascular health – then modern science is able to assist there, too. Where once there was the little blue pill there is now a feedback-regulated injectable dispenser, a little electronic capsule they put in your gluteus muscle that really does the business. You can customise response times and various other aspects of your experience from an iPhone app. I put my code key on the main screen and invite my guests to choose my level of arousal, rating another mention in the gossip pages. Satisfaction – for all concerned – is positively guaranteed. I am RoboKyriakos. My genitals emit a low amp electrical wang pulse, as Charles Dance memorably said.
Yes. You will find that he actually did.
I am invincible, in the bank as in the sack. The shark swims in the markets, in the exchanges, in my balls. There are no castles I cannot storm. Day upon day upon night upon night, I invest Megalos’s money – and that of a growing number of other clients – and I am unstoppable. The Patriarch, for his part, is evidently something of a mover and a shaker, albeit only in a moral sense. I find him on the front page of my newspaper brokering a labour agreement, then on the eleven o’clock news talking about the duty to the motherland. His profile is enhanced by a rumour that he’s made some very smart investment calls recently, with a new – unnamed – advisor.
That would be my balls.
Megalos thrives. Everyone is buying what he’s selling, that mixture of humility and pride that sits so well on a priest, and the hint of an old-fashioned intolerance for people who are not like us. Now I’m sure he and Cosmatos are – semiotically speaking – in bed together. They use all the same dog whistles, the same humblebrags, the same pleas for tolerance that somehow make intolerance seem quite reasonable. He’s Greece’s most eligible celibate, and no public occasion can take place without him. Even Europe loves him, inviting him to diplomatic events to keep him inside the fence. For as long as he’s prepared to shake hands with the German Minister for Poverty and Aid and talk about the African Problem in measured tones; for as long as he has good things to say about the Chinese efforts against air pollution, then he’s one of them, after all. A great thinker, is Nikolaos Megalos, uniting the working-class Right with the wealthy Right, representing those who might otherwise slip into more unpalatable corners of the political spectrum. Not that he could get through the door without my balls to make him richer.
Yes, my balls and everything that goes with them: even when the shark is not in evidence, it seems I cannot make a wrong choice. My own wealth increases almost as mightily as my cyborg erection. If I had known that alcohol poisoning, insomnia and the ineradicable scent of sex on my upper lip would do this to my professional skills, I would have debauched myself into a coma years ago. Fortunately I am now mature enough to handle my mutant power responsibly, so I do not have a heart attack or turn up to work without my trousers or anything like that. I run five funds now, all at once. They have differing imperatives, differing instructions and priorities, and in fact Megalos is the only large institutional client remaining in the original one. All the others have upgraded, moved on to my new, notionally riskier funds. Megalos is bound by some standing orders which require him to avoid such investments, so he and a smattering of smaller investors whom he introduced are the only ones still playing it safe. For the others, I dance between the flashing blades of economics like the girl from Cirque du Soleil. Nothing can stop me. The room – the whole bank – knows what I’m doing to myself, but for as long as I’m on this streak they won’t get in the way. You don’t mess with a man on a tear. In fact in a weird way they’re my safety net. For as long as I’m up, they’ll let me roll, and as soon as they sense weakness they’ll move me out and send me on a Kur, which is what the Germans call it when you go to a nice hotel with raw carrots on the menu to dry out and remember your own name.
It’s not a solution. Cosmatos was right about one thing: I don’t seem to be losing my shark. She’s come with me on to the land by some crazy shark magic, something primal and weird that can’t be undone. I’m tied to her. Perhaps I married her with that watch. Did I tell you I went to get a new one? I did. I thought of Watches of Switzerland, but the most expensive thing they had was a TAG Heuer, a ridiculous effort made of carbon fibre. If I want a fighter jet, I’ll buy one, I won’t buy a watch in the style of a MiG. In the end I go for a Ulysse Nardin, because the guy in Jaeger-LeCoultre almost makes me wait, and while I’d love to get Breguet to sell the Marie-Antoinette, they’re just never going to put out. I know someone who offered them $22 million for it and they said no. They keep that thing just to fuck with you. I’m guessing they believe one day they’ll give it to a street urchin, and this one selfless anti-capitalist act will upset the axis of the world and usher in a new era of analogue watches, that Breguet are art-prank crypto-communists. Or no one’s offered them enough yet for their insane timepiece. Whatever. Nardin makes one that has so many precious stones on it the enamelled white gold dial is almost impossible to see. They agree to do a personalised version with a shark on it, because, hey: Kyriakos.
I put it on. The bracelet feels hot against my skin. It itches and then it hurts, and when I take it off there’s a mark as if I’ve burned my hand in a fire. Each link has left a print. The horologist at Nardin is horrified. He will apply a hypoallergenic coating, he says, it’s never happened before, you usually only see that sort of reaction with impure gold, he’ll assay the metal immediately.
In the end, he produces a new watch, but it’s exactly the same. I don’t show him the underside of my wrist, where the clasp has branded a little triangle into my skin.
*
I eat with the pantheon.
For four months, I join the Bilderberg swirl. I cannot turn around without shaking hands with a billionaire or a head of state. Would I care to come to [insert broken country here] and institute a new economic plan? Perhaps an island off the coast for my personal paradise would help me to decide? I can taste the power in my incidental acquaintances, in the carpets I walk on between meetings. I need to get to Mumbai, and normally I’d just get my credit card company to sort out a package, car and first-class ticket, top hotel, a standard thing I wouldn’t have to think about. But not now. Now my phone rings, and it’s Ben Teasdale, the Arizona technologist who owns half the fibre-optic cable in the US and supplies connectivity to the whole of Asia. He’s a transhumanist, famously: when he dies he will try to squirt his consciousness into a computer, then freeze his brain in case there’s any of himself left inside. He funds research into weird technologies: man–machine interfaces and artificial telepathy. He holds patents in things which will probably drive the next hundred years of economic growth.
‘Izzat Kyriakos?’
‘Yes.’
‘This is Ben Teasdale. Uhh hear you’re goin’ to Mumbai.’
How he hears he does not say. Doesn’t need to. If the NSA watches everyone, all the time, they do it with stuff he built. But all he’d have to do is ask, anyway. It’s Ben Teasda
le.
‘Yes, I have some business over there. I’m on a flight tomorrow.’
‘Screw that. You know what the odds ahh on dyin’ in a aih crash on commercial?’
‘Considerably more favourable than those for private jets.’
‘Don’t have a private jet. Bought a Airbus. Used to have a Boeing, but Uhh like all the electronics on the Airbus. Longest unpowered glide was a Airbus. Plane that landed on the Hudson was a Airbus.’
‘The one that landed unpowered at Heathrow was a Boeing.’
‘That was the pilot, not the plane. That was unbelievable. How the Queen did not hire that guy Uhh do not know.’
‘Who did hire him?’
‘Uhh did,’ says Ben Teasdale. ‘So you want to hitch a ride? Uhh’m goin’ over foh a couple of days.’
So I fly with Ben Teasdale. It turns out I literally fly with him: he’s a trained aviator and he likes to take the stick on long flights, just for an hour or so. He makes me his co-pilot, which is probably unlawful, but once more: it’s Ben Teasdale. Nation states do not arrest Ben Teasdale. Ben Teasdale is a sovereign power.
We talk restaurants. Wine. Cigars. Cars. That’s it.
He lends me a wing of his house for the duration. I try to figure out what he wants. I realise he wants nothing. He’s curious. He thinks we’ll meet again.
He flies on to Krasnoyarsk, but he hooks me up with another friend to get home. ‘Asian money,’ he says vaguely. ‘Interesting fella.’
The interesting fella is taller than me – who isn’t? – but very thin. His face is deeply lined, to the point where it’s hard to say if he is fifty or seventy. He has a Boeing. He thinks there are too many gadgets on the Airbus, and it is in the nature of gadgets to go wrong all the time. What you want from a plane, the interesting fella says, is purity of purpose. It goes up and stays up until you want it to come down. You do not want it to fiddle. The Boeing company understands this, which is why he gets his planes from them. Planes, plural, because he has several. There are three waiting for us on the tarmac, and he picks one at random. ‘Security,’ he says, and pantomimes a machine gun. ‘One has always to be a little careful.’