Slaves to Fortune - Tom Lanoye

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outer space.

      The night before, Tony had gone into hiding. Disappeared off the radar, along with his laptop and his twelve memory sticks. They contained encoded company secrets from throughout the years. Activities that had been kept off the balance sheets. Toxic investment products, cut with clean ones and then oversold as reliable derivatives. A list of demanding clients and their exotic bank-account numbers. A demanding client—and this could be a person, a fund, a country, or another bank—didn’t like to share where the money came from or where it was going next, but demanded the highest interest rates and, if they didn’t get them, put their eggs in the competition’s basket.

      The memory sticks were supposed to be a private database, nothing more—a way of keeping track in the growing rat’s nest of data. Tony only consulted them when his laptop was offline, that was how worried he was about hackers and extortionists. He had installed all the firewalls possible, but didn’t trust any of them completely. He had never wanted to use the sticks for criminal purposes. The thought hadn’t even occurred to him. His loyalty and sense of duty were too great for that. Now, in retrospect, he could no longer imagine it, but as long as he’d worked for the bank, gratitude for his job had won out over doubts about his role. He had shown respect because he thought he was respected. Extremely proud was how he had felt about his career, his salary, and his domestic happiness, even though he seldom got home before eleven at night and usually left again by seven in the morning. His weekends were one day long—unless there was a crisis, then they lasted an afternoon. His holidays in Provence were never longer than seven days, one of which was spent travelling there and another getting back. For ten years, he’d begged his wife to be patient. Just before she turned forty, he’d granted her a pregnancy. After the birth of their daughter, he’d had himself sterilized.

      The more blood he shed on the altar of his profession, the more fanatically he took up its defence. He even protected his employer from slander on internet forums, albeit under a false name. He didn’t want be known as a toady. Toadies didn’t survive in investment banks. Indispensability depended on hard figures, not on soft-soaping.

      On the Net, he had used ten pseudonyms in rotation to attack each new critic. He had the nine other usernames give his first alias the thumbs up, accompanied with little commentaries that attacked the details in the post but backed up the general gist. Sometimes the discussions between his aliases were longer than their collective brawls with the slanderers. This was how he conducted his chorus of swelling counter-voices to a climax: the detractors would grow tired of the unexpectedly large blowback and go and mouth off elsewhere, about some other financial mastodon.

      Their departure filled him with more disappointment than triumph. He didn’t have any other hobbies.

      Now he, too, had departed. He was in exile. He took his incriminating memory sticks and his laptop with him in a sports bag bearing the bank’s logo. He wasn’t intending to do any harm with them. He wasn’t a rancorous person; he found revenge barbaric. But he didn’t feel like paying for what was on his sticks. They would be his life insurance, nothing more.

      His real life insurance would be shut down a few days after his disappearance, he was certain of that. Not everyone found revenge repulsive. He had many superiors, and the urge to retaliate increased the further up the food chain you went. His good name would be dragged through the mud, his bank accounts and his credit cards blocked, his shares, warrants, and options would be confiscated or forfeited. Whatever value they still had.

      He stamped his BlackBerry to smithereens in the main station in Brussels, right after he’d used the phone one last time to say goodbye to Martine, his shocked wife. He hadn’t had Klara, their six-year-old daughter, on the line. She was still with the mother from the babysitting co-op, Martine sobbed. Tony didn’t know whether to believe his wife or whether she wanted to spare Klara the trauma of two tearful parents. Klara was a hypersensitive child.

      But Tony was the person who would have been able to calm her down. He and Klara often talked on the phone. They mainly talked on the phone. But 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

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