Greed, page 24
‘In simple terms, yes, but this paper proves the opposite,’ said Jeanne. ‘In the final analysis, pooling and sharing is better for everyone than Ann and Bill’s selfish behaviour. No pursuit of equilibrium, just constant dynamics.’
‘A paradigm shift,’ said Jan. ‘That’s the phrase Will uses in his notes. The diagrams of the universe. The move from viewing the Earth as the centre of the solar system to understanding that in fact it’s the Sun.’
‘That’s exactly what Will meant. This work heralds an entire paradigm shift in our view of humankind and how our society operates.’
While Jeanne was explaining, Fitz had produced another quick sketch showing Carl and Dana’s cooperation bonus more clearly.
‘And the beautiful thing about it,’ said Fitz, ‘is that Carl and Dana don’t really need to work any harder to achieve this better outcome.’
‘Not really?’ said Jan. ‘Not at all.’
‘Just a little,’ Fitz corrected him. ‘They need to arrange the sharing of their crop and also ensure they’re both in it for the long-term.’
‘There are transaction costs,’ Jeanne explained, ‘especially when you get more than four farmers, just as there are in complex societies and nation states and in the global economy.’
‘Humans have established institutions and roles,’ said Fitz, ‘to take care of issues of distribution: markets, politics, managers in companies.’
‘They don’t work very well, though, do they?’ Jan countered. ‘Somehow it’s those very distributors – bankers, traders, managers – who always get the most ears of wheat, or money, instead of the farmers who could use it to produce more grain.’
‘You’re not wrong there,’ said Fitz, grinning, ‘but that doesn’t affect the fundamental advantage of the principle of cooperation. It just needs to be organized differently from no—’
He stared in horror at the door. Someone had knocked.
Jan’s heart skipped a beat. The killers wouldn’t give a polite knock …
‘Jeanne Dalli!’ called a woman’s voice from the hallway. ‘This is the police. Can we talk to you for a moment, please?’
SIXTH DECISION
* * *
‘Under certain circumstances the principle allows even small entities to destroy complex structures.’
Will Cantor
59
Maya knocked again.
‘Are you in there, Ms Dalli?’ she repeated.
‘Just a second,’ came the reply from inside.
Maya heard a clatter of high heels approaching. The door was opened by a woman in her late twenties who looked like a model. Her suit was visibly expensive, and Maya caught the delicate scent of a costly perfume.
‘The police?’ Jeanne Dalli asked in English with a trace of irritation. ‘How can I be of help?’
‘I apologize most sincerely, Ms Dalli,’ the manager blurted out at once, ‘but the police—’
‘We were informed that you met two men we’re looking for a short time ago in the lobby,’ Maya interrupted. ‘Fitzroy Peel and Jan Wutte.’
‘I … yes, I did,’ she replied, surprised. ‘Why are you looking for them?’
‘We’d like to know why you met them and if you know where they are now.’
‘Well, OK, come in,’ said Dalli, stepping to one side. Something about her demeanour told Maya that this woman was made of sterner stuff than her good looks suggested.
It was a junior suite with a bedroom and a living room-cum-study. Virtually the same size as Maya’s entire flat. A blazer and two blouses were spread out on the bed, and the doors to the wardrobe stood open. Otherwise the suite was extremely neat and tidy, showing barely any sign of occupation. The full-length plate-glass windows gave a view over the hotel’s sweeping gardens.
‘I need to leave for the summit soon,’ Dalli said. ‘May I offer you a drink?’
‘No thanks,’ said Maya. ‘This won’t take long.’
There was no need to beat around the bush with this woman.
‘Peel and Wutte,’ said Jeanne Dalli. ‘I had a coffee in the lobby with them. Peel contacted me this morning because he wanted to talk about a mutual acquaintance.’
‘About what?’
‘Conversations I’d had with this old acquaintance. Months ago. About professional matters,’ she said dismissively. ‘Nothing very interesting. Finance and economics.’
She peered at her expensive watch, but Maya refused to be distracted.
‘Finance and economics,’ Maya repeated. ‘Fascinating. You weren’t by any chance talking about Herbert Thompson?’
Maya had surprised her. Or maybe not.
‘The Nobel Prize winner who may have died last night?’
‘May have?’
‘Have the police officially confirmed his death then?’
‘No.’
‘Why would we have been talking about him?’
‘An innocent question.’
Jeanne Dalli shot another glance at her watch.
‘What does Wutte have to do with a mutual acquaintance of yours and Peel’s?’ asked Maya. Something about this woman got under her skin. She was too smooth, too professional, too well prepared. Then again, maybe a multibillionaire’s assistant had to be.
‘I didn’t ask, and he didn’t say anything, as far as I can remember. Maybe he simply tagged along with Peel?’
‘All right. So who was this mutual acquaintance?’
‘A man named Will Cantor.’
The man whose room Peel and Wutte had broken into last night. Maya knew that if you were going to lie, you should stick as closely as possible to the truth, and Jeanne Dalli seemed to know that too.
‘Will Cantor is, or was, in Berlin too,’ Maya said. ‘Did you know that?’
‘Not until Peel told me. I haven’t seen Will for months.’
‘Do you know where the two of them are now?’
‘I haven’t a clue. I left the lobby before they did. Why are you are in such a hurry to find them?’
Perhaps she needed to shake this woman out of her complacency. ‘They’re suspected of murder.’
Jeanne Dalli’s face betrayed a flicker of emotion. ‘Murder! Whose murder?’
Maya decided to try her luck. ‘Herbert Thompson’s.’
‘I thought it was an accident.’
‘That’s what the media are reporting,’ said Maya.
‘But if those two had anything to do with it,’ Jeanne Dalli said, ‘they surely wouldn’t be walking into a five-star hotel in the city centre in broad daylight?’
This woman had an answer to everything. Maya’s enquiries were getting her nowhere for now. She handed Jeanne Dalli her card. ‘Thank you for your time. Do please give me a call if you think of anything else, find out anything new or hear from those two men.’
‘I’m not doing that again,’ Jeanne hissed after waiting a couple of minutes with her ear pressed to the door. Jan and Fitz were standing in the bathroom doorway. Fitz had the stack of papers tucked under his arm.
‘Thanks,’ he said for the second time.
‘I should’ve handed you and the documents over and told her everything,’ she said.
‘And where would that have got you?’ Fitz replied. ‘Nowhere. We can only claim that the papers came from Ted Holden’s safe, we can’t prove it. We have even less evidence that Will’s notes were in there – and they’re the only link.’
‘Potential link,’ Jeanne corrected him. ‘I’ve had enough. I’ve got to go, but first I’ve got to return the documents to Ted’s safe or he’ll smell a rat.’
‘But—’
‘No buts.’ She removed Fitz’s own drawings from the sheaf of paper and put the rest back into the envelope. ‘I was supposed to be at the summit ages ago. Ted will be wondering where I’ve got to.’
‘He’ll be wondering a lot more than that when this study’s published.’
‘I’m leaving now,’ she said, extending her free hand towards Fitz. ‘The key card to my room, please.’ Fitz gave it to her. ‘Wait ten minutes before you leave just in case someone’s still out there.’
At long last! Jan couldn’t wait to get out of this room.
‘What will you do?’ Fitz asked as she turned to go.
Without turning round or breaking stride, she said with a shrug, ‘I’ve no idea.’
Maya and Jörn followed the manager past the reception desk and into the back office where two men were sitting in front of banks of monitors. Each man was keeping an eye on two rows of ten screens arranged in a slight arc.
‘Did you find anything?’ Kreuzer asked.
‘There they are,’ said the younger of the two, pointing to the screen directly in front of him. ‘In the lobby having coffee with Ms Dalli.’
He fast-forwarded the footage and the three people shifted around on their chairs, stood up, called a waiter, chatted and said goodbye. Wutte and Peel stayed where they were, paid, had another brief exchange with the waiter and got to their feet.
‘They go to the back of the lobby,’ the security guard explained, playing the relevant footage, ‘and disappear into the stairwell.’
‘Damn!’ said Maya. ‘Do you have cameras there too?’
‘No.’
‘What about in the hallway leading to Jeanne Dalli’s room?’
‘Only in the standard lifts. Beyond that, our guests have complete privacy.’
‘There’s far less surveillance in the VIP area,’ Kreuzer added. ‘Privacy for special guests begins in the express elevators.’
‘You have special elevators up to the suites?’ Jörn asked in disbelief.
‘We need to go back up to Jeanne Dalli’s room,’ said Maya, ‘and also check Ted Holden’s suite.’
‘Why?’ Kreuzer asked in alarm.
‘Because Dalli went there too, and Wutte and Peel may be in there right now.’
‘Our orders are to keep a low profile,’ Jörn reminded her.
‘Like you did at the squat yesterday? Come on, let’s go,’ she said to Kreuzer.
‘I can’t simply let you into our luxury suites!’ the manager protested.
‘Oh, but you have no problem with potential murderers being there?’ Maya retorted.
‘Do you want to see the other guy too?’ one of the security guards interrupted her.
What was he talking about?
‘What other guy?’ Maya asked.
60
Jeanne returned the envelope to exactly the same position in the safe as she’d found it. She still didn’t know quite what to make of what she’d read. How had Ted got hold of Thompson and Will’s manuscript? Thompson was a longstanding adviser to the billionaire; some would even describe them as friends. Why shouldn’t he have given the documents to Ted? It was the scribbled and crumpled sheet of paper, whose imprint Fitzroy and Jan claimed to have found in Will’s hotel room, that really puzzled her. Fitzroy’s question was a good one. How had Ted come by it, especially in conjunction with a manuscript and notes for a speech by two men who had died the previous evening? Murdered, if Fitzroy and Jan were to be believed.
However, the two of them had as little evidence for their story as they did for the rest of the affair. There might be some other explanation.
The handwritten note was the only new element. In the manuscript, Fitzroy had located the passage that might be the basis for the vivid parable of the farmers. There might be a link between the authors of the two texts. Maybe the scrawl really was from Will’s hand, but who knew how it had come into Fitz and Jan’s possession in the first place? Will was an old friend of Fitz’s. Maybe they hadn’t merely planned to meet but had actually done so. Maybe Fitzroy had paid a visit to Will in his room and caught sight of the paper by chance, realized how revolutionary it was and been desperate to find the original? Now he’d invented some story about killers and Ted’s involvement in murder in order to get his hands on the documents. She had no idea what to believe. All these thoughts were running through her mind as she hurried towards the express elevator. Still ruminating, she pressed the button next to the lift door, which slid open without a sound.
‘Hi, Jeanne,’ the man in the lift said softly.
Jeanne’s face turned red. ‘What are you doing here?’
He put his finger to his lips. Shush. Be quiet.
61
‘What do we do now?’ Jan asked.
Fitz studied his drawings. ‘We wait a few more minutes,’ he said, ‘like Jeanne told us to.’ He went back to reading. ‘This particular example also refutes the notorious statement by our equally notorious British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher,’ Fitz said. ‘“There is no such thing as society.”’
‘I want out of here,’ said Jan. ‘It doesn’t interest me right now.’
‘It should, though,’ Fitz replied absently, reaching for his pencil. ‘How wrong Thatcher was!’
This was unbelievable! This idiot could live in his mathematical world if he liked, but Jan needed to grapple with reality. He caught sight of a mobile on the sofa.
‘Jeanne forgot her phone,’ he said.
Fitz didn’t answer. He simply drew a bracket around Carl + Dana’s Cooperation Bonus and wrote one word. Society.
‘This is society, right here! The extra prosperity created by working together, which is only possible thanks to cooperation, thanks to society.’
‘Then maybe the two of us should start working together,’ Jan barked. ‘So what do we do now?’
‘We’ve been working together since yesterday evening,’ said Fitz, ‘and pretty well too, I’d say. Look what we’ve managed to uncover.’
‘You really do have a screw loose, you know. Are those formulas the only thing that you can think about? That policewoman was searching for us on suspicion of murder! And—’
‘Oh, give me a break. She was only trying to unsettle Jeanne. This here … this is big news!’ He took a photo of the diagrams and typed a message. ‘I’m sending all this to Nida and Kim. They’ll be interested.’
You mean, you’re interested in Nida, more like.
‘It gets even more paradoxical,’ Fitz exclaimed. ‘Modern economics assumes that human beings are pure profit maximizers – Homo economicus. That—’
‘Fitz!’
‘Fitzroy, if you please. That implies that humans will do anything to bolster their own advantage. Capitalism is driven by self-interest. By greed.’
‘I’m not driven by greed, just by my own self-interest not to end up in police custody!’ cried Jan.
‘So you’re greedy for freedom,’ said Fitz.
‘And what about those maniacs out there looking for us? I bet they’re not sitting around, twiddling their thumbs.’
‘No one suspects we’re here. We’re safe,’ said Fitz, staring at his drawing. ‘In Will’s example, Ann and Bill are driven by greed. They think only of themselves. But that’s not what people are really like – or at least not only. People are altruistic, selfless, compassionate. They help others …’
‘Just like our black-clad killer friends,’ Jan joked.
‘The farmers’ fable shows that greed should motivate people to pool and share their resources,’ Fitz declared. ‘“Greed is good.” Greed is right. Remember Wall Street, the cult eighties film?’
‘You old fogey,’ Jan said. ‘That was long before my time.’
‘This wasn’t quite what Gordon Gekko had in mind.’ Fitz burst out laughing, then folded up the documents and stuffed them into his pocket. ‘If you want to achieve something that lasts, then you can’t afford to cheat people and try to rob them of all they have. If you’re really greedy, you need to give people something. Solidarity, altruism and charity are not romantic ideals. In actual fact, unsentimental, rational mathematics proves that in the long run they’re the best bet for everyone.’
‘The best bet for us right now would be to get out of here.’
‘Put your hands behind your head and relax. Don’t move.’
Jan felt as if his blood had turned to molten lava. Standing halfway between them and the door was a large, athletic man in a dark suit and tie with sharply defined features, a grade-one buzz cut and a very discreet earpiece. He had a pistol in his right hand, and Jan was staring down the barrel. In the other hand, at the same height, he was holding a mobile phone.
He was a more civilized version of the men who’d been chasing them since yesterday evening, and out in the hallway were two more like him.
Oh shit, shit and double shit!!!
62
Fitz had dropped the phone and put his hands behind his head. Jan followed his example. The two other suits entered the room, also brandishing guns, and surrounded them.
‘Don’t even think about trying anything stupid,’ said their leader. ‘We’re now going to cuff you and turn you over to the police.’
The two men grabbed Jan’s wrists and twisted them expertly behind his back.
At least they’re not the hit squad!
‘Why?’ Fitz asked. ‘We haven’t done anything.’
‘Tell him about your cooperation theory,’ Jan taunted him. ‘Maybe it’ll persuade him to be nice to us.’ Under his breath he hissed, ‘Why didn’t you listen to me? We could’ve been long gone. Safe, my arse.’
He felt a hard, narrow band being ratcheted tighter until it cut into his skin.
‘Leave me alone!’ Jan shouted. ‘Hel—’ he tried to yell, but his cry subsided into a whimper as the man grabbed him between the legs and squeezed so hard that it sent a sickening jolt up through his groin and stomach and into his throat. He retched and almost threw up. The man squeezed hard for a second time, sending another wave of sheer agony surging through Jan’s body.
‘Don’t. Try. Anything. Stupid,’ the bastard repeated. Doubled up in pain, Jan nodded, although his head was nearly bursting.
The men pulled tight a second strip of plastic around Jan’s wrists. ‘Cable ties,’ the leader said. ‘Unbreakable.’
