Sila's Fortune (32 page)

Jane had not fallen in love with the gangster; nonetheless, Simon's heavy-handed attempt to conform to a stereotype that was a complete fabrication was irritating. She warned him: ‘I love your weaknesses.'

He was crippled by his weaknesses. Obviously he couldn't go on working with Zadie. On the basis of a minimal but lucrative settlement, he handed in his resignation. He didn't look for another job. He no longer had any confidence in himself and besides, the banking world disgusted him. The humiliation he had suffered made him feel sick and he couldn't imagine ever going back to working as a quant.

‘You'll have to get a job some day,' Jane would say.

Simon didn't answer. He was sinking. No longer living in a world of images was destroying him, and it saddened him to think that he was no better than the traders whose image of themselves crumbled under the weight of professional failures.

A month later, the break-up with Jane Hilland completed his annihilation. Within five minutes, the young woman announced her decision and left. He would never see her again.

One morning, Simon received an invitation card:

On the back it read:

Prior to renovation the Hotel Cane would like to offer its regular customers an exceptional opportunity: come and break, smash, destroy, obliterate the old world. A new hotel, more beautiful, more welcoming, will rise from the rubble.

NB. A sledgehammer will be given to you on your arrival.

This unsettling invitation was all the more surprising since he had never been a client of the Hotel Cane, except for having had an – admittedly memorable – dinner at the restaurant years before, in another life. And furthermore, the card had been posted in New York. He tossed it onto the table.

He remembered that night perfectly. He had made it the symbol of the illusory parenthesis of his life, lost in these roles and since a number of the erstwhile protagonists had since passed away, there was a whiff of mourning about the memory. Lev Kravchenko had died in a terrorist attack and, in his successive transformations, Matthieu Brunel had vanished. In spite of his efforts, Simon had been unable to track him down. He had been swept away by some new identity, taking with him a part of Simon's life, a curious detour that Simon did not regret since he had discovered new sensations, but ones that had proved to be a dead end.

After it was over, he had travelled. But though he could go to the ends of the earth, still he came face to face with himself, endlessly revisiting the dead ends of his soul, confronted by a world that looked increasingly the same as he grew older and some strange alchemy brought countries ever closer, never knowing whether it was his own gaze which wiped out the distinctions or whether it was some terrible spell of regularisation.

He had tried to discover the new face of the world, journeying across Asia and the factory of the future. But often he simply saw it as an overblown West, bloated by vast crowds of people in a breathtaking destruction of nature. When the great whirl of countries had cancelled itself out in a vast, blank tedium, he came home.

He had rented a large studio in the 15th arrondissement and furnished it tastelessly, without realising that he was using his aunt's dated, old-fashioned apartment as a model. Since he had spent all his money travelling, he set about looking for work. His somewhat erratic career path worked against him. He didn't inspire confidence in prospective employers and research laboratories enjoyed the heady pleasure of rejecting the traitor. He eventually got a lowly job as a financial engineer, hired by a car manufacturer in Guyancourt, just outside Paris. He resumed the humdrum life he had known before Matthieu, now tinged with disillusion.

On April 21 2009, he emerged from Javel métro station at 6.57 pm and headed home. He took a shower, slipped on his bathrobe and, as he was towelling his hair dry, bumped into the dining table. Cursing under his breath, he pulled away the towel that was blinding him. There in front of him on the treacherous corner of the table lay the invitation card, creamy white, calling him to order.

He decided to go to the Hotel Cane. The handsome suits of his former life were no use to him: the wide square-shouldered cut epitomised the late 1990s. But he had nothing else to wear, so he pulled on a pair of jeans, his best shirt and a dark jacket from the past. The reflection in the tiny bathroom mirror seemed acceptable to him. No one would laugh at him.

A large crowd had gathered outside the Cane. People seemed excited at the prospect of demolition. Simon recognised the faces and the appearances of bygone days. Not as individuals, but from a certain air of opulence. Tall, slender young women strutted among the young men, the supermodel figures looking
like anaemic flowers, though they seemed animated, gripped like the others there by the thrill of destruction.

Simon handed over his invitation. The revolving door turned. He recognised the grand lobby, still intact: demolition was not yet allowed in here. A flash of memory told him that Lemerre's restaurant was to his right. The double doors were closed.

He handed his coat in at the cloakroom and in return the attendant gave him a steel sledgehammer with a big smile and the words: ‘Enjoy yourself.'

Simon went on his way in silence. A couple of young men, sledgehammers in hand, rushed past him. He stepped into the reception rooms: a tornado had swept through here. Broken tables and chandeliers lay smashed over the floor like glass jellyfish. People had been offered what they most loved: the thrill of destruction sublimated as spectacle. Simon walked past theatrical scenes and dumb shows where actors played out crimes or orgies. Pyramids of glass came crashing down beneath the artistic blows of a robot; a pink car froze in the act of crashing through the French windows; a bath equipped with an outboard motor steamed feverishly and in the midst of these creations, the faithful customers, fashionably dressed, wandered around with their sledgehammers casually destroying the old world as they passed.

Then suddenly, he saw him.

Matthieu Brunel or Matt B. Lester or whatever his name was now was wearing a dinner jacket, dress suited to demolition and rubble. Next to him was a beautiful girl, one of those impossibly tall, impossibly thin creatures, probably from Eastern Europe.

‘It's amazing how good it feels to smash things,' Matt said, coming over. ‘My speciality is mirrors. What about you?'

Simon didn't answer. This encounter stirred up such emotions in him that he didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

Matthieu hadn't changed much. His face was simply more brutal, his expression a little harder, inured to his every urge. And his features were curiously smooth, as though botoxed.

‘So the invitation, you sent it?' Simon asked, his voice hoarse.

‘Of course, who else?'

‘How did you track me down?'

‘Easy. I never really lost sight of you. Once or twice while you were travelling – I have to say you got about a bit – but the minute you were back in Paris I found out. I suppose I should have got in touch sooner but … You know how time flies. And then this demolition day came up and I thought it was a perfect symbol.'

‘I tried to find you.'

‘Really? That would have been hard. I transformed myself completely this time. Name, surname. I'd had enough. And it worked out: I'm a different man. Married, settled, kids.'

‘What about her?' Simon asked nodding towards the girl, who looked sulky and bored.

Matthieu gave a wolfish smile.

‘A hobby. Everyone needs a hobby. Marriage is tough. I've only just met her. Ukrainian. Pretty hot, don't you think? Sixteen, seventeen maybe, you can never tell with these girls.'

‘You haven't changed,' said Simon dully.

‘Thanks for coming,' said Matthieu. ‘I really wasn't sure you would. It was good of you, especially as it's been a long
time now … Years. And years that count double. And here we are together again, just like old times. Though everything's changed in your life. It's not the golden age any more – London, the money, the excitement …'

‘It was never a golden age, it was all just lies. And anyway, they've been hit by the crisis too. We've learned a few things. About banks, about money, about financial set-ups. I don't regret anything.'

Matthieu shrugged.

‘Maybe people did learn something, but it doesn't matter. They watched billions, thousands of billions flushed down the toilet, lots of them lost their jobs, but it doesn't matter. Because nothing will really change. Because it was all just talk, just people pretending to be shocked, it's not like they actually
did
anything – except bail us out, of course.'

‘Bail us out? What do you mean,
us
?'

Matthieu stood to attention with a mixture of pride and mockery.

‘Us. The people who asserted themselves. I've set myself up at the top of the tower and no one will ever throw me out now. I told you, Simon. I needed money, lots of money, because some day soon everything is going to come crashing down and only the richest will survive. I told you I'd give you a place in my tower, my marble and steel tower. Well, the tower is ready: my apartments are reinforced, the doors are armour-plated, the whole ground floor is patrolled like a military base. I'm ready for the apocalypse.'

A triumphant expression spread over his face and Simon realised that this was where the physical change was, in this
crass contentment. Matthieu had achieved his aims. He was happy. He had money enough to fill his pockets and more. His wallet, his office, his apartment, his safes, his houses. The brutality of his features was that of the predator sated after slaughtering its prey. Fortunate are the mad and the megalomaniacs! He had
triumphed
!

Simon had followed the soap opera of the 2008 financial crash just as he had followed the Russian crash of 1998 from the inside and, more distractedly, the bursting of the dot-com bubble while he'd been travelling in India and Thailand. He felt that the current crisis could not be compared to the others, that it heralded the end of the world just as, despite appearances, the crash of 1929 had ushered in American hegemony and eclipsed the power of the UK. This was the end of the West's supreme power. As a detached observer, he thought that, as usual, financialisation had heralded the end of an economic supremacy, just as it had centuries ago in Genoa or Amsterdam, financial skills having supplanted those of industry and commerce. This, in general, was the point at which one economy passed the baton to another; it did not vanish, and in fact kept much of its wealth for some time, but never again would it dominate. He even expounded on this historical analysis with his co-workers, who knew nothing about his past and were astonished by the breadth of his knowledge. But his analytical stance masked something unwholesome, as though he wanted some kind of revenge, the complete collapse of a financial world that had duped and humiliated him and whose profound immorality he understood only too well. He had first heard of the so-called ‘subprime' mortgage crisis in 2007 without truly understanding
its possible impact. But when Lehmann Brothers, to everyone's astonishment, filed for bankruptcy because of the collapse of its mortgage-backed securities, he had gleefully imagined the shock wave felt by his little friends in the banking business and he knew they would be trembling with fear because every bank's accounts were riddled with toxic assets. But nothing happened: the ordinary taxpayer had bailed out the threatened billionaires and the losses had been mutualised. The American Federal Reserve had bought up the toxic assets. In a scandal more astonishing than anything perpetrated by the Russian oligarchs, since by a little financial sleight-of-hand, no one had any choice – the banks had to be saved or everyone would perish – as small investors were bankrupted to the economic crisis, businesses went to the wall and tens of millions of people joined the dole queues, the foundations of the banking system had been preserved at the expense of a few scapegoats and the sacking of a handful of traders of no importance. And what with the state of the money markets and the disappearance of rival banks, people could look forward to exceptional end-of-year bonuses.

Matthieu had been right: no one would oust him from his tower. He was lord and master, by virtue, not of blood, but of money, with a universal
droit de seigneur
. He had everything. Everything, at least, that money with its magic, its furious and fascinating magic, could buy. Its power to transform. Lives, feelings, faces.

A man came over to them. A thick-set man of average height with a neat beard that softened his bulldog features and an overdeveloped upper body.

‘Mark!' Matthieu raised a hand to greet him.

The two men high-fived and Matthieu said in English: ‘How've you been? Good flight?'

He turned back to Simon and explained: ‘I insisted that Ruffle come. He hadn't even opened the invitation. We've been seeing quite a lot of each other in recent years. We've got business connections. But you two know each other, don't you?'