Stochastic Man (5 page)

I didn’t pick up death vibes for him and I told him so.

I also said, “But I wish you wouldn’t do it, Paul. I’m not infallible and you’re not immortal.”

“If it isn’t safe in New York for a candidate to meet the voters,” Quinn replied, “we might as well just use the place for a Z-bomb testing sight.”

“A mayor was murdered here only two years ago.”

“Everybody bated Gottfried. He was an Iron Cross fascist if anybody ever was. Why should someone feel like that about me, Lew? I’m going out.”

Quinn went forth and pressed the flesh. Maybe it helped. He won the biggest election victory in New York history, an 88 percent plurality. On the first of January, 1998, an unseasonably mild, almost Floridian day, Haig Mardikian and Bob Lombroso and the rest of us in the inner circle clustered close on the steps of City Hall to watch our man take the oath of office. Vague disquiet churned inside me. What did I fear? I couldn’t tell. A bomb, maybe. Yes, a shiny round black comic-strip bomb with a sizzling fuse whistling through the air to blow us all to mesons and quarks. No bomb was thrown. Why such a bird of ill omen Nichols? Rejoice! I remained edgy. Backs were slapped, cheeks were kissed. Paul Quinn was mayor of New York, and happy 1998 to all.

10

“If Quinn wins,” Sundara said one night late in the summer of ‘97, “will he offer you a job in his administration?”

“Probably.”

“Will you take it?”

“Not a chance,” I told her. “Running a campaign is fun. Day-by-day municipal government is just a grubby bore. I’m going back to my regular clients as soon as the election’s over.”

Three days after the election Quinn sent for me and offered me the post of special administrative assistant and I accepted without hesitation, without one thought for my clients or my employees or my shiny office full of data- processing equipment.

Was I lying to Sundara on that summer night, then? No, the one I had been fooling was myself. My projection was faulty because my self-understanding had been imperfect. What I learned between August and November is that proximity to power becomes addictive. For more than a year I had been drawing vitality from Paul Quinn. When you spend so much time so close to so much power, you get hooked on the energy flow, you become a juice-junkie. You don’t willingly walk away from the dynamo that’s been nourishing you. When, as mayor-elect, Quinn hired me, he said he needed me, and I could buy that, but more truthfully I needed him. Quinn was poised for a huge surging leap, a brilliant cometlike passage through the dark night of American politics, and I yearned to be part of his train, to catch some of his fire and be warmed by it. It was that simple and that humiliating. I was free to pretend that by serving Quinn I was serving mankind, that I was participating in a grand exciting crusade to save the greatest of our cities, that I was helping to pull modern urban civilization back from the abyss and give it purpose and viability. It might even be true. But what drew me to Quinn was the attraction of power, power in the abstract, power for its own sake, the power to mold and shape and transform. Saving New York was incidental; riding the lines of force was what I craved.

Our whole campaign team went right into the new city administration. Quinn named Haig Mardikian his deputy mayor and Bob Lombroso his finance administrator. George Missakian became media coordinator and Ara Ephrikian was named head of the City Planning Commission. Then the five of us sat down with Quinn and handed out the rest of the jobs. Ephrikian proposed most of the names, Missakian and Lombroso and Mardikian evaluated qualifications, I made intuitive assessments, and Quinn passed final judgment. In this way we found the usual assortment of blacks, Puerto Ricans, Chinese, Italians, Irish, Jews, etc., to run the Human Resources Agency, the Housing and Redevelopment Board, the Environmental Protection Administration, the Cultural Resources Administration, and the other big numbers. Then we discreetly planted many of our friends, including an inordinate number of Armenians and Sephardic Jews and other exotics, high in the lower echelons. We kept the best people from the DiLaurenzio administration—there weren’t very many—and resuscitated a few of Gottfried’s hard-nosed but enlightened commissioners. It was a heady feeling to be picking a government for New York City, to drive out the hacks and timeservers and replace them with creative, adventurous men and women who happened, only
happened
, also to provide the ethnic and geographic mix that the cabinet of the mayor of New York must have.

My own job was amorphous, evanescent: I was private adviser, hunch maker, troubleshooter, the misty presence behind the throne. I was supposed to use my intuitive faculties to keep Quinn a couple of steps ahead of cataclysm, this in a city where the wolves descend on the mayor if the weather bureau lets an unexpected snowstorm slip into town. I took a pay cut amounting to about half the money I would have made as a private consultant. But my municipal salary was still more than I really needed. And there was another reward: the knowledge that as Paul Quinn climbed I would climb with him.

Right into the White House.

I had felt the imminence of Quinn’s presidency that first night in ‘95, Sarkisian’s party, and Haig Mardikian felt it long before that. The Italians have a word,
papabile,
to describe a cardinal who might plausibly become Pope. Quinn was presidentially
papabile
. He was young, personable, energetic, independent, a classic Kennedy figure, and for forty years Kennedy types had had a mystic hold on the electorate. He was unknown outside of New York, sure, but that scarcely mattered: with all urban crises running at an intensity 250 percent above the levels of a generation ago, anybody who shows he’s capable of governing a major city automatically becomes a potential President, and if New York did not break Quinn the way it broke Lindsay in the1960s he would have a national reputation in a year or two. And then—

And then—

By early autumn of ‘97, with the mayoralty already as good as won, I found myself becoming concerned, in what I soon recognized to be an obsessive way, with Quinn’s chances for a presidential nomination. I
felt
him as President, if not in 2000 then four years later. But merely making the prediction wasn’t enough. I played with Quinn’s presidency the way a little boy plays with himself, exciting myself with the idea, manipulating pleasure for myself out of it, getting off on it.

Privately, secretly—for I felt abashed at such premature scheming; I didn’t want cold-eyed pros like Mardikian and Lombroso to know I was already enmeshed in misty masturbatory fantasies of our hero’s distant glowing future, though I suppose they must have been thinking similar thoughts themselves by then—I drew up endless lists of politicians worth cultivating in places like California and Florida and Texas, charted the dynamics of the national electoral blocs, concocted intricate schemas representing the power vortices of a national nominating convention, set up an infinity of simulated scenarios for the election itself. All this was, as I say, obsessive in nature, meaning that I returned again and again, eagerly, impatiently, unavoidably, in any free moment, to my projections and analyses.

Everyone has some controlling obsession, some fixation that becomes an armature for the construct that is his life: thus we make ourselves into stamp collectors, gardeners, skycyclists, marathon hikers, sniffers, fornicators. We all have the same kind of void within, and each of us fills that void in essentially the same way, no matter what kind of stuffing for the emptiness we choose. I mean we pick the cure we like best but we all have the same disease.

So I dreamed dreams of President Quinn. I thought he deserved the job, for one thing. Not only was he a compelling leader but he was humane, sincere, and responsive to the heeds of the people. (That is, his political philosophy sounded much like mine.) But also I was finding in myself a need to involve myself in the advancement of other people’s careers—to ascend vicariously, quietly placing my stochastic skills at the service of others. There was some subterranean kick in it for me, growing out of a complex hunger for power coupled with a wish for self-effacement, a feeling that I was most invulnerable when least visible. I couldn’t become President myself; I wasn’t willing to put myself through the turbulence, the exertion, the exposure, and that fierce gratuitous loathing that the public so readily bestows on those who seek its love. But by toiling to make Paid Quinn President I could slip into the White House anyway, by the back door, without laying myself bare, without taking the real risks. There’s the root of the obsession most nakedly revealed. I meant to use Paul Quinn and let him think he was using me. I had identified myself,
au fond
, with him: he was, for me, my alter ego, my walking mask, my catspaw, my puppet, my front man. I wanted to rule. I wanted power. I wanted to be President, King, Emperor, Pope, Dalai Lama. Through Quinn I would get there in the only way I could. I would hold the reins of the man who held the reins. And thus I would be my own father and everybody else’s big daddy too.

11

There was one frosty day late in March ‘99 that started like most of the other days since I had gone to work for Paul Quinn, but went off on an unexpected track before afternoon arrived. I was up at quarter past seven, as usual. Sundara and I showered together, the pretext being conservation of water and energy, but actually we both had this little soap fetish and loved lathering each other until we were slippery as seals. Quick breakfast, out of the house by eight, commuter pod to Manhattan. My first stop was my uptown office, my old Lew Nichols Associates office, which I was maintaining with a skeleton staff during my time on the city payroll. There I handled routine projective analysis of minor administrative hassles—the siting of a new school, the closing of an old hospital, zoning changes to allow a new wipe-out center for brain-injured sniffers in a residential district, all trivia but potentially explosive trivia in a city where every citizen’s nerves are taut beyond hope of slackening and small disappointments quickly start looking like insupportable rebuffs. Then, about noon, I headed downtown to the Municipal Building for conference and lunch with Bob Lombroso.

“Mr. Lombroso has a visitor in his office,” the receptionist told me, “but he’d like you to go on inside anyway.”

Lombroso’s office was a fitting stage for him. He is a tall well-set-up man in his late thirties, somewhat theatrical in appearance, a commanding figure with dark curling hair silvering at the temples, a coarse black close- cropped beard, a flashing smile, and the energetic, intense manner of a successful rug merchant. His office, redecorated from standard Early Bureaucrat at his own expense, was an ornate Levantine den, fragrant and warm, with dark shining leather-paneled walls, dense carpets, heavy brown velvet draperies, dim bronze Spanish lamps perforated in a thousand places, a gleaming desk made of several somber woods inlaid with plaques of tooled morocco, great white urnlike Chinese floor vases, and, in a baroque glass-fronted credenza, his cherished collection of medieval Judaica—silver headpieces, breastplates, and pointers for the scrolls of the Law, embroidered Torah curtains out of the synagogues of Tunisia or Iran, filigreed Sabbath lamps, candlesticks, spice boxes, candelabra. In this musky cloistered sanctuary Lombroso reigned over the municipal revenues like a prince of Zion: woe betide the foolish Gentile who disdained his counsel.

His visitor was a faded-looking little man, fifty-five or sixty years old, a slight, insignificant person with a narrow oval head sparsely thatched with short gray hair. He was dressed so plainly, in a shabby old brown suit out of the Eisenhower era, that he trade Lombroso’s nippy-dip sartorialism seem like the most extreme peacock extravagance and even made me feel like a dandy in my five-year-old copper-threaded maroon cape. He sat quietly, slouched, hands interlocked. He looked anonymous and close to invisible, one of nature’s natural-born Smiths, and there was a leaden undertone to his skin, a wintry slackness to the flesh of his cheeks, that spoke of an exhaustion that was as much spiritual as physical. Time had emptied this man of any strength he might once have had.

“I want you to meet Martin Carvajal, Lew,” Lombroso said.

Carvajal rose and clasped my hand. His was cold. “A pleasure at last to encounter you, Mr. Nichols,” he said in a mild, numb voice that came to me from the far side of the universe.

The odd courtly phrasing of his greeting was strange. I wondered what he was doing here. He looked so juiceless, so much like an applicant for some very minor bureaucratic job, or, more plausibly, like some down-at-the-heel uncle of Lombroso’s here to pick up his monthly stipend: but only the powerful were admitted to Finance Administrator Lombroso’s lair.

But Carvajal was not the relict I took him to be. Already, in the moment of our handshake, he appeared to have an improbable access of strength; he stood taller, the lines of his face grew taut, a certain Mediterranean flush brightened his complexion. Only his eyes, bleak and lifeless, still betrayed some vital absence within.

Sententiously Lombroso said, “Mr. Carvajal was one of our most generous contributors to the mayor’s campaign,” giving me a suave Phoenician glance that told me,
Treat him kindly, Lew, we want more of his gold.

That this drab, seedy stranger should be a wealthy campaign benefactor, a person to be flattered and curried and admitted to the sanctum of a busy official, shook me profoundly, for rarely had I misread someone so thoroughly. But I managed a bland grin and said, “What business are you in, Mr. Carvajal?”