Duncan shrugged. ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me this before? Why did you pretend you didn’t know who he was?’
Duncan sighed. ‘After everything all of you had done to keep things quiet, I didn’t want to admit that I’d let you down. That I’d let out what had really happened. I just hoped that Marcus would go away and I could forget about him.’
‘But why didn’t you deny it?’
‘It was too late. Lenka had already told him. Besides, he had a right to know.’
He had a right to know. Lenka’s words. Well, he knew now. And Chris had no idea what he would do with that knowledge.
Chris spent all the next day at the office, with only a break at midday to have lunch with Duncan’s client, Khalid, at a restaurant in Devonshire Square in the City. Khalid was twenty minutes late, but was all smiles when he finally arrived. He seemed to be about Chris’s age, neatly dressed with a small black moustache, warm brown eyes and a ready grin. They indulged in the typical market small talk. It turned out that Khalid was a friend of Faisal, the Saudi on Chris’s training programme who was now apparently in charge of a large pan-Gulf investment fund. The waitress came, and Khalid flirted expertly with her before ordering his sole done in a very particular way. No wine.
Khalid asked about the Central European high-yield bond market, and Chris answered him as best he could. The problem was that there weren’t yet many issues to choose from, and only three that Chris could strongly recommend.
The sole came, and it was prepared to Khalid’s liking. ‘But you don’t just invest in high yield, do you?’ he asked.
Chris told him about his government bond trades: about the florints, zlotys, korunas, kroons and lats he dealt in every day. Khalid was intrigued, and asked intelligent questions. He, too, had been involved in trading the Continental European bond markets before the euro, and from the sound of it, he was probably quite good at it. As Chris talked, he realized that after a couple of years of thorough immersion, he really did know these markets well.
They had finished the coffee, and Khalid insisted on paying the bill. ‘That was fascinating,’ he said. ‘And thank you for steering me away from Eureka Telecom.’
‘No problem. I think that’s wise, at the moment. I wouldn’t trust Bloomfield Weiss an inch on that kind of stuff.’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Khalid. ‘Do you know Herbie Exler?’
‘I used to work for him.’
‘Ah,’ said Khalid carefully.
‘Don’t worry. He screwed me.’
‘He screwed me, too,’ said Khalid. ‘Several times. I think he thinks I’m just a dumb Arab who he can leg over whenever he feels like it. What did he do to you?’
‘Remember that big convergence trade Bloomfield Weiss were involved with a couple of years ago?’
Khalid nodded. ‘How could I forget it?’
Well, that was me. But when I wanted to get out of it, Herbie wanted to double up. We did, we lost, I got the blame, I was on the street.’
Khalid watched Chris carefully as he said this, as though trying to judge whether Chris was spinning a convenient cover story. He could probably tell he wasn’t. There was no need: Chris had no reason to try to impress him.
‘He’s an asshole,’ Khalid said matter-of-factly.
Chris smiled. ‘I wouldn’t argue with that.’ It was late by the time Chris got back to his flat from the office that night. He checked his e-mail before he went to bed. There was one from Marcus.
You say Alex’s drowning was an accident, but I only have your word for that. If you won’t trust me by telling me what happened on the boat, then I can’t tell you what Lenka told me. I am still worried by her death. I don’t think I can trust any of the people who were on the boat that night. So I won’t give you my phone number or address.
Marcus
Damn! Chris quickly typed out a reply.
Marcus
I am flying to America on Sunday. I am going to New York, and Hartford, Connecticut. I would very much like to meet you. You name the time and the place, and I will be there.
He sent the e-mail, and went to bed.
There was an answer waiting for him the next morning. One word.
No.
Chris sighed. Still, Eric was right. It couldn’t be that hard to track down someone with a name like Marcus Lubron. He’d never heard the name Lubron before he’d met Alex. He’d allow himself some time while he was in New York to find him. Perhaps Eric could help.
Chris leaned against the wall by the porter’s lodge and watched the children go by. He remembered how infuriated he had been when he was at Oxford to read an article by a graduate about how young all the undergraduates looked to him. Well, twelve years on he knew it was true. Surely, Chris thought, he had never looked quite like these kids?
Then he saw her, striding across the quad, or whatever they called it in Cambridge, in jeans, jersey and a denim jacket. He was relieved to see that she looked a couple of years older than most of the spotty inhabitants of the college. She brightened when she saw him. He kissed her cheek, already cold in the March air.
‘Hi, it’s great to see you,’ she said.
‘And you. Thanks for inviting me up here.’
‘It seemed the least I could do after your hospitality last week. Do you mind if we just walk? I’d like to explore the town a bit.’
‘That’s fine with me,’ said Chris.
‘Do you know Cambridge?’ Megan asked. ‘You didn’t go here, did you?’
‘I went to the other place,’ said Chris. ‘I spent a couple of drunken evenings here ten years ago seeing friends from school. I’m afraid I don’t remember it very clearly.’
They walked. Chris hadn’t been back to Oxford for years, and he was surprised by how different Cambridge felt from the way he remembered university. There were few tourists around at this time of year. People were walking to and fro with quiet purpose. Although he knew, because he could remember, that students had their own problems, their own worries, their own crises, the atmosphere seemed to be one of calm serenity. Traffic had been banished from the centre of Cambridge and at times the loudest noise he could hear was the sound of footsteps around him, or the rattle of an old bicycle. He felt like a grubby outsider from the materialistic bustle of another world, from the world of pay cheques, commuting on the underground, suits, mortgages.
‘What’s the University of Chicago like?’ he asked Megan.
‘Nothing like this,’ she said. ‘At least, not physically. The oldest buildings are only about a hundred years old. But it’s a good school. There are some good historians there: people even these guys respect.’
‘I’m sure you’re one of them,’ Chris said.
Megan smiled. ‘We’ll see. What I really like about Cambridge is that it seems like a place where history happens. My kind of history.’
‘You mean all the old buildings?’
‘Yes, but it’s more than that. You can imagine people studying here for centuries, reading and writing Latin, arguing about theology. It somehow makes the study of, I don’t know, manuscript illumination in the tenth century, more real. In Chicago, I felt as if I was on a different planet. In fact, Mars seemed to be closer and more real than St Dunstan and his friends.’
‘It seems an awfully long time ago to me.’
‘Not to me,’ said Megan. ‘I remember the first time I became interested in all this stuff. I was an exchange student at a high school in France, in Orléans. The girl I was staying with couldn’t care about anything that happened before about nineteen seventy, but her father was fascinated by history. He took me to this tiny little church in a place called Germigny-des-Prés. There was a blind curate who showed us round. Most of it was standard grey gothic, but one part of it, the apse at one end, was decorated with the most gorgeous frescos. I can still remember the curate describing them from memory. I couldn’t believe that something so beautiful could have been created a thousand years ago, in the so-called “dark ages”. Ever since then, I’ve been trying to understand what it was like to live then, how mysterious and dangerous the world must have seemed, and how people tried to make sense of it.’