The Mark and the Void Read Online Free

per cent of your information.
    Walter Corless is very much aware what side of the rule he’s on. He knows he is the wealthiest and most powerful man you have ever met, and as such he demands 100 per cent of your time and attention. A meeting with or even a call from Walter is like some supermassive planet materializing in your little patch of space – blocking the sun, overwhelming your gravitational field, so that you can only watch as the entire structure of your world goes hurtling off to rearrange itself on his. He started off selling turf from the back of a flatbed truck; thirty years later, he is chairman and CEO of one of the biggest construction companies in the British Isles. Even the worldwide slump hasn’t hurt him: while his peers put all their chips into housing, Dublex diversified into transport, logistics and, most profitably, high-security developments – military compounds, fortifications, prisons – which, as unrest sweeps across Europe and Asia, constitute a rare growth area. That a company he named after his daughter now builds enhanced interrogation facilities in Belarus gives a good indication of the man’s attitudes to business and life in general.
(That daughter, Lexi, now runs a string of nursing homes known informally as the Glue Factory.)
    His driver calls me shortly after six; I go outside to find Walter’s limo parked – in contravention of all of the Centre’s rules – on the plaza in front of Transaction House. Walter is sprawled across the back seat. He stares at me as I squeeze into the fold-down seat opposite him, breathing heavily through his nose. He is a dour, grey-faced man, who looks like he was dug up from the same bog he got his first bags of turf. Newspaper profiles refer to his ‘drive’ and his ‘focus’, but these are euphemisms. What Walter has is the dead-eyed relentlessness of the killer in a horror movie, the kind that lumber after you inexorably, heedless of knives, bullets, flame-throwers. Though his fortune runs into the billions, and he employs a team of accountants in tax havens around the world, he still enjoys calling on his debtors personally, and the pockets of his coat are always full of cheques, bank drafts, rolls of notes in rubber bands. Sometimes he’ll present me with a fistful, with instructions to invest them in this or that. This is not strictly my job, but then Walter doesn’t care what my job is; or rather, as our biggest client, he knows that my job is whatever he says it is.
    Tonight he wants to ask my thoughts on a tender. Dublex has been approached by the interior ministry of the Middle Eastern autocracy of Oran to fortify the private compound of the Caliph.
    ‘They are expecting trouble?’ I ask.
    Walter just grunts. He knows, of course; he has specialists in every conceivable field, but he still likes to canvass opinions from as wide a spectrum as possible before making a decision, in order, Ish says, to maximize the number of people he can yell at if something goes wrong. ‘Is there money in this fucker’s pocket, is what I’m asking you,’ he says.
    ‘It’s one of the biggest oil producers in the region. I imagine his credit is good,’ I say.
    Walter scowls. I tell him I’ll look into it, and he signals his approval by changing the subject, launching into a familiar tirade about ‘regulations’.
    When we are done, I return to my apartment, where I can finally start investigating the mysterious writer in earnest. Searching online, I discover that the novel he mentioned,
For Love of a Clown
, is real; an image search confirms, in a picture that shows him shaking hands with a giant papaya at something called the Donard Exotic Fruits and Book Festival, that its author and the man who approached me are one and the same. His Apeiron page has two customer write-ups, both negative: the first compares his clown-themed novel unfavourably to Bimal Banerjee’s
The Clowns of Sorrow
, and gives it a rating of two snakes and a cactus;