My secretaries greet me silently. One of them is beautiful, the other capable, they hate each other, and they’re not that fond of me either. I’ve slept with the beautiful one, her name is Elsa, six or seven times. I would have gotten rid of her a long time ago, except she could blackmail me. The other one, Kathi, I only slept with once, under the influence of new medication that made me do all sorts of things I don’t want to think about anymore.
“Mr. Kluessen is waiting,” says Kathi.
“Fine.” I go into my office, sit down behind the desk, fold my hands, and slowly count to ten. Then I finally pull the phone out of my pocket. No answer. Why is she doing this to me?
I administer Adolf Albert Kluessen’s entire estate, and I’ve lost everything. All the statements and accounts he’s received in the last two years were faked. The man is old and not very clever, and even if I’m no longer in any condition to win back his money, I can still manage to invent impressive balances and report gains I would have made, had I foreseen the movements of the market. I also add all sorts of curves to the figures, drawn in red, blue, and yellow, which increase trust. But every conversation with him has its dangers.
I stand up and go to the window. The view is spectacular; it’s hard to accustom yourself to the sheer extent of it, and the brightness. As ever, when the world, uninvited, threatens me with its sparkle and brilliance, I have to think of Ivan, and a long-gone afternoon in Arthur’s library. We were twenty-two, it was shortly before Christmas, Ivan had come from Oxford, I had come from the sanatorium.
“Tell!” he said.
I had almost no memory of the last months. Everything had been eggshell colored, the walls, the floor, the ceilings, the staff’s coats. At night you didn’t know whether the voices you were hearing came from the other patients or out of your own head.
“You have to play along,” said Ivan. “That’s the whole trick. You have to lie. You think people see through you, but nobody sees through anyone. People are impossible to read. You think other people get what’s going on inside you, but that’s wrong.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s the right answer. Watch, bend the rules. People are almost never spontaneous; mostly they’re machines. What they do, they do out of habit. You have to undo the rules, and then you have to follow them as if your life depended on it. Because it does. Your life depends on it.”
I stared at the table. Very old wood, a family heirloom, it once belonged to our great-grandfather, who had supposedly been an actor. The black grain made an unbelievably beautiful pattern. It surprised me that I should even notice such a thing, but then I realized I wasn’t the one who had noticed. It was Ivan.
“Truth!” he said. “That’s all well and good. But sometimes none of it gets you anywhere. Always ask what people are expecting of you. Say what people say. Do what people do. Ask yourself who exactly you’d like to be. Then ask yourself what that person you’d like to be would do. Then do it.”
“If the cell hadn’t split back then,” I said, “there would only have been one of us.”
“Concentrate!”
“But who would it have been? Me, or some third person we don’t know? Who?”
“The trick is to sort things out with yourself. That’s the hardest thing. Don’t expect help from anyone. And don’t imagine you can go into therapy. All it’ll teach you is to accept yourself. You get good at excuses.”
I should have told him he was right, I think now, I should never have gone into therapy. I would like to talk to him, even today, I need to see him, I need his advice. Maybe I could borrow money from him and disappear. A fake passport, a plane to Argentina, just me. It would still be possible.
I pick up the phone and unfortunately hear Elsa’s voice, not Kathi’s: “I need to speak to my brother. Call him, ask him to come here.”
“Which brother?”
I rub my eyes. “What do you mean, which?”
She says nothing.
“So call him! Tell him it’s really important. And will you finally get Kluessen in here!”
I hang up, cross my arms, and try to look as if I were sunk in thought. Suddenly it occurs to me that I didn’t see Kluessen outside in the waiting room. The couch was empty. But didn’t she tell me he’d arrived? If he was already here and not in the waiting room, would that mean …? Worried, I look around.
“Hello, Adolf!”
He’s sitting there, staring at me. He must have been there the whole time. I smile and try to look as if it had all been a joke.
Adolf Albert Kluessen, a substantial old man in his mid-seventies, well dressed, accustomed to being obeyed, skin wrinkled by the sun, bushy eyebrows, looks at me as if he’d swallowed a frog, as if he’d lost his key today, along with his passport and his briefcase, and was being held up to ridicule for all of it, as if he’d been robbed and then his sports car had had its paint scratched. There are dark patches of sweat under the arms of his polo shirt, but that’s a result of the heat and doesn’t mean a thing. Adolf Albert Kluessen, son of the department store owner Adolf Ariman Kluessen, grandson of the founder of the department store Adolf Adomeit Kluessen, scion of a family whose eldest son has borne the name Adolf for so long that no one could rally themselves to give up the tradition, go figure, looks at me as if the whole world were despicable. And with all of that, he doesn’t even know he’s bankrupt.
“Adolf, how nice to see you!”
His hand feels as knotty as wood. I hope mine isn’t damp with nerves. Nonetheless, I have control of my voice, it isn’t trembling, and my eyes are clear. He says something about me not answering his emails, and I cry that it’s a scandal and I’ll fire my secretary. I quickly lay three printed sheets in front of him: figures that mean nothing, and include the most famous risk-free stocks: Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, Google, and Mercedes-Benz, lots of pie charts, everything as lit up as can be.
But today it’s not working. He blinks, then sets the sheets of paper aside, leans forward, and says he has something really basic he needs to get off his chest.
“Something basic!” I get to my feet, walk around my desk, and sit on the edge. Always make sure you’re a little higher than your counterpart — an old negotiating trick.
He’s no longer the youngest of men, he says. He doesn’t want to risk things anymore.
“Risk?” I fold my hands. “On my father’s life!” Folding your hands is helpful, it looks sincere. By contrast, what looks totally false is laying your hand on your heart. “We’ve never taken risks!”
Warren Buffett, says Kluessen, has advised never to invest in anything you don’t understand.
“But I understand it. It’s my profession, Adolf.” I stand up and go to the window, so that he can’t see my face.
A few years ago everything was still in good order. The investments were lucrative, the results satisfactory. Then there was a bottleneck in liquidity and it occurred to me that nothing was stopping me from simply asserting that I’d made gains. If you report losses, investors pull their money out. Declare profits and everything stays the same — you can continue, you balance out the loss, no one is hurt, it’s only numbers on a piece of paper. So that’s what I did, and after a few months the money was there again.
But a year later I was in the same situation. At the worst moment my second-most-important client wanted to withdraw twenty-nine million euros. I had positions I couldn’t liquidate without losses, so I reported fake gains, which brought me new investors, and I used their money to cover the payments. I was sure that the stock exchange would quickly recover its equilibrium and everything would go back to normal.