Stochastic Man (25 page)

Mardikian was silent a very long time.

He said, finally, in a hoarse, cottony voice, “Lew, are you serious?”

“Extremely.”

“If I go and get Quinn, will you tell him exactly what you just told me? Exactly?”

“Yes.”

“Wait here,” he said.

I waited. I tried not to think about anything. Keeping mind a blank, let the stochasticity flow: had I blundered, had I overplayed my hand? I didn’t believe so. I believed the time had come for me to reveal something of what I was really up to. For the sake of plausibility I hadn’t bothered to mention Carvajal’s role in the process, but otherwise I had held nothing back, and I felt a great release from tension, I felt a warm flood of relief surging in me, now that I had come out at last from behind my cover.

After what may have been fifteen minutes Mardikian returned. The mayor was with him. They took a few steps into the office and halted side by side near the door, an oddly mismatched pair, Mardikian dark and absurdly tall, Quinn fairhaired, short, thick-bodied. They looked terribly solemn.

Mardikian said, “Tell the mayor what you told me, Lew.”

Blithely I repeated my confession of second sight, using, as far as was possible, the same phrases. Quinn listened expressionlessly. When I finished, he said, “How long have you been working for me, Lew?”

“Since the beginning of ‘96.”

“Four years, almost. And how long is it since you’ve had a direct pipeline into the future?”

“Not long. Only since last spring. You remember, when I urged you to get that oil-gellation bill through the City Council, just before those tankers broke up off Texas and California? It was about then. I wasn’t just guessing. And then, the other things, the ones that sometimes seemed so weird—”

“Like having a crystal ball,” Quinn said wonderingly.

“Yes. Yes. You remember, Paul, the day you told me you had decided to make a run for the White House in ‘04, what you said to me? You told me, You’re going to be the eyes that see into the future for me. You didn’t know how right you were!”

Quinn laughed. It wasn’t a cheerful laugh.

He said, “I thought if you just went off to rest for a couple of weeks, Lew, it would help you get yourself together. But now I see the problem runs much deeper than that.”

“What?”

“You’ve been a good friend and a valuable adviser for four years. I won’t underestimate the value of the help you’ve provided. Maybe you were getting your ideas from close intuitive analysis of trends, or maybe from computers, or maybe a genie was whispering things in your ear, but wherever you got it, you were giving me useful advice. But I can’t risk keeping you on the staff after what I’ve heard. If word gets around that Paul Quinn’s key decisions are made for him by a guru, by a seer, by some kind of clairvoyant Rasputin, that I’m really nothing but a puppet twitching in the dark, I’m done for, I’m dead. We’ll put you on full-time leave, effective today, with your salary continuing through to the end of the fiscal year, all right? That’ll give you better than seven months to rebuild your old private consulting business before you’re dropped from the municipal payroll. With your divorce and everything, you’re probably in a tight financial position, and I don’t want to make it any worse. And let’s make a deal, you and me: I won’t make any public statements about the reasons for your resignation, and you won’t make any open claims about the alleged origin of the advice you were giving me. Fair enough?”

“You’re firing me?” I muttered.

“I’m sorry, Lew.”

“I can make you President, Paul!”

“I’ll have to get there on my own, I guess.”

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” I said.

“That’s a harsh word.”

“But you do, right? You think you’ve been getting advice from a dangerous lunatic, and it doesn’t matter that the lunatic’s advice was always right, you have to get rid of him now, because it would look bad, yes, it would look very bad if people started thinking you had a witch doctor on your staff, and so—”

“Please, Lew,” Quinn said. “Don’t make this any harder for me.” He crossed the room and caught my limp, cold hand in his fierce grip. His face was close to mine. Here it came: the famed Quinn Treatment, once more, one last time. Urgently he said, “Believe me, I’m going to miss you around here. As a friend, as an adviser. I may be making a big mistake. And it’s painful to have to do this. But you’re right: I can’t take the risk, Lew. I can’t take the risk.”

35

I cleaned out my desk after lunch and went home, went to what passed for home for me, and wandered around the shabby half-empty rooms the rest of the afternoon, trying to comprehend what had happened to me. Fired? Yes, fired. I had taken off my mask, and they hadn’t liked what was underneath. I had stopped pretending to science and had admitted sorcery, I had told Mardikian the true truth, and now no more would I go to City Hall and sit among the mighty, and no longer would I shape and guide the destinies of the charismatic Paul Quinn, and when he took the oath of office in Washington come January five years hence I would watch the scene on television from afar, the forgotten man, the shunned man, the leper of the administration. I felt too forlorn even to cry. Wifeless, jobless, purposeless, I roamed my dreary flat for hours, and, wearying of that, stood idly by a window for an hour or more, watching the sky turn leaden, watching the unexpected flakes of the season’s first snowfall begin to descend, watching cold night spread over Manhattan.

Then anger displaced despair and, furious, I phoned Carvajal.

“Quinn knows,” I said. “About the Sudakis resignation. I gave the memo to Mardikian and he conferred with the mayor.”

“Yes?”

“And they fired me. They think I’m crazy. Mardikian checked with Sudakis, who said he didn’t have any intention of quitting, and Mardikian said he and the mayor were worried about my wild crystal-ball predictions, they wanted me to go back to straight projective stuff, so I told them about
seeing.
I didn’t mention you. I said I was able to do it, and that was where I was getting stuff like the Thibodaux trip and the Sudakis resignation, and Mardikian made me repeat everything to Quinn, and Quinn said it was too dangerous for him to keep a lunatic like me on his staff. He put it more gently than that, though. I’m on leave until June thirtieth, and then I get cut from the city payroll.”

“I see,” said Carvajal. He didn’t sound upset and he didn’t sound sympathetic.

“You knew this would happen.”

“Did I?”

“You must have. Don’t play games with me, Carvajal. Did you know I’d get thrown out if I told the mayor that Sudakis was going to quit in January?”

Carvajal said nothing.

“Did you know or didn’t you?”

I was shouting.

“I knew,” he said.

“You knew. Of course you knew. You know everything. But you didn’t tell me.”

“You didn’t ask,” he replied innocently.

“It didn’t occur to me to ask. God knows why, but it didn’t. Couldn’t you have warned me? Couldn’t you have said, Keep a tight lip, you’re in worse trouble than you suspect, you’re going to get tossed out on your ass if you aren’t careful?”

“How can you ask such a question this late in the game, Lew?”

“You were willing to sit back calmly and let my career be destroyed?”

“Think carefully,” Carvajal said. “I knew you’d be dismissed, yes. Just as I know Sudakis will resign. But what could I do about it? To me your dismissal has already happened, remember. It isn’t subject to prevention.”

“Oh, Jesus! Conservation of reality again?”

“Of course. Really, Lew, do you think I’d warn you against anything that might seem to be in your power to change? How futile that would be! How foolish! We don’t change things, do we?”

“No, we don’t,” I said bitterly. “We stand off to one side and politely let them happen. If necessary we
help
them happen. Even if it involves the destruction of a career, even if it involves the ruination of an attempt to stabilize the political fortunes of this miserable misgoverned country by guiding into the presidency a man who— Oh, Jesus, Carvajal, you led me right into this, didn’t you? You set me up for the whole thing. And you don’t give a damn. Isn’t that so? You simply don’t give a damn!”

“There are worse things than losing a job, Lew.”

“But everything I was building, everything I was trying to shape— How in God’s name am I going to help Quinn now? What am I going to do? You’ve broken me!”

“What has happened is what had to happen,” he said.

“Damn you and your pious acceptance!”

“I thought you had come to share that acceptance.”

“I don’t share anything,” I told him. “I was out of my mind ever to get involved with you, Carvajal. Because of you I’ve lost Sundara, I’ve lost my place at Quinn’s side, I’ve lost my health and my reason, I’ve lost everything that mattered to me, and for what?
For what?
For one stinking squint into the future that may have been nothing but a quick fatigue high? For a head full of morbid fatalistic philosophy and half-baked theories about the flow of time? Christ! I wish I’d never heard of you! You know what you are, Carvajal? You’re a kind of vampire, some sort of bloodsucker, pulling energy and vitality out of me, using me to support your strength as you drift along toward the end of your own useless, sterile, motiveless, pointless life.”

Carvajal didn’t seem at all moved. “I’m sorry to bear you so disturbed, Lew,’’ he said mildly.

“What else are you concealing from me? Come on, give me all the bad news. Do I slip on the ice at Christmas and break my back? Do I use up my savings and get shot holding up a bank? Am I going to become a sniffer addict next? Come on, tell me what’s heading toward me now!”

“Please, Lew.”

“Tell me!”

“You ought to try to calm down.”

“Tell me!”

“I’m holding nothing back. You won’t have an eventful winter. It’s going to be a time of transition for you, of meditation and inner change, without any dramatic external events. And then—and then—I can’t tell you any more, Lew. You know I can’t
see
beyond this coming spring.”

Those last few words hit me like a knee in the belly. Of course. Of course! Carvajal was going to die. A man who would do nothing to prevent his own death wasn’t going to interfere while someone else, even his only friend, marched serenely on toward catastrophe. He might even nudge that friend down the slippery slope if he felt a nudge was appropriate. It was naive of me to have thought Carvajal would ever have done anything to protect me from harm once he had
seen
the harm coming. The man was bad news. And the man had set me up for disaster.

I said, “Any deal that may have existed between us is off. I’m afraid of you. I don’t want anything more to do with you, Carvajal. You won’t hear from me again.”

He was silent. Perhaps he was laughing quietly. Almost certainly he was laughing quietly.

His silence sapped the melodramatic force from my little parting speech.

“Goodbye,” I said, feeling silly, and hung up with a crash.

36

Now winter closed upon the city. Some years no snow comes until January or even February; but we had a white Thanksgiving, and in the early weeks of December there was blizzard after blizzard, until it seemed that all life in New York would be crushed in the grip of a new ice age. The city has sophisticated snow-removal equipment, heating cables buried in the streets, sanitation trucks with melt-tanks, an armada of scoops and catchments and scrapers and skimmers, but no gadgetry could cope with a season that dropped ten centimeters of snow on Wednesday, a dozen more on Friday, fifteen on Monday, half a meter on Saturday. Occasionally we had a thaw between storms, allowing the top of the accumulated pack to soften and slush to drip into the gutters, but then came the cold again, the killing cold, and what had melted turned quickly to knife-edged ice. All activities halted in the frozen city. A weird silence prevailed. I stayed indoors; so did anyone else who had no powerful reason for going out. The year 1999, the whole twentieth century, seemed to be taking leave in frigid stealth.

In this bleak time I had virtually no contact with anyone except Bob Lombroso. The financier phoned five or six days after my dismissal to express his regrets. “But why,” he wanted to know, “did you ever decide to tell Mardikian the real story?”

“I felt I had no choice. He and Quinn had stopped taking me seriously.”

“And they’d take you more seriously if you claimed to be able to see the future?”

“I gambled. I lost.”

“For a man who’s always had such a superb sixth sense of intuition, Lew, you handled that situation in a strikingly dumb way.”

“I know. I know. I suppose I thought Mardikian had a more resilient imagination. Maybe I overestimated Quinn, too.”

“Haig didn’t get where he is today by having a resilient imagination,” Lombroso said. “As for the mayor, he’s playing for big stakes and he doesn’t feel like taking any unnecessary risks.”