A Week in December Page 4

  The book group met once a month and the school work came in three times a year, so Tranter was still open to offers. In this hopeful vein, he had been intrigued one day in April to open his e-mail inbox and to see, after the usual spam for Bruno Banks, that there was one for him from Mrs Doris Hine, or reception@rashidpickle.org.uk.

  Tranter had heard of the company, in fact had a jar of their aubergine chutney in his kitchen cupboard, and he could scent money in Mrs Hine’s message. He replied at once, and a date was set for him to visit Farooq al-Rashid, the founder and owner of Rashid Pickle, at home in Havering-atte-Bower with a view to advising him on a ‘literary project’.

  III

  Jenni Fortune was on the final circuit of her Sunday shift. It was true she’d turned the light off in her cab the better to enjoy her privileged view of the city without her own reflection in the way, but that was not the only reason. She never looked at photographs of herself, and spent as little time as possible looking in the mirror. There was nothing glamorous about the uniform, and for that she was grateful because it meant there was no choice; for the same reason, she had liked the blazer and skirt required by her school.

  Being a Tube driver gave her power and responsibility. Almost all her training was in safety measures, the care she had to take with other people’s lives; the train itself was controlled by a single lever and was easier to drive than a car. ‘We’re paid’, the older drivers in the canteen had said when she arrived, ‘not for what we do but what we know’ – and this included how to get the forty-year-old rolling stock on the move again if it broke down, as, when the weather grew cold, it often did.

  Jenni lived in a two-bedroom flat in Drayton Green, in the western suburbs between old Ealing and the new India of Southall. The second room was occupied by her younger half-brother, Tony, who was out of work. Tony and Jenni had only known each other for a few years, though their respective single mothers had gathered from casual conversations with the father that there were other children too. Tony had been curious about his halves, said to be six in total, and had tracked Jenni down. Marie, Jenni’s mother, thought Tony was a sponger, like his father, and that with Jenni he’d ‘latched on to a good thing’. It was true that Tony looked at Jenni’s payslip with awe, though in fact, after tax and rent at £250 a week, there was little left for much beyond the weekly shopping. Tony had lived off the jobseeker’s allowance for the previous year. He was obliged to take occasional jobs to maintain a position on the benefit ladder, to which he returned when it was safe.

  His room was at the back of the house, looking towards the athletics track. In his schooldays, he’d been a promising 400-metre runner himself, but it had meant training at weekends because the teachers wouldn’t supervise sports in the afternoon, as part of some historic work-to-rule, and Tony found getting up at seven on Saturday to take the Tube from Tottenham to the club in Harringay too much to ask. He liked to think he’d kept in shape by playing Sunday football in Gunnersbury Park, but at the age of twenty-eight he was already carrying several extra pounds on his belly. The amount of weed he smoked made him hungry for food but not for exercise; in the evenings, he went to a pub in Harlesden and later on to various clubs, where he drank lager and bourbon.

  He didn’t understand Jenni. What would make a girl get up early every day and put on clunky shoes with rubber safety soles and drive a train through a dark hole in the ground? She had good holidays and steady cash, but so what? That canteen, that dick of a station supervisor, the social club, the smell, the darkness underground ... And then when she got home she just read books. Or played that boring virtual-world game, Parallax.

  Tony blamed Liston Brown, the man who’d taken up with Jenni when she was nineteen. Any man could see what Liston’s game was. He was maybe thirty-nine, had three children with different women and too much money from developing property in North London. He played golf at a tolerant club off the M40 and was a member of a West End club notorious for its pole dancers and high prices. Jenni had been working as a catering assistant in a junior school in Islington when Liston picked her up. She’d never met anyone like him before. Nor had Tony, except once, when he’d been to buy some skunk and found his normal source off sick, and a man a bit like Liston – tall, imposing, in a black cashmere coat with a striped Italian scarf double-hooped at his throat – had done the deal instead.

  As well as two cars and a house near Alexandra Palace, Liston had charm. Reluctantly at first, Tony had gone along for parties and Liston had treated him like a brother. He did near-perfect imitations of people on television and had a fund of almost-believable stories about them; he had a room with a private cinema and a bar at which you helped yourself to any drink you could imagine, as well as little pre-rolled joints in a glass jar. When everyone was high, Liston switched on the powerful karaoke machine and urged them to perform. He’d break the ice himself with a virile Marvin Gaye.

  It had been shocking when he dropped Jenni. Afterwards, she seemed to lose all interest in men. Her twenties passed. She was good to her mother and she was never out of work, though some of the jobs she did were things Tony wouldn’t personally have considered. Then at the age of twenty-nine she had surprised them all by training as a driver; it was almost as though she was trying to hide from something, Tony thought, burying herself beneath the ground.

  Jenni walked back from the station when her shift was finished and let herself into the flat. There was no sign of Tony. She made pasta shells with tomato sauce and opened a carton of orange juice; she ate quickly, eager to get on to the computer.

  Sunday evenings were always busy in Parallax. People had been out clubbing on Saturday, got up late, spent the afternoon recovering and were now ready for a bit of fun before the week began again.

  In the hallway there was a good-size flat-screen computer that Jenni had bought from her savings. A colleague in the operations room at the Depot had shown her how to cleanse the hard drive of Tony’s weighty downloads, which caused the system to run slow. Jenni inspected the contents and removed, without opening, an energy-sapping item called ‘White Girls, Black Studs’ and two games in which over-muscled men went through post-nuclear cityscapes in battered army vehicles, carrying rocket launchers and gaining points for annihilating goons and half-naked women.

  She had left Miranda Star in a far nicer place: on the banks of the Orinoco, where she had built a house. In order to pay for this, Miranda had borrowed 200,000 vajos from a mortgage lender called Points West and had engaged to repay it at a rate of five per cent interest over ten years. With Miranda’s new job as a beauty therapist, this was just about feasible. Vajos were on a fixed exchange rate with sterling in the real world, and Jenni had, cautiously at first, given her credit card details online to the Parallax Foreign Exchange, which was based on the island of Oneiros.

  The economy of Parallax derived from that of the real world, but with a lesser sense of responsibility. The inventiveness of the traders was such that few people understood the securities they bartered, but the gains to be made were stupendous, while the losses, after a certain level, became either too complicated to compute or too subdivided by onward sale to pin on one person. If they were truly serious, they were absorbed by the Central Bank, and the resulting blip in the overall Parallax economy could be ironed out by raising game subscriptions, taxes and shop prices for the less sophisticated. The financiers’ gains were theirs to keep, but their losses were democratically shared.

  Most of the gamers, though, Jenni noticed, still preferred sex. She checked on the progress of Miranda’s house and found that the builders had completed it overnight, a week ahead of schedule. The tiles in the swimming pool were slightly bluer than she’d imagined and there were rather more caged parakeets in the marble entrance hall than she remembered ordering, but otherwise it was perfect. Miranda’s bedroom overlooked the river, and in the shining white bathroom were pink curtains with embroidered daisies on the hems. A breeze blew through the French doors that opened on t
o the balcony.

  Round the new house was a thin tape, a bit like those used at a crime scene in reality, which said ‘NO ENTRY’ at intervals. Some people left their houses open, unattended, but Jenni didn’t want just anyone snooping round Miranda’s bedroom.

  When she’d finished her tour of inspection, she left the gated community on which the house had been built and went for a walk through some ruins on the edge of the encroaching and still gorgeously untouched rainforest.

  She had not gone far before she encountered a man. He had cargo pants to the knee, bare torso and multiple piercings. His skin was light brown, though most of it was covered in tattoos; he carried a Uranium credit card (the highest rating) and a submachine gun in his right hand.

  Jenni sighed. This was not the kind of man she would have chosen, but she had learned that it was pretty much standard dress for men in Parallax. Most of the maquettes were scary and you just had to remind yourself that they might in reality be women or children – you absolutely could not rely on appearances; you had to disbelieve your eyes.

  She knew the man had seen her because she found herself being messaged.

  ‘What your name?’

  ‘Miranda Star.’

  An answering legend appeared automatically (you couldn’t message and withhold your own identity) above his maquette’s head: ‘Jason Dogg. Age 35. Pisces. Adventurer/ Prospecter.’

  ‘What you doing?’

  ‘Looking at my new house.’

  ‘That your’s? Then we are neighbours!’

  Jenni noticed his English spelling. Most of the gamers were American.

  ‘Great,’ she wrote, feeling a twinge of exhilaration.

  ‘Can I visit your house?’

  ‘Not til I know u better.’

  ‘Lets go clubbing tmw. I know a good place.’

  ‘Is it expensive? Only 15 vajos left,’ typed Jenni.

  ‘Not if you do’nt drink. How long you in Parallax?’

  ‘Two years.’

  ‘You’r so cool.’

  ‘Why u have machine gun?’

  ‘Tell you when we know eachother more. Clubbing tmw?’

  ‘Maybe. Must crash now. Am tired,’ Jenni wrote. ‘In TL, do you live in England?’

  ‘Yes. London. Wot time u come on?’

  ‘Working late tmw. Maybe Tuesday night?’

  ‘See ya then.’

  Jenni felt excited at the thought that someone was going to take Miranda clubbing. She’d have to get some new clothes tomorrow – a dress at least – and she wondered what the stores were like in Caracas. In what the gamers called ‘TL’ or True Life, she was on the second shift on the Circle Line, so she’d have time.

  * * *

  John Veals’s wife Vanessa at that instant poured herself a large gin and lime. She was dreading her husband’s return because he had said he’d take her out to dinner. Although half American herself, Vanessa retained an English deference towards waiters and restaurants, with their snooty manner and demi-French menus. She always asked politely for something listed and was quick to accept that her request had been unreasonable if told that it was no longer available.

  John and his colleagues, with whom she was occasionally obliged to dine, didn’t even look at the menu. They’d summon the waiter and tell him what they wanted.

  ‘Right, we’ll start with a plate of ribs in the middle of the table here. Then I want carpaccio of beef with a thin mustard sauce. What? No, I’m not interested in that. I want it very thin, with Dijon mustard in the sauce and a few green leaves, maybe rocket. Then I want roast chicken. No, I don’t want coq au vin. I want plain roast chicken, lots of salt on the skin, roast potatoes, not small ones, proper size and cauliflower cheese. That’s it. OK? And some gravy. No, not fucking jus. Gravy. And my friend will have a cheeseburger.’

  ‘Sir, we do not have—’

  ‘Yes, you do. You have filet mignon. Mince it up. Get a bun. You have a cheeseboard here. Look. It says here, £5 supplement! Get a slice off it. You can do it. It’s what you do.’

  It was worse when the heads of American banks were with him. Even when one of them had been persuaded to try something that was actually on the menu he would change his mind after it had been delivered and send it away again. ‘Just bring me some clams.’ ‘Sorry, sir, we have no—’ ‘Here’s £50. Go and buy some.’

  John Veals hated holidays, but once, in the burning summer of 2003, Vanessa had told him that if he didn’t come with her to an Italian villa for a fortnight she would leave him. It was an immense palazzo, the last cool building in the European heatwave, with a mosaic-tiled swimming pool, a small olive grove, eight bedrooms, silent icy air conditioning, a live-in couple and a view of poplared hills that might have brought a spasm of joy to Giorgione. Veals left three days early for an unmissable appointment in New York and discovered on his arrival at his Manhattan hotel that Vanessa had bought the villa for £2.5 million.

  ‘How did you manage that?’ he asked by phone from his room.

  ‘I contacted the agent and they put me in touch with the owner. And I asked him how much he wanted for it.’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘You know you gave me access to the Bermuda accounts. You remember, last year when—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s not that. It’s how you did it. Did you say you asked him how much he wanted?’

  ‘Yes, I asked him how much he—’

  ‘That’s no fucking way to trade.’

  ‘Do you think it’s too much, John?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. It’s just the principle of the thing. Asking him what he wants! For Christ’s sake, Vanessa.’

  As the clock showed six, John Veals went to the bookcase in the corner of his office, removed a few volumes and opened a small safe behind them. He took out a brown envelope that contained three sheets of photocopied A4 paper. He sat down, tilted the back of his chair and put his feet up on the desk again while he examined the papers. It was not the first time he’d read them.

  For more than two years, he had been watching Allied Royal Bank. It was a fine institution in many ways. Its roots were in the empire and its branches were in the high street. It looked after more institutional pensions than any other bank and it was laughingly said that the future happiness of one in three Britons over sixty-five years old depended on it. People joked that the four-legged runner of its logo, intended by a management consultant to represent ‘diverse synergy’, looked like a walking frame. It was associated in the public mind with low-risk, traditional banking; one of its small branches had been in Edgware, and it was here that the eighteen-year-old John Veals had opened his own first bank account with £25 he’d earned in his uncle’s betting shop. He had been with ARB in various ways ever since, and High Level used the Victoria branch for some of its day-to-day needs.

  Allied Royal, however, wasn’t altogether happy with the idea of itself as the old person’s friend, the knitted cardigan of the banking world. It had therefore developed an aggressive investment banking arm which had generated most of its profits over the last two decades. Largely through its business in derivatives (many relating to commodities it had traded for real in empire days) the management had been able to deliver an average of twenty per cent a year to the shareholders.

  Veals had sensed, however, from the way the share price moved from day to day, that all might not be what it seemed at Allied Royal. He noted that when bank stocks fell, Allied Royal fell a fraction more than its competitors; when the other big banks returned to where they’d been, Allied Royal never quite clawed back all it had lost. These were only fractions, barely visible to the unfocussed eye. Daily calls to the trading desks of large investment banks told Veals that to buy credit protection on ARB would cost a little more than those on any of its big British rivals. These insurance policies against a bank failing to meet its debt obligations were always cheap, because the chance of default was so slight; but to insure against an Allied Royal debt failure over the standard five-year period of
the insurance, or ‘credit default swap’, was just a whisper more expensive than it was for any comparable bank. This was what piqued Veals’s interest. And then ARB’s balance sheet publicly revealed how much money it had taken from the wholesale markets (or borrowed, in other words, from other banks): too much, in Veals’s view.

  In March 2006, Allied Royal surprised the world by buying a large Spanish bank. Veals’s analysts looked hard at the deal and concluded that it was ‘testosterone-driven’. The figures did add up, but everything was stretched. ARB had raised large quantities of debt secured both on the anticipated future cash flows and on the expectation that there would be cost savings in merging the two banks into one big new structure. Veals knew people always underestimated how much it cost in mainland Europe to achieve such savings and was surprised that ARB had managed to prevent the analysts from pointing this out. By now, however, he was definitely interested.

  In April 2006, he fired his head of Compliance, a Scot called William Murray. In theory, such a person was meant to ensure that every deal made by the fund ‘complied’ strictly with the rules laid down by the regulators. The word, however, lent itself to jokes; Steve Godley suggested that Murray had been fired for not being ‘compliant’ enough. In the push-pull of dealings with Veals, Murray had pulled too hard: he seemed to have forgotten that it was Veals and not the FSA who paid his salary. The purpose of a compliance officer, in Veals’s view, was to facilitate and to warn, in that order. If necessary, the third duty was to look the other way.