Capital

pre-booked tickets for the London Eye. And here they were.
    One of the Japanese girls had come over to Matya and by sign language and mime offered to take a photograph of Matya and Zbigniew on Matya’s mobile phone. So they huddled together and the smiling Japanese girl held her hand above her head to indicate, here it comes, and then took the picture. Then Zbigniew (clever Zbigniew) had the idea of asking her to do the same thing with his phone, so that he and Matya would have near-identical Zbigniew-and-Matya-on-the-London-Eye photos on their phones. Then he took her home, in time for the tea date with a girlfriend that she’d warned him about – a clever way of setting a limit to their date; he wasn’t the only one who’d given some thought to stratagems and how to play it – and he took her back to the Tube, giving her, as they parted, a single kiss on the cheek. Well, Zbigniew thought, how perfect was that? And then it was time to think about something else, but to Zbigniew’s great surprise, he found that he couldn’t.

84
     
     
    On the morning of Monday 15 September, Roger got the sack. He had no preparation, no build-up, and he did not, not even in the faintest way, see it coming. It had been an ordinary morning, with the only noteworthy thing being the fact that a busker was kicked out of the Underground by two policemen, who had clearly moved beyond the stage of negotiating reasonably by the time Roger arrived, because they had picked the musician up and were carrying him bodily out of the station, their hands under his armpits, his feet wildly pedalling. A third policeman, following behind, carried the man’s violin case. It looked like a piece of slapstick out of a silent film, and Roger was still smiling to himself about it at eleven thirty, when he had a message to say that Lothar would like to see him in his office immediately.
    Roger sauntered through the trading room, slaloming around the desks, his crew hard at work, the noise levels satisfactorily high – because a loud trading room is a busy trading room. Mark was nowhere to be seen, as indeed he hadn’t been all morning: that was a good thing also. Roger had long since tired of his efficient but shifty and hard-to-read deputy, with his air of aggrievement or underappreciation, or whatever it was; Roger had never been interested enough to find out.
    One of the tricks to managing Lothar – managing upwards, that crucial skill for the modern corporate employee – was to always do what he asked immediately. Even if, especially if, the task had no particular urgency, Lothar liked the idea that his will was always turned into action as soon as he expressed it. So Roger felt that this meeting, or chore, or whatever it was, had already got off to a good start when he arrived in Lothar’s office a mere ninety seconds after his phone had rung. Lothar was sitting at the meeting table rather than behind his desk, and he did not look well: he was pale, indeed he was about the same colour as his white shirt. It was as if he’d decided to give up all that skiing-sailing-orienteering-triathlon nonsense and had taken up sitting in libraries, and, over the weekend, he had acquired the complexion to go with it. Next to Lothar was Eva, the head of human resources, an unsmiling Argentinian whose complete devotion to corporate correctness in all forms made Roger nervous. This will be some bullshit thing about a complaint, or a hiring and firing issue. It couldn’t be about Roger discriminating against female colleagues; he hardly had any. Somebody had gone behind his back about something. Such was life.
    ‘Ah, Roger,’ said Lothar. ‘We seem to have a little problem. When I say “we” I mean Pinker Lloyd. What do you know about the fact that your deputy has been practising criminal embezzlement under your nose?’
    Lothar’s voice was cracking slightly and he was, Roger could see, shaking. He realised that his boss was not pale because he had given up outdoor sports; he was pale because he was angry. He was as angry as Roger had ever seen him; he was as angry as Roger had ever seen anyone. Roger had the strong feeling that something had gone very, very wrong.
    ‘What are you talking about?’ said Roger.
    And they told him. He found it hard to take in, but the gist was that someone in Compliance had found something he wasn’t expecting in the records of his own computer use. This was Mark’s mistake: he hadn’t allowed for the Compliance