A History of Money: A Novel by Alan Pauls, Ellie Robins Page B

the newspapers feature ecstatically on their front pages, seems to have less to do with the conditions of their captivity, no matterhow harsh they are, than with the monetary demand that’s imposed on them. The difference between a showy executive soon after his abduction, while he’s still in full possession of his faculties, and the same executive when he’s released days, weeks, or months later, is monetary. It’s the money he’s missing, that’s been stolen from him; it’s the cash flow—because these armed organizations are in his father’s camp: they only believe in cash—that’s been drained, taking with it all his proteins, nutrients, plasma, red blood cells: all of the basic elements whose evident depletion the police doctors note with alarm when they examine the abductees immediately after their release. He even pictures the whole process in a kind of neat mental cartoon, drawn in that already slightly outdated style—king-size Havana cigars lit with hundred-dollar bills, bulging bellies filled with glassfuls of shrimp cocktail, wristwatches shining like gold ingots—that the radical press often uses to satirize capitalists and their lackeys: the abductee, with his Montecristo still between his fingers, growing thin and fading away in a rickety old bed while a tube that’s full to bursting extracts money and blood at once from the same vein.
    Once again—as with the life insurance policy his mother makes him sign a week before she sets off for a month and a half in Europe with her second husband—the question is why four million and not two, seven, or a hundred and twenty-five thousand? Once they’ve seized their target, to use the military jargon that’s all the rage at the time, how do the highest-ranking guerrillas work out how much to demand? What criteria do they use, what estimates are they guided by, how do they rationalize this accounting anomaly? If all of these men are rich, why do they ask for seven hundred thousand for some of them and two and a half million for others? Do they ask for the amount they think the enemy can pay, or the amount they need in order to resupply themselves withweapons, communications equipment, vehicles, and hiding places, or to distribute food and clothing in slums and rural wastelands, or to plan future actions? The only thing that’s more difficult to price than a human life is art. Whenever he stumbles across one of these exorbitant figures while reading the newspaper, his first feeling is a rush of joy, a euphoric frenzy. When he thinks about poverty, and the misery that has no name, and the terrible hardships that the abductees and the companies they represent force, directly and indirectly, on ever-greater swathes of society, any sum seems too small, any amount ridiculous. There isn’t enough money in the world to repay all that! His second impulse is a little different: a slight hesitation, tinged with a certain discomfort. He reads the figure again and thinks: if at least there were some logic to it. If at least it followed the example of Godard-of-no-man’s-land, as he christens him on the afternoon he spends buried in a creaky seat at the film archive, stretching his neck as far as he can in an attempt to see over the afros of the couple in front of him; the afternoon he sees the executions in the indoor swimming pool in
Alphaville
for the first time, with the unhappy victims falling into the water in their suits and ties and the party of pinups in bikinis plunging in after them to drag them to the side of the pool; the afternoon he decides, with the solitary solemnity typical of decisions made at fifteen years old, that he will no longer tell the lie everyone tells, calling him the French Godard, the Swiss Godard, even the Swiss-French Godard, because to his mind the border between France and Switzerland is the origin of all that he admires in him, which is to say everything, from his bottle-cap glasses to the cuffs of the narrow-legged pants that