And what a day! Pouring over the Sudanese Bank of Karmarathon's ridiculous documentation, trying to get to the nub of exactly what it was their financial engineers meant by ‘an edible financial product’. What was ‘Yum-Yum'? Why, it was a credit card and a current-account banking facility; it was a share-watch service and a brokerage facility; it was a telephone-banking service and a secure-deposit facility with a high-interest yield. As he worked his way through the dull copy, the designations tumbled around one another, ‘facile service’, ‘serviceable facility’ — what possible difference could it make? So what if the dividends accruing to the customer could be transformed either into foodstuffs or foodstuffs options? So what if the very materials that made up the documentation for the product — chequebooks, credit cards and so forth — were actually, in and of themselves, edible. None of it cut any ice with Ian. He'd seen them come and seen them go, these revolutionary new personal banking products. Not one of them had had any impact on the increasingly unknowable, dilatory even, quality of money itself.
At this fag end of the millennium money had begun to detach itself from the very medium of exchange. Money was lagging behind. Ian knew — because he had read about it in the press — that there was aproximately $800 trillion that had simply winked into existence. It had never been earned by anyone, or even printed by any government. Everywhere you looked you saw advertisements screaming: ‘Value for Money’. That such an obvious non sequitur should have become a benchmark of credibility was beyond Ian's, and indeed anyone's, understanding. This ‘value’ was as insubstantial as the $800 trillion. It was linked to no commonly perceived variable; instead it was chronically relativised. The merchant banks and brokerage firms that made up the City had long since given up on employing even the most flamboyant and intuitive of economic forecasters. Instead they had fallen back on the self-styled ‘money critics’, refugees from the overflowing newsprint sector, who offered their services to provide ‘purely aesthetic’ judgements on different mediums of exchange.
But business was still business. So, together with his co-marketeers, Ian levered his sweating bulk into the black cab that stood, coughing and heaving, outside Norman House.
‘Grindley's,’ said Hal Gainsby to the cabby.
‘You'll be going to the S.K. K. F. Lilex launch then,’ the cabby replied.
‘How did you know?’ Only Si Arkell was young enough and curious enough to bother with a query.
‘Oh, I take a keen interest in any new ulcer medication that comes on the market,’ said the cabby, powering the cab away from the kerb and straight into a snarl of traffic. ‘It goes with the job.’
The city was hot, the cab was close. Inside the five marketeers’ deodorants competed with one another for olfactory supremacy. Si Arkell's ebulliently tasteless sandalwood talc won the day. By the time they had struggled across the Old Street Roundabout, battled through Hatton Garden, fought their way down High Holborn — the cabby dispatching challengers to the right and to the left, with ‘Fuck off's and klaxon honks — and gasped betwixt the raffia of metal that held Trafalgar Square in its vice, Ian was about ready to expire. They all dived out of the sweaty confines of the cab. Gainsby paid the cabby off, while Ian stared up at the mock-Regency portico of Grindley's, which loitered under the dusty plane trees along Northumberland Avenue.
The presence had been with Ian all afternoon as well. It was a sinister afflatus, hissing a welcome in his ear. At any moment Ian expected everything to come tumbling down around him. And that — in a manner of speaking — is exactly what did happen.
CHAPTER EIGHT. REENTER THE FAT CONTROLLER
Now there are, as it is said in the Papal Bull, seven methods by which they infect with witchcraft the venereal act and the conception of the womb. First, by inclining the minds of men to inordinate passion; second, by obstructing their generative force; third, by removing the members accommodated to that act; fourth, by changing men into beasts by their magical art; fifth, by destroying the generative force in women; sixth, by procuring abortion; seventh, by offering children to devils, besides other animals and fruits of the earth with which they must work harm.
Early on the morning of that same day the travellers’ message board at Heathrow's Terminal Three had begun to clog up with a large number of notes, petitions and billets-doux. All were written in different hands and all were addressed to a variety of individuals, but every single one was intended for the same man.
The Fat Controller was arriving from America. From New York City, to be precise. It was a characteristic of The Fat Controller that he was always arriving from somewhere and yet it was never actually possible to conceive of him as being anywhere else other than exactly where he was. At any rate, not possible for those who knew him. Perhaps somewhere, on some other planet, for example, there may be a race of highly advanced coenobites, whose entire purpose it is to spend their reclusion collectively visualising The Fat Controller in those places from which he is forever arriving. If so, they must be very highly advanced indeed.
The Fat Controller came wheeling through the swing doors that lead from the customs area to the main concourse of the terminal. He was wearing his travelling kit, Donegal tweed jacket, grey flannel trousers and brogues. Over his bolster arm he had draped one of those American trench coats that are furnished with more button-down panels, straps and belts than are strictly necessary. Trailing behind him like a faithful little dog, came a brown Sansomite suitcase. The Fat Controller tugged somewhat erratically on its lead and the thing waggled along, as if it were an afterthought.
The Fat Controller reached the end of the handrail that separates the arriving passengers from the friends and relations that have come to meet them. Here he halted and turned, the better to observe the rendezvous of his fellow travellers. The Fat Controller always did this. He always got off the flight as quickly as possible and rushed through immigration and customs, so that he could witness this moment.
‘It's a very important moment indeed,’ he was fond of saying. ‘A very emotional and naked moment. When people greet one another, after an absence — particularly in airports, where the overhead strip lighting is so poorly modulated — they are rendered transparent to one another. An unfaithful husband's guilt passes across his face like a shadow, in the nanosecond that it takes him to place a welcoming smile on his face for his waiting wife. Two lovers meet and both their expressions betray the certainty of their eventual parting, in the very instant before they touch. Ungrateful brats debouch from their cheap holiday in someone else's misery and their tired parents try desperately to summon up joy out of indifference. These are the very moments that I treasure! For I am a traveller in feeling and a trafficker in souls — so flitting and spindly-legged are the examples I seek that I may style myself a very entomologist of the emotions!’
The Fat Controller would roll these phrases around in his mouth, together with some single malt whisky and a coil of smoke from his habitual cigar, before expelling them at his audience. The Fat Controller was very fond of pontificating, although all too often compulsion was his only way of ensuring listeners.