The Stochastic Man Read online

  He said, “Time for business. New instructions for Quinn.”

  There was only one thing to convey this time: the mayor was supposed to start shopping around for a new police commissioner, because Commissioner Sudakis was shortly going to resign. That startled me. Sudakis had been one of Quinn’s best appointments—effective and popular, the closest thing to a hero the New York Police Department had had in a couple of generations, a solid, reliable, incorruptible, personally courageous man. In his first year and a half as head of the department he had come to seem a fixture; it was as if he had always been in charge, always would be. He had done a beautiful job transforming the Gestapo that the police had become under the late Mayor Gottfried into a peacemaking force once again, and the job was not yet done: only a couple of months ago I had heard Sudakis tell the mayor he would need another year and a half to finish the cleanup. Sudakis about to quit? It didn’t ring true.

  “Quinn won’t believe it,” I said. “He’ll laugh in my face.”

  Carvajal shrugged. “Sudakis will no longer be police commissioner after the first of the year. The mayor ought to have a capable replacement ready.”

  “Maybe so. But it’s all so damned implausible. Sudakis sits there like the Rock of Gibraltar. I can’t go in and tell the mayor he’s about to quit, even if he is. There was so much static over the Thibodaux and Ricciardi businesses that Mardikian insisted I take a rest cure. If I go in there with something as wild as this, they might have me put away.”

  Carvajal stared at me imperturbably, implacably.

  I said, “At least give me some supporting data. Why does Sudakis plan to quit?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Would I get any clues if I approached Sudakis myself?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know. You don’t know. And you don’t care, do you? All you know is that he’s planning to leave. The rest is trivial to you.”

  “I don’t even know that, Lew. Only that he will leave. Sudakis may not know it himself yet.”

  “Oh, fine. Fine! I tell the mayor, the mayor sends for Sudakis, Sudakis denies everything, because as of now it isn’t so.”

  “Reality is always conserved,” said Carvajal. “Sudakis will resign. It will happen very suddenly.”

  “Must I be the one to tell Quinn that? What if I don’t say anything? If reality is truly conserved, Sudakis will leave no matter what I do. Isn’t that so? Isn’t it?”

  “Do you want the mayor to be caught unprepared when it happens?”

  “Better that than to have the mayor think I’m crazy.”

  “Are you afraid to warn Quinn about the resignation?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think would happen to you?”

  “I’ll be put in an embarrassing position,” I said. “I’ll be asked to justify something that makes no sense to me. I’ll have to fall back on saying it’s a hunch, only a hunch, and if Sudakis denies he’s going to quit I’ll lose influence with Quinn. I might even lose my job. Is that what you want?”

  “I have no desires whatever,” said Carvajal distantly.

  “Besides, which, Quinn won’t let Sudakis quit.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. He needs him too much. He won’t accept his resignation. No matter what Sudakis says, he’ll stay on the job, and what does that do to the conservation of reality?”

  “Sudakis won’t stay,” Carvajal said indifferently.

  I went away and thought about it.

  My objections to recommending that Quinn start looking for a successor to Sudakis struck me as logical, reasonable, plausible, and unarguable. I was unwilling to crawl into so exposed a position so soon after my return, when I was still vulnerable to Mardikian’s skepticism about my stability. On the other hand, if some unforeseen turn of events would force Sudakis to quit, I’d have been derelict in my duties if I had failed to give the mayor the warning. In a city forever on the edge of chaos, even a few days’ confusion about lines of authority in the Police Department could bring matters close to anarchy in the streets, and one thing Quinn really didn’t need as a potential presidential candidate was a resurgence, however brief, of the lawlessness that had roiled the city so often before the repressive Gottfried administration and in the time of the feeble Mayor DiLaurenzio. And on the third hand, I had never before refused to be the vehicle of one of Carvajal’s directives, and it troubled me to defy him now. Imperceptibly Carvajal’s notions of reality conservation had become part of me; imperceptibly I had accepted his philosophy to an extent that left me fearful of tampering with the inevitable uncoiling of the inevitable. Feeling a bit like someone who was climbing aboard an ice floe heading downstream in the Niagara River, I found myself resolving to bring the Sudakis story to Quinn, misgivings or no.

  But I let a week slide by, hoping the situation would somehow resolve itself without my interference, and then I let most of another week go past; and so I might have allowed the rest of the year to slip away, but I knew I was deluding myself. So I drew up a memo and sent it in to Mardikian.

  “I’m not going to show this to Quinn,” he told me two hours later.

  “You have to,” I said without much conviction.

  “You know what’ll happen if I do? He’ll have your ass, Lew. I had to do half a day of fancy dancing over Ricciardi and the Louisiana trip, and the things Quinn said about you then weren’t very complimentary. He’s afraid you’re cracking up.”

  “All of you think that. Well, I’m not. I had a nice sweet vacation in California and I’ve never felt better in my life. And come next January this town is going to need a new police commissioner.”

  “No, Lew.”

  “No?”

  Mardikian grunted heavily. He was tolerating me, humoring me; but he was sick of me and my predictions, I knew. He said, “After I got your memo I called in Sudakis and told him there’s a rumor going around that he’s thinking of quitting. I didn’t attribute it. I let him think I got it from one of the boys in the press corps. You should have seen his face, Lew. You’d have thought I’d called his mother a Turk. He swore by seventy saints and fifty angels that the only way he’d leave his job was if the mayor fired him. I can usually tell when a man’s putting me on, and Sudakis was as sincere as anybody I’ve ever seen.”

  “All the same, Haig, he’s going to quit in a month or two.”

  “How can that be?”

  “Unexpected circumstances do arise.”

  “Such as?”

  “Anything. Reasons of health. A sudden scandal in the department. A megabuck job offer from San Francisco. I don’t know what the exact reason will be. I’m just telling you—”

  “Lew, how can you possibly know what Sudakis is going to do in January when not even Sudakis does?”

  “I know,” I insisted.

  “How can you?”

  “It’s a hunch.”

  “A hunch. A hunch. You keep saying that. It’s one hunch too many, Lew. Your skill has to do with interpretation of trends, not with individual predictive instances, right, but more and more you’ve been coming in with these isolated shots, these crystal-ball stunts, these—”

  “Haig, have any of them been wrong?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “None. Not a one. A lot of them haven’t proved out yet, one way or the other, but there isn’t one that’s been contradicted by later developments, no recommended course of action that has definitely been shown to be unwise, no—”

  “All the same, Lew, I told you the last time, we don’t believe in soothsayers around here. Stick to broad projections of visible trends, will you?”

  “I’m only looking out for Quinn’s welfare.”

  “Sure. But I think you ought to start looking out more for your own.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “That unless your work here takes on, well, a less unconventional tone, the mayor may have to terminate your services.”

 
“Crap. He needs me, Haig.”

  “He’s starting not to think so. He’s starting to think you may even be a liability.”

  “He doesn’t realize how much I’ve done for him, then. He’s a thousand kilometers closer to the White House than he would ever have been without me. Listen, Haig, whether or not you and Quinn think I’m crazy, this city is going to wake up without a police commissioner one day in January, and the mayor ought to begin a personnel search this afternoon, and I want you to let him know that.”

  “I won’t. For your own protection,” Mardikian said.

  “Don’t be obstinate.”

  “Obstinate? Obstinate? Tm trying to save your neck.”

  “What would it hurt if Quinn did quietly start looking for a new commissioner? If Sudakis doesn’t quit, Quinn could drop the whole thing and nobody’d need to know. Do I have to be right all the time? I happen to be right about Sudakis, but even if I’m not, what of it? It’s a potentially useful bit of information I’m offering, something important if true, and—”

  Mardikian said, “Nobody says you have to be a hundred percent right, and of course there’d be no harm in opening a quiet contingency search for a new police commissioner. The harm I’m trying to avoid is to you. Quinn as much as told me that if you show up with one more way-out bit of black-magic prophecy he’d transfer you to the Department of Sanitation or worse, and he will, Lew, he will. Maybe you’ve had a tremendous run of luck, pulling stuff like this out of the air, but—”

  “It isn’t luck, Haig,” I told him quietly.

  “What?”

  “I’m not using stochastic processes at all. I’m not operating by guesswork. I see, is what I’m saying. I’m able to look into the future and hear conversations, read headlines, observe events, I can dredge all sorts of data out of time to come.” It was only a small lie, displacing Carvajal’s powers to myself. Operationally the results were the same, whichever one of us was doing the seeing. “That’s why I can’t always give supporting data to explain my memos,” I said. “I look into January, I see Sudakis resigning, and that’s all, I don’t know why, I don’t yet perceive the surrounding structure of cause and effect, only the event itself. It’s different from projection of trends, it’s something else entirely, wilder, a lot less plausible, but more reliable, a hundred percent reliable, one hundred percent! Because I can see what’s going to happen.”

  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?”