Born Yesterday by Gordon Burn

donation that summer towards the new extension at Tate Modern, of which he was a Trustee.
    He heard about him from the neighbours: about the black Range Rover with the smoked windows brought up to within inches of the garage door at seven every morning; the papers fanned out just so across the back seat; the rapid acceleration. (This from a woman who lived in the flats directly opposite who struck up a conversation with him at the newsagent’s one morning. ‘You have a little dog, don’t you?’ she said pleasantly. ‘You’re a writer. I see you. I’m straight opposite. You’re from the same part of the world as me.’) The new owner was a kind of phantom created by hearsay and rumour – a virtual owner. In this way he was entirely a creature of his time, a time that had stopped caring what companies produced; they existed now only for buying and selling. Hedge funds. Fungible assets. Private equity. The derivatives market. Mr Studzinski was said to be a master of modern financial engineering; a genius at the new prime minister Gordon Brown’s pet subject, fiscal arithmetic.
    These were the reasons the directors of Northern Rock retained Studzinki’s services as an adviser when there was a run on the bank in the middle of September, with savers camping overnight outside branches all across the country to withdraw their money. It was the first run on a Britishbank in more than a century, a scandal of mismanagement that was the result (it seemed, although it was initially difficult to work out how) of something called ‘subprime mortgages’ in America. Divorced from the jargon, this turned out to be the practice of lending money to low-income homeowners, many of them black, who could never afford to pay it back.
    The Bank of England had to pump £26 billion of taxpayers’ money into Northern Rock to keep it afloat. Studzinski, by then head of investment banking at Blackstone, the private equity group, was among those who had to weigh up the claims of the various groups and conglomerates bidding to buy the bank. Whatever the eventual outcome, Studzinski himself couldn’t lose. The advisers to the consortium led by Sir Richard Branson were known to be getting a minimum £5 million even if the deal fell through. Studzinski’s guarantee was understood to be at the very least double that.
    After his obsession with secrecy and his wealth, the other best-known thing about Studzinski was the depth of his religious faith. He devoted time to prayer and meditation in the morning and again at night. He was a devout Catholic who had had a private chapel built in his house. Pride of place in the chapel was given to two candlesticks which had once belonged to the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola. He was made a Knight of the Order of St Gregory for a record of good works, including thirty years working with the homeless, and the Catholic church in Britain was said to be so beholden to him that CardinalCormac Murphy-O’Connor, the Church’s leader in England and Wales, would change his diary to fit in with John Studzinski’s.
    At the beginning of the summer, the house abutting Mr Studzinski’s was sold and a team of builders moved in. The builders were mainly Polish and at lunchtimes and cigarette breaks they would gather as a group at the front of the house. He grew used to seeing them, lounging round chatting and smoking, gathered around a radio playing Polish music. It was something new in the street, new music, the smells of different foods and cigarettes, but a scene familiar in every part of London, where house prices in some areas – this area was one of them – had been increasing by as much as 30 per cent a year.
    When the work on the house was nearing completion – the appearance of two women among the workforce suggested they had reached the stage of making good and skimming, and the house was close to being liveable in again – he bumped into a neighbour from his block who told him that earlier that