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LUKE RHINEHART

THE SEARCH FOR THE DICE MAN

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith. London W6 8JB www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1993

Copyright © Luke Rhinehart 1993

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780006513919

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007322251

Version: 2014-09-05

Accident is the creator of life.

Charles Darwin

Life is at best a tenuous and hazardous enterprise, but mankind’s puny efforts to protect himself from its instability and randomness seem worse than futile. It appears the best course is simply chancing it.

Emerson

It is necessary to resign from the human race – with a forged signature, of course.

Luke

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Preface

Second Preface

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

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58

Epilogue

Keep Reading

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Preface

You don’t know about me unless you’ve read a book by the name of The Dice Man, but no matter. That book was made by me and I told the truth, mainly. There were things which I stretched, but mainly I told the truth.

In my fashion.

The book was all about how I came to make all my decisions by casting dice, to convert and pervert my psychiatric patients into the dicelife, and to blow my previous life to smithereens.

Now the way that book winds up is in the middle of a sentence, with me dangling on a vine over a cliff. That was in the seventies.

This book you’re browsing through now doesn’t pick up the story then. It skips a bit – about twenty years. It’s mostly about my son Larry and his quest to locate me and give me a piece of his mind. He runs into a lot of my friends and followers and gets a little confused. He tells some of the story himself and I tell some, and to keep the intellectual reader awake, we’ve thrown in some excerpts from my journals. It’s a good read.

Luke Rhinehart

Second Preface

The man is an incorrigible liar. He and his followers are utterly untrustworthy.

Larry Rhinehart

1

I might never have gone on a quest for my father if it hadn’t been for an unexpectedly light rain in Iowa. I was long three hundred futures contracts of December wheat based on a forecast of torrential rains in the Midwest. I expected the heavy rains to ruin the harvest and raise the price of wheat. Unfortunately, the rains didn’t fall mainly in the plain. They fell primarily on Cleveland, Chicago and Detroit, where very little wheat is grown. The price of wheat plummeted the next day and I lost about two million dollars for my clients. My employer called me in for a chat. My clients phoned me for chats. My employees and colleagues avoided me. The only people who phoned or dropped by were people who wanted to shoot me.

I’d lost big money for my clients a few other times, but somehow having to explain that ‘I thought it was going to rain harder’ was the sort of explanation that incites rather than soothes. And it didn’t help matters that the rains that didn’t fall mainly in the plains hadn’t been my only recent miscalculation. For almost three months I’d been on what is charitably called a losing streak. If my indicators said corn and wheat were going up, corn and wheat immediately changed their minds and took a dive. If I took a long position in the stock market, some unexpected inflation report or mad Iraqi dictator would set stocks spiralling downwards.

For three years I’d been something of a trading hotshot – ever since at the tender age of twenty-five I’d accidentally made a name for myself. I happened to be short several stock market futures on that lovely day in October 1987 when the stock market dropped six hundred points. While all around me friends, colleagues and strangers stood shell-shocked at the monitors watching the value of their stock holdings nosedive, I stood beside them watching myself and my clients grow richer and trying desperately to repress giggles.

In the fickle ways of Wall Street, that day I made my name at Blair, Battle and Pike (BB&P). At dawn I’d been a mere associate trader, given minimum leeway to dabble at my own ideas for trading. At dusk I was a Vice President and Senior Trader.

Mr Battle, the firm’s esteemed leader, knew that he would feel more comfortable being able to tell people that his Senior Trader had been right on that infamous day rather than wrong, so he adroitly changed Senior Traders. In the morning the previous Chief Trader, Vic Lissome, had been king and I merely a peon. In the evening Vic was sitting blank-eyed in a local pub wondering how the market could have clobbered him so badly, and I was humbly thanking Mr Battle for his confidence – and trying desperately to remember why I’d decided to go short those futures.

And from then until the summer of 1990 I’d been a consistent winner, but in the last few months I’d begun to lose money. So when my father began to intrude again into my life after a fifteen-year absence, it came at a time when I was in a vulnerable position – financially, socially and emotionally.

My troubles began when I arrived back at the office after lunch. On a Friday afternoon in September, trading tended to be on the slow side, and this Friday was no exception. Jeff Cannister, a short, dynamic fireplug of a man who always greeted me with shades of nervousness ranging from nail-biting tension to total panic, announced that gold had gone down over a dollar and a half in the ninety minutes I’d been gone. Jeff always managed to report such market movements as if my personal absence had led to the fall in gold – or the fall in the yen, etc. – and that had I stayed in my office staring at my monitor I’d have held up the price and saved the firm money.

With Jeff tailing along behind, I continued to stride through the mass of open cubicles at which brokers and traders sat in various states of controlled frenzy. I was aware of how incongruous the two of us were, my tall and lanky frame towering over the squat Jeff so that backbiters, as I knew, sometimes referred to us as ‘Mutt and Jeff’

So gold had fallen slightly when I thought it was about to rise; at least it hadn’t fallen through the floor, as wheat had done the week before.

‘Any news to cause it?’ I asked Jeff.

‘Nothing I saw,’ said Jeff. Despite his thick solidity, Jeff was totally unfit for the traumas involved in making and losing large sums of money in short periods of time. Still, he was good at what we did and I was happy having him as an associate trader – until he burned out, got hooked on coke, discovered religion or ceased to sleep. Then he’d have to be pensioned off – at the age of twenty-nine, probably.

‘The grains are rallying now, especially beans,’ announced Jeff gloomily – as if all over the country corn and wheat and soybeans were bursting upwards in a personal effort to thwart Jeff and his firm.

‘Just maintain our stops and let me know if they get hit,’ I said, flinging my suit jacket over the back of a computer monitor and throwing myself into my swivel desk chair.

As Jeff left I began examining my main monitor, which had quotes on all the stocks, bonds and futures I was actively trading. My phone line buzzed.

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘Hi, darling, I miss you,’ came the lovely voice of my fiancée. Honoria, who also happened to be the daughter of the head of the firm, Mr Battle. Oh, I was a winner in those days.

‘Hi, sweetheart,’ I said, leaning back in my chair and smiling.

‘Daddy’s house guests this week are two inscrutable Japanese bankers, one of them with a conspicuous interest in sex. When the tall one first met me he was masterful and flirtatious and eyeing all the more protuberant parts of my anatomy, but when he learned I was a VP at Salomon Brothers and engaged to you he lost interest and spent the day with an old issue of Playboy.’

‘Say,’ I interjected, ‘what are two Japanese bankers doing as Mr Battle’s guests, anyway?’

‘I asked Daddy that and he was strangely secretive. I think he may want them to invest in the firm.’

‘Not likely unless they actually buy him out. He’s not thinking of selling, is he!?’ I added with a brief flash of panic.

‘Of course not, dear. He’s grooming you to become head of the firm as soon as he retires at the age of ninety-nine.’

I frowned at the thought of Mr Battle’s longevity. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘I’d just as soon not see any more than I have to of your father and these Japanese this weekend. Maybe we can spend the day on my sailboat.’

‘No, no sailing, dear. When I want to be bored and seasick at the same time I’ll let you know.’

‘Oh, yeah, right.’ Honoria only liked water that was as flat and predictable as concrete.

‘However, we can take a walk down to the river. When are you coming?’

‘On the early train tomorrow morning. And I’m really looking forward to being with you this weekend.’

‘Me too, darling. Oh, oh, big call coming in, have to say bye-bye. I miss your cock.’

And she hung up.

Her abruptness was typical. She enjoyed wealth and style, but liked to mask her enjoyment by sudden small eccentric acts of rebellion which made her seem detached and cynical. She was really a sexually conservative woman, and her saying that she missed my cock was one of her tiny acts to épater les bourgeois. When we were actually making love she somehow rarely seemed to notice my cock.

After I replaced the phone I let my gaze wander to the photograph of Honoria and myself on the bookshelf beyond my desk and complacently admired the handsome couple we made: me tall, dark and broodingly good-looking – a sort of gangly Richard Gere; she slender, blonde, nicely proportioned, exquisitely coiffed, flawlessly complected, and rich – an elegant Cybill Shepherd.

From the first time I met her, about a year earlier, I loved being with her, loved exchanging Wall Street gossip and admiring each other’s trading coups, loved telling people we were going to get married, loved calculating our yearly income. A check of all the technical and fundamental indicators rated Honoria triple-A – a definite ‘buy’ I knew that I, a poor orphaned nobody, was lucky to be where I was, if only I didn’t blow it.

Another incoming call.

‘Mr Potter on the line,’ said Miss Claybell, my secretary. ‘I believe he wants to talk to you about his investment in the BBP 21st Century Futures Fund.’

‘I’ll bet he does,’ I said. ‘Put him on.’

The BBP 21st Century Futures Fund was my personal brainchild, a mass of money – currently about eighteen million dollars – which we invested in various futures markets. The fund was unique in that we guaranteed a return of at least 2 per cent, even if the fund’s value shrank and showed a loss. In effect, the company was promising to absorb any losses that the futures trading would show over a one-year period. This unique gimmick made the selling of a futures fund to conservative investors much easier. After all, how many investments – other than treasury bills and bonds – were guaranteed against loss? And the BBP Futures Fund promised it might return anywhere between 15 and 50 per cent per year. Since its inception two years earlier, money had come pouring into the fund, money from both speculators and more conservative investors like Mr Potter. And the fund’s value had increased about 32 per cent a year. I had every right to be proud. Except for the last three months.

‘Hello, Larry Rhinehart speaking,’ I said in my dynamo trader voice.

‘Ah, yes, Mr Rhinehart,’ said the gravelly voice of the filthy-rich Mr Potter. ‘Arthur Potter here. I see the net asset value of the fund fell for the third straight week.’

That’s right, sir.’ I was tempted to say, ‘I purposely let it fall again so we could have a chat,’ but knew the irony would be either resented or lost.

‘Markets tend to go both up and down,’ I continued aloud, ‘and our BBP Fund is no exception.’

‘Since I put that million in eight weeks ago the value of the fund is down about 7 per cent,’ Mr Potter went on. ‘If the fund goes bust how do I know –’

‘The fund is not going to go bust, Mr Potter. You’ve seen the record over the full two years. Does it look like the record of someone about to go bust?’

‘Those figures could have been fabricated.’

I sighed. The trouble with Wall Street was that since so many people cheated it was hard for an honest man to be trusted.

‘Then why haven’t we fabricated the figures for the last eight weeks?’ I asked. ‘If we’re cheating, why stop cheating?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mr Potter. ‘Perhaps you’re just being clever.’

‘Mr Potter, sir,’ I said, ‘for you to lose your money the firm of Blair, Battle and Pike would have to go bust. You don’t seri –’

‘Like Drexel, Burnham. Lambert,’ said Mr Poner.

With the phone gripped between my right shoulder and ear, I snapped a wooden pencil in two and resisted the urge to throw the fragments across the room.

‘Normally, as you know,’ I answered coldly, ‘we ask clients to commit their funds for one full year. If you wish to withdraw your money I’ll personally recommend we make an exception, but you’ll have to take your 7 per cent loss. If you want your guaranteed 2 per cent profile you’ll have to wait the full year.’

The silence on the other end of the line made me know I’d scored a direct hit.

‘Mmmm,’ said Mr Potter, and within thirty seconds he had hung up, having indicated he wanted to stay in the fund.

I finally smiled and dropped the two pieces of pencil into the metal waste-paper bin. The other thing that made the BBP Fund unique was that BBP, in return for guaranteeing the investors against losses, was taking one-third of the investors’ profits, the highest profit percentage in the industry.

I tipped back in my swivel chair and felt a little angry at Potter and his ilk. No one seemed to appreciate what I’d accomplished since October 1987.

Up until that month – all through the 1980s – BB&P had made money the way most firms did – the old-fashioned way: by doing nothing. That is, they bought and sold stocks for other people and themselves, using all sorts of interesting theories or no theories at all, and despite all their efforts or lack thereof they made money.

For most of the eighties if you had money you made money. You bought a condominium – you were clever. You bought a stock, any stock, you were a genius. You bought a house, any house, you were sharp. It was an era when rich dumb guys finished first and richer dumb guys finished even firster.

Until October 1987, anyway. Then a funny thing happened. Almost everyone who for at least five years had been a genius was suddenly in one calamitous day a jerk. Seldom in human history have so many bright wealthy men awakened in just one day to discover such an unambiguous truth: that they were neither so bright nor so wealthy. Their clever condominiums became rather quickly empty and unsellable. Their genius junk bonds became ungenial junk bondage.

We humans don’t take kindly to such awakenings. I suppose that when you lose several trillion dollars in one day you can be pardoned for not saying the obvious: all the wisdom of the previous five years had just been normal human stupidity. I’d happened to bet right on that horrible day but later I’d come to wonder whether if I’d been more mature and less cocky I might have examined 19 October 1987 a lot more carefully. Its most obvious lesson, I, like everyone else, never learned: what the market does on any given day may bear no resemblance to what it has ever done before.

Then my secretary marched into the room without buzzing. Miss Claybell was a chubby middle-aged woman who consistently wore clothing that looked as if it had been collected from church bazaars, applied too much make-up and never had an original thought. However, she was everything I wanted in a secretary – reasonable, unemotional, efficient, obedient and totally dedicated. Her very unemotional efficiency meant, however, that her slipping into my inner office unannounced must mean something was up.

‘There are two gentlemen to see you,’ she announced. ‘They say they’re FBI agents.’

2

At first I felt nothing; I just stared back at her, tipped forward in my chair and lowered my arms from behind my head.

‘FBI agents?’ I echoed vaguely.

‘They won’t say why they want to question you.’

I looked up at Miss Claybell neutrally, but with my heart now pumping panic and my mind desperately searching for the crime I must have committed. But since I was compulsively honest in all Wall Street financial dealings, my mind was filled with unpaid parking tickets, with a nineteen-year-old Goldman Sachs broker trainee I had seduced and abandoned, a 1987 income tax return that contained several creative deductions.

‘Should I show them in?’ Miss Claybell asked, watching me with that bland composure that made everyone else at Blair, Battle and Pike seem slightly panicky.

I came slowly to my feet, still staring at her uncertainly. I had an urge to pace, but managed to hold my feet to the floor, although my upper body rocked back and forth and my right hand was wrestling with pocket change.

‘Yes,’ I managed. But as Miss Claybell turned to leave I realized a futures trader being questioned by federal agents was bound to arouse a lot of not totally favourable conjecture.

‘And I want you to be present,’ I added.

She hesitated, nodded, and then, leaving the door open, disappeared.

The two men who soon entered looked like slightly unsuccessful businessmen who’d come to try to sell me some penny stocks or a supplemental health insurance policy. They introduced themselves as Hayes and Macavoy. They sat down stiffly in the two extra chairs while Miss Claybell, memo pad in hand, stood unobtrusively – or as unobtrusively as someone who dressed like Queen Victoria could – near the door, which she gently dosed.

The one called Hayes, a hollow-cheeked man in need of a shave, glanced briefly back at her.

‘We’re here to question just you, Mr Rhinehart,’ he said. ‘Your secretary can go.’

‘She’s staying,’ I countered quickly. ‘I want a written record of our conversation.’

Hayes looked so expressionlessly at me that it was like looking at a computer screen whose language I didn’t know.

‘Have it your way,’ Hayes said. After the briefest of glances at Macavoy he cleared his throat and continued. ‘Is Luke Rhinehart your father?’

That stopped me cold. Parking tickets, male chauvinism and creative IRS deductions all disappeared, and I was left with the image of the big smiling father I’d barely known.

‘Was my father,’ I said.

Hayes stared hard.

‘You believe your father is dead?’ he asked.

‘No, I mean Luke Rhinehart was my father until he deserted his family over fifteen years ago.’

‘I see,’ said Hayes. ‘And do you know where he is now?’

‘No.’

‘When did you last speak to him?’ Macavoy suddenly interjected. He was a slender man too, but taller, gangling, younger than Hayes. He looked like a prematurely aged teenage hoopster.

‘Ten years ago,’ I answered.

‘What was the occasion?’

‘My mother … had been killed in a car accident a week earlier,’ I said as calmly as I could. ‘He called to ask if my sister and I wanted to come live with him.’

Hayes and Macavoy waited for me to go on.

‘Well?’ Hayes finally asked.

‘It was the first and only contact I’d had with him since he’d disappeared five years before. I told him to go to hell.’

Hayes blinked once and then nodded.

‘And you’ve had no contact with him since?’ he asked.

‘None.’

‘But you’ve had contact with his followers.’

‘They’ve occasionally harassed me, if that’s what you mean,’ I said irritably.

‘How have they harassed you?’

‘By showing up. By telling me how my father has transformed their lives. Or ruined their lives. By being assholes.’

Macavoy coughed.

‘Didn’t any of them ever bring you a message from your father?’

‘No.’

‘Or told you some of the marvellous things your father is doing?’ There was a sarcastic bite in the question.

‘Look,’ I snapped, abruptly standing. ‘I really don’t want to talk about this. How can you possibly be interested in pursuing my father for the stupid things he did fifteen or twenty years ago?’

Hayes looked at me a moment and then exchanged glances with Macavoy.

‘We’re not interested in what your father did twenty years ago,’ he finally said. ‘We’re interested in what he’s doing right now.’

I hesitated.

‘Right now!?’ I managed.

‘Yes.’

‘And what do you think he’s doing right now?’ I asked, sinking slowly back down into my chair.

‘We can’t go into that,’ said Macavoy. ‘Let me ask you this: has anyone been acting strangely around you lately?’

I stared at him a moment and then laughed.

‘Everyone. All the time. What else is new?’

‘I mean has anyone new come into your life that struck you as odd?’ the gangly hoopster persisted.

‘No,’ I said irritably. ‘What are you driving at?’

‘We have reason to believe that your father may try to get in touch with you,’ said Hayes.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Good,’ said Hayes. He stood. ‘But when you do, we want you to get in touch with us. Immediately.’ He reached across the desk and handed me a card.

‘May I ask why my father, after all these years, might now want to get in touch with me?’

Macavoy too now rose.

‘He’s your dice daddy,’ Hayes said. ‘Maybe the dice will tell him to.’

3

His father – his father was still alive somewhere.

After everyone had left the office, Larry sat frozen in his chair, trying to control the trembling in his hands, his lips, even his gut. The man whose betrayal had poisoned his life was now injecting some new infection into its present flow.

A successful psychiatrist, in the late sixties Luke had thought he’d discovered the cure for human misery: injecting chance systematically into one’s life. He thought he could break down the normal stuck-in-the-mud personality and thus expand human experience, role-playing, and creativity. He embarked on the mad enterprise of trying to explore the malleability and multiplicity of the human soul. He introduced himself and his patients to diceliving – the making of life decisions by casting dice. His theory was that humans tended to get stuck in trying to live with one set of beliefs, attitudes and behaviour – one self – when the healthy human would be better off feeling free to be many selves, with many inconsistent attitudes and behaviours.

In dice therapy he encouraged his patients to create a variety of optional actions or roles, and let the dice choose their behaviour for a given hour, day or week. The goal was to break down the usual single stuck self and discover new habits, loves and lives.

Of course in successfully attacking his own personality, Luke broke up his family, ruined his professional standing, alienated friends, and broke enough laws to attract numerous law-enforcement agencies.

He also became somewhat famous – or notorious, dice therapy and diceliving becoming something of a fad in the early seventies. Luke became a minor cult figure like Timothy Leary or Ram Dass, seeming to symbolize the rejection of society’s traditional values in favour of individual creativity and multiplicity. By jumping bail after his trial and disappearing from sight, he gave his life a certain romantic aura lacking in other counterculture figures who were raking in dollars on the lecture circuit, but the aura faded as his disappearance seemed increasingly final. Total absence is a difficult state to keep exciting.

As he sat in the office that day trying to steady his hand on the flat desktop, Larry remembered bitterly that as an eight-year-old child he had liked his father’s dice games, both for their own sake and for Luke’s playing them with him. He’d once cast a fat red die and seen it choose the option that he go fight a bully who’d been hassling him for months. He remembered knocking the snotnose down, and never having any trouble with him again. For a week, anyway, the event had made him a believer in the dice.

Another afternoon he’d let the dice continually choose in which direction he walk and, giggling, he kept ending up with his nose against some building’s walls.

But his father had become increasingly erratic. He remembered one morning Luke’s eating his eggs with his fingers and grunting like some animal, the eggs mostly not making it into his mouth, he and his sister giggling, Larry’s mother in the background silently glaring. And he remembered his father, who never bought a Christmas present for anyone, unexpectedly bringing home half a dozen presents to both him and his sister, including a gigantic five-foot-high bear that he’d loved for years. And of Luke’s striding around their apartment all one weekend, declaring in stentorian tones, like some Shakespearean actor, lines which were probably muddled quotations from plays somehow appropriate to what was happening.

But most of his memories of that time were less pleasant – of the tense parental silences, of his mother always shouting at his father and her fury when she caught Larry using the dice, shouting that if she ever caught him doing that again she’d send him to a foster home.

And when Luke finally disappeared without a word, Larry came to feel it was the dice themselves that had made him leave and ruined Larry’s life – hence his bitterness against not only his father but against everything his father had stood for.

Nevertheless, there were times when he wished he’d accepted Luke’s offer to take him in after his mother’s death, since from that moment on he’d been on his own and broke. He’d had to work full-time every summer and part-time during all his college years, while most of his classmates were apparently free to loaf. In reaction against his father he’d come to believe passionately in the value of control, order and reason. His psychiatrists pointed out that making a religion of order was a dramatic rejection of his father’s interest in irrationality and chance, and that he’d even chosen his profession in reaction against his father. One of the more notorious features of Luke’s diceliving had been his followers’ remarkable success at picking profitable stocks and bonds using the dice. At Wharton Business School Larry had determined to prove the value of reason and research over his father’s bastard deity, Chance.

But in the last five years of conquering chance with his trend lines, resistance areas, momentum figures, stochastics, point and figure charts and Eliot Waves, how often some chance event would send a market reeling in a direction contrary to that predicted by all his indicators! And how annoying that, even without any measurable chance event, markets somehow refused to perform as all his technical indicators forecast they would.

Despite Larry trying to picture his father before he’d taken up his quixotic quest for the cure to human misery, he had absolutely no memories of him before the age of eight. That was a sure sign of repression, Dr Bickers had assured him. He groaned at the thought of having to talk to Dr Bickers about this FBI visit: how the man would smirk at this archetypal return of the father. And he grimaced too at realizing that despite his dislike of Dr Bickers he seemed to be consulting psychotherapists almost as often as his father used to consult the dice. He ought to bill his father.

Over the years he’d think he was making progress, announce to friends that he’d finally made a key breakthrough, and then a few weeks later tell these same friends that his therapist was a charlatan – and possibly a secret diceperson.

His reveries were abruptly interrupted by an official buzz from Miss Claybell: Mr Battle wanted to see him in his office immediately.

Ah, yes. Nothing like a visit from the FBI to make a trader’s boss want to have a chat.

4

Mr Battle’s being both the head of the firm as well as Honoria’s father meant that his every word, sigh and stare had significance for me far beyond its merit. Every time I had a losing trade it not only meant a few fewer digits in the asset column, but also that my son-in-law rating went down several points. Rains failing to fall mainly in the plains constituted not merely a small financial disaster, but also a threat to my marriage, a marriage I devoutly and greedily desired. And there’d been far too many rains not in the plains recently.

When I neared the old man’s cavernous office I veered off into the executives’ men’s room to do a bit of grooming. Mr Battle was a stickler for appearances. A trader with shirt unbuttoned, tie and hair askew was a man communicating not concentration and busy-ness, but rather a state of being overwhelmed. Since most traders were overwhelmed, such normal grooming was elsewhere the norm, but not at BB&P. Mr Battle wanted his traders all to look as if they’d just emerged from a men’s fashion ad in the Sunday New York Times magazine section – cool, elegant and unflustered – million-dollar profits something they pulled off between aperitifs.

‘A tie is a symbol,’ he’d explained to me once when he’d caught me alone in my office with my tie off. ‘A symbol of caring about power. If it doesn’t always represent actual membership in the successful levels of society, it at least represents the wish to do so. Failure to wear a tie represents either rebellion against or indifference to everything that counts.’

‘But I’m alone in here, sir,’ I’d protested.

‘God sees,’ he said.

Mr Battle had been one of the three founding members of the firm back in 1977, Blair having the money. Pike being the brainy trader, and Mr Battle contributing a little money, his high social standing and extensive social and financial connections. Blair and Pike had had the goodness to die over the next decade, leaving Mr Battle as majority owner and de facto boss. He was legendary for his ability to charm the rich into sharing their wealth with BB&P (‘investing’), but hopelessly out of his depth in any intricate financial dealings. As long as I made money for BB&P and seemed a socially acceptable and presentable young man, I’d be in his favour. If ever I began to lose money for the firm or, even worse, turned out to be black or Jewish or the son of mongoloids, I’d be dropped with peremptory swiftness.

As I stared into the mirror to straighten my lie and brush my hair, I knew that I was not cool, would never be elegant and was as flustered as I ever got, since the thing that really flustered me was my damn father.

‘Seeing the chief honcho, huh?’ a voice said from behind me.

Changing the angle of my vision I spotted in the mirror the lugubrious face of Vic Lissome, the onetime Chief Trader I’d replaced three years earlier. Vic was seated in an open cubicle, fully clothed, reading the National Inquirer, a periodical much favoured by traders. Reading it kept them in touch ‘with the pulse of the nation’, said Vic, although I felt it kept them in touch primarily with three-headed dogs and childbearing men.

‘Yeah,’ I replied. Many people at BB&P assumed that I was a suck artist who’d somehow managed to wrap Mr Battle around my little finger, when in fact I usually lived in mortal terror of Mr Battle. I felt that everything I’d achieved had been achieved despite Mr Battle’s preferences rather than because of them.

‘You look like shit,’ said Vic helpfully from his cubicle hideaway. ‘You look like you just got hit with a Saddam Hussein.’

Ever since that August day two months earlier when Saddam Hussein had unexpectedly sent his troops into Kuwait to conquer six infantrymen and a mentally ill housewife (the only documented resisters) and thus sent various futures markets reeling off in new directions, any unexpected news development had been called, genetically, a Saddam Hussein. This ‘in’ argot would last until the next notable Saddam Hussein.

‘Actually it’s more a minor domestic problem,’ I said, not wanting to have to talk to Vic about the failure of the rains.

‘Domestic?’ said Vic. ‘You mean the old fart is not too happy with your porking his daughter?’

‘I got to go, Vic’ I said, moving quickly to the door. ‘A man who is late is a man who is not there.’

This last line was not my own but a famous quotation from Mr Battle, a man noted for pithy sayings of questionable value.

‘Ah, Rhinehart!’ he said from behind his desk, a gigantic monstrosity of glass and metal tubing that closely resembled a glass pingpong table without the net. He was a large, good-looking man with beefsteak jowls and he dressed with immaculately tailored dignity. With his magnificent sweep of bushy hair nicely streaked with grey, he usually looked as if he was posing for an ad for some exotic liqueur.

‘What’s this about the FBI raiding your office?’ he went on.

‘Raiding my office?’ I echoed uneasily. ‘It wasn’t anything like that.’

‘One FBI agent talking to someone is an inquiry,’ countered Mr Battle, spouting one of his aphorisms. ‘Two agents is a raid.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, stopping to stand in front of the desk like a pupil before his principal.

‘Exactly. Now tell me all about it. I believe in confronting unpleasantness immediately and wrestling it to the ground.’

‘There, uh, was no, is no unpleasantness. The FBI was making an inquiry about someone I haven’t seen in more than fifteen years. I couldn’t help them and they left.’

‘Really!?’ exclaimed Mr Battle, scrutinizing me as if wondering if I’d really thought he’d swallow that one. ‘Fifteen years It must have been a pretty horrendous crime. Who was it, some serial killer?’

‘They didn’t say why they were seeking the man,’ I said. ‘They were vague and ambiguous. But I can assure you the whole thing has nothing to do with me or my work here at BB&P.’

Mr Battle continued to gaze at me as if wondering why I was telling all these lies.

‘And who is this man the FBI is so curious about that they seek out people who haven’t seen him in fifteen years?’

Oh, Jesus. Here it comes. Everything I’d been trying to hide.

‘Uh, a relative, sir. A man who disappeared a long ti – fifteen years ago.’

‘A relative!’ said Mr Battle. ‘That could be distressing. Not a close relative, I hope.’

Oh, Jesus.

‘I … uh … was never close to him.’

‘Who is it, an uncle?’

I stared back at Mr Battle numbly.

‘My father,’ I said.

Mr Battle looked not surprised but confused.

‘But your father is dead.’

‘Uh, not necessarily.’

‘Not necessarily! I distinctly remember when reviewing your personnel file a few months ago that both your parents were deceased!’

‘Uh, yes, sir. My mother was killed in an auto accident and my father hasn’t been seen or heard from in – more than a decade. I, uh, assumed that he was dead.’

‘And now you discover he is a serial killer!?’

‘No, no, I’m sure he’s not – the FBI didn’t say why they wanted to contact him.’

‘Contact him!’ Mr Battle exclaimed, now sitting ramrod-straight in his chair and glaring at me. ‘Arrest him, you mean! My God, man, you must have some idea why they’re looking for him!?’

‘I really don’t!’ I answered, feeling myself squirming. ‘Years ago – almost twenty years ago – he got in some trouble with the FCC for disrupting a television programme and the unauthorized release of mental patients, and, uh, a few other matters. But the FBI indicated they wished to see him now about something else.’

Mr Battle, still eyeing me, rose from his chair and moved slowly forward with the soft tread of a predator about to pounce on its prey before the hypnotic spell was broken.

‘This is a serious business, my boy,’ he said.

‘Yes – I mean no. I’m sure my father hasn’t done anything serious. I think they just wanted to talk to him about something.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Mr Battle, coming to a halt three feet away and gazing at me again with that sceptical-physician stare that implied he was still seeking the exact nature of my fatal illness. ‘The FBI doesn’t send two men to question a son who hasn’t seen his father in fifteen years because they only want to talk to the man.’

Mr Battle stared on another moment and then turned away with a sigh.

‘This won’t do, Larry, won’t do,’ he said as he slowly returned around the pingpong table to his seat behind it. ‘I can’t have my daughter marrying the son of someone on the FBI’s “most wanted” list.’ With another sigh he sat down and swung around to face me.

‘I want her to marry the son of a man who is respectably deceased. I think you may tell people that this FBI visit was to ask you about a former employee. Do you understand?’

‘I think I do.’

‘It’s safe to say it’s in your interest to see that your father stays boringly buried.’

‘I agree, but suppose –’

‘Your personnel file states that your father is no longer alive,’ Mr Battle said, beginning to shuffle some papers on his desk. ‘Let us be content with the official truth.’

He then rang for his secretary and turned to gaze at the monitor on his desk – the interview was over. Until I could prove otherwise, my father would probably remain, in Mr Battle’s mind, a corpse and a mass murderer.

5

Larry’s session later that day with Dr Bickers began with Larry’s claiming that when he began to lose money in his trading it made him feel as if his whole life was getting out of control, and he wanted to be able to control this anxiety with something other than tranquillizers.

Dr Bickers, ignoring Larry’s usual complaint, asked why he was so upset this afternoon. Only then did Larry briefly mention the FBI visit to his office that morning.

Dr Bickers, scrunched in his chair like a shrivelled potato, rarely made more than two or three explicit comments during an entire hour and was content now to revert to his traditional commentary.

‘Mmmmm,’ he said.

‘No, no,’ Larry said irritably. ‘After these months now with you I don’t think my problems have anything to do with my father.’

As Dr Bickers reverted to his usual silence, Larry leaned back against the back of the deep leather chair he was sitting in, and with the memory of the damned FBI visit, felt his irritation rise.

‘Not that it’s been easy,’ he said, trying to give his voice a soft confidence he wasn’t exactly feeling.

‘After all, he deserted me when I was barely twelve, disappeared to go off and lead his own mad life with no thoughts for me or my mother or sister. As you know, for a while I let that act poison me just a bit, made me resent traits he had, mentions of him, every aspect of him that I noticed in myself …. But thanks to these sessions together, I really don’t think that he’s my problem any more. It’s the trading losses.’

Larry straightened himself in his sitting position and glanced at Dr Bickers, who was peering up at him expressionlessly, a wrinkled turtle peering at a passer-by.

‘Hey, it’s not easy. I have to endure constant reminders of his life and what it stood for – not only the physical garbage of the book he wrote and articles about him, but human garbage too – people showing up and telling me how much they adored him or hated him …. Me throwing them out after the first faint words of praise.’

Larry sighed.

‘It’s been hard,’ he went on, ‘but I’ve been toughened by it. By committing myself to order and reason I think I’ve managed to pretty much erase his presence from my life. Sitting here today I can say with some confidence that that he’s not an important factor in my life.’

‘Mmmmmm,’ said Dr Bickers’ voice from off to one side. It was his third major contribution to the day’s session. Agreement? Question? Larry was so used to rambling on he barely paused to wonder.

‘I suppose some sons might have succumbed to the temptation to follow in their father’s footsteps,’ he went on. ‘But not me. I’ve gone the opposite way. And hey, look, I’m rich, successful, well adjusted – except for these recent nightmares about being caught naked, too many calls and going bankrupt – and in five months I’ll be marrying Honoria! A beautiful woman who shares all my interests and – so I really can’t complain, despite my recent losses and having a father who betrayed and deserted me and will always stand as a symbol of irresponsibility.’

‘Mmmmmmm,’ said Dr Bickers firmly.

Larry stood up and began to pace.

‘… A man who stands for all that’s perverse in human nature, a man who was willing to destroy everything to pursue his harebrained theory, a theory that defies all that is sacred, dignified, restrained and decent in life, a man who was mad, besotted with sick sexual salaciousness, a slave to inconsistency, a man who couldn’t bother to bring up a son, a poor helpless child who worshipped him, but who this madman tempted into adoration and then abandoned for fifteen years, fifteen terrible, hateful monstrous abandoned years that I had to live through until this moment when I am … uh … at last … at last … uh … cured.’

White-faced, breathing heavily and with fists clenched, Larry stopped pacing and turned to face Dr Bickers.

Dr Bickers, his chin lowered toward his chest, glanced up over his rimless glasses.

‘Mmmmmm,’ he suggested.