10:30

Cyprus · 15 January 2015 · Told by Yan Ardatovskiy

It was a Thursday in January, and I was in Cyprus, which in January is a place that has not quite decided whether it is winter. The sea outside was grey and polite. I remember the coffee, because it was excellent. Andreas, who looked after the building and several other things nobody had asked him to look after, made it every morning in a briki on a little gas ring in the kitchen: finely ground, a little sugar, brought up to the edge of boiling and taken off at exactly the right second, which he claimed could only be judged by ear. He put a cup on my desk at a quarter past eleven, as he did every day, and said, “Metrio,” as he did every day, as if I might have forgotten how I took it.

I was doing something so ordinary that I can still remember it only because of what came after. A lease renewal, I think, and a list of laptops somebody wanted approved. Three years earlier a handful of us had come to the island to build something properly: licences, systems, people, procedures, every piece stood up carefully and checked twice. The dealing desk sat two floors below me. I rarely went down in the mornings. When a desk like that is working, it hums, and from two floors away a hum is indistinguishable from silence.

The first thing I heard was a phone. Then another. Then so many that they stopped being phones and became weather. Underneath them came a sound I had never heard in that building: the alarms on the dealers’ screens, the ones built to go off when something is badly wrong, which in three years had gone off perhaps twice, and then only for a second. Now they did not stop. They came up through the concrete and the stairwell and the air conditioning, thin and electronic and continuous, like a smoke alarm in a neighbour’s flat. My first thought, and I am not proud of it, was that someone had burnt the toast.

I did not know yet what had happened. Nobody on my floor did. It had happened in Zurich, at 10:30 their time, which was 11:30 where I sat, while I was deciding whether a lease clause was worth an argument. The Swiss central bank had published a short statement. For three years it had held the franc in place against the euro, and had promised, in the calm voice of people who own a great deal of gold, to go on holding it. That morning, in one sentence, it let go. I read the sentence properly only in the evening. By then I could have recited everything that followed from it.

I put the cup down, still half full, and took the stairs. It is strange what you notice. The stairwell smelled of floor polish. On the first landing I passed Eleni from compliance coming up, very fast, holding a folder against her chest the way people hold things when they want both hands occupied. She did not say anything. She looked at me the way you look at someone who has not yet heard, with a kind of courtesy, and kept going. On the next landing the noise was loud enough that I could separate it: phones, alarms, and under both of them, voices that were not raised at all.

That was what I understood first, before any of the facts. Nobody on the desk was shouting. Marco, who ran it and who shouted about football, lunch and the air conditioning as a matter of routine, was sitting very still with a receiver in each hand, speaking in the voice of a man reading out a telephone number. The young ones were white. The older ones were grey. Someone finally found the switch for the alarms and the silence that followed was worse. I stood in the doorway and did not go in, because there was nothing I could do in that room except be in the way, and I had the sense to know it.

The rest I pieced together over the afternoon, the way you piece together a car accident from the people who were standing on the corner. The currency had moved further in a few minutes than it usually moved in years, and when that happens clients can lose more than they have, and in our kind of business what they cannot pay becomes yours. That is the only technical sentence in this story, and it was the only one that mattered. The phones did not stop. Felix, who had joined in the autumn and still ironed his own shirts, took a call, listened, and put his hand over the receiver. “He says it’s a mistake,” Felix said. “He says it can’t be real.” Marco, without looking up, said, “Tell him I agree.”

Around four, news began to arrive from other firms in other cities, and none of it was good. Somebody read the headlines aloud in a flat voice, like football results from a league he did not follow. Somebody else wrote a number on a whiteboard, looked at it, and rubbed it out with the side of his fist, as if that helped. Outside, the light went gold and then orange over the sea, and on the promenade people were walking dogs and eating ice cream in coats, entirely unaware that anything had happened, which was, I think, the correct response. My coffee was still upstairs on my desk, cold, with the grounds settled at the bottom. I had forgotten it existed.

Nobody went home. At about eight somebody ordered food and nobody ate it. At about ten one of the partners said the word “close”. Not a position: the company. He said it gently, the way a doctor would, and nobody argued with him, which is how I knew it was real. The partners went into the glass room at the end of the floor and shut the door. The rest of us sat at our desks and pretended to work, and watched them through the glass like relatives in a hospital corridor. I could see hands moving over papers, and one man standing at the window with his back to the others, looking at a sea he could not see in the dark.

I thought about the three years. About how carefully we had stood everything up, one piece at a time, each one straight, each one checked, each one leaning a little on the next: the people on the systems, the systems on the licences, the licences on the capital, the capital on the clients, the clients on a promise made in Zurich. It had looked like order. It had looked, frankly, like something to be proud of. At a quarter to midnight the door of the glass room opened, and all of us looked up at once to see whether the last piece was still standing.

What fell, one after another, after a single sentence from Zurich?

Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the people in these stories. So have some of the stories. Not all of them, and not everything that sounds invented is. Please do not treat it as a fair coin.