Cornucopia

by John Francis Kinsella

  *

  That day, as Dublin was hit by yet another wave of extreme winter weather, the trial of three ex-bankers took place in a packed court. They were accused in what was described as the gravest financial misconduct case ever tried by an Irish court. It involved a series of fraudulent loans totalling nearly five hundred million euros.

  The atmosphere was tense as the prosecution’s charges were read to the court, after which the former head of the defunct Anglo Irish Bank, Sean FitzPatrick, faced his judges and pleaded not guilty. On one side sat the accused, opposite were the jurors who would decide his fate.

  Kennedy, though he was not present, would have been familiar with the process: by a strange coincidence he had sat before the judges in the same court room almost a decade and a half earlier on charges of conspiracy to defraud the very same bank.

  A WRITER

  O’Connelly as a writer and journalist, was extremely pessimist when it came to Russia. Putin seemed to be going down a one-way street: his latest insult to the West was to have invited North Korea’s Kim Il-sung to Moscow for celebrations to mark the seventieth anniversary of the victory over the Nazis. It was so absurd as to be almost unbelievable; inviting the hereditary dictator of an outlaw state to celebrate the victory over a criminal state … by another tyrant, Joseph Stalin. It was an insult to the millions of Russians who sacrificed their lives in the Great Patriotic War. Even Khrushchev had denounced Stalin for the cult of personality he had engendered and the crimes he had perpetrated.

  It was bad enough when Kim Il-sung, a terrifying comic dictator whose benighted people believed their God-like leader neither urinated nor defecated, threatened his neighbours with nuclear destruction, but when Russia threatened to target Denmark with its atomic missiles the world had definitely gone crazy. Perhaps it was just posturing or bluster, a throwback to the Soviet Union, especially during its last desolate years when it was evident the Cold War had been lost and their empire was crumbling around them.

  O’Connelly smiled when he remembered a Russian TV news report with pictures of lines outside Parisian bakers on Sunday mornings entitled ‘Bread shortages in Paris’. If it helped Muscovites reconcile themselves with the then desperate state of their country, why not.

  Traditionally, the French invited their families for lunch on Sundays and pastries were always a favourite on the desert menu. As Russians queued for bread, Parisians queued for pastries, it was as if the words attributed to Marie Antoinette were as fitting as ever.

  The six and a half hour Are Lingus flight to New York was scheduled to arrive at JFK International at two thirty, which meant O’Connelly would be in town about four; giving him time to check-in to his hotel and freshen up for dinner with Jason Hertzfeld.

  He peered from the window of the business class cabin hoping the clouds would clear over the west coast of Ireland. He was in luck, suddenly green patches started to appear, then came a weak silver flash reflecting the watery sun on the Shannon. He scanned the countryside laid out like a patchwork quilt for the airport, which had once a refuelling point for Aeroflot on its regular run to Cuba from Moscow; when Nikita Khrushchev sent his men to build missile bases there; and later Leonid Brezhnev’s soldiers, when the Cold War got several degrees hotter with proxy wars in Vietnam, Angola and Central America.

  Shannon Airport had marked the history of transatlantic aviation. Many celebrities had made a refuelling stop in Shannon: presidents, politicians, film stars, writers and even El Lider Maximo: Fidel Castro. Many of them dined in the Lindbergh Restaurant, where they no doubt shared their tales of adventure in the skies.

  In 1919, Alcock and Brown crash landed in a bog after having set out to cross the Atlantic from Gander in Newfoundland in a Vickers Vimy. They were greeted with words: ‘Welcome boys. Where to, and where from?’ announcing their landing in Ireland, not England!

  In 1937, the Transatlantic Flying Service opened the first transoceanic passenger line, with a whole series of refueling stops, one of which was on the banks of the Shannon at Foynes. It was there Irish Coffee was invented when an enterprising local publican softened the coarse gustatory sensation of Irish whisky for the ladies with a dash of coffee, cream and sugar, making it an instant hit in fashionable London and New York salons.

  O’Connelly dozed half thinking of Colombia, a country he had never visited, and conjuring up scenes for his next book. He was invited as a guest writer at the Hay Festival, thanks to Hertzfeld’s tireless promotion, with the writers’ books translated into Spanish and Portuguese, distributed in an ever growing number of Latin American countries.

  O’Connelly was grateful, though he found himself on the road with an increasing frequency and under a relentless pressure to produced. His smart phone had become an indispensable tool, one he could use literally anywhere and with which he not only made notes, but found himself using it more and more for actually writing, storing his texts on Google Drive, communicating with his other devices and correcting his drafts for grammar, spelling and factual details such as dates, places, names and events, recent or historical.

  Boeing Clipper Trans-Atlantic Flying Boat 1939

  So much had changed since James Joyce completed Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in his own hand. Nearly half a century after Joyce’s death, when O’Connelly had first commenced his efforts as a budding writer, he had frequently destroyed his notes and early drafts, imagining that others, if they came across his multiple corrections, side notes, erasures, scribblings, grammar and spelling errors, would see him as a poor amateur or even worse a semi-illiterate.

  It was only when, many years later, he came across a collection of manuscripts written by Jean Cocteau, exhibited in a Left Bank bookshop, near Saint-Sulpice in Paris, did he realise many a writer’s manuscripts were an almost indecipherable a maze of what seemed at times delirious outflowings of their imaginations. Some time later at a Sotheby’s auction preview of letters and manuscripts of famous authors he discovered many manuscripts were chaotic, others near perfection. Some talented writers others had personally corrected and rewritten their works; many others depended on their publishers’ correctors, readers, assistants and typesetters to put order into their meanderings.

  This discovery was confirmed once and for all when the manuscripts and notes of James Joyce were made available to the public by the Irish National Library in 2004, when a new exhibition centre was opened on Kildare Street in Dublin. The inaugural theme was centred on James Joyce and his celebrated work Ulysses with many of the great man’s manuscripts on display.

  From that moment O’Connelly never looked back. The art of writing, that is to say putting a story on paper, or some other support, was not an exercise in style or a manifestation of grammar skills. It was the telling of a story. Naturally it had to be readable, capable of stirring the emotions of the average reader. But it was the story that counted. Joyce had experimented in style, which meant that many readers past and present found certain of his works difficult to read. However, Joyce believed the ideas he put on paper were inseparable from the manner in which they were written. He was a Modernist and his styles included experimentation with structure, dialogue and characterization: interesting for certain, but lost on less appreciative readers.

  O’Connelly, as a writer, was unconcerned by such considerations. In Joyce’s time the literary world was narrow, for the few, it was a world of experimentation, where most mainstream publishers were dedicated to what they determined was good literature, that is for the educated classes, where commercial values were seen as vulgar, a concept reserved for paperbacks, for the common man, the masses, most of whom had no access to good modern literature, for them it was the style of Micky Spillane, which was judged as cheap, lurid, fiction. Paradoxically Spillane was admired by Ayn Rand and recompensed late in his life with an Edgar Allan Poe Grand Master Award.

  Hertzfeld was all business, and Bernsteins, of which he was a partner, even more so. That did not worry O’Connelly, who saw posterity as no furth
er than the pleasure of seeing his next book on the New York Times best sellers list.

  THE BUND – SHANGHAI

  The speeches had ended and the cocktail reception slowly winding down when two young bankers ducked out of the Peace Hotel to the Shanghai Bund. The day had been long and boring as a succession of bankers, financiers and ministers droned on about investment, growth, currencies and banking technicalities in general.

  Seth Elis led the way across Nanjing East Road to Zhongshan East, otherwise know as The Bund. There he pointed to a building, which with its Ionic pillars, architrave, frieze and cornice, resembled an impressive early twentieth century bank. It was the former Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China, built in 1923. Since then a lot of water had flown under the Waibaidu Bridge and the staid looking edifice had been transformed into Bund18, a very trendy, very upmarket, shopping emporium where its customers could enjoy a nice cup of tea in the Joël Robuchon salon de thé, or a meal at the Bund Hakkasan, or the French chef’s restaurant, after browsing in the luxury boutiques that included Cartier, and all the rest of bling, which was not the priority of the two young bankers. Instead they headed for the seventh floor where the Bar Rouge was situated.

  As the night was still young with few party-goers in the fashionable discotheque and bar, they opted for the rooftop terrace where they ordered drinks and enjoyed the spectacular view across the Huangpu River to Pudong and its gaudy skyline.

  Elis was a young up-and-coming investment analyst at the Blackstone Group, whose linguistic and relational talents had pointed him towards a career in international relations. He had been hired, more than a year before graduation, whilst still studying for his MBA at Wharton, during the investment house’s annual search for new talent.

  Over drinks they exchanged career experience. Elis told Liam how he had been called to interviews by a frenzied pack of competing banking and investment house recruiters, often with little or no time to prepare himself for the interviews.

  Clancy’s background and business experience was far removed from Seth’s, whose wealthy New York parents had ensured his place at the Wharton Business School, one of the oldest, and most expensive in the world. Wharton was classed fourth in the Forbes’ list of leading business schools, where the average graduate’s starting salary was one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars - which seemed to Clancy a mind blowing sum for a novice, whatever his diplomas, and on top of that was a twenty five thousand dollar signing on bonus.

  Schools like Wharton or the London Business School had been so far removed from Liam’s world that he had never even been aware of them. Such schools had become businesses, especially the latter, which to men like Francis was a profit making enterprise disguised as a seat of learning. Unlike Wharton, the London Business School was not exactly a venerable institution, rather a parvenu, founded in 1964, opening its doors when the socialist government came to power, led by the colourless Harold Wilson, a prime minister as uninspiring as a Soviet apparatchik, who as the last rays of sun faded on the disappearing rump of the once glorious British Empire, led his country down a road to devaluation and deindustrialisation.

  The school’s Marylebone campus was situated in a grand John Nash terrace, built in 1822, and described as ridiculously fantastic in Mogg’s Visitors guide to London of 1844. Under this grandiloquent neoclassical façade it was inaugurated by Elizabeth II in 1970.

  Its recently created extension in Dubai was evidence of its pursuit of money. Francis, as a leading professor of economic history at Trinity College Dublin, found the school’s pretensions greatly exaggerated. It was nothing more than a modern emanation of the University of London, itself founded in 1836.

  The creation of the school, he like to point out, coincided with the death of Winston Churchill, one of Britain’s greatest ever figures, who, if he were still alive, would have despaired at the hollow men who succeeded him to lead his once great nation.

  In short LBS was an imposter and an upstart compared to his own proud Alma mater, which was founded in 1592 by the first Elizabeth.

  After graduating in business studies at Cornell University, Elis had spent two years as a junior investment banker with Morgan Stanley before following in his father’s footsteps and completing a two year residential MBA programme at Wharton. Clancy on the other hand had no MBA, he had not even gone to university, entering investment banking by pure chance during Ireland’s spectacular boom years.

  Red Bar on the Bund

  At precisely the same moment as Elis was applying himself at Wharton, all paid thanks to dad, upfront, a senior partner in one of Morgan Stanley’s law firms, Liam found himself in a Dublin pub looking into a half empty glass of Guinness, unemployed, on the street so to speak, licking his wounds, another victim of the Irish banking debacle.

  In 2010, when markets started to recover and Clancy was still struggling to make ends meet in his start-up as a financial consultant in Marbella, he was contacted by INI and hired on Pat Kennedy’s recommendation. Kennedy, who besides preferring a home grown Irish lad, believed in hands on experience and innate talent rather than academic qualifications alone.

  The London prime property market had started to accelerate and Clancy’s experience as an ex-trader with the bank’s Dublin unit, along with his hard earned knowledge gained through untangling the property problems of UK expatriates in Spain, as well as the incumbent financial and legal questions, seemed to him a good choice.

  It was after midnight when the Bar Rouge finally started swinging. The two up-and-coming bankers quickly forgot their careers after latching onto a couple of attractive Chinese girls … or was it the other way around?