there wasn’t time to convince Martine. He wouldn’t be surprised if his BlackBerry were already being tapped. I’m sorry, darling! Keep thinking of me, and tell Klara that Daddy will be back as soon as he can! He left the broken pieces and the battery in a corridor where there were no security cameras. He might be acting overly cautiously, but prevention was better than being arrested. A little fear of being followed wasn’t unhealthy for a man in hiding with a controversial record.
Next, he took the metro to the terminus of line 5, Herrmann-Debroux station. It was a twenty-minute walk from there to his hideout on the Tervurenlaan, which bisected one of the prettiest neighbourhoods in the European capital. He hadn’t dared take a taxi. He might just stumble on the one ex-Yugoslavian driver who had inherited a photographic memory from his partisan family. Or what if the Belgian security services, or who knows, even the CIA, kept lists of anyone arriving by taxi at what was supposed to be his safe haven?
No, no taxis for him. In Brussels, Tony figured, you’d stand out least as a pedestrian with a sports bag in a sweater. A sweater whose hood you could pull right over your head. He’d purchased the item especially for this purpose from a grubby little shop near the Fontainasplein. A low-key disguise. And even then, after leaving the Herrmann-Debroux, he’d be better off taking the quiet minor roads that would take him past Castle Hertoginnedal’s gardens. Pleasant footpaths, pastoral greenery on either side, almost deserted at dusk. The fewer people who noticed him, the better.
He would miss Klara and Martine like crazy. He felt no remorse about the rest. They should have checked his work more thoroughly. But they weren’t even capable of it. That was the essence of the collapse. It was also the reason that all of his peers had long been fired and he hadn’t. Nobody in the world, except for himself and a handful of confrères, understood the details, let alone the scope, of the newest generation of econometric computer models.
If Tony were honest, he had to admit that he had found it hard to keep a handle on them, himself. They had outgrown the human brain, so to speak. It wouldn’t be long before they became independently operating cancerous growths, autonomous digital organisms, spurred on algorithmically to ever-greater speeds, until they achieved perpetual motion with unprecedented purchasing power and no inhibitory mechanism at all. In virtual reality, where there were no days or nights and the free markets stayed open forever, the most diverse products could be purchased fully automatically and then immediately resold, even if they had long ceased to exist in the tangible world. Sometimes they had never existed in the first place. The market for financial derivatives was already ten times larger than the real-life global economy. The end of the tumescence was still not yet in sight.
The concept that a product must exist in order to be traded has long been outmoded. Just as old-fashioned is the idea that money should exist before you can spend it. In a career barely spanning two decades, Tony, as key witness in the front row, had been able to observe this natural progress on his ever-thinner, ever-higher-resolution computer screens. Trading had definitively freed itself from its two fetters, merchandise and money. The earth’s produce and the bargaining chips to obtain it with? They had quite simply become superfluous. Just as art for art’s sake had come into existence, now there was trading for the sake of trading. After the poet and the conceptual sculptor, now the banker and the stockbroker had entered the era of pure lyricism, in which you didn’t have to take anyone else into account, least of all the public. Lucre became hermetic poetry. Even property could be a soap bubble.
At some point a real bill would be presented, for real money. Material money, old-fashioned money. They all knew that only too well. Fearful of being the first to be cast out of the pecuniary pecking order, they had all just carried on speculating and cashing in. This schizophrenia didn’t even prove to be that unpleasant. When repression takes hold of a closed group of insiders, an enjoyable collective intoxication ensues. Especially if the concrete salaries and bonuses continued to rise in tandem with the phantom rates.
Intoxication becomes addiction, and addiction is the new Order of the Garter’s badge of honour—honi soit qui mal y pense. In no time, a newfangled nobility had risen up, a coterie of untouchables, dancing on the lid of a cesspool that gained the allure of a blocked volcano as more and more yeast and toxic gasses escaped from the underground river of global crap. Its eruption had been a surprise, nevertheless, and was felt across the globe.
On Tony’s memory sticks there were constructions and trajectories that undeniably fingered him as the architect and route planner. But why should he put on the hair shirt? He had been an errand boy, nothing more. He had followed his masters’ marching orders without insubordination. If they’d been hoping he’d be the get-out clause that would ensure their collective impunity, they had the wrong man. For the first time in his life, he was going to categorically follow their beloved principle: ‘Help yourself, no one else will.’
They had tried to hammer in the unwritten rule—‘the Law’—from his first workday onwards. Each employee, they had warned him, would be judged on his quarterly results, not on the vague feelings of satisfaction of some client or other. This was neither cheating nor negligence, they thought. In the long term, it was the client in particular, each client, who was better off with a stronger bank. That was how it worked, the Invisible Hand, the tentacle that governed the free market better and more rationally than God his Creation. Help yourself, and the whole world would be better for it.
Tony hadn’t openly protested, even though the Law clashed with his ethics as a programmer, his principles as a dyed-in-the-wool democrat, and his sense of duty as a spouse, and later, a father. And, above all, he didn’t like to be forced to do anything he didn’t believe in one hundred percent.
This internal conflict was the only thing that irritated him about his job. Ostensibly, he had submitted meekly to the banking uniform—a tie and designer labels. Internally, and that was what counted, he had continued to see himself as some kind of rebel. A latent anarchist. However fiercely he defended his corporatist pride to the outside world, it didn’t prevent him feeling on the inside that he was a missing link. An autonomous pivot between the normal tribe he came from and the master race of high finance to which he would never be admitted.
And which he’d never wanted to belong to, in the first place. He was neither one nor the other. He was himself. And that secret feeling of honour was something no one could take away from him.
His latent resistance had turned into overt revolt shortly after his department head had called him a leech and a conman down the phone. The heads of other departments had come to threaten him, too, all the way to his office, which they had never set foot in before. One of them, a red-faced brute in a double-breasted suit, foaming at the mouth, had unexpectedly taken a swing at him with a balled fist covered in rings. The fellow was probably still coked up, too. Once one party drug wears off, you need another.
Tony had been able to turn his face away in a bewildered reflex. The punch had grazed his jaw without doing any visible damage, but his cheek was still sore a week later. A humiliating phantom pain that only let up when Tony made up his mind what to do. You couldn’t even call it rebellion. It was more about finding an antidote for the poison.
From now on, he swore—as he emptied his drawers and collected his memory sticks, packed his laptop in the sports bag, not forgetting his framed photo of Martine and Klara—from now on he would live life the way he’d been brought up. Help yourself? You could say that again. He didn’t just know the programmes for embellishing bank balances and pimping up long-term government budgets.
He also knew the paths a person of flesh and blood could take to go up in smoke.
And even here, Tony thought—sweating on this hilltop in Mpumalaga at the foot of God’s Porch—even here, the Law worked. Even here, I and I alone am the master of my own destiny. He wiped his sweaty palms on his cotton safari trousers and shouldered his gun again. He hadn’t been a bad marksman during his military service.
