The Search for the Dice Man (22 page)

As the intelligent reader knows, New York City and Lukedom, although similar in some ways, have their differences. For one thing I was expected to show up for the same job every day at the same time and in the same place. And with the same personality. For another, in New York people tend to turn up in the same clothes and saying and doing the same things each time you meet them. In New York when you meet the vice president of a bank you can be pretty sure he’s a vice president of a bank and will remain so for at least a few more months, a security lacking in Lukedom.

In New York when you pick up the daily newspaper and read that a Palestinian has killed a Jew or a Jew a Palestinian, you can be sure that the death has occurred within the last few days and not two years ago, or ten, or fifty, as in the papers at Lukedom. And when you turn on your television set you can be pretty sure that Cliff Clayburn will not suddenly be involved in a six-second orgy with several licentious mailman groupies. And if a woman declares her love for you you can be certain that it was because at least for the moment she felt that way, and not because some damn die told her to say so and will tell her to go after someone else the next day.

On one level I felt a sense of relief at escaping Lukedom and being back with the regularity and reliability – such as it is – of the madness of Manhattan. When Jeff greeted me that first Thursday morning biting his nails and bemoaning the fact that the President still hadn’t declared his peace initiative and that we were thus losing money on our positions, I felt like embracing him – it was like
refinding a favourite teddy bear. When Miss Claybell briskly handed me a typed summary of every transaction in our various managed accounts since I’d been gone, I wanted to hug her too: the world was rounding into order again.

I was even glad to see Mr Battle, though Mr Battle was not his usual pompous, friendly self. He was now merely pompous. After making me wait in the outer office for twenty minutes he greeted me with distinct chilliness. He was not pleased that I’d been away from the trading desk for almost a week and thus lost the firm money. He was also not pleased that I hadn’t monitored more carefully my most important single position – Honoria.

I have to confess, dear reader, that Mr Battle’s frowning lecture frightened me. The simple fact of being back at my old job in the hyperkinetic rat-race of Manhattan was making me desperate to get things right with my job and my fiancée. I felt as I did when I sensed a magnificent investment opportunity slipping away: I had to grab it now before I ‘missed the boat.’

When I invited Honoria to my apartment that night and she came, I was tremendously relieved to see her. Dressed with her usual simple elegance, she listened quietly as I poured out an apology for having deserted her when she left Lukedom. I climaxed this by pulling out my (flawed) engagement ring and offering it to her, begging her to accept me back in her good graces.

Honoria sat silently for what felt like a long time, her left hand resting lifelessly in mine, the ring still held in my right.

Finally, she gave my hand a small squeeze and assured me how happy she was that we were back together, even how much she’d missed me. But when she finally took the ring she said perhaps we should wait a week or two before she actually began wearing it: I was expected to suffer a bit more before being pronounced fully rehabilitated.

We sat side by side and hand in hand on the couch and
she listened with uncharacteristic interest to my story about Lukedom – my initial clues about Luke, the gift of my father’s ashes, and the FBI’s arrival. Although I left Kim out of the story, Honoria didn’t at first ask about her. When I’d finished, she squeezed my hand.

‘I’m so happy your father turned out dead,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you?’

Actually it was a question I’d been studiously avoiding since receiving the urn from Jake. Since rushing away from Lukedom I’d thrown myself compulsively back into my old life.

‘Well, yes,’ I said after a pause. ‘It ends my quest.’

‘And it ends any concern we may have about his making an embarrassing re-entry into your life.’

‘Yes,’ I said, although I knew I still had doubts about the truth of the matter.

‘And psychologically,’ continued Honoria, giving my hand its fifth squeeze, ‘your encounter in Lukedom with your father’s follies has probably liberated you from his influence just as completely as meeting him in the flesh would have.’

‘… Yes.’

‘What do you plan to do with his ashes?’

‘I haven’t decided,’ I said, feeling uncomfortable. ‘Everything’s happened so fast I’m still at sea on a lot of things.’

Honoria hesitated, but then went in for another squeeze.

‘I hope you’re not at sea about us,’ she said softly, looking demurely down at our linked hands.

‘Uh … no.’

‘And I hope Kim didn’t pester you down there,’ she added.

At the first mention of Kim I evaded Honoria’s eyes, especially since at first I thought her reference to ‘down there’ referred to my loins and not to Lukedom.

‘No’, I replied. ‘She came and went her own way.’

‘She began pursuing you from the first time you met,’ said Honoria. ‘But I never thought she’d stoop to running after you to Lukedom.’

‘I guess she thought you and I had broken up.’

‘That’s no excuse for diving at your cock the first time it appears unprotected.’

I blinked in astonishment, having, in the subdued mood created by her feminine softness, forgotten her penchant for the salty, if slightly stilted, comment.

‘… Yes,’ I managed.

That night our remarkably nice lovemaking made me feel flattered, depressed and guilty, but whether my guilt was towards Honoria because of Kim in Lukedom, or towards Kim for what I was doing that night, I wasn’t then capable of knowing.

That next morning, Friday, Kim phoned me at my office. When Miss Claybell told me she was on the line I felt a strange surge of sadness and didn’t know whether I should take the call or not, but did.

‘I wanted to see what you were up to,’ said Kim. ‘I take it you’re returning to your old life.’

‘I … I wasn’t aware I’d left it,’ I said, at the sound of her voice again feeling that strange surge of sadness.

‘You weren’t? Funny. I remember someone who let his fiancée go packing and seemed rather giddy when he thought he was rid of her.’

I let a silence hang on the line. I knew I hadn’t really confronted my strange elation at Honoria’s hanging up on me in Lukedom. On the other hand, Kim was chaos. No matter how much I might feel for her she could only mean the end of what my whole life had been aiming at.

‘Lukedom has a tendency to make people act in unusual ways,’ I finally said. ‘I … wanted you, and Lukedom let us … enjoy each other.’

‘Really?’ said Kim. ‘I thought it was a lot more than that … a lot more, and I’m sorry that my going to
Michael’s that morning has soured you on what we were creating. It was stupid of me, and I owe you an apology, but you should have known that even if the dice had chosen a one-in-thirty-six shot and I’d decided to follow it and slept with him it wouldn’t have changed what we’d discovered the night before. Nothing can change that.’

That fucking sadness began flowing through me like some fast-acting depressant and I sensed my stupid eyes tearing.

‘I’m engaged to Honoria,’ I managed. ‘I shouldn’t have … done what I did.’

This time there was a silence from Kim.

‘Well,’ she finally said in a soft voice that I sensed was close to cracking, ‘if you and Honoria are back together … then I guess I’m gone. I … I never intended to … interfere … even if your relationship with her seems phoney … and built on quicksand.’

Again there was a long silence on the line.

‘I’m sorry,’ I finally said.

Another silence.

‘Me too,’ her almost inaudible voice said, and she hung up.

The moment the line went dead I wanted her back, wanted to shout not just my apology but acknowledge that it was
her
I loved, that it was
her –

Suddenly Jeff was in the office, looking not just frightened – he always looked frightened – but in a state of catatonia: eyes glazed and bulging, mouth agape, shoulders hunched, spittle in the corner of his mouth.

‘What’s the matter!?’ I shouted.

Jeff stood there just inside the office door, the frenzied trading floor a frenetic blur behind him, and slowly shook his head, eyes still glazed, the saliva now definitely advancing to the drool stage.

‘The sky has fallen …’ he managed.

Oh, well, was that all, I thought – just another minor freakout. I went around my desk towards Jeff to comfort him.

‘The President has betrayed us,’ Jeff added in a mumble, bringing me to a halt.

‘What do you mean?’

‘His peace initiative …’ mumbled Jeff, still staring nowhere at no one, ‘is sending four hundred thousand troops to Arabia.’

Before the elections of November 1990, the President of the US had sent, after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, approximately one hundred thousand men to the Middle East, for purely defensive purposes of course, to defend Saudi Arabia from an unprovoked attack from Iraq and thus causing long gas lines in the US. Then that Friday, three days after the election, he announced that the Pentagon was planning to send an additional three hundred thousand American troops to defend Saudi Arabia.

Quadrupling the military forces in the region was not exactly what one would normally call a peace initiative. Of course, the President, like so many leaders before him, assured one and all that this huge increase in military force was solely for defensive purposes, although why one hundred thousand men had constituted sufficient defence on 4 November and on 8 November the number became four hundred thousand wasn’t explained.

In any case. Wall Street, which knows the difference between a peace initiative and the beginning of a war, acted accordingly. The stock market sagged, gold rose, and oil, good old oil, which was highly overbought, went zooming higher. The BB&P futures fund suffered a devastating loss, fully 15 per cent of the fund’s asset value.

That morning Larry first had to suffer through a long session with Mr Battle, who paced and brooded and questioned and lamented and could hardly believe what had happened.

‘No, no, no,’ Mr Battle said for about the thirteenth time, ‘this can’t go on. For three years nothing like this has ever happened. I can’t believe it. Are you sure you made
those trades? I thought you’d developed systems that eliminated any such catastrophic losses!? Why, why, why? No, no, no …’ And so on.

Then he and Jeff huddled in the custodians’ rest room, a place both more secure and somehow more fitting for their present status. Or at least Jeff huddled. Larry raged.

‘Phone the bastard!’ Larry shouted. ‘Find out what the hell he thought he was talking about!’

‘I can’t!’

‘What do you mean, you can’t! He has a phone, doesn’t he? He’s still alive, isn’t he? Or did someone else who took his tip already wipe him out?!’

‘I … I … I …’

‘Jesus, first it’s no, no, no, and now I, I, I. Has everyone begun speaking in triplets? Why can’t you reach him?’

Jeff just stared up at him open-mouthed and afraid.

‘Well!?’

‘I … I just can’t.’

Then it hit Larry, completely and clearly.

‘It wasn’t a State Department friend, was it?’ he asked softly.

‘… No …’

‘It was someone feeding you inside stuff on a regular basis.’

‘Yes.’

‘He can get in touch with you, but you can’t get in touch with him.’

‘Yes.’

‘You were double-crossed.’

‘… I’m not sure …’

‘You’re a complete asshole.’

‘… Yes.’

Misery loves company, so Jeff and I, who rarely saw each other outside the office in happier days, now began to hang out together. This tendency was aided quite a bit in that no one else wanted to hang out with either of us. Although incurring notable losses is not as contagious or fatal as the black plague, on Wall Street it is treated much the same. Lesser people might enjoy being with those who are bigger losers than they, but successful people know that the aura of losing is communicable, and that if A hangs out with B and B is a loser, then, by definition, A must also be a loser. I knew that Jeff and I were in trouble when the custodians ordered us to stop using the custodians’ rest room. It was hard to see how much lower we could sink.

But the Battle family began to work on it. Their doors too began to swing closed or prove unusually sticky to open. At first Honoria seemed as aghast at the huge losses in oil futures as I was. But even as she tried to comfort me, I could see she was looking at me as if I’d suddenly gone totally bald and toothless: I suddenly wasn’t the man she thought she knew. And when I incurred further losses the next week in my everyday trading, I could tell people were beginning to sniff the odour of a loser, an odour, I knew, that no amount of expensive cologne, powerful deodorant or past triumphs could hide.

Suddenly Honoria had a lot of work over weekends Salomon Brothers seemed to have an outbreak of evening meetings that prevented her coming over to my apartment, where in the past we’d enjoyed my becoming a bull and going long and using maximum leverage, and Honoria
making an opening offer, splitting her stock, getting her fill, and short squeezing, all leading to powerful upward thrusts in all the important markets and a final go-for-broke consummation of the merger. Honoria began implying that it might be desirable if I spent more time diddling with my technical indicators and less diddling with hers.

All this was rather depressing. Jeff had finally broken down and admitted that for his two earlier coups he’d been relying on someone with inside information, and though this man claimed Jeff had misunderstood his instructions, he had clearly double-crossed Jeff on the ‘peace initiative’, probably to permit X to double his own profits. I was almost relieved that my most horrific losses had been caused not by the sporadic unreliability of my technical work but by someone actually defrauding me. I gloomily told Jeff to pretend not to suspect X and to keep the lines of communication open. I think he assumed that it was because I wanted to join the ranks of cheaters, and was a little disappointed in me. I was actually driven by a more human motive: I wanted revenge.

No matter how chaotic and abnormal my five days in Lukedom had been, such chaos there was normal. That first week back in Manhattan was worse: the beginning of chaos in what for many years had been gleaming order. Even as I felt my world collapsing around me I tried desperately to be my old self again, that is, the man I’d been most of my adult life, the exception being those few stupid days when I’d gone a little crazy in Lukedom.

I left my father’s plastic dice and bronze die with ashes in the mahogany box and placed it neatly at the back of a top shelf of my study bookcase, so recessed that no one would ever notice it and ask embarrassing questions. Although Honoria was quite happy Luke Rhinehart was dead, my feelings remained confused.

First of all, I didn’t entirely believe that he
was
dead. Second, when I did somewhat believe that he might be dead, my feelings varied from a vague sadness to a bitter
smile. In either case I felt no sense of completion. I still resented him for abandoning me years before and now resented him additionally for daring to make a claim on me, a claim he’d in no way earned. The idea that I had to prove myself worthy of my father seemed grossly unfair. I fantasized shouting at him that it was
he,
the father, who should go through a period of trial before deserving reconciliation with me rather than vice versa. I should set up a series of tests that would force him to prove that he was stable, reliable, consistent, unchanging, predictable – as regular as a healthy set of bowels. That would teach the bastard.

All through November things slid further and further downhill. On those rare occasions that Honoria agreed to see me she insisted on going over my technical work to see what I might be doing wrong. When I tried to talk about the coming child she grew silent, implying that having a baby was not something she intended to get excited about until it came. When I approached her with straight male lust my kisses were returned with such tightness and lack of juice it was like kissing two thin strips of boiled leather.

I began to acknowledge how much I missed Kim, but a few phone calls failed to locate her.

Thank God she was a slut. Otherwise I’d feel I had really lost someone important. Of course I continued to long for my slut and soon was madder at her for not letting me locate her than for her sluttishness. I alternated between longing achingly for Kim and longing greedily for a full return to Honoria’s good graces; between lusting for a great trading coup and wanting to dynamite Wall Street and take to sea in my sailboat. In brief, I behaved like a frustrated child. In the end, I began, quite decisively, to mope.

I began standing late at night staring into my mediane cabinet and wondering exactly how many of my various sedatives I’d have to take to earn the big sleep. Once,
during a cab strike when I’d been forced to use the subway, I found myself late in the evening on the edge of the platform staring down at the tracks, thinking how easy it would be to time my leap a few seconds before the speeding express train raced in. And there was almost no one around to notice or care, the platform being almost empty. Tears of self-pity welling in my eyes, I edged closer yet.

In the distance came the muffled roar of the approaching train. Hearing it, I became convinced that not only could I jump but that I would. That’ll show ’em!! I felt the strange thrill-chill of exhilaration-terror of the martyrish adolescent as I moved to the very edge of the platform and watched the train come barrelling out of the black maw to my left and tear towards me.

Suddenly there was an arm around my neck and something poking in my back and I was pulled roughly away from the track. So fast did this happen that it was only half a minute later that I realized that two young thugs had pulled out my wallet, ripped off my watch and were sprinting away down the platform and up some stairs. The express train had rushed on past without me. In Manhattan it’s never possible to do anything in peace.

As the gloomy days continued I didn’t know which was worse: the times my colleagues totally avoided me or the times I actually spent with them. Once, too depressed to face sharing another downer lunch with Jeff, I shuffled down Broad Street and unthinkingly entered the first restaurant I came to, only to be greeted by a surprised Mr Battle and Brad Burner, who were apparently having lunch with some banker friend of theirs. They looked deeply embarrassed, but when I admitted that I was alone Mr Battle insisted I join them.

After we’d been served our cocktails and hors d’oeuvres and ordered our dinners, the conversation was barrelling forward about, naturally, money. Although we were sealed at a small round table. I felt separated from the rest.
In the middle of the ongoing conversation I finally found myself participating. Sort of.

‘I’m burned out,’ I announced glumly to no one in particular.

‘That’s very good,’ Mr Battle said to Brad, continuing their discussion. ‘Who could ask for anything more?’

‘Exactly,’ said Brad. ‘I think we may as much as double our position. It’s a kind of hidden monopoly without government regulation.’

‘All our work seems so ineffectual,’ I continued, staring out into nowhere.

‘That’s the key,’ said Mr Battle. ‘And the fact that no one realizes it.’

‘I’m sick of pretending we know what we’re doing, when half the time we’re only the blind leading the blind.’

‘It’s the whole secret of successful investing,’ announced Brad to Mr Battle with a note of satisfaction.

‘Let’s see,’ said a befuddled waiter, arriving with our lunches. ‘You, sir, are the veal. and you the stuffed shrimp?’

‘No, no, no,’ said Mr Battle. ‘I’m the stuffed shrimp.’

‘And I’m the crabmeat salad,’ announced the banker.

‘I’m a helpless pawn in a game being played by dunces,’ I announced dully to the waiter.

‘Prawn, sir? I … I’ll have to recheck my order.’

‘Larry gets the chicken,’ said Mr Battle irritably.

‘How you doin’ today Lair?’ said Brad, as if noticing me for the first time but digging vigorously into his veal.

‘I’m at zero.’

‘Great,’ said Brad, watching the waiter pour some fresh wine in his glass. ‘Our model portfolio is up another 3 per cent this week.’

‘I’m frozen in a sea of muck,’ I continued in the same dull monotone.

‘Eat your chicken,’ said Mr Battle irritably.

‘I don’t want chicken,’ I said, now noticing the plump
breast stewing in its sauces on my plate.

‘Really?’ said the banker. ‘What do you want?’

‘A new life,’ I said.

‘Not on the menu,’ snapped Mr Battle.