Stochastic Man (3 page)

BRONX ASSEMBLYMAN QUINN

ATTACKS SLUM-CLEARANCE DELAYS

MAYOR QUINN CALLS FOR

CITY CHARTER REFORM

SENATOR QUINN SAYS

HE’LL SEEK WHITE HOUSE

QUINN LEADS NEW DEMOCRATS

TO NATIONWIDE LANDSLIDE

PRESIDENT QUINN’S FIRST TERM:

AN APPRAISAL

He went on talking, all the while smiling, maintaining eye contact, holding me impaled. He quizzed me about my profession, he pumped me for my political beliefs, he iterated his own. “They say you’ve got the best reliability index of any projector in the Northeast…. I’ll bet not even you anticipated the Gottfried assassination, though…. You don’t have to be much of a prophet to feel sorry for poor dopey DiLaurenzio, trying to run City Hall at a time like this…. This city can’t be governed, it has to be juggled…. Are you as repelled by that phony Neighborhood Authority Act as I am?... What do you think of Con Ed’s Twenty-third Street fusion project?... You ought to see the flow charts they found in Gottfried’s office safe….” Deftly he plumbed for common grounds in political philosophy, though he had to be aware I shared most of his beliefs, for if he knew so much about me he would know I was a registered New Democrat, that I had done the projections for the Twenty-first Century Manifesto and its companion, the book
Toward a True Humanity
, that I felt as he did about priorities and reforms and the whole inane Puritan idea of trying to legislate morality. The longer we spoke the more strongly I was drawn to him.

I began making quiet unsettling comparisons between Quinn and some great politicians of the past—FDR, Rockefeller, Johnson, the original Kennedy. They had all had that warm beautiful doublethink knack of being able to play out the rituals of political conquest and simultaneously to indicate to their more intelligent victims that nobody’s being fooled, we all know it’s just a ritual, but don’t you think I’m good at it? Even then, even that first night in 1995, when he was just a kid assemblyman unknown outside his own borough, I saw him heading into political history alongside Roosevelt and JFK. Later I began making more grandiose comparisons, between Quinn and the likes of Napoleon, Alexander the Great, even Jesus, and if such talk makes you snicker, please remember that I am a master of the stochastic arts and my vision is clearer than yours.

Quinn said nothing to me then about running for higher office. As we returned to the party he simply remarked, “It’s too early for me to be setting up a staff. But when I do, I’ll want you. Haig will be in touch.”

“What did you think of him?” Mardikian asked me five minutes later.

“He’ll be mayor of New York City in 1998.”

“And then?”

“You want to know more, man, you get in touch with my office and make an appointment. Fifty an hour and I’ll give you the whole crystal-balling.”

He jabbed my arm lightly and strode away laughing.

Ten minutes after that I was sharing a pipe with the golden-haired lady named Autumn. Autumn Hawkes, she was, the much-hailed new Met soprano. Quickly we negotiated an agreement, eyes only, the silent language of the body, concerning the rest of the night. She told me she had come to the party with Victor Schott—gaunt gigantic youngish Prussian type in somber medal-studded military outfit—who was due to conduct her in
Lulu
that winter, but Schott had apparently arranged a deal to go home with Councilman Holbrecht, leaving Autumn to shift for herself. Autumn shifted. I was undeceived about her real preference, though, for I saw her looking hungrily at Paul Quinn far across the room, and her eyes glowed. Quinn was here on business: no woman could bag him. (No man either!) “I wonder if he sings,” Autumn said wistfully.

“You’d like to try some duets with him?”

“Isolde to his Tristan. Turandot to his Calaf. Aïda to his Radames.”

“Salome to his Jokanaan?” I suggested.

“Don’t tease.”

“You admire his political ideas?”

“I could, if I knew what they were.”

I said, “He’s liberal and sane.”

“Then I admire his political ideas. I also think he’s overpoweringly masculine and superbly beautiful.”

“Politicians on the make are said to be inadequate lovers.”

She shrugged. “Hearsay evidence never impresses me. I can look at a man—one glance will do—and know instantly whether he’s adequate.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Save the compliments. Sometimes I’m wrong, of course,” she said, poisonously sweet “Not always, but sometimes.”

“Sometimes I am, too.”

“About women?”

“About anything. I have second sight, you know. The future is an open book to me.”

“You sound serious,” she said.

“I am. It’s the way I earn my living. Projections.”

“What do you see in my future?” she asked, half coy, half in earnest.

“Immediate or long range?”

“Either.”

“Immediate,” I said, “a night of wild revelry and a peaceful morning stroll in a light drizzle. Long range, triumph upon triumph, fame, a villa in Majorca, two divorces, happiness late in life.”

“Are you a Gypsy fortuneteller, then?”

I shook my head. “Merely a stochastic technician, milady.”

She glanced toward Quinn. “What do you see ahead for him?”

“Him? He’s going to be President. At the very least.”

7

In the morning, when we strolled hand in hand through the misty wooded groves of Securtiy Channel Six, it was drizzling. A cheap triumph: I tune in weather reports like anyone else. Autumn went off to rehearse, summer ended, Sundara came home exhausted and happy from Oregon, new clients picked my mind for lavish fees, and life went on.

There was no immediate follow-up to my meeting with Paul Quinn, but I hadn’t expected one. New York City’s political life was in wild flux just then. Only a few weeks before Sarkisian’s party a disgruntled jobseeker had approached Mayor Gottfried at a Liberal Party banquet and, removing the half-eaten grapefruit from the astounded mayor’s plate, had clapped a gram of Ascenseur, the new French political explosive, in its place. Exeunt His Honor, the assassin, four county chairmen, and a waiter, in one glorious boom. Which created a power vacuum in the city, for everyone had assumed the formidable mayor would be elected to another four or five terms, this being only his second, and suddenly the invincible .Gottfried wasn’t there, as though God had died one Sunday morning just as the cardinal was starting to serve the bread and wine. The new mayor, former City Council President DiLaurenzio, was a nonentity: Gottfried, like any true dictator, liked to surround himself with bland obliging ciphers. It was taken for granted that DiLaurenzio was an interim figure who could be pushed aside in the ‘97 mayoralty election by any reasonably strong candidate. And Quinn was waiting in the wings.

I heard nothing from or about him all fall. The Legislature was in session and Quinn was at his desk in Albany, which is like being on Mars so far as anybody in New York City cares. In the city the usual weird circus was going full blast, only more so than usual now that the potent Freudian force that was Mayor Gottfried, the Urban Allfather, dark of brow and long of nose, guardian of the weak and castrator of the unruly, had been removed from the scene. The 125th Street Militia, a new black self-determination force that had been boasting for months that it was buying tanks from Syria, not only unveiled three armored monsters at a noisy press conference but proceeded to send them across Columbus Avenue on a search-and-destroy mission into Hispano Manhattan, leaving four blocks in flames and dozens dead. In October, while the blacks were celebrating Marcus Garvey Day, the Puerto Ricans retaliated with a commando raid on Harlem, personally led by two of their three Israeli colonels. (The
barrio
boys had hired the Israelis to train their troops in ‘94, following the ratification of the anti-black “mutual defense” alliance put together by the Puerto Ricans and what was left of the city’s Jewish population.) The commandos, in a lightning strike up Lenox Avenue, not only blew up the tank garage and all three tanks, but took out five liquor stores and the main numbers computer center, while a diversionary force slipped westward to firebomb the Apollo Theater.

A few weeks later at the site of the West Twenty-third Street Fusion Plant there was a shootout between the profusion group, Keep Our Cities Bright, and the anti- fusionists, Concerned Citizens Against Uncontrollable Technology. Four Con Edison security men were lynched and there were thirty-two fatalities among the demonstrators, twenty-one KOCB and eleven CCAUT, including a lot of politically involved young mothers on both sides and even a few babes in arms; this caused much horror and outcry (even in New York you can stir strong emotions by gunning babies during a demonstration), and Mayor DiLaurenzio found it expedient to appoint a study group to re-examine the whole question of building fusion plants within city limits. Since this amounted to a victory for CCAUT, a KOCB strike-force blockaded City Hall and began planting protest mines in the shrubbery, but they were driven off by a police tac squad strafing ‘copter at a cost of nine more lives. The
Times
put the story on page 27.

Mayor DiLaurenzio, speaking from his Auxiliary City Hall somewhere in the East Bronx—he had set up seven offices in outlying boroughs, all in Italian neighborhoods, the exact locations being carefully guarded secrets— issued new lawnorder pleas. However, nobody in the city paid much attention to the mayor, partly because he was such a
nebbish
and partly as an overcompensating reaction to the removal of the brooding, sinister, overwhelming presence of Gottfried the Gauleiter. DiLaurenzio had staffed his administration, from police commissioner down to dogcatcher and clean-air administrator, with Italian cronies, which I suppose was reasonable enough, since the Italians were the only ones in town who showed any respect for him, and that merely because they were all his cousins or nephews. But that meant that the mayor’s sole political support was drawn from an ethnic minority that grew more minor every day. (Even Little Italy was reduced to four blocks of Mulberry Street, with Chinese swarming on every side street and the new generation of
paisanos
holed up securely in Patchogue and New Rochelle.) An editorial in the
Wall Street Journal
suggested suspending the upcoming mayoralty election and placing New York City under a military administration, with a
cordon sanitaire
to keep infectious New Yorkism from contaminating the rest of the country.

“I think a UN peacekeeping force would be a better idea,” Sundara said. This was early December, the night of the season’s first blizzard. “This isn’t a city, it’s a staging ground for all the accumulated racial and ethnic hostilities of the last three thousand years.”

“That’s not so,” I told her. “Old grudges don’t mean crap here. Hindus sleep with Paks in New York, Turks and Armenians go into partnership and open restaurants. In this city we invent
new
ethnic hostilities. New York is nothing if it isn’t avant-garde. You’d understand that if you’d lived here all your life the way I have.”

“I feel as though I have.”

“Six years doesn’t make you a native.”

“Six years in the middle of constant guerrilla warfare feels longer than thirty years anywhere else,” she said.

Oh-oh. Her voice was playful, but her dark eyes held a malicious sparkle. She was daring me to parry, to contradict, to challenge. I felt the air about me glowing feverishly. Suddenly we were drifting into the I-hate-New-York conversation, always productive of rifts between us, and soon we would be quarreling in earnest. A native can hate New York with love; an outsider, and my Sundara would always be an outsider here, draws tense and heavy energy out of repudiating this lunatic place she has chosen to live in, and grows bloated and murderous with unearned fury.

Heading off trouble, I said, “Well, let’s move to Arizona.”

“Hey, that’s my line!”

“I’m sorry. I must have missed my cue.”

The tension was gone. “This
is
an awful city, Lew.”

“Try Tucson, then. The winters are much better. You want to smoke, love?”

“Yes, but not that bone thing again.”

“Plain old prehistoric dope?”

“Please,” she said. I got the stash. The air between us was limpid and loving. We had been together four years, and, though some dissonances had appeared, we were still each other’s best friend. As I rolled the smokes she stroked the muscles of my neck, cunningly hitting the pressure points and letting the twentieth century slide out of my ligaments and vertebrae. Her parents were from Bombay but she had been born In Los Angeles, yet her supple fingers played Radha to my Krishna as though she were a
padmini
of the Hindu dawn, a lotus woman fully versed in the erotic shastras and the sutras of the flesh, which in truth she was, though self-taught and no graduate of the secret academies of Benares.

The terrors and traumas of New York City seemed indecently remote as we stood by our long crystalline window, close to each other, staring into the wintry moonbright night and seeing only our own reflections, tall fairhaired man and slender dark woman, side by side, side by side, allies against the darkness.