Read The Shape Stealer Online

Authors: Lee Carroll

The Shape Stealer (9 page)

BOOK: The Shape Stealer
2.54Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

“You turn this cell into a garden, filled with birds

“And flowers; nor could there be a grander theme

“Than you for any art. I worship at your throne”—here he interrupted himself to bow slightly toward me, making me blush more than I cared to—

“And pray that you and this most earnest Will

“Will understand each other very soon.”

Kepler shot a warm-eyed look at Will that I perceived as one of grandfatherly fondness for him, again to my embarrassment, as I wondered what “understand” could be a euphemism for. Kepler concluded with,

“Rejoice!—as we are cut loose from this hell.”

I wondered if Will had put him up to this, a poem that had an Elizabethan ring to it as Will’s poems did—though I suspected, without exactly recollecting, that Kepler was from the same era—but Will’s features held no emotion but pleased surprise. He’d been anything but a convincing actor with me, so I adjusted to the idea that a scientific genius, whom I had studied in high school astronomy, was attempting to play Cupid in my personal life, centuries past his time. That was too much of a brainful for even the last forty-eight hours, but I decided it was not considerate of me to simply stand there in stupefied silence, so I thanked him. “I have never heard of you as a poet, just as an astronomer. Am I ignorant on this point?”

Kepler smiled. “I’m no poet. In my youth, as a student at the University of Tübingen, I did have a few years in which I frequently wrote sonnets, composing them while walking in the woods, on scraps of paper I then stuffed into my pockets. The sonnet was a popular form at the time. But I was not able to continue to write them, under the heavy but welcome burden of calculations required to verify my planetary theories. However, I listened to this brilliant young man recite a spontaneous poem of his own a little while ago, and it inspired me. Reawakened my poetic voice.”

“You heard my poem?” Will asked him.

Kepler nodded. “I was too weak to respond, but I did hear it. It was one of the few things that helped me keep my sanity during those dark moments of imprisonment.”

“This exchange of poems and pleasantries is all very well and good,” Jules’s prim voice came from the opening of the cell, “but are we going to stand here talking poetry while those madmen are loose? They have killed my colleague Jean-Luc, and now Annick has gone off in pursuit of them.”

“Annick followed them?” I asked. “How do you know?”

“She texted me,” Jules said, holding up his cell phone. “It was
most
irresponsible of her after I specifically ordered her to remain in hiding at the entrance of the catacombs.”

“Ah, but most intrepid,” remarked Kepler. “Perhaps the young lady will be able to tell us where Marduk and Dee have gone.”


If
they don’t kill her first,” Jules snapped. Then he turned on his heel with military precision to march away from us—an effect ruined by his having to stoop and turn sideways to get through the hole in the brick wall. We followed him in silence, cowed by his anger and by the sight of Jean-Luc’s body, his face covered by Jules’s jacket, lying on the catacombs floor. Another corpse to add to the mounds of the subterranean dead, I thought, recalling the piles of bones and skeletons we’d passed on our way here. I shivered, imagining the corpses of Marduk’s victims piling up in the same abundance on the streets of modern-day Paris.

 

11

Black Pools

Few would have suspected the true identities of John Dee and Marduk as they strolled, a few minutes before seven a.m
.
, into the glossy glass lobby of Global Financial Fund headquarters on the Rue Cuvier near the Quai Saint-Bernard. Both wore Brooks Brothers suits and white dress shirts. Dee had on a well-knotted tie to indicate that he came from the traditionalist world of private banking; Marduk’s open collar was actually a conformist gesture toward the freewheeling culture of hedge funds.

Though at one time the tie, or lacking one, represented a divide between California funds and East Coast or European funds, the financial consultant Dee had seen in advance of this meeting had told him that tielessness had now spread like a contagion, everywhere but into the Far East. The consultant, David Ferris, a dapper man in his thirties, had sniffed the air with disapproval while saying this, as if informality were a pestilence.

“We just need to look authentic,” Dee had told him. “Will Hughes will be doing road shows to raise capital, and I need him to look like a manager—not that he isn’t one.”

Upstairs, in his expansive fourteenth-floor office, the man waiting to meet with them had an identity as public and transparent as Dee’s was private and obscure. Vice Chairman for External Relations of the Global Financial Fund Jean Renoir was frequently quoted in the financial media, especially in the past year or two, when his comments had turned emphatically cautionary. None of the journalists whom he palled around with, and sometimes wined and dined, would have guessed that during this period Renoir increasingly seethed with resentment, bitter that his antileverage advice had not been taken by nations and individuals prior to the ’08 crash.

His urbane demeanor remained the same. But, in his mid-fifties now, balding and with a paunch, Renoir had taken as a blow to his outsized self-esteem the fact that even though he had been so right and the world had been so wrong, he had been unable to do anything about it. He was neither the leader of a country nor the head of a national bank who could directly implement a tight credit policy, though his voice was heard in august financial circles. So when an opportunity for influence presented itself, in the form of an extraordinarily ambitious gold-buying scheme, a chance not only to punish nations and their currencies for overuse of credit but to profit massively in doing so, he had been all ears.

Renoir knew little about this mysterious John Dee who was riding up in the elevator to his office now, with the somewhat better-known hedge fund manager Will Hughes. Dee’s claim to be the head of an ultra-secret and high-asset private bank in Dublin, Ireland, one that specialized in providing financing to increasingly popular, off-market “black trading pools,” could not be fully verified. But that was no surprise, nor even cautionary, given the secretive nature of that world. Of greater concern, perhaps, was his claim to be descended from the historical figure John Dee, an assertion improbable on its face. (One reason this meeting had been scheduled was to get a feel for whether or not Dee was some kind of crackpot.) People did have their vanities, however, and there was always the slight chance he was such a descendant.

Dee’s colleague Will Hughes was better known and definitively legitimate—Renoir had seen him on any number of financial talk shows—and together Dee and Hughes had verified their access to billions of dollars, euros, and pounds, as well as to other currencies, to the satisfaction of Renoir’s trusted chief of staff, Saturn Hicks.

His intercom buzzer made the familiar shrill sound.

“Mr. Dee and Mr. Hughes here to see you, sir,” receptionist Carla Worth said in her best, perfectly accented English. They must have spoken to her in English. Renoir had expected it, but he would not have been surprised if they had used French.

“Send them in, please.”

As they came through the door Renoir got up and swung around his desk to greet both men with a handshake. That was a gesture he did not make for all, or the majority, of his visitors. Many had to come over to his desk to meet him while he sat. Dee and Hughes then took plush chairs a few feet apart in front of the desk; both seemed distracted at first by the view out the wall window behind Renoir. The Seine glimmered with late dawn, and over Renoir’s right shoulder rose the spires of Notre Dame. Sunlight at a low angle glowed in a patch on the rose-patterned carpet midway between the two men’s chairs. Hughes seemed particularly interested in the angle at which it was traversing the window and soon had moved his chair a foot or two to his right, away from it.

“I see you fellows must be in love with Paris the way I am,” Renoir broke the silence.

“Paris has been around a long time,” Dee replied indifferently. Will Hughes seemed to be studying his well-polished shoes.

What cold fishes, Renoir thought. Ulan Bator had existed a long time too, and Marseille. Nobody loved them that he’d heard of. Maybe the natives. Maybe. Paris was a jewel. Despite his desire to be congenial, he didn’t think he could reply to such a banal utterance.

Another silence.

“To me, it is the San Francisco of Europe,” Hughes said ponderously. “All it lacks is an ocean.”

A comment as silly as Dee’s was frigid, Renoir reflected, but at least he had to give the man credit for trying. He studied Will Hughes briefly, before replying. Renoir recognized him from television and photos in the financial press, but he thought he could detect some tiny difference in his facial features, some obscure imperfection, right now. As if one of his eyebrows was a little longer than the other—maybe that was it—or was the peak of one of his ears too high? He couldn’t tell, and then he warned himself against excessive nervousness at this meeting, not surprising given the monumental amounts of money involved.

“Yes, I like San Francisco too,” he said.

Hughes nodded. Renoir observed Hughes’s gaze to wander again, from the floor to the window to Renoir’s own face now, not exactly meeting his eyes, and then to his neck. To the floor, and back to his neck. Was it his tie? Was it crooked? Renoir’s hand found its way to the knot and found it straight. Will Hughes was starting to annoy him. He needed to bring the man down from his pedestal—but in a friendly way.

“Mr. Hughes, I have found my introductory discussion with your colleague Mr. Dee most interesting. I am of course familiar with your innovations in socially conscious investing, like the Green Hills Partners, which seeks to improve the lives of animals by selling short the stock of companies that engage in factory farming and other nonhumane practices. Audacious, and heartwarming, though you must tell me sometime how you manage the commodity risk with those trades.”

“Commodity risk?” Hughes asked. He could feel Dee glancing at him anxiously.

“Livestock, of course, eats corn and grain, so the swings in the prices of foodstuffs must impact corporate profits.”

“It’s early in our friendship for me to be handing you trade secrets,” Hughes replied.

Delicately, Dee said, “There are, of course, hedging strategies to deal with any and all commodities, including gold and silver. Surely you, Mr. Renoir, of all people, should be familiar with that.”

Renoir backed off. The pair was certainly high-strung … Nothing wrong with a little shop talk, was there? He shrugged and went on. “In any event, Mr. Dee tells me that you are, in the black pools, engaged in far more pioneering and unorthodox endeavors than with your admirable Green Hills fund.”

Now Will Hughes smiled. And Renoir found something peculiar in the way he pressed his lips together. As if he was hiding something.

“You can give Mr. Renoir some of your thinking regarding the black pool possibilities, Will. Why don’t you?”

“I’ve started off pretty old-fashioned when it comes to quantitative procedures,” Hughes said. “Straight down the middle with risk metrics. Low exposure, high reward through repetitive trading gains. That’s the mantra. But I am extremely progressive when it comes to investment themes. As you mention. Green Hills began as an environmentally concerned fund, expanded to advocating for humane practices on behalf of some of the most defenseless among us, animals being led to the slaughter.”

Renoir was less than amused by this humane notion, which he had read about at some point a year or two before but not taken with any particular seriousness. The French economy depended heavily on agriculture. If the man’s views became associated with his, Renoir’s, name in public, it could be political poison for him. And his appointment at the GFF was, ultimately, a political one. However, he saw no immediate need to worry. They simply needed to keep their plot secret, at least until it was well under way and the results financial news. Renoir remained silent after Hughes’s little speech.

Dee then steered the discussion in a more palatable direction. “What Mr. Hughes is trying to establish here, my esteemed Mr. Renoir, is that he is quite sensitive to the plight of the oppressed, whether they be two-legged, or four-, or a hundred-legged, for that matter.” He laughed. “Bringing justice to credit-crazed capitalists whose predatory lending has caused so much suffering, by causing a collapse of the gold bubble, is an extension of progressive logic. And so we stand at the ready, sir, at your service!”

Renoir was reassured by these platitudes, at least as to Dee’s sense of public relations, but he remained troubled by the tautness of Hughes’s smile, which he observed from the corner of his eye. Then Hughes relaxed his lips, and Renoir found a little too much white gleaming at him, as if the man had spent excessively on some polishing treatment. Was there something wrong with his teeth? Finally Hughes returned to the neutral expression he had entered the room with, and Renoir’s distraction subsided, but, still, this man was making him as uncomfortable as anyone with billions of dollars that Renoir wanted to speculate with could. It was time for him to truly take control of the meeting. He half stood from his chair, leaned on the mahogany desktop, and said tersely, “So the three of us stand agreed, then, that the corporate and banking greed unveiled to the general public in the fall 2008 crash goes unpunished a year later, in fact has been rewarded by a variety of bailouts and ‘look the other way’ investigations! And so therefore it’s time that we, three individuals with unique capacities to carry out justice and punish the perpetrators, took matters into our own hands?”

Both men nodded. Renoir breathed a sigh of relief, then decided to go on to a more momentous concept.

“We will start out using three billion euros in the black pools with the utmost secrecy, as John Dee and I have already discussed, to raise the price of gold, first there, in the black pools, and then everywhere, as the consequences of the trades begin to affect the general market. And as we eventually—maybe in a week’s time—leak reports of our success, consequently we will be able to raise almost infinitely more capital. Our assistants can meet during the next few days to work out the many logistical details of this plan.

BOOK: The Shape Stealer
2.54Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Spy Out the Land by Jeremy Duns
The Children's Story by James Clavell
Impulse by Candace Camp
Outsider (Outsider Series) by Smeltzer, Micalea
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Anything for a 'B' (MF) by Francis Ashe
Fifty Shades of Mr Darcy: A Parody by William Codpiece Thwackery