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TRIAGO: There! That! Didst thou see ’t?
The card-sharp’s fumbling misdirect?
That tell-tale grin or worldly wink that
Cracks heav’n apart and for a twinkling
Throws rude light upon perfidious conjury!
Spy the dark-clad stage boy! How he flies
Yet bolts a trice too late to beat the curtain’s rise.

Enter HERCULIO, eating an apple.

HERCULIO: How now, sweet Triago. What sorrow?
TRIAGO: A browful, sir. In foreign paper, densely ink’d.
HERCULIO: Pray tell. (Aside) I would pray there were a choice
Had I any hope of answer.
TRIAGO: ’Tis the tell, Herculio. ’Tis a slip. I see the wires.
O, Trickery! O, Falsity! Mark the fingers
Cross’d behind thy back!
Has this been but a prank, Herculio?
My wretched decadal privation, just some jape?
HERCULIO: All well meant, good Triago. Be not sour.
These are not grapes.
TRIAGO: Indeed not sir: rather, scrapes.
And scars and knocks — the job lot doggedly sustained.
HERCULIO: Some more than others. The odd one feigned.
But come, Sir Tig: what holds you there?
TRIAGO (waving paper): A tract from a brother clerk in America.
HERCULIO: Cripes abroad. Grim tidings?
TRIAGO: Forsooth: it wears the colours of a fight.
A wordscape stain’d with tightly kernèd face
And girded round with fontish weaponry.
HERCULIO (snatching the document): Verily, convenantry this dark speaks
Of litiginous untrust: wherefore such cruel indemnities?
Wherefore such a want of fun?
A merchant wrapp’d with better sense
Wouldst just as soon injunct th’orbiting sun!
What is this pact, Triago? Who demands such fearsome consequence?
TRIAGO: An entente of secrecy, no more.
HERCULIO: Forsooth, my deceitful ears mislead.
Say it again, my friend, what didst thou say?
TRIAGO: A trifling confi, My Lord, no more. An N.D.A.

—Büchstein, Die Schweizer Heulsuse

Once in a long while over the sort of long, inglorious career most people have in the finance industry, you see a giveaway. A tell: a knowing look, a sly wink, fingers crossed behind the back, a stray wire, a black-clad stage-hand scampering away a moment too late to beat the rising curtain — just enough to wonder: is this whole thing, secretly, a gigantic have? Are we stooges? Have we all been fitted up, Truman Burbank-style, in some epochal, multi-decade-long Game For A Laugh? Is the creator playing with us for his sport, like flies to wanton boys?

I had one of those moments today. It arrived in the shape of an eight-page, tightly-kerned, ten-point Times New Roman slab-style Americanised tract: The kind of writing that suffocates you: it admits of no breathing — there is no punctuation nor artful use of white space to break the wordscape up girded-about with the weaponry of litigious mistrust — Indemnities, the mutual contemplation of equitable injunctions, covenants to destroy utterly and salt the barren earth

The JC’s ever-so-occasional newsletter

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See also

• Game For A Laugh