I wonder aloud if assassination is a serious worry to him. I haven’t seen much in the way of security since Teasdale picked me up, and it’s just occurred to me that it must nonetheless be all around me, around us, all the time. It is of course very expensive and therefore as unobtrusive as it is watertight.
The interesting fella asks me if I am familiar with the explanation of gravity in which space–time is a rubber sheet and each object placed on it forms a greater or lesser indentation, deforming the surface of the sheet so that other objects will roll down the incline. I agree that I have heard this description. We, the interesting fella says, meaning the Fifteen Hundred, we possess gravity. Where our gravity well touches another, there may be a collision. A man or an economy may be destroyed. In the event that one person is aware of the imminent arrival of another, the first may take steps to alleviate the danger posed by the second, up to and including seeking to make the threat go away altogether. Although this happens only very rarely, that is not the same as it never happening at all. He asks if I play Go. Go, he says, is a good metaphor, although that is a vast understatement of its beauty. Go is not a simulation of anything. Go is Go. It possesses – he hesitates – atsumi. He waves his hands. Atsumi, like the walls of a castle. Thickness and dominion. Mass, like with gravity again: the power to move things by being what it is. English and Japanese are both good languages for saying these things. Good, but not great. I ask if he is himself Japanese.
The interesting fella says that he is not.
When he does not say anything else, I admit that I have never played Go and ask him to show me how it works.
We play Go. It turns out that my ignorance of the game does not make me a tedious opponent because one of the ways in which Go is not like chess is that there are no prescribed openings as such. There are familiar patterns that quickly yield to uniquenesses, and what appears to be a mistake may become a fulcrum whose existence and position enables something remarkable. It is about identity as much as strategy. It is also profoundly difficult for computers to understand. Even a smallish chess machine can beat most players – but until very recently the very best Go simulator still struggled with an average human opponent. Now that has changed, but it happened by making a different kind of step altogether. Effectively, the digital Go master is not a machine at all, but a simulated person whose consciousness only extends to Go.
For a while, as we play, I wonder what it would be like to experience existence through these elliptical black and white stones touching lightly on the sheer mathematical field of the board. The combination of simplicity and complexity is delicious: two colours and a grid, and yet after a few moves, the board embraces trillions of possibilities.
I let myself enjoy the game and do not try to analyse it, and my choices flow. The interesting fella still wins, but the competition is not the point.
After he has won three, he looks at me. ‘I am surprised,’ he says.
‘How so?’
‘I expected you to talk all the time.’
I tell him I’m glad to be quiet for a while because my life is very loud. This meets with his approval.
‘My life is also loud – but this week is for me. I am going to Sotheby’s to buy a painting. A pastoral scene with many maple trees. When I was growing up, my mother told me the maple was a symbol of love and new beginnings. Then when I was a young man I learned that it also represents practicality and balance, which are almost the opposite of love. A tree of contradictions, or duality, turning to reveal one face or another to the world. I understand the quality of the brushwork is unparalleled.’
‘Who is it by?’
‘It is supposed to be by Tintoretto, but it is a forgery.’
I have the feeling, again, that I am being measured. ‘A good one?’
‘An excellent one. Sotheby’s have no idea. One may expect the bidding to be quite intense.’
‘And you are not going to tell them it’s a fake.’
‘Indeed not.’
In the fourth game, I box him in for a moment, and the hole in the board makes the shape of a shark. The interesting fella tuts. The Chinese don’t like the number 4, he says. It whispers of the trap of birth, that it is accompanied by the inexorability of death. But that is a homophony, not identity. It is a shadow in the code. Do I see a 4?
I tell him that the number 4 has a different significance for me, and the interesting fella grins. ‘Oh, yes,’ he says. ‘Megalodon!’ That makes me laugh. The interesting guy raises an eyebrow. I explain that I have a client with a similar name. It is okay to do this because Nikolaos Megalos has never requested or implied any need for discretion regarding the Order’s decision to hire my firm.
The interesting fella frowns. ‘I know of him,’ he says, and we share another of his silences.
‘Perhaps,’ he suggests at last, ‘I will buy the painting and give it to someone as a very subtle practical joke.’
‘Perhaps the forgery is painted over a genuine masterpiece,’ I reply.
He spreads his hands for a moment, acknowledging that anything is possible.
We play. I reflect that when it comes out that I’ve been sharing plane rides with Ben Teasdale and his set, I will get more clients. Influence clusters. International finance is not done in boardrooms, it’s done here, in these liminal spaces that are made out of money. Governance is in the private terminals at global aviation hubs, in occasional palaces and ubiquity, in sharing a limo because you have nothing to prove. The merely rich talk about their other homes, their other houses. The gods do not. If they need somewhere, they acquire it, or someone else provides it. They do not keep track of nations or properties, because they are at home everywhere.
In the sixth game, I make a late move on instinct and realise as the interesting fella blinks sharply and then claps his hands that I have done something right. The face of the board ripples and shifts as we play out the finish. I have won.
The interesting fella makes a pleased little noise. ‘Myoushu,’ he says. ‘And plenty of kiai.’
I smile back. ‘In Greek: meraki. It has my heart in it.’
‘Yes. But also you were unexpected.’
And so I am brave enough to ask my last question: ‘Why are you buying the forgery?’
He extends his hand across the table for me to shake. ‘Because it is beautiful, Constantine Kyriakos.’ His skin is very dry and thick. He is a working man. I am embarrassed by the difference.
He studies me for a moment, then opens his wallet and removes a card. A long number is printed in red.
‘If you have trouble,’ he says. ‘These are my guys. For security. “You may travel to the ends of the earth, but I shall hold you always in my palm.” Say it back to me.’
I do.
‘Good.’
The pilot asks us to prepare for landing.
*
I am sitting at my desk and I do not know what to do.
Ten seconds ago, every digit on the screen became a 4.
444444444444
444444444444
444444444444
444444444444
444444444444
444444444444
I scrolled down, but it was relentless – endless. Then I reset the system. It was the same. For a moment I thought I was losing it, and then I realised that I was not. Then I sat there for another few seconds and stared, and I’m still staring now. Some of the digits are bolded, some are italicised, some are not. It makes weird patterns and pictures, like kelp, and as I make the connection I understand.
I know what this is.
The market is about to crash, and crash hard, like Hindenburg hard. The peaks and troughs of faux cathode green, dark and light, slip across the screen. In the deep valleys between towers of kelp: the shark, waiting for the corpses to drift down.
It doesn’t matter why. Perhaps some idiot has let the algo-traders run riot again. Perhaps it’s just a blip and tomorrow it’ll correct, or perhaps the Fort Knox gold reserves have been
stolen, or the US has been hit by a nuclear strike. Perhaps the US is about to be hit by a nuclear strike. It doesn’t matter. It’s happening, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
No, really, there’s nothing. Imagine:
Hi, it’s Constantine Kyriakos. I was on the cover of GQ last month. Well, okay, it was German GQ. It doesn’t matter. I’m a finance genius, okay? And something bad is happening to the market, something so bad I think there may be a national security threat to your country, like a dirty bomb or something—Hello? Hello? Hello? …
Guten tag, hier Constantine Kyriakos. Ich möchte etwas ganz wichtiges erzählen. Eine Katastrophe kommt. Gerade jetzt. Ja. Jetzt. Ich weiß nicht genau. Eine Katastrophe. Vielleicht finanziell. Es wird finanzielle Folgen haben. Ich—Hallo? Hallo? …
Ni hao …
Buenos días …
Hi, look, I’ve called a couple of your colleagues, the State Department and Homeland Security, they hung up on me but you’ve got to listen: there’s a serious problem and I think you should put some planes in the air, I think maybe you’re being attacked … Well, because the markets are crashing … Well, no, but they’re about to … Well, I know because I have a magic shark in my head and I can see her fin in the stock ticker when things are going to hell—Are you still there? Please don’t hang up! Hello?
Yeah. That’s not going to work. And even if it did, what the hell could anyone do? I’d probably trigger the crash myself by trying to stop it.
So in these next minutes I have to decide who lives and who dies.
Five funds. Five funds with differing instructions and goals, five funds taking different approaches, each profiting from my barmy intuitions, each rising in strength, but each somewhat opposed to the others. I can save three, maybe four, but one of them can’t go on. One of them will eat dirt. The combination of my moves will surely screw somebody. The money music has stopped in the world today and someone’s getting left without a chair. The question is who?
But in the end, it’s not much of a choice. The original fund is the odd one out, the others are more compatible in philosophy, if diverse in holdings – and my new clients are pantheon clients. You don’t dump the Fifteen Hundred. You just don’t. For all I know they’ve set this up just to see what choice I make. Does it seem unlikely to you that the rulers of the world would gut the economy for a year just to check up on one man? That’s because you’re not one of them. You belong to another species. If you’re not in the Fifteen Hundred, you’re not just different, you’re barely real.
So I drop Megalos down the deepest hole I can find. I let my original fund take a bath. A bath in acid. He’s a man of God, anyway: poverty will be good for his soul. And I realise that I am about to ascend. In a little while, I will not be an advisor to the world’s elite. I will be one of them – and probably quite near the top.
I call each of my other clients, one by one, and I warn them of what’s about to happen so that they can move their other money around, find shelter from the storm.
*
The news breaks an hour later. I’m listening to the radio, which not many people do any more but I do. The whole thing happens slowly and calmly, as if we were all just waiting for this moment. Another banking crisis? Feh. Who cares? How much worse can it get? We knew that the British housing bubble was unsustainable, again. We knew that food bonds were a shitty idea, again. We knew that the Chinese were propping up the dollar and couldn’t do it for ever, that the renminbi was still unnaturally restrained, that Congress was screwing with the debt ceiling, again. We knew our mistakes weren’t going away, that we were sailing in a kettle with an ever-increasing number of holes in it, and that the patches themselves would sooner or later drag us down into the deep blue water. It was only a question of which ridiculous, pusillanimous choice would be the one to make it happen. But we hadn’t realised, even I hadn’t realised, even with all I knew, even I didn’t consider that all that finance crap meant something very practical. Six months ago the government finally privatised the water utilities in Greece. Today it turns out that the companies that bought them cannot pay the workers, or for the purchase of electricity to desalinate and purify. Water will be rationed from tonight, in the summer heat, an absurdly small amount per person per day may be drawn from the tap. There is no way to control usage by home or even by street. Who you have to trust depends entirely on the random roving of the mains beneath the streets, a network that ignores social niceties of class and wealth. In a better world it would be – ho ho ho – a watershed moment for the city, even the country. We’d pull together. People would talk about the moment when Athens shared its cups for a hundred years, and we’d emerge new-made as a nation of parts. That would be a world without television talk shows. Not one of them bothers with such a milkdream. Instead they call whoever can be most eloquently hateful and put them all together on a blue leather sofa. Great TV ensues, fisticuffs and rabble-rousing. ‘You foreign scroungers are taking our water!’ I make a note that I must buy any stations that are for sale and arrange to have all the producers fired.
For a short while everything continues to function, like the band playing on the Titanic. Shops set out their stocks of mineral water in cardboard trays and people buy them. I try to buy out the whole stock so that I can give it all away, but the manager won’t let me. ‘If I give it away,’ he says, ‘they’ll think everything else is free, too, and people will start to come up from the bad areas.’ I think I’m feeling a bit guilty about what I just wallowed in, but I couldn’t have known. In the queues at the wholesalers where you can buy those serious barrels of water for office coolers, people greet one another with a sort of alien invasion politesse while they wait to hear whether their savings have gone down with some bank, or whether they’ve landed on one of the solid islands in the stream. I could tell them. I don’t.
I realise I’m here by force of habit. There’s no reason for me to do any of this. I should be sorting out my new world, moving house for a while, but I’m trapped, just watching myself, my country. I’m too fascinated to take up my empty throne just yet. And I don’t think I’ll ever come here again, or understand it if I do. These are my last hours of ordinary humanity. They’re precious.
And they’re strange. There’s a wild moment coming, a day of misrule. We can all feel the riots waiting behind the hills. It’s like a weather forecast: today, fine with bankruptcies, some rain. Tomorrow: high pressure zone moving in, torrential downpour of shit; and over the weekend: civil unrest, burning cars.
When I talk to people I know about the finance part, I lie, and say I am worried too. I suggest that this kind of instability affects everyone, up and down the scale, but the truth is that when the fog clears – unless the whole world descends into barbarism and to some extent even then – I will be even richer than I was at close of business. I will no longer have a job at my bank, but that won’t really worry me because at that point I will own banks. In fact, by chance, I will probably own the bank I presently work for.
In the faces of my fellows in the queue, even as we share companionable grumbles, I can see something wary. They are not here to make friends, or even to buy water. They are checking out the opposition.
When I get home, I pack a bag.
All the while I expect to be ducking Megalos’s calls, and I do feel residually bad about him and his holy order suddenly having to live up to the ideal of humble poverty, but in fact he doesn’t try to get in touch. I assume that he is firefighting, or that he has been ousted and the new boss of the Order of St Augustine and St Spyridon is an actual Christian, a pious old geezer who welcomes the chance to lead his flock back to whatever pastures they actually come from and do good works. It’s going to be a boom area, charity. Almost everyone south of Milan will need it, and anyone east of Zurich. Interestingly, Iceland has done rather well. Say one thing for the Icelanders, say this: they learn fast.
In foreign news, the Red Cross is already talking about a continental network of food banks, an
d the left coalition in France has called for the nationalisation of the energy companies and the transport infrastructure. It’s a terrible idea in the context of the financial community and how they will treat France hereafter, but it’s not a bad one in terms of keeping as many French people alive as possible through the winter. Perhaps the crazy communists have just recognised a little bit ahead of everyone else how bad this is really going to be. Certainly some of my erstwhile colleagues are being rather rash about it. They have not yet taken on board the level of desperation this has created, and are still talking rather arrogantly about riding the problem out. Say rather, they will ride it down, and at the bottom they will find people who are quite likely to use their Maseratis for bonfires and cook their manicured dogs for food.
I think I’ll go to the Bahamas. There’s a short list of countries you’d actually want to go to which will not be adversely affected by this situation, and very few of them have decent food or fine weather. There’s a much longer list of countries you wouldn’t really want to go to under normal circumstances which will either not be affected or will not notice one more appalling nightmare in the crowd.
I’m not going to apply for residency in Norway, and I’m definitely not going to Afghanistan, Colombia or Western Sahara.
I am, however, going stir crazy in the flat. I’ve been awake for too long and I’m making fairly jittery, bad decisions. I need to clear my head. So while I’m wondering which island would be best, I may as well go for my daily run. I have a trainer, Grant, and he’s part of that American culture of exercise where they apparently ‘come from yes’. I think that he wakes in the morning and does a hundred pushups, drinks a cucumber and seagrass shake with added bull semen and then goes for a quick marathon, and fuck you, Pheidippides, because that’s his warm-up. He goes every year to something called the Leadville Race and finishes it, which is apparently not what most people do, and when he really applies himself he comes in the top thirty. I suppose, if I do go to the Bahamas, I’ll have to bring him along. It seems like importing one’s own hair shirt, but needs must.