‘Will it make me happy?’ I wasn’t thinking. So much had happened and I really wanted to know.
‘Maybe not,’ she said, ‘but sure as shit, nothing else will.’
Well, if I was going to be unhappy – or at least not happy, because a mathematician knows the difference between the absence of x and its negation – then I chose to be unhappy like this. I chose to be unhappy and rich, rather than unhappy and poor. I was reasonably sure at the time that unhappy and poor was a lot unhappier, although since then I’ve seen the very rich get themselves into states of sorrow and horror which are inaccessible without vast fortunes: with insane money comes insanity. This business of billions – what the fuck can you buy with a billion that will fill the hole? Nothing. I know. I’ve seen it. There’s nothing. Not all the Edvard Munch paintings and white truffles and Bentleys will do the job. A year later you just need another one. Honestly, it’s worse than iPhones.
Maybe it is time for a change. Maybe this Kyriakos isn’t who I want to be after all. In mathematics we talk about transformations. A transformation is everything you have to do to one thing to make it into another. If you take a square and warp it until you get a parallelogram, that’s a transformation. What transformation would make Kyriakos happy, I wonder? What if the answer was just quitting while I’m ahead?
No. No money talk. Not allowed in here, on the quiet side of the apartment. No money matters, no flash, no self-deception, no temporary women – which means none at all, the way I live now – no bullshit of any kind. Just Constantine Kyriakos, and the things that matter.
Which, it turns out, doesn’t leave very much.
I don’t open a bottle of the Taburno Sannio. I sit instead, and watch Athens go by from the balcony. The people in the street and the misty sky become a beach with waves washing on it and then a clifftop. I dream of a woman in chains on a table being menaced by a dragon, and maybe it’s real or maybe it’s just rush hour and delivery trucks.
It’s not always easy, being Greek. Even the mud has gods in it.
*
On Monday, back to work. Office banter, riven through with a pleasing amount of envy and horror. Was it really the way it says in the paper? Was it amazing? Was it spontaneous or did I pay someone to make it happen? (People in my circle tend to believe that anything can be arranged, and therefore that anything amazing that happens probably has been. It does not occur to them to admire serendipity, or to court it. It should make me sad, but that is the sort of thinking I leave behind in Glyfada.)
Yes, yes, I met a shark. Who hasn’t met a shark? What, no one? Just me, then? Well, you know, it was a spiritual experience. I feel almost baptised in the waters of Greece. I am more Greek than I have ever been. I am the salty essence of the nation, the blood that flows beneath the skin. I touched something very special. Yes, I did.
What in particular? Well, since you ask, a couple of gorgeous French cabaret dancers and a woman from London who had piercings in places which would astound you. No, none of them had even a little bit of Greek in them, or, they didn’t until—
It is too easy. I am a machine. I am alpha, indeed I am the alpha-est. Which is why this afternoon, with the slowest of the papers still catching up with my heroic exploit and flattering attention from even the haughtiest of Athens’s fast set ladies still happily directed to my address, I am meeting Patriarch Nikolaos Megalos of the Order of St Augustine and St Spyridon. (He is called a Patriarch, which is a title usually reserved for the popes of different branches of the Christian church. Nikolaos Megalos is permitted to use the title for historical reasons that are really interesting if you care, which I don’t. Since his order is so important – and so very, very rich – I have no idea why they need two saints, except that Wikipedia says Augustine died of old age and barely performed any miracles, for all that his Confessions are so renowned, and St Spyridon is basically famous for setting his own beard on fire as part of an explanation of the Holy Trinity. Perhaps two slightly substandard saints put them on a par with, say, the Franciscans, who can lay claim to one of the real zingers, a guy who talked to birds and healed practically everyone in Tuscany at one time or another.)
The Order would be a major client, if I can reel them in. Churches always are, if they bank at all, but the Order at some point must have been given one of those gifts that the old emperors liked to bestow on the favoured – a string of diamond mines, or mineral rights for the whole of Morocco. When they cashed out I have no idea, but they are now a smallish subset of the Orthodox religion with the kind of money more usually held by people who create search engines or new ways to smuggle heroin.
I don’t meet the Patriarch of the Order at my own office. I don’t even use my usual staff. They’re not appropriate: too young, too brash, and too typical of my profession. This opportunity has arisen, apparently, because this Patriarch is new and feels the need to clear out some infrastructural chaff before he gets to his future life of deep spiritual contemplation and pastoral care. The old guy was ousted in some sort of priestly coup d’état of the sort churches pretend not to have. I am therefore working to a style I have established with religious institutions, one that seems to make their representatives happy, and as long as they’re happy they continue to invest and I continue to get a commission and that commission is large. For these meetings I use a cave-like basement office belonging to a friend, a man who keeps vineyards as a hobby. The room has wooden panels rippled by age, and stone flagging. The desk is a traditional kidney with an actual blotter: it reeks of perpetuity. My rooms at the bank are for more commonplace clients and the dynamic is wrong for a personage like Nikolaos Megalos, and wrong for me when I need to be his kind of banker. There’s nothing worse than meeting someone who is dressed for the Crucifixion in a room with a six-foot Patrick Nagel girl on the back wall.
I sit in the semi-dark, and I listen to the sound of old wood, of distant roadworks and taxi drivers, of high heels on the floor above: the signature babble of the world the Patriarch thinks is just walking dust. I smell beeswax and somewhere a hint of cologne – not mine – and sweat.
When the borrowed assistant announces my client has arrived, I get up and briefly practise stretching out my hands across the desk.
(Oh crap. ‘Make a note, please, Petros, that I need to buy a watch. And show him in.’)
Petros nods and wafts out. He could be a monk himself. He’s actually a doorman at a local hotel. They lend him out to me on occasion.
In any case, the double handshake is not the right thing, not today. Today I am prodigal but merit-worthy. I was lost, and while I may not yet actually be found, the search parties are definitely hopeful I will be back in the fold in no time. That’s the note: honest but not one of the flock, and seeking a way home. So we’re going bashfully formal.
Enter Megalos.
Picture a science fiction-looking hat, all black and shaped almost like a fan. Then put a man under it with the face of a Persian warrior king and a square black beard. Give him a black robe trimmed with very pale blue, and eyes in the same tint. Put on his finger a fat Burmese ruby set in a ring dating from before the Council of Trent, and a rope belt with knots at prayerful intervals all the way down to the floor. Constantine Kyriakos, this is Patriarch Nikolaos Megalos, and even if you have spoken to him on the phone, this is the first time you are seeing him in person since his accession. There are old scars on his fingers and his nails are chipped, as if he builds boats for a living. Perhaps the Order of St Augustine and St Spyridon has a secret fight club, the way banks do these days.
I picture Megalos roaring like a bull moose and breaking the Bishop of Rome across his knee. He’s a huge bastard. I’m not a thin man, but inside his gaiters this guy must have legs like the Pillars of Herakles. He’s big like strongmen are, huge belly and fat on his limbs, muscle underneath as thick as a pork roast. Carpentry, I realise, remembering the briefing. He’s a carpenter, in emulation of you-know-who.
When I read that, I imagined a dainty old
geezer doing holy marquetry. This guy probably builds those giant-sized cathedral doors made of teak.
The Patriarch permits me to kiss his ring, and then a moment later we embrace, because this much money is like family in itself.
*
‘Food bonds,’ I say when we have dispensed with both ‘Thank you for coming’ and ‘I do hope your recent travails have not greatly affected you’. I had not thought of my shark as a travail, so we do a little comedy about that, and then I get to the point, which is food bonds. ‘They’re the new CDOs. That’s where the batshit money is going right now.’ Deliberately casual to the point of crass, because this affords my new client the opportunity to rise above me on a moral level. It’s important that Nikolaos Megalos should feel morally superior, because he’s basically at school here and no one who wears a hat like that has been the junior partner in a master–student relationship for quite some time. But if I let my language get away from me a little and have to apologise, then the Patriarch can go home feeling that he has brought sanctity for a brief while into the life of a sinner, and that at the same time he has gleaned valuable knowledge and indeed concrete investment advice from this perilous conversation. These twin convictions will make him happy.
Twins will do that.
So: would the OSASS like to get its pious paws on some really outrageous slices of Mammon’s estate?
Hand to mouth, oh la la, faux pas! ‘Your pardon, Eminence, I don’t mean to blaspheme.’
Nikolaos Megalos rumbles like a Harley, and I realise this is him laughing. ‘That is not technically blasphemy, Constantine Kyriakos, but rather the invocation of a false god, which is heresy or paganism, depending on who you are. But be at ease; I will promise not to burn you so long as you acknowledge the true Church in time. St Augustine, after all, was a mighty sinner until he regained himself.’
‘Thank you, Eminence.’ You preposterous old fart.
‘You are welcome, Constantine Kyriakos. But returning from my wisdom to yours for a moment: may I point out in the meantime that collateralised debt obligations did not end well?’
Actually CDOs were fine so long as you stuck to the right ones. I mean, they were by definition always junk, but you were sort of okay if you went with the good junk rather than the ones they made later when the demand was so high they thought it would be clever to create junk-junk and label it triple-A, and when everyone and his aunt decided to borrow ten million dollars against a fucking shack in the Everglades. Use your head: no idea that proposes free money is ever a good idea, because money is mathematics and mathematics does not allow you to add something to one side of the equation without balancing it on the other – but they weren’t originally the hell-fest of financial immolation they turned into down the line. Finance by itself is ruthless, and that ruthlessness is its salvation. The real disasters are only possible when you bring politics into it, because politics is about pretending to care.
‘Even if that were true,’ I tell Megalos, ‘there’s no local downside – that is, no downside for the OSASS – so long as you buy the right tranche and get off the ride before the music stops. It’s about timing.’ The Patriarch says he knows all about the importance of temporal things, and once again we have a bit of a chuckle. We’re funny guys.
No, but seriously, here’s the thing: the CDO was actually a laudable idea in the beginning, for a given value of the word. They took the advantages of large borrowers and shared them among small borrowers who otherwise wouldn’t get terms they could afford by clubbing them all together, and they parcelled out the risk of default along with possibility of profit. The key was choosing the right people to lend to, customers who were smart and could pay back but who for whatever reason weren’t getting approved for normal loans. The honest salt-of-the-earth poor for whom the better rate they could get through loans financed by CDOs meant the difference between affordability and impossibility.
Well, yes, there was a minor side issue with money laundering, but really, when isn’t there? Anyway, it was all ticking over.
‘Are you with me so far, Your Beatitude?’
‘I am not the Pope,’ the Patriarch reminds me gently.
‘Sorry, Eminence. I get excited.’
‘Be at ease, my son. We all do, from time to time.’
‘The problem, Eminence, is that there aren’t enough high-quality poor people.’
The Patriarch’s eyebrows very nearly reach the brim of his hat.
In a strictly financial sense, it’s true. There simply are not that many good borrowers out there getting missed by the system. Some, but not anything like enough, because the lending banks are neither idle nor stupid at the pointy end unless you specifically instruct them to be, which is where politics comes into it. The market for CDOs was hot, and everyone wanted more of them, not least the government, which was presiding over a boom in confidence and property prices and thereby being made to look like a hero. Dutiful and delighted, the banks got back out there and created some more, riskier collections of debt and finally some which were frankly toxic and they were getting these rated as the same thing as the first lot, which is a miracle I’m not going to look too closely at in case it turns me to stone. So now they were creating bank loans which were unrepayable, which were actually structured so that they were never going to be repaid. You want to borrow half a million dollars against your shitty backlot and build a house you can’t afford, and you want to never make any payments and just owe the full amount plus interest – a sum total which is more than your ugly mosquito-infested pit will ever be worth – in forty years, by which time you will almost certainly be dead? We can accommodate that. Because the money wasn’t in the repayments any more, the money was in selling on the risk. It wasn’t important, in the first instance, whether the loan was good. It was only important that someone wanted to buy it, and they did.
In retrospect even the most bullish of our American colleagues would probably admit that was not a very good way to do business. But everyone was into it.
(I got lucky: I had a sniff of the problem early from a guy at Goldman and I hedged well. By the time the crash happened I was insulated. I didn’t get much richer, but my clients didn’t lose any money, either, which at the time made me look like a genius, and of course we did well in the volatility that followed when everything else was cheap as shit.)
But the big deal now is food bonds. You get them by parcelling up obligations to buy or sell given products. Again, selling food futures is helpful to people who actually make food because they need money in advance of their crops to bring those crops to market. It’s also a hedge, because food markets can be volatile and you don’t want to grow a huge amount of a given crop and then have to sell it all at once when there’s lots of it around because it’s harvest season – and, of course, you don’t want to be a nation state looking to import a bunch of grain and find that everyone else has outbid you and now you’re starving, because very bad things happen to governments that allow that sort of thing. Ask the tsars, if you can find the pieces.
Recently, there’s been some talk about regulating this kind of speculation, which probably isn’t a bad idea. Good rules make good games. Games without rules degenerate.
Institutionally, however, the financial industry doesn’t trust regulations proceeding from governments run by charming retired actors, burned-out drug and sex addicts, and professional bullshit artists. Go figure. So there is already a work-around: you can loan a producer money against the final product. The producer is then free to sell to whomever, assuming the risk of a price drop but gaining the benefit of a price hike, so long as they pay you back your money plus a premium. It sounds like small change compared to a market worth almost a trillion dollars, but you have to remember that there are seven and a half billion people on earth and only about fifteen hundred or so of them are billionaires. There’s a kind of penumbra of rich people – another few hundred thousand – and a twilight zone of merely affluent people whose standard of living a
nd location is basically the extent of their wealth, a kind of geopolitical fortune rather than a bankable one, and then basically everyone else is poor as hell. Which makes the poor, considered as a group and obviously only in brute numerical terms, pretty rich.
So, sure, let’s lend them the money they need to grow food, right? But you wouldn’t want to engage in a project like that without sharing some of the risk, so the CDO structure is frankly ideal. Just don’t actually call them CDOs or, you know, all manner of shit will fall on your head.
‘It’s a good deed, basically. A profitable one,’ I tell the Patriarch.
‘Until it goes wrong.’
‘Nothing lasts for ever.’ I lift my palms to the ceiling in a gesture which my Cultural Semiotics in Business trainer tells me could signify helplessness or honesty and generosity. ‘You swim, or you sink.’
Abruptly I’m tasting salt water in my nose and my wristwatch is falling away beneath me, but this time my hand is falling with it. Jesus fuck! Jesus fucking bastard fuck! I have post-shark stress disorder. Fuck!
Can he tell? Are my eyes bugging out? Am I pissing myself or trying to swim in mid-air?
No. Seemingly not. I can deal with it, I know how. Reaffirmation. Burn fear away with life. Purge the corners of the room. I’ve been sleeping with the bedside light on, anyway. And a few more parties should do it, write over the bad memory with good ones, like a computer writing over sensitive information: Department of Defense Approved self-erasure, 1s and 0s. Crosses and grails. Lingams and yonis. Sex, okay? Just sex and more sex and maybe that’ll take care of it. Fuck it out.
Fuck it out. Fuck it fuck it fuck it fuck it I was nearly eaten by a giant monster and it saw me and I gave it my watch and it’s here, it’s here it’s here here here in this room, hiding behind this clergyman’s hat! I know it is. I shouldn’t be in a cellar, it’s too close to the water table, and sharks live in water.