‘Perhaps he had information that was not made available to us,’ Jurgen says.
‘Or he’s being counterintuitive,’ Kevin suggests.
‘He doesn’t know what he’s doing,’ Jocelyn Lockhart says. ‘Poor bastard, look at him.’
Still gabbling meaningless statistics into the morning sunshine, the Minister’s bleached face is lathered with sweat; the heavy three-piece suit bulges unconvincingly, as if it’s filled with straw.
‘What’s he even doing there?’ Ish says. ‘Why hasn’t he handed over to someone else?’
‘Strategic,’ Gary McCrum says.
‘Nobody without a terminal illness would’ve been able to get this bailout through,’ Jocelyn Lockhart agrees. ‘But people feel sorry for him.’
A journalist asks the Minister about possible IMF intervention if Ireland’s fortunes continue to decline. The Minister appears irritated. ‘I’ve already made it clear that there will be no third parties …’ But as he speaks, the camera pans to his left and reveals, in the scrum of apparatchiks behind him, the little Portuguese man again.
‘They’re already here …’ Jocelyn Lockhart sings.
‘Bullshit,’ Ish says.
‘All over government buildings,’ Jocelyn says. ‘And I heard they’ve booked a whole floor of the Merrion Hotel.’
‘There’s no way IMF’d let him chuck more money at Royal Irish,’ Ish objects. ‘It’s economic suicide.’
The media reaction to the Minister’s announcement is apoplectic, terminal illness notwithstanding. The radio waves are clogged with hard-luck stories deriving from the last wave of cuts: grandmothers and children and chronically ill whose pensions were slashed or whose special-needs assistants were withdrawn or whose care was cancelled overnight by governmental austerity, even as yet more billions flow in decidedly unaustere fashion to the notoriously corrupt bank.
Market reaction is divided: bondholders are glad to hear they will be getting their money, but there is an increasing sense of mystery as to where this money will be coming from. The country’s budget is running at almost a third of GDP, and any appearance of Ireland in the bond market is accompanied by the financial equivalent of an involuntary shudder.
The market is very, very happy, at the same time, about BOT’s takeover of Agron. The incredibly complicated deal, involving literally hundreds of subsidiaries, has been turned around by the Dublin office in record time (the rumour is that three temps were hired just to sign Porter’s name on the contracts). At a stroke, BOT has acquired six thousand new employees, ranged all over the world, and from the share price it appears the spectacular gamble has paid off.
‘Of course it’s paid off,’ Ish says. ‘The market loves spectacular gambles, it’s all bloody men. It’s the deals that make sense they get pissy about.’
‘What are we going to call ourselves now?’ Kevin says. ‘We can’t really be AgroBOT, can we? Sounds like some kind of android hooligan.’
‘That’s right up the market’s sodding street as well,’ Ish says.
She, however, appears to be the only person in the world with any misgivings. As the days pass, the financial world’s love for Frankensteinian newcomer AgroBOT only grows, and with it our market capitalization. Message boards fizz with conjecture about Porter Blankly’s next innovation, investors battle each other for expensive slivers of the bank’s stock — and for holders of that stock, such as the BOT staff, the boom times, as the Irish premier said back in the days of the Celtic Tiger, are getting even more boomer. In fact, the atmosphere in our tiny bubble increasingly comes to resemble that of the Tiger; that is to say, a certain amount of irrational exuberance becomes noticeable.
‘Evening all.’
‘There’s Kev — whoa, check out Kevin’s watch, everybody!’
‘What — oh, you mean this?’ Diamonds glitter from a panoply of unnecessary dials.
‘Isn’t that the one James Bond wears?’
‘Look out, Russkies! Kevin’s got the James Bond watch!’
‘Aren’t you on a temporary contract?’ Ish says. ‘How could you possibly afford that?’
‘I work for BOT, don’t I? I leveraged my position, that’s all.’
Every evening there is a client presentation or a birthday or a new fat deal to celebrate — and even if there isn’t, I find myself drinking anyway, in Life Bar or somewhere more exclusive. In the past, these outings bored me; now, I am glad to eliminate the danger of a few hours on my own, to avail myself instead of the city’s many avenues of forgetting.
Tonight we are in the penthouse bar of a boutique hotel, one of the few that managed to survive the crash; a debate is in train over whether a boom or a bust is a better time to be rich, with Brent ‘Crude’ Kelleher arguing that during a boom there are more luxury goods available, a ‘better atmosphere generally’, and, although there is a smaller gap between your wealth and that of others, people slightly less rich than you understand exactly how nice your stuff is. Dave Davison, on the other hand, maintains that luxury is debased by being widely available. ‘That was why the boom was such a nightmare. You couldn’t take a business-class flight without being stuck next to some dishwasher salesman telling you about his 7 Series.’
Jurgen takes us aside to pass on a rumour of another acquisition.
‘Another one?’
Jurgen nods. ‘Porter is looking at asset management firms, also at one of the large clearing businesses.’
‘Didn’t he just buy a bank?’ Ish says. ‘Like, don’t we still have a few payments to make on that?’
‘On the face of it, yes.’ Jurgen lifts off his glasses and polishes them with a handkerchief. ‘It comes back to the strategy of counterintuitiveness. As we are all aware, this has been a great success. However, BOT’s competitors have started to act counterintuitively as well, meaning that we need to be even more counterintuitive, perhaps even to the point of being counter-counterintuitive.’
‘Isn’t that the same as being intuitive?’
‘That is the question we need to answer. Porter has a team of quants working on it as we speak. For now, he believes that relentless and indiscriminate expansion remains the best policy for the bank. Soon we will be established across the system to such a degree that our future will be secured, no matter what.’
‘Unless something counterintuitive happens,’ Ish says, but Jurgen has spotted an ex-colleague and bustled away. She turns back to me, laying her hand on my forearm solicitously. ‘How are you doing tonight, Claude? Are you holding up okay?’
‘I think so,’ I say, surprised. ‘I have only had two drinks.’
‘No, I mean, you know, after your waitress.’
‘Oh, that.’ I feel my heart plummet, like a lift with a snapped cable. ‘I have hardly thought about it.’
‘That’s good,’ she says, but she keeps staring at me sympathetically and patting my arm, as if I were a child with a grazed knee. ‘So what’s Paul got planned for the Story of Claude now?’
‘I have dropped all that,’ I say tersely. ‘It was a silly idea.’
‘Oh, right,’ she says. She makes an oar of her finger, scoops it along the inner rim of her cocktail glass, which is frosted with cream. ‘No, because I just thought, I mean in a book, when the guy’s in love with someone out of his league or whatever and it doesn’t work out, what often happens is he realizes he’s had feelings for someone else all along.’
‘Someone else?’
‘Yeah, except, you know, he only realizes now.’
I give this some thought. ‘Does that happen in books?’
‘It does in the ones I read,’ she says, a little defensively.
‘To me the scenario does not sound plausible. How does he only realize now? Love is not like an illness, gestating in your body before you begin to feel sick. In my experience, if you are in love, you know it straight away.’