Sila's Fortune (15 page)

‘You're a good worker,' he was quickly informed by Samuel, who had changed his mind. ‘You should be making more money.'

‘I'm making too much as it is,' said Simon.

Samuel, assuming this was a joke, burst out laughing. He mentioned it to Zadie.

‘You should give him a pay rise, otherwise he'll leave.'

‘He said that?' asked Zadie, astonished.

‘Well, he was joking about how much he earned.'

‘Maybe, but he's just starting out as a quant. We can hardly put millions his way.'

‘He makes probably a twentieth of what I earn.'

‘You're overpaid.'

‘If you gave him £5k a month, I think he'd be all right. With his bonus, that would be fair and should keep him happy for a while.'

‘He really said this to you?'

‘Absolutely. And I felt bad for him.'

Simon was offered another £1,000 a month. He went home shaking his head.

‘They've given me a pay rise! I mean, I was already earning three times what I made at the lab, and here they are giving me a rise. All this just for calculating risks on a computer!'

‘And you earn nothing compared to your boss,' said Matt, ‘who earns nothing compared to some of the traders and they earn nothing compared to the fund managers.'

‘It's obscene.'

‘No, it's irrational. Welcome to the kingdom of the absurd. Let the living begin!' said Matt flinging his arms wide.

That night, they had dinner at The Fat Duck, one of the finest restaurants in England, not far from London.

Mark Ruffle would probably never have become a father had it not been for Dario Fesali. He was already the father of a small child, but he would not have been a father as he understood it, meaning a man with a fully-fledged identity, including a first name, were it not for the help of Fesali and of television.

At the Ruffle house, the television was permanently on. It was both a background noise and a familiar, even a familial presence. Mark and Shoshana's son Christopher, who naturally had a TV in his bedroom, was an addict and only in front of the screen did his face, which bore the profoundly vulgar expression of all spoiled children, light up. It was this addiction that saved – or possibly doomed – his father.

Arriving home from work one day, Mark saw a man on TV with an over-tanned face and white hair whom he mistook for Hugh Hefner, the founder of
Playboy
, a magazine he liked to read. Doubtless both men had the same ageing vitality, a product of greed and cosmetic surgery, but it wasn't Hugh Hefner, it was Dario Fesali.

The name Fesali, which means nothing in Europe, first became famous in the USA in the mid-nineties, only to become infamous some ten years later. Dario Fesali was a man of about sixty, of Italian origin and, as he liked to remind people, he was
the son of a grocer and a child of the Bronx, and now CEO of D.F. Investment. But above all he was ‘The Man who Built the American Dream'. And it was when he heard this motto that Mark became a father and the begetter of his own name. The moment he heard it, he found his true religion and through it, his identity.

According to the news report, Fesali was the man who had started the subprime property market in New York back in the late '60s. The principle was simple. The ambition of this admirable philanthropist was to put the means of home ownership within reach of the poor and the minorities who had no capital of their own. To do this, the loan was made by the bank in exchange for the title deeds to the property. And since property prices kept rising, the borrowers grew rich. At worst, if they couldn't make their payments, the bank would sell the property and, prices having risen in the meantime, the lenders benefited. Of course, since risk was an important factor for the lending establishment, it felt compelled to charge very high interest rates, especially as there was no cap on the rate charged in the United States where usury limits do not exist.

D.F. Investment was an unqualified success. It had a six billion dollar turnover, tens of thousands of employees, hundreds of area offices offering loans across the whole of the United States and making healthy profits. In fact this documentary about Fesali had been shot on a vast estate in California, in a house whose living room made Ruffle's father's lavish mansion look like a garden shed. The camera, lovingly lingering on the trappings of financial success, followed him as he went about his business, exploring his vast limousine with its cream-coloured seats, his private jets.

Ruffle listened spellbound as the man talked about the little kitchen table back in the Bronx in the 1960s where he had started his business; then suddenly Fesali's catch-phrase, the insistent leitmotiv that had made him famous – like the ‘little phrase' from Vinteuil's sonata that haunts Swann in Proust's
In Search of Lost Time
– appeared in the brilliant sky of the television: ‘Give me your poor, your huddled masses, I want to share my fortune with them.' And just as Swann reclined in a thrill of sensual pleasure when he heard the famous ‘little phrase', savouring the subtle fragrant essence of the music, so Ruffle, his boorish heir, discovered the meaning of life when he heard his mentor's words. This base, vulgar creature whose spiritual interest had never strayed beyond the end zone of a football field felt a thrill as intense as that most rarefied dandy in all of literature. And he was not stirred by the talents of some great musician whose art, in Proust, that great tormented soul, is depicted as the quintessence of his suffering, but by the two-bit philosophy of a wily old fox.

Ruffle finally realised what he had to do. His vocation in life was not to be his father's son, to take over the family business as and when his father saw fit – which would be as late as possible – but instead to set himself up in the high-risk mortgage market. He would turn the houses and the apartments his father had built into fabulous high-yield investments. Like D.F. Investment, he would lend to the poorest of the poor and become the high priest of American prosperity to everyone.

This, in the end, was what it was all about. What the former Clarimont running back was searching for was not so much money as a role, a voice. He couldn't stand it any longer, he
needed to find a way to talk about his football triumphs again and the interview with Fesali had just given him the words. He needed so badly to talk, to talk about himself, to have an audience, to find recognition. From others and from himself. If he pulled this thing off, he would be rich without needing any help from anyone then he too could claim he was an American dream maker, he too could welcome the poor, the huddled masses. Like Fesali he would pose, hand on his heart, and his words would coil around him like so many beautiful garlands.

From that moment, things moved quickly for Ruffle, and he experienced what was without doubt the happiest period of his life. No security and no particular authorisation were necessary to set up a loan company, he could have worked out of a shack on a patch of waste ground as long as he could find borrowers to trust him. But he didn't need to. Banks welcomed him with open arms and he found several Wall Street investors, people he'd met during his years working for his father's firm, who were happy to help him set up in business.

In 1996, with his wife and son, he moved to Miami. He had briefly considered New York but the global city, its universal appeal, a magnet for the whole world's talents and desires, made him nervous. His Fesali-like armour was not yet strong enough; behind these steel plates, as thick and tough as the football pads of his teenage years, lurked the anxieties of the uneducated provincial boy from Clarimont. He feared the eloquence, the intelligence of the big New York entrepreneurs, whether American or European. Miami was an ideal stopover between Clarimont and the world. It was a large, cosmopolitan city but bore no comparison with the gigantic proportions of
the truly big American cities. A city shot through with water and sunlight, nestled in the tropical atmosphere of his childhood, bordered by swampland. And a region where, thanks to his father's wealth and connections, his name was not completely diluted by the vastness. What's more, for the first time in his life Ruffle proved to be genuinely clear-sighted. Miami was at a turning point in its recent history, midway between the ravages of the hurricane of 1992 and the property boom of the 2000s. Everything was possible, and before the construction cranes became a permanent part of the landscape, before skyscrapers, each taller than the last, rose above the Miami skyline, there were vast fortunes to be made.

Ruffle set himself up in offices of worrying size, which marked out his ambition from the get-go. He hired brokers to scour the poor neighbourhoods and from that point, anyone who was not already a client of D.F. Investment signed up with Ruffle Universal Building, the company he founded.

Over the years, Ruffle had come to recognise his father's top agents, the ones who could be friendly, cheerful and reassuring. The consummate professionals who could sell the dingiest, ugliest properties. Offering them more money than his father ever had, he lured them to Miami and at a huge meeting for ever known in the company as ‘White Thursday', promised colossal bonuses to the highest performers. And being the new Fesali, Ruffle entrusted them with a mission to go into every home, into every seedy building, every hovel, and save these people in spite of themselves.

‘People don't want the American dream, they sit around on their asses because they haven't got the balls to change their
lives. So you're going to kick down the door of their nightmare and turn it into a dream. You'll move in with them and hang out in their shit-tip kitchen until they sign the fucking contract. You are the architects of the American dream. Thanks to you, thanks to us, these people's lives will be transformed and, as you drive down the coast to see them, remember that this is a mission, a mission to do good.'

And the brokers, seeing dollar signs flashing, kicked down the doors, and if they were sent packing they went back again the next day. Like vultures, they hung around stairwells asking the kids playing in the street when their parents would be home. Since they worked all hours, they had all the time in the world. They sensed their time had come, that Ruffle Junior would pay for their beachfront houses, their Mercedes convertibles. They sensed that the life they'd dreamed of was theirs for the taking if they could only get names on contracts. They knocked on the doors of the poor, of Blacks and Hispanics in run-down neighbourhoods, they exploited every Cuban contact they had in search of newly arrived immigrants. Then they camped out in their kitchens. They went one better than Fesali in the Bronx. They persuaded the senile, the feebs and the drunks to sign up, but they also convinced the young couples and the gullible. They talked like they'd never talked, their smile sunnier, their manner more reassuring than it had ever been in their lives. They offered thirty-year variable interest mortgages with the first two years
interest free
. Eyes fluttered at the thought of these two glorious years with nothing to pay; the most clear-sighted minds were opened and they signed up, even those who had been suspicious from the start, thinking
it didn't matter, that they would sell on, that property prices were constantly rising, that they had nothing to lose. They'd sell on because trees did grow to the sky, because the world had discovered a universal winning formula, one that guaranteed everyone could be rich and sustained growth could carry on for ever. Life was a cinema screen. They had zero earnings? It didn't matter. All they had to do was sign a little contract, and two years from now, they'd earn big time. Two years in the USA was a lifetime. So what if they only earned 15,000 a year? They deserved a 200,000 dollar mortgage. And those first years weren't just interest free, they could be
payment free
if necessary. The money was theirs, all they had to do was sign. All they had to do was surrender, here at their kitchen table, finally worn down, just append their signature to the bottom of the contract. And then it was all over, all the brokers had to do was smile and say, ‘You made the right decision. It's for your own good.' Then they'd have a drink, a toast to their future prosperity, their beautiful houses. And the realtors would say goodbye, close the doors behind them and dash down the stairs. Picking their way through the ravaged streets, past kids skulking on street corners, thinking it was best to get gone before they had their tyres stolen. The day was a success because the contracts kept piling up, because they'd sold the American dream by the truckload. And all this was right and good.

What Ruffle truly wanted was a transformation: he wanted it enshrined in bricks and money. His house in Clarimont had been nothing but a pale imitation of his father's wealth. His house in Miami shattered any possible notion of comparison, scotched any idea that the son would be happy to follow in his
father's footsteps. Instead of a big suburban house, the Ruffle family opted for a white dream on the seafront with a vast, blue swimming pool some distance from downtown Miami. This was the word Ruffle used to described it, the only word on his lips now: ‘This is my dream.'

The dream in question was wide and low, a little like a flying saucer, with a projecting roof supported by pillars like animals' paws. Inside, everything was white, dazzling, shimmering with sunlight with wood fittings of staggering richness. Ruffle had preferred this house over Shoshana's choice, a colonial mansion in the European style. Still he had hesitated, both because Shoshana had developed a passion for Europe since their trip to Paris, and because he wondered whether a more classical building would confer on him the air of sophistication he so clearly lacked. But in the end he rejected the colonial house which was so unlike him. The circular spaceship on the other hand, modern and luxurious, surrounded by water, perfectly embodied the spirit of Miami: a young, constantly developing city, a crossroads between worlds where people of every nationality melted into an immaculate modernity.