RECEIPT 2009 by Edward St.Boniface (distant reading .txt) 📖

RECEIPT 2009
A short story by Ed Griffiths (pseudonym Edward St.Boniface)

On the 66th floor of the Nimrod Building on Wall Street there is a famous suite of offices which lie immediately above the boardroom of one of the most prominent investment and banking conglomerates in the world. Less well known is the small private elevator starting in an obscure sub basement of the tower not accessible to the public which goes directly to floor 66 without a single intervening stop and without doubt is the most heavily trafficked elevator in New York City.

Martin Lucre stood at the great curved two-storey window that gave him a panoramic view of the city landscape and doubled as a massive anamorphic plasma screen on which the most memorable presentations in the financial world were shown to the favoured few.
He had the gilded look of success only movie stars and the most blue blooded of rich heirs-apparent can achieve, or in the past a great pope or king might sometimes have captured in a good portrait. It glowed from him like the rich tones of platinum or coltan or neutron-spitting uranium.

He mused on how the analogy of a pope or king was so apt. Martin Lucre was the scion of three generations of incorporated investment bankers and was part of the most privileged inner circle of the global power matrix. Nimrod Securities International banked for kings and technology barons and warlords and presidents, kept the secrets even the soberest bankers of Switzerland could not be trusted with. In his hands Martin Lucre held the kind of power that could not be seen or identified or named, but was felt by every human on the planet.

Night was falling and the city coruscated before him, one of the primary engines of the stalled world economy. It looked no different but even in his exclusive aerie there was a malaise in the air. 2009, only a month old had been bad and was set to grow far worse, but so far not a breath of scandal or loss had attached itself to Nimrod International.

Nor would it. The institution and he both had protection. Not the protection of expensive lawyers or mere wealth or even prudence, although those were factors that had been carefully contrived here for over a hundred years. It lay in another, older direction which few paid heed to in finance these days.

There had been no pilgrims today and Martin felt the slight stirring of anxiety that told him his own daily appointment was not to be put off. Turning from the spectacular sectors of winking polychrome lights and smouldering rivers of traffic and checkered temple-like buildings he loved to watch in their stately evolutions he touched a concealed wall panel and entered a private corridor which plunged him into absolute dark.

Only the switch for the secret elevator showed a tiny guiding light and Martin confidently walked the short distance to a small chamber which opened at the end. As he drew near, the strange mustiness which always emanated from it seemed to have become stronger. He would have to clean it himself, an act of dirty manual labour no one who knew him outside this place would dream he ever stooped to.

Martin crouched low as he came into the cramped hemisphere, taking off his Savile Row London jacket and carelessly dropping it on the mouldy floor. Those new initiates coming to the chamber for the first time were always surprised at that. The always-immaculate Nimrod Building was clinical in its spotless perfection with the single exception of this secret space, from a majestic Art Deco fascia over the entrance to the leaping classical Muses that reached for the sky on the soaring radio mast square on top.

It could not be otherwise, though. Martin Lucre had entered this room every day of his life since he was nine years old and officially inducted into Nimrod Securities International. It had always been like this and the mood of the chamber, his reaction to it, never diminished.

He felt dread. Not the simple fears of a lifetime that all human beings acquire and share and are conquerable but the kind of emotion that the primitive cave dweller once felt before the monstrous fury of the elements. The frightful exaltation a deeply religious man knows only in the presence of an undisputed miracle perhaps once in a lifetime.

Just ahead of Martin Lucre, uncomfortably close in the small smelly curved room stood a small piece of history on a dais. An original Edison gold stock ticker-tape machine in perfect working order, still synchronized to the New York Stock Exchange index and capable of rolling out the major price shifts as they happened.

With silent reverence Martin sank to his knees and held the filmy tape in his hands, head bowed but not looking at the cryptic record in single or short grouped letters and numerals of the day’s trading which of course he already knew. His very heart resonated to the pulse of the markets and he physiologically felt the discordant ringing of the bell at the close of each day’s business.

Of course it was just a machine, for all its elegant design and richness of materials. It only reflected what happened in his world and did not control it. That was the territory of the small clay object set into an undistinguished alcove in the wall and with a tiny ancient brazier set before it which Martin reached over slowly and cautiously to light, mumbling a harsh phrase in a long dead language as he fumbled with the traditional flint and pestle.

Long ago Martin Lucre’s great grandfather, an ambitious young man adventuring in Persia, had stumbled across an old man in the desert selling off clearly pilfered antiquities. He bought the tiny idol and returned with it to New York, knowing there was something special and authentic about it. He showed it to archaeologists who could tell him nothing. Not long after he founded the bank that became Nimrod International.

When one day, years later a venerable rabbi came to his office to discuss a charitable donation he did learn precisely what the identity of the clay object was, exactly what its provenance implied and very specifically the rites of exorcism and purification that were needed to free himself from its growing baleful influence. Charles Martin Lucre threw the old man out and did not give him a single penny for his synagogue.

Now Martin Lucre the fourth chairman of direct succession from his ancestor regarded his inheritance and quietly spoke his prayer. Where others had fallen to the world’s financial convulsions he had been true and was safe. Alone among the wreckage of greed and ambition and colossal hubris that had laid New York’s and London’s and Tokyo’s and Frankfurt’s and Shanghai’s banks low, Nimrod stood proud and tall still. Their bills had been collected. His account, Nimrod’s account, was still solvent.

Suddenly the ticker tape machine started up, although trading had long since finished. A small piece of tape spooled out and dropped into Martin Lucre’s hand. For a moment it seemed the brazier burned a little brighter and lurid shadows danced in the curves of the graven image as it spoke to him for the first time. He looked down, suddenly trembling with mortal apprehension.

It was a receipt.

“Your bill has now come due, Martin”, said Great Mammon.

Publication Date: 03-19-2010

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