Sila's Fortune (14 page)

Lev gave a deep breath and turned over. On his back, his birthmark. Elena stared at it. A dark stain. The coarse, slightly scabrous skin hypnotised her. This, perhaps, was his corruption. A dark blemish, small at first, then gradually getting larger like a single water lily constantly doubling in size until it fills the lake, suffocating all life in it. A throttling, a suffocation that, little by little, would destroy him, or at least destroy everything about him she had once loved. And if she was truly honest, perhaps the water lily was already there, already spreading out over the heart of this man, stifling his pity, his tenderness,
his humanity. And in that case, what was she doing with him? What was she doing with this poisonous water lily?

Not far away, in a room at the Hotel Cane, above the restaurant where she had had dinner, another woman was also having trouble sleeping. In the shadows, she too was staring at her husband's sleeping body, a body that was not round like Lev's, but pumped and muscular – the upper body at least. She was not staring at a blemish, but at her very own gargoyle, the man she used to cheer from the sidelines of the football field, this infantile creature that, as a bubbly cheerleader, she could not help but love and even admire not realising that he was already a gargoyle in the making, a self-infatuated idiot plagued with frustrations, irredeemably infantile, slave to the pathetic demon of appearances, turning endlessly in circles in his thwarted illusions of power and greatness.

And so, high above the slow pulse of the city, a former cheerleader in rumpled socks gradually shrank back into the darkness of her feelings, as did a slightly older woman from the other side of the world, both of them staring at the dark back of a man abandoned to the sleep of folly and cruelty.

Simon loved London because it was here that a new life had begun for him. Completely by accident, since he had been perfectly happy with his previous life, Simon Judal, now known as Jude, has also reinvented himself, like a puppet slipping on the costume of a banker at an American bank. It never ceased to amaze him. He thought about it all the time. The boy with the glasses sitting in the front row. The boy everyone made fun of. The swot. He was a
banker
. And it was with the joy of a child dressing up at Christmas that in a cold, elegant boutique decked out in marble he had bought several dark pinstriped suits which he felt made the best impression, and into the pockets slipped his ivory-white business cards, which were soft and felt like cotton. In the shoe shop to which Matthieu had taken him, a salesman had asked him with a grace he found moving: ‘Is this your first visit to John Lobb?'

And this loss of virginity, veiled in a highly instructive speech about the respect due to shoes, which after being worn for a day should be allowed to rest for three days, so that a true John Lobber should own at least four pairs, had fascinated him because he felt as though he had become a member of a brotherhood of initiates, probably much like those who owned a pair of Berlutis. A brotherhood prepared to spend one, two, even
three times an average monthly wage on a pair of shoes. And if he felt any remorse, it was drowned out by the purchase of fifteen dazzling blue and white shirts of that silky softness that now constituted his material world.

Of course he'd found it strange that they'd changed his surname and he was now called Jude, like his nickname, his team leader having insisted no one called Judal – a name dangerously similar to the biblical Judas – could work in banking, a profession based on trust and loyalty. But after all, it simply amounted to following Matthieu's example without the domestic and psychological implications.

Every morning, like brushing his teeth, Simon with his pathological memory, recited something he'd learned years before while studying to get into the Polytechnique, which claimed that every man dreams of being a gangster. Because this was exactly how he felt when he put on his suit and knotted his tie. He would roll his shoulders a little, say good morning to Matt who, if the weather was fine, still breakfasted on the terrace – even in London, Simon had managed to find a terrace, which though not as big or as high as the Paris apartment, overlooked a beautiful, green square. Then Simon would head down the stairs – silkily carpeted as though the whole building were a single apartment and the communal areas as important as the most elegant living room – pick up the newspaper on the doorstep, carry on down the stone steps guarded by a pair of lions rampant, and find himself in a large, tranquil square in Chelsea surrounded by small houses like his. In this haven of materialism, which endeavoured simply to cosset and pamper every banker on the square (almost everyone here worked in
the City) Simon felt
at home
, his every desire satiated. Nor did it feel as if he was living in the financial capital of Europe, living for and through the City, which was in the grip of a financial frenzy, drawing young people from across the continent to the Grand Casino; on the contrary, it felt as if he was living in a quaint, charming country town which smiled tenderly upon its residents like a grandmother. And here in the peaceful – and extortionate – surroundings where they lived, as he hurried towards the Tube station which would suck him and the other besuited men into the bowels of the earth, he felt exactly like the gangster in the book. He was earning money, he would earn a lot, if all went well a hell of a lot; he had a job people envied; he was part of a team who called themselves ‘the Kelmann mafia' the way people refer to the ‘Morgan mafia'; all this in a bank at once admired and feared, just like a gangster in the movies.

‘Kelmann,' the young English woman Zadie Zale, known as ZZ, informed him, ‘is not a bank, it's
the
bank.'

This is how she began her speech, before explaining that Kelmann was feared because it was powerful, because it demanded absolute loyalty, because in the Kelmann tower in Manhattan, a symbol of power were the 300 all-powerful partners, invisible, selected through a ruthlessly competitive process, who left their jobs only when invited to join the US Treasury Department where, in hushed tones, they gave the best advice. Best for the government and best for Kelmann, since no one ever truly left the firm.

‘At Kelmann, in Europe at least, we're the shock troops. We're new, we're young, we're the best. We're hired to created the financial instruments of the future, the ones that will make
money for the bank, make money for us, the ones everyone will imitate. We are the future. We're the ones who will dream up the derivative products of the third millennium and I really believe that when we've finished nothing will ever be the same.'

This grandiloquent but inspirational speech, which had young Zadie with her blonde curls all but panting as though in the throes of religious ecstasy, greatly worried Simon but as a team leader the Englishwoman was exceptional: forceful, charismatic and charming. Her position and her skills were undisputed. The most important trader on her team was a likeable, good-humoured American guy of about thirty called Samuel Corr, who dressed with studied elegance like a marquis at the court of Louis XIV, clothed from head to foot in the most lavish and costly designer labels. But then, in the modern world, were they not the courtiers of another Sun King, diffracted in a virtual world of bank accounts, bills, cheques and credit cards? The Money King, worshipped and magnificent, to whom, at the moment, they were lowly equerries at best but to whom, in time, they would become important vassals.

Samuel had studied at Harvard, Zadie Zale at Cambridge and Simon at the École Polytechnique. Each believed they came from the finest university in the world, Samuel because Harvard was the richest and the most famous, Zadie because Cambridge gloried in a tradition without peer and Simon because he was the result of a terrifying selection process. If all three were the products of the most elite schools in their respective countries, they were not of equal value. Samuel was a banker with a glittering future, at once charming and grasping, gifted with limitless self-confidence. He was the brokers'
blue-eyed boy, and they constantly invited him to the finest restaurants. Simon, for his part, was still an idiot-savant whose talents were almost entirely in the field of mathematics. This was another reason Zadie had hired him: she had nothing to fear from him. Simon was not management material and found it difficult to manage himself. He was not permitted any real responsibility. But he could play a major role in a subordinate position because within his circumscribed domain – applied mathematics – he was quite brilliant. The real power on the team was Zadie. This woman, with her sometimes wild-eyed stare, her all-consuming ambition, was exceptional. Zadie was single – men were terrified of her, they could not compete, they found her speed and her energy at once alluring and emasculating – and she possessed a breadth of vision that Samuel utterly lacked. The man who hired her to work at Kelmann, after her decisive interview, had thought: ‘She'll crush us all.' But he hired her even so, for fear she would go over to the competition, and in the secret hope that she would remember him one day.

At the end of her speech, with the panache of a film director, Zadie got to her feet, strode briskly down the corridor, flung open the double doors of the trading room and announced: ‘The whole world is here!'

She was right, the whole world was here. The world in microcosm, in this hive of computers, mapping the world by translating it into numbers. The best access point to the modern world: money. Intangible digits whizzing from London to New York, Singapore or Shanghai, Paris, Frankfurt or Tokyo, clouds of numbers trailing money like swarms of bees targeting a particular area, a particular passing fad. And the men, young,
rich, aggressive, and eager to make fortunes for themselves too, following the tides of the world, of money across the global currency markets.

Standing in the doorway, hesitant to cross over, Simon absorbed the sounds of the room, the shouted orders of buy and sell, the concentrated fury of hundreds of traders crowding into the space, filling the space, waiting for the slightest variance in markets round the world to make an offer, take a position.

‘Go in, Simon,' Zadie said gently as one might to a child. ‘This is the world, it's your world now. Go in.'

And he had gone in. He had moved cautiously, breathing in the smells, taking in the sounds, soaking up the energy of the room. He had stopped, and in a blinding revelation, understood what he was going to do. It was something he already knew, of course, but he suddenly felt it inside himself. This confusion of instincts, voices, sounds, products, places, he would crystallise just as he had done throughout his terrified childhood. Just as, after the death of his parents, he had engulfed the terror of the world with silence, projecting his fear onto numbers, so from this confusion he would create data models based on the reassuring combination of statistics and projections. He would create perfect models, calculating the lows, the highs, the volatility, the correlations, thereby providing his bank and his clients with the infallible winning formula which would protect them from all unknown factors, for a fee, naturally. Basically, he would be doing what he was best at: seeking out security in a world fraught with risk, converting fears into figures, something that was the very core of his being. Contrary to what he first thought, coming to finance after working in research was
not a change, it was in fact the crucial meaning of his life. It was what he was born to do.

Though she could not read his thoughts, Zadie noticed the radiant look on his face and it reassured her in her decision. No one had wanted Simon. ‘Leave him to his lab,' they said, ‘he's not cut out to work in a bank. He's a complete loser.' Samuel had been brutal: ‘Nice enough. Bit like a toilet. Very white.' But she had seen possibilities in him, notably a capacity for synthesis she'd rarely found even among the ‘quants' – the quantitative analysts – working for her. But she was drawn to this ‘toilet', to the sort of mathematical innocence, an almost childlike purity on which was inscribed – dazzlingly, in her opinion – the whole breadth of mathematics. It was equally clear that Simon would never be a team leader.

‘It remains to be seen whether he gets shat on from a great height,' quipped Samuel alluding to his ‘toilet' comment. This same Samuel was the first to come up to him every morning and shake his hand, nor was he being hypocritical: an ubergeek like Simon would never have been his preferred candidate, but now Zadie had hired him, they had to work with him.

In fact, Simon fitted in well with the team. The schoolboy mentality reminded him of the Polytechnique. Clever people who only ever talked trash. A mixture of sarcasm and sex. Over the weeks, over the jokes and the lunchtime sandwiches, he discovered a number of very different characters. In fact, they came from everywhere, from every walk of life, every country, and though rallied to the banner of the Almighty Dollar, they conserved something of their otherness. A Danish archaeologist barked his offers as though betting at a high-stakes table;
a Russian Hebrew scholar whispered them with an intense solemnity as though he were risking his soul for his clients; and an elegant Frenchman, an aficionado of the
nouveau roman
, was reputedly one of the bank's best traders. Of course, most of his colleagues were utterly dull, young fund managers who had decided at the age of ten to work in banking so they could make as much money as possible as quickly as possible. But there were also those who had wound up here by chance, gravitating towards the centre of the world, following the crowds without quite knowing why. And they were not the worst, like Simon, who had accidentally discovered a fundamental vocation.

Fundamental and quite enjoyable. Simon was among the horde of zealots who sat trembling in front of a bank of monitors and phones, their voices metallic as though tempered by stress until they became like steel. Simon worked at his own pace, he produced his data models, studied derivatives suggested by the team, aggregated statistics, calculated possibilities. For every product, he assessed risk – not in the way an Indian agribusiness client trying to protect himself against a devastating monsoon might do, but with that naive, confident conviction that what he was doing at his computer was good work. He interpreted uncertainties, evaluated the future, examined the variables to fit statistically rational curves.