Sila's Fortune

by Fabrice Humbert

  ‘I should have been a professor,’ he said, settling back into the armchair.

  Elena considered him curiously. She didn’t for an instant believe this myth, which Lev came out with at regular intervals. If he had wanted to be a professor, he would be one, end of story. Lev needed money and power, and he was a man of action. Perhaps he had something of the intellectual in him, like many of the first-generation oligarchs. But this phrase invariably presaged an explanation. She waited.

  ‘We’ve found this field.’

  ‘An oilfield?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In Siberia, near Garsk.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘The field belongs to a farmer,’ Lev went on, ‘a man called Riabine. A pig-headed peasant. His family has been working the land for generations and he wants to keep working it till he dies. We’ve made various offers to him, but he’s turned them down.’

  He was hoping for a question, a comment. Nothing. He had to carry on, but the words were heavy.

  ‘He really should accept our offer,’ he repeated forcefully. ‘Because if he doesn’t, Litvinov will end up with his land.’

  ‘What if he doesn’t want to sell?’ Elena protested. ‘If he’s not prepared to sell to you, he’s not likely to sell to Litvinov.’

  ‘You don’t refuse an offer from Litvinov.’

  ‘You mean …’

  Elena was reluctant to draw the conclusion.

  ‘Of course,’ Lev muttered, ‘Litvinov will decide for him, by force if necessary.’

  Elena set her book down on the coffee table.

  ‘To think we’ve had him here in our house … and this is what he’s become,’ her face contorted in disgust.

  ‘This is what everyone has become! They’ve lost all sense of morality. The slow day-to-day drip of corruption. All it takes is a single action, you know, the first time you turn away from morality, that first step is the most difficult. Then there’s a second and a third … each more serious than the last.’

  Elena was staring at him.

  ‘Who are you talking about? What do you mean, everyone? Who are you talking about, Lev?’

  Lev, embarrassed, ran his hands over his face.

  ‘Everyone, yes, more or less. Because business is tough. Because the country has gone through a revolution that destroyed the old corrupt order, and replaced it with a new form of corruption. Because we have no choice.’

  Elena was silent for a moment.

  ‘We have no choice?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ Lev’s tone was firm. ‘We have no choice.’

  Elena got to her feet.

  ‘So you’ve made your decision. This Riabine, you’re going to make him a … final offer.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it to you.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Elena, ‘you were right to talk to me about it.’

  ‘I haven’t made a decision, Elena,’ said Lev, alarmed by the expression on his wife’s face. ‘That’s why I wanted to talk to you. In fact, I decided to leave Riabine to Litvinov. Let other people do whatever they like, I won’t be like them.’

  Elena stared hard at him, as though trying to discover the truth in him. ‘But you’re tempted, aren’t you, Lev? Tempted to take that oilfield by force, because that’s what Litvinov would do, because you’re afraid that Liekom will get it and the name Lev Kravchenko will be synonymous with failure? Because you’re afraid everyone will walk all over you?’

  Lev didn’t answer.

  ‘You’re scared, Lev. I know you are. That’s why you’re hesitating, that’s why you talked to me. You’re afraid to be brave. You were never scared of anything, now you’re terrified. You’re tempted by violence, but it’s fear that’s eating away at you.’

  ‘What fear?’ Lev said scornfully. ‘I’ve never in my life felt fear.’

  ‘Not physically, maybe, though even that has changed. It’s true that once even in a street brawl you wouldn’t have been scared. But you’ve got older and fatter, and most of all from a moral point of view you’ve completely changed. But none of that matters. The fear I’m talking about is more deep-seated. You’re afraid people will snatch your whole life from you. Your company, your wealth, your reputation. You’re afraid of becoming so weak in people’s eyes that they’ll crush you. But I’m asking you to be brave, Lev. I’m asking you to overcome your fear and act according to your conscience. Think about it, Lev, please. There’s never been a more important moment in our whole life. I swear, this is the most important moment, the moment of choice.’

  And suddenly, tears were streaming down her face.

  ‘Be brave, Lev. For us, I’m asking you, I’m begging you.’

  She buried her face in her hands and sobbed. Lev went to her, took her in his arms, hugged her tears, her pain. He hugged this woman who, from their very first conversation, he had admired for her dazzling intelligence. For that dagger of terrifying lucidity that was her mind. It was even possible that this was why he had married her, this feeling of intellectual inferiority he felt when he was with her. He kissed her.

  ‘I’ll be brave, Elena.’

  Lev trudged out of the room. He sought refuge in his office. For some time he sat motionless, his face a blank. Then he got up, looked at himself in the full-length mirror, a tarnished mirror, and through the black spots of tarnish, the marks left by time, in this same mirror where once the prince must have looked at himself, Lev saw a man with a fleshy face, bloated with fatigue, with food, with alcohol. His thoughts sharpened by what his wife had said, he could discern the corruption and the fear.

  He contemplated this man with a sort of detached contempt.

  The corruption and the fear.

  He grabbed the phone. Called the Chechen.

  ‘Go and find Riabine. Make up his mind for him.’

  16

  Things were now clear: money was their master. It had taken Simon some time to realise it but the uneasiness he felt when he was with the traders had eventually clarified the situation. No one took any notice of him because he earned nothing – or nothing much – even if he thought he earned a lot.

  The question was this: how much did you have to earn a year to exist? Five hundred thousand dollars, a million, five million, ten million? At first Simon didn’t really understand the indifference of his colleagues towards him, but though he hid away behind his computer, assimilating, sorting and exploiting statistics for every asset, option and option of an option in this world, the knowledge of his social status inevitably reached him through looks, tones of voice, a thousand little signs. And he quickly realised that his position in the Kelmann hierarchy was not high. He was a quantitative analyst – a quant – meaning nothing very important. He was, as he put it, a ‘cost centre’ rather than a ‘profit centre’. A necessary, indeed an essential cog, but poorly paid compared to the traders because he took no risks. He calculated risks, he didn’t take them. He didn’t take positions worth tens or hundreds of millions, making a fortune for the bank – if the market moved in his favour – part of which would come back to him as a bonus. A good trader took risks, a good quant eased them. Traders were men, they were manly, the way they talked was hyper-masculine, with frequent use of the word ‘balls’: ‘I’ve got balls, I’ll cut off his balls and make him eat them, I’ve got him by the balls,’ and so on.

  How much did you have to earn a year to exist? Simon remembered a conversation he had had with a Paris taxi driver who told him twenty thousand was what you needed to live decently. In ordinary life, most people would have agreed on that figure. As soon as someone was earning thirty or forty thousand, he was rich and you envied or despised him for it. When you were working in finance, the same salary was evidence of failure. And the more you climbed the greasy money pole, the higher the price of failure: a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand. You had to start counting in dollars, otherwise the sums took too long to say. And you had to leave the
bank and move into investment funds where managers, who randomly kept 20 per cent of the profits they made, earned sums that were beyond comprehension: fifty, a hundred, two hundred million dollars a year! Even a billion! A billion dollars for buying stocks with other people’s money in a bull market.

  The taxi driver calmly went on driving, the teacher passing on his knowledge, the doctor healing and the researcher … actually, the maths researcher was beginning to hesitate. Young graduates with PhDs in games theory realised they could earn ten, a hundred, a thousand times more on the stock markets. And though they loved pure mathematics, boasted about the absolute freedom of research, still the great, dark energy emanating from London or New York exerted a terrible magnetism. First and foremost, the money, but also its more reputable corollaries: a game played in real conditions with all the thrills of the biggest casino in the world, the competition, the insistence on results, the action, the stress … it was like a gauntlet thrown down to their youth. And as the tide began to swell and as they heard that other engineers, researchers, friends were banging on the doors of the banks, so gradually, deep underground, the thought began to spill out like a wave, carrying off more of them. Money swept them up, each in unconscious imitation of the others, and they cut their ties with their home countries and headed for London or Tokyo, or more rarely the US, where they lived as expats in a bubble of money, utterly oblivious to the Paris taxi driver. This was exactly what Simon had been told: the banks were draining the brains of the entire planet. But in doing so, the banks transformed them, forced them to evolve in a bubble the like of which had never existed, one entirely divorced from the life of the country, in which everyone spoke English, moved with astounding speed, almost as fast as funds closely followed a particular geographic area only to desert it at the first sign of trouble. They were drunk on this life of stress, targets, bonuses, and the rest of the time, they partied. Simon could see this. He and Matt went out all the time: once you reached a certain level, London restaurants were very good, much better than they’d been in the 1980s, because they’d been forced to adapt to the demands of these young tycoons, in particular to the refined palates of the French, more than 300,000 of whom lived in the city working at various different professions. The elegant parts of town had also become very expensive as property prices exploded – bankers’ salaries triggered an inflation that relegated English people in other professions to the distant suburbs, to gruelling journeys on overpriced trains that were invariably late. Simon and Matt routinely booked tables for eight or ten, all bankers, all under thirty, and they would spend as much money as they could. They showed up in Ferraris, in Porsches, in Mercedes which they casually handed over to valet parking, they were like lords, they threw money around then went on to nightclubs where they drank to excess and beyond. Stressed by their work, full of themselves, obsessed with an image fuelled by money and results, an image that was shattered when the money and results failed to materialise, something was happening all too often in 1998 as crises in Asia and Russia caused the markets to plummet, they needed to live large, physically and financially. They needed to express this intoxication.

  This was how the whole world turned. Vast capital was needed for all the developing countries, and as for developed countries, they were caught up in an excess of conspicuous consumption fuelled by debt. Salaries were low, what was on offer was vast: everyone bought on credit. The whole world was on a drip-feed of credit, no one had the money to pay for it, but that didn’t change anything, the wheel had to turn and go on turning until everything exploded. And the people at the centre of this credit quivered with the movement of the wheel, caught up in a whirl all the more frenzied since in this universe of short-termism and vast fortunes everything could collapse overnight.

  How much? How much did you have to earn a year to feel indestructible? How long before the pride of excess took hold?

  Now, when he went back to France, Simon was a Polytechnique student who had got himself a job at Kelmann. He was a success. People looked at him with respect, and maybe they were wondering how this idiot had pulled it off, but there was none of the condescension, the humiliating contempt he had endured his whole life. At work, he was just another young quant, which was considerably less glamorous. But even so, when he and Matt went out to dinner, he no longer felt like an outsider. Enjoying the slightly more relaxed sense of hierarchy that prevailed on nights out, he had the impression of being part of this world, although in a way that was more diaphanous, more fragile than the others, a ghostly double of their appetite for living and for money. The gestures, the conversations, the clothes were familiar to him. He was one of them. True he came by tube or took a taxi, he didn’t own a Ferrari, but he was one of them. He had crossed over.

  He would probably not have gone out as much as he did if it were not for Matt. Matt made a fantastic trader – the dazzling smile, the aggression, the macho posturing. He knew everyone in London. He had friends at Merrill Lynch, Kelmann, Lehman Brothers, SocGen, Deutsche Bank, at some of the hedge fund companies too, a party was not a party without Matt. He had clearly found his niche. He had inexhaustible reserves of energy. He could last all night, intimidating even the toughest party animals. His track record with girls was almost as impressive as in Paris: young, smiling, anonymous, identical blondes threw themselves at him. Almost as impressive? That was only because London was a city devoid of women. Bankers for the most part were men, and the tough, clever women in the business terrified Matt so much he didn’t dare try to seduce them. But waitresses, interns, other bankers’ girlfriends, foreign students studying English at the London School of Economics, all were perfect prey for a trader with his tongue hanging out. All he was missing was the Ferrari.

  Why didn’t he buy one? One simple reason. Matt didn’t earn a penny. He was a trader who didn’t trade. He knew everyone, fitted in perfectly with this world, he spoke the language, understood the gestures, wore the clothes, but he did nothing. Hence his boundless reserves of energy. He told people he worked for a small hedge fund, dealing with Russian investors, Saniak, a murky company whose managers no one knew which made it an ideal cover for Matt. He had no problem lying, a lie came to him as easily as the truth. What difference was there between them? At most an effect of language. In fact Matt probably did not feel as though he was lying: he slipped on his job as he might a new jumper. He needed this hedge fund so he could exist in the eyes of others, therefore the hedge fund employed him. Besides, he could only get a job if he had a job already. People only lend to the rich. Matt was gifted with the magnificent fluidity of the compulsive liar, criss-crossing the porous borders of truth and fiction. When he was clubbing, he told people he worked hard and earned a fortune in a frank, easygoing manner that convinced everyone. He wasn’t pretentious, just sure of himself. Simon barely noticed any more, though he was the one who paid the rent, his friend’s additional expenses being covered by his savings from Paris and handouts from his parents.

  This inactivity remained mysterious. It was true that Matt had not been to university and had no experience, both of which might have proved awkward. But in England, where things were rather more relaxed than in France, the banking world was more open to highly motivated people from different backgrounds, and lots of arts students worked in the City. You’d often find examples of secretaries or waiters who’d ended up with high-profile jobs, and as everyone kept reminding him, originally traders had been nothing more than the barrow boys of the stock exchange. And it was true that before the 1980s, stewards, out-of-work actors and posh boys with no university education had dabbled on the stock exchange and made money back in the days before deregulation, when finance had been a boring business. Those days were gone now, but there was still a slender opening. But Matt was unable to take advantage of it. His slickness, his lies, the friends he hung out with in the clubs made it easy to get interviews, but he never got called back. He always said he was good in the interviews but that something about him didn’t click, som
ething he couldn’t explain, something that was starting to eat away at him, some deep-seated, fundamental difference he didn’t understand which meant that he was never hired, while people he considered dreary, dull and stupid got hired instead. Over time he arrived to interviews more stressed and consequently more arrogant. Bracing himself for the humiliation to come, he puffed out his chest, became stiff and brusque and lost his greatest asset: his charm. But in any case, even in his early interviews his smile and his drive hadn’t helped. He did not please. A terrible discovery for a charmer.

  Why did he fail? Because his career profile was atypical, because he had only a limited knowledge of the financial sector, even if he could chat about it casually, but mostly because of this something. This nameless factor.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said one day to Simon. ‘I’m good, I’m a born trader. I’ve got a feel for the market and the coldbloodedness of a killer. I’m capable of giving them results like they’ve never seen. I know it, I’m sure of it. But they won’t hire me. They’re cretins. Complete fucking cretins. Just because there’s something about me they don’t like.’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘I don’t know what. That’s the problem. And obviously they don’t tell me. Hypocrites, the lot of them. Otherwise it would be easy. So I end up lugging this problem, this thing from one interview to the next without being able to do anything about it. I should go and talk to them, look them in the face and hiss “What is it? Why won’t you hire me, arsehole? What’s wrong with me?”’

  ‘Probably better not. Banking is a small world. You’d only get yourself blacklisted.’

  ‘It’s pathetic,’ said Matt, getting to his feet and taking his head in his hands. ‘Here I am desperate for the opinions of these losers who won’t hire me because I’m not a loser like them.’