“What, like a trick?” I asked.
Edward laughed. “Maybe. A little harsh, but maybe. Confidence is what keeps the whole show on the road. You need confidence – faith, even – to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Arguably, if you just stopped the whole edifice would collapse.” He glanced at me. “It’s also about value, but there’s the rub. What is value? Value is what people think it is. A thing is worth what somebody will pay for it. But then somebody pays what everybody thinks is an outrageous price for something, a price everybody ‘knows’ is idiotic, and yet if they can offload it for even more to somebody else then it really was worth at least what they paid for it, wasn’t it? The profit is the proof. Though of course if they get caught with it, when it becomes horribly clear that it wasn’t worth anything like what they paid, then they were wrong and everybody who ‘knew’ they were wrong gets proved right.” He sipped his whisky. “The difficult thing is to spot reliably who’s right and who’s wrong by buying in before a stock gets too expensive and get out before it becomes clear it’s actually like somebody in a cartoon who’s just walked over the edge of a cliff and only doesn’t fall because they haven’t realised yet. You know, like Tom and Jerry.”
I’d been thinking Road Runner myself, but I knew what he meant. We both watched the waves for a moment. “Is that the Invisible Hand holding them up, then?” I asked.
Mr N laughed again. “The Invisible Hand. Well, that’s just an article of faith. That’s another myth. Like we’re a twenty-four-hour society. No, we’re not; the markets aren’t. They close at teatime every day in whatever city they’re in, there’s nothing between New York and Sydney and they’re shut the whole of the weekend. And holidays. Just as well too or I’d never get any time off. What do you think of the whisky?”
I shook my head, frowned. “I’m not sure. It’s quite sweet and a bit peaty. I sort of want to say an Islay but I don’t think it is. Could be a Talisker that I haven’t had before but I’m still thinking about it.” I shrugged and looked bashful. “Leave it with me?” Mr N grinned and nodded, looking almost proud of me. This uncertainty was all bollocks by the way. It was a Highland Park from the Orkney Islands. I knew cos even though Mr N had poured it while I wasn’t looking I’d spotted the bottle on the sideboard with the dribbly bits running back down the inside when he’d handed it to me, so I knew. But I needed to go through the charade to make it look good, didn’t I?
“It is a confidence trick,” Edward said, staring out to sea again. “All banks are technically insolvent and all PLCs are one-way bets, or they bloody should be if you handle them right. If they work you keep the profits and if they don’t you close them down and the money they owe to other companies or other people is just left hanging. You don’t go bankrupt, not if you’ve arranged things right. Shareholder, director, MD. That’s what the Limited bit of Public Limited Company means, you see? Limited liability. Not the same as a partnership, or being a Name at Lloyd’s.” He waved his arm at the waves, spilling a little of the whisky. There had been quite a few G &Ts and bottles of wine before the whiskies.
“Really?” I said. I wasn’t sure this sounded right. I guess I must have looked dubious.
“There you are, you see?” Edward said. “A civilian, a very naive person, might think that if a group of people got together, borrowed a lot of money to start a business, ordered lots of plant and equipment and raw materials without paying for them and then made a complete mess of it and lost everything they would somehow still owe all that money, but they don’t. If what they started was a PLC then the company becomes a sort of honorary person, do you see? It owes the money, not them. If it goes under then it goes into administration and its assets are sold off and if those don’t cover what was owed then that’s too bad. As long as they stayed within the letter of the law throughout you can’t touch the directors or the shareholders. The money’s just gone. Of course, if it’s all a great success, then hurrah. All shall have prizes. See what I mean? One-way bet.”
“Jesus, Edward, you’re starting to sound like a commie.”
“Right-wing Marxist, Adrian,” Mr N said briskly. He nodded once, still staring out to sea. “As a matter of fact I did flirt with Socialism, in my youth.”
“That when you were at university, was it?”
He smiled. “Yes. University. But then I saw how much more comfortable life could be as one of the exploiters rather than one of the exploited. Plus I decided that if the proles were so stupid as to let themselves be exploited, who was I to stand in their way?” He smiled at me, his sparse, sandy hair ruffled by the wind. “So I went over to the Dark Side. Cheers.” He drank.
I laughed. “That must make Barney Luke Skywalker.”
He shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t know Star Trek well enough to say who he’d be. Not Doctor Spock, that’s for sure.”
I almost didn’t correct him. But it was such an obvious one he might say it to somebody else who would and then I’d look like I was being what do you call it? Obsequious or something. So I said, “You’re getting your stars tangled” and explained.
“Yes, well,” he said airily, waving his glass again. He turned to me. “And which side are you on, Adrian?”
“I’m on me own side, Mr N. Always have been, always will be.”
He looked like he was studying me for a moment. “Best side to be on.” He nodded, and drained his glass.
It began with Dr Seolas Plyte. The good doctor was asleep in the withdrawing room off his study in the Speditionary Faculty of the University of Practical Talents in Aspherje when it happened. His favourite mistress, still lying on top of him on the chaise longue in a haze of post-coital torpor, jerked once, exactly as she might have had she too been in the act of falling asleep. She reached down, took him purposefully in her arms and before he could properly wake they were both gone.
Ms Pum Jésusdottir was hiking in the Himalayan Hills when they came for her. A long-laggard world this one, where the Indian subcontinent had barely begun its slow crash into Asia. Here, the highest point in the Himalayas was tree-covered and less than thirteen hundred metres above sea level. She was walking alone along a recently blazed trail beneath tall plane trees dripping from a recent shower, stepping from side to side of the track to avoid the stream of water that it carried, reflecting that if you made a path in an environment of high precipitation without also making ditches then really you just made a stream bed, when she saw the girl sitting – hunched, hugging her knees, staring ahead – a short way up the path.
She couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen; one of the native tribal girls, dressed conservatively ankle to neck in a black caftanne, her hair gathered in a net, fingers glittering with rings. The girl didn’t look at the older woman as she approached. She just sat staring straight ahead, across the path. From a few metres away, Jésusdottir could see that the girl was shaking, and had been crying.
“Hello?” she said. The girl looked at her, sniffing, but did not reply. Ms Jésusdottir tried Hindic. The girl’s expression changed. She rose, standing, unfolding herself, and smiled at the older woman, who only then felt the first pang of fear in her gut. “Oh, Ms Jésusdottir, I have some bad news.”
Brashley Krijk disappeared from his yacht while cruising in the Eastern Middlearthean, off Chandax, on the isle of Girit.
Der Graf Heurtzloft-Beiderkern heard somebody come into the opera box behind him. He assumed it was one of his sons returning; they had both left earlier to indulge their cigar habit in the corridor outside and to flirt with any young ladies they happened to encounter. Whoever it was, they slipped in while the coloratura soprano was just launching into her final and most heart-rending solo. But for that, he might have looked round.