The Stochastic Man Read online

  “I suppose I did.”

  “You think he’s practicing witchcraft? You think he’s some kind of magician?”

  “I know probability theory, Bob. If there’s one thing I do know, it’s probability theory. Carvajal’s done a couple of things that go beyond normal probability curves. One is his stockmarket performance. Another is this Gilmartin thing.”

  “Perhaps Carvajal gets his newspapers delivered a month in advance,” Lombroso said.

  He laughed. I didn’t.

  I said, “I have no hypotheses at all. I only know that Carvajal and I operate in the same kind of business, and that he’s so much better at it than I am there’s no comparison. What I tell you now is that I’m baffled and a little frightened.”

  Lombroso, calm to the point of seeming patronizing, drifted easily across his majestic office and stared a moment into his showcase of medieval treasures. At length he said, speaking with his back turned, “You’re being excessively melodramatic, Lew. The world is full of people who frequently make lucky guesses. You’re one yourself. He’s luckier than most, sure, but that doesn’t mean he can see the future.”

  “All right, Bob.”

  “Does it? When you come to me and say the probability of an unfavorable public response to this or that piece of legislation is thus-and-such, are you seeing into the future, or just taking a guess? I never heard you claim clairvoyance, Lew. And Carvajal—”

  “All right!”

  “Easy, man.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Can I get you a drink?”

  “I’d like to change the subject,” I said.

  “What would you like to talk about next?”

  “Oil gellation policy.”

  He nodded blandly. “The City Council,” he said, “has had a bill in committee all spring that calls for gellation of all oil aboard tankers coming into New York Harbor. Environmentalists are for it, naturally, and, naturally, the oil companies are against it. Consumer groups aren’t too happy about it because the bill is bound to push up refining costs, which means retail price increases. And—”

  “Don’t tankers carry gelling equipment already?”

  “They do, yes. Been a federal regulation since, oh, ‘83 or so. The year they first began the heavy offshore pumping in the Atlantic. Whenever a tanker has an accident that causes structural rupture and there’s a chance of an oil spill, a nozzle system sprays all the crude in the damaged section with gelling agents that turn the oil into a solid glob, right? Which keeps the oil inside the tank, and even if the ship breaks up altogether the gelled oil floats in big chunks that can easily be scooped up. Then they simply have to heat the gel to—what is it, 130 degrees Fahrenheit?—and it turns back into oil. But it takes three or four hours just to spray the stuff into one of those huge tanks, and another seven or eight for the oil to gel, so we have a period of maybe twelve hours following the onset of gellation in which the oil is still fluid, and a lot of oil can escape in twelve hours. So City Councilman Ladrone has this plan requiring oil to be gelled as a routine step in transporting it by sea to refineries, not just as an emergency response in case a tanker cracks open. But the political problems are—”

  “Do it,” I said.

  “I have a stack of pro and con position papers that I’d like you to see before—”

  “Forget them. Do it, Bob. Get that bill out of committee and into law this week. Effective, say, June first. Let the oil companies scream all they want. Have the bill enacted and have Quinn sign it with a very visible flourish.”

  “The big problem,” Lombroso said, “is that if New York enacts a law like that and the other Eastern Seaboard cities don’t, then New York will simply cease to serve as a port of entry for crude oil heading toward metropolitan-area refineries, and the revenue that we lose will be—”

  “Don’t worry about it. Pioneers have to take a few risks. Get the bill rammed through, and when Quinn signs it have him call upon President Mortonson to put a similar bill before Congress. Let Quinn stress that New York City is going to protect its beaches and harbors no matter what, but that he hopes the rest of the country won’t be too far behind. Got it?”

  “Aren’t you pushing ahead too fast with this, Lew? It’s not like you just to issue ex cathedra instructions like this when you haven’t even studied the—”

  “Maybe I can see the future, too,” I said.

  I laughed. He didn’t.

  Bothered as he was by my insistence on haste, Lombroso did the needful. We conferred with Mardikian, Mardikian spoke with Quinn, Quinn passed the word to the City Council, and the bill became law. The day Quinn was due to sign it, a delegation of oil-company lawyers showed up at his office to threaten, in their politely oily way, a harrowing court fight if he didn’t veto the measure. Quinn sent for me and we had a two-minute discussion. “Do I really want this law?” he asked, and I said, “You really do,” and he sent the oil lawyers away. At the signing he delivered an impromptu and impassioned ten-minute speech in favor of national mandatory gellation. It was a slow day for the networks, and the heart of Quinn’s speech, a lively two-and-a-half-minute segment about the rape of the environment and man’s determination not to acquiesce passively, made it into the night’s news programs from coast to coast.

  The timing was perfect. Two days later the Japanese supertanker Exxon Maru was rammed off California and broke apart in a really spectacular way; the gelling system malfunctioned and millions of barrels of crude oil fouled the shoreline from Mendocino to Big Sur. That evening a Venezuelan tanker heading for Port Arthur, Texas, experienced some mysterious calamity in the Gulf of Mexico that spilled a load of ungelled oil on the shores of the whooping crane wildlife refuge near Corpus Christi. The next day there was a bad spill somewhere off Alaska, and, just as though these three awful spills were the first the world had ever known, suddenly everybody in Congress was deploring pollution and talking about mandatory gellation—with Paul Quinn’s brand-new New York City legislation frequently being mentioned as the prototype for the proposed federal law.

  Gilmartin.

  Gellation.

  One tip remained: Socorro for Leydecker before summer. Get to him early.

  Cryptic and opaque, like most oracular pronouncements. I was entirely stopped by it. No stochastic technique at my command yielded a useful projection. I doodled a dozen scenarios and they all came out bewildering and meaningless. What kind of professional prophet was I when I was handed three solid clues to future events and I could turn a trick on but one out of the three?

  I began to think I ought to pay a call on Carvajal.

  Before I could do anything, though, stunning news rolled out of the West. Richard Leydecker, governor of California, titular leader of the New Democratic Party, front-running candidate for the next presidential nomination, dropped dead on a Palm Springs golf course on Memorial Day at the age of fifty-seven, and his office and power descended to Lieutenant-Governor Carlos Socorro, who thereby became a mighty political force in the land by virtue of his control of the country’s wealthiest and most influential state.

  Socorro, who now would command the huge California delegation at next year’s national New Democratic convention, began making king-making noises at his very first press conferences, two days after Leydecker’s death. He managed to suggest, apropos of practically nothing, that he regarded Senator Eli Kane of Illinois as the most promising choice for next year’s New Democratic nomination—thereby setting instantly into motion a Kane-for- President boom that would become overwhelming in the next few weeks.

  I had been thinking about Kane myself. When the news of Leydecker’s death came in, my immediate calculation was that Quinn should now make a play for the top nomination instead of the vice-presidency—why not grab the extra publicity now that we no longer needed to fear a murderous struggle with the omnipotent Leydecker?—but that we still should contrive things so that Quinn lost out on the convention floor to some older and less glamorous man, who then woul
d go on to be trounced by President Mortonson in November. Quinn thus would inherit the fragments of the party to rebuild for 2004. Somebody like Kane, a distinguished-looking but hollow party-line politician, would be an ideal man for the role of the villain who deprives the dashing young mayor of the nomination.

  For Quinn to move into serious contention against Kane, though, we would need Socorro’s support. Quinn was still an obscure figure to much of the country, and Kane was famous and beloved in the vast mid-American heartland. Backing from California, giving Quinn the delegates from the two biggest states if not much else, would enable him to make a decent losing fight against Kane. I figured that we would let a tasteful interval go by, perhaps a week, and then start making overtures to Governor Socorro. But Socorro’s instant endorsement of Kane changed everything overnight and undercut Quinn completely. Suddenly there was Senator Kane touring California at the side of the new governor and emitting orotund bleats of praise for Socorro’s administrative skills.

  The fix was in and Quinn was out. A Kane-Socorro ticket was obviously in the making, and they would steamroller into next year’s convention with a first-ballot nomination locked up. Quinn would merely look quixotic and ingenuous, or, worse, disingenuous, if he tried to mount a floor fight. We had failed to get to Socorro in time, despite Carvajal’s tip, and Quinn had lost a chance to acquire a potent ally. No fatal damage had been done to Quinn’s 2004 presidential chances, but our tardiness had been costly all the same.

  Oh, the chagrin, the same, the obloquy! Oh, the bitter onus, Nichols! Here, says the strange little man, here is a piece of paper with three pieces of the future written on it. Take such action as your own prophetic skills tell you is desirable. Fine, you say, thanks a million, and your skills tell you nothing, and nothing is what you do. And the future slides down around your ears to become the present, and you see quite clearly the things you should have done, and you look foolish in your own eyes.

  I felt humble. I felt worthless.

  I felt that I had failed some sort of test.

  I needed guidance. I went to Carvajal.

  16

  This is a place where a millionaire gifted with second sight lives? A small grimy flat in a squat dilapidated ninety-year-old apartment house just off Flatbush Avenue in deepest Godforsaken Brooklyn? Going there was an experiment in foolhardiness. I knew—anybody in the municipal administration quickly gets to know—which areas of the city had been written off as out of bounds, beyond hope of redemption, outside the rule of law. This was one of them. Beneath the veil of time and decay I could see the bones of old residential respectability here; it had been a district of lower-middle-class Jews once, a neighborhood of kosher butchers and unsuccessful lawyers, and then lower-middle-class black, and then slum black, probably with Puerto enclaves, and now it was just a jungle, a corroding wasteland of crumbling little red-brick semidetached two-family houses and soot-filmed six-story apartment buildings, inhabited by drifters, sniffers, muggers, muggers of muggers, feral cat packs, short-pants gangs, elephant rats, and Martin Carvajal. “There?” I blurted when, having suggested a meeting to Carvajal, he suggested we hold it at his home. I suppose it was tactless to be so astonished at where he lived. He replied mildly that no harm would come to me. “I think I’ll arrange for a police escort anyway,” I said, and he laughed and said that was the surest way to invite trouble, and he told me again, firmly, to have no fear, that I would be in no peril if I came alone.

  The inner voice whose promptings I always obey told me to have faith, so I went to Carvajal without a police escort, though not without fear.

  No cab would go into that part of Brooklyn and pod service, of course, does not reach places like that. I borrowed an unmarked car from the municipal pool and drove it myself, not having the gall to risk a chauffeur’s life out there. Like most New Yorkers, I drive infrequently and poorly, and the ride had perils of its own. But in time I came, undented if not undaunted, to Carvajal’s street. Filth I had expected, yes, and rotting mounds of garbage in the street, and the rubble-strewn sites of demolished buildings looking like the gaps left by knocked-out teeth; but not the dry blackened corpses of beasts in the streets—dogs, goats, pigs?—and not the woody-stemmed weeds cracking through the pavement as if this were some ghost town, and not the reek of human dung and urine, and not the ankle-deep swirls of sand. A blast of oven heat hit me when I emerged, timidly and with misgivings, from the coolness of my car. Though this was only early June, a terrible late-August heat baked these miserable ruins. This is New York City? This might have been an outpost in the Mexican desert a century ago.

  I left the car set on full alarm. Myself, I was carrying a top-strength anti-personnel baton and wearing a hip- hugging security cone warranted to knock any malefactor a dozen meters. Still I felt hideously exposed as I crossed the dreary pavement, knowing I had no defense against a casual sniper pot-shotting from above. But though a few sallow-faced inhabitants of this horrendous village eyed me sourly from the darkness behind their cracked and Jagged windows, though a few lean-hipped street cowboys gave me long bleak glances, no one approached me, no one spoke to me, there were no fourth-floor fusillades. Entering the sagging building where Carvajal lived, I felt almost relaxed: maybe the neighborhood had been much maligned, maybe its dark reputation was a product of middle-class paranoia. Later I learned I would never have lasted sixty seconds outside my automobile if Carvajal hadn’t given orders insuring my safety. In this parched jungle he had immense authority; to his fierce neighbors he was a sort of warlock, a sacred totem, a holy fool, respected and feared and obeyed. His gift of vision, no doubt, used judiciously and with overwhelming impact, had made him invulnerable here—in the jungle no one trifles with a shaman—and today he had spread his mantle over me.

  His apartment was on the fifth floor. There was no elevator. Each flight of stairs was a grim adventure. I heard the scurrying of giant rats, I choked and retched at foul unfamiliar odors, I imagined seven-year-old murderers lurking in every pool of shadow. Without incident I reached his door. He opened before I could find the bell. Even in this heat he wore a white shirt with buttoned collar, a gray tweed jacket, a brown necktie. He looked like a schoolmaster waiting to hear me recite my Latin conjugations and declensions. “You see?” he said. “Safe and sound. I knew. No harm.”

  Carvajal lived in three rooms: a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen. The-ceilings were low, the plaster was cracking, the faded green walls looked as if they had last been painted in the days of Tricky Dick Nixon. The furniture was even older, with a Truman-era look to it, floppy and overstuffed, floral slipcovers and sturdy rhinocerous legs. The air was unconditioned and stifling; the illumination was incandescent and dim; the TV was an archaic table model; the kitchen sink had running water, not ultrasonics. When I was growing up in the mid-1970s, one of my closest friends was a boy whose father had died in Vietnam. He lived with his grandparents, and their place looked exactly like this one. Carvajal’s apartment eerily recaptured the texture of mid-century America; it was like a movie set, or a period room at the Smithsonian.

  With remote, absentminded hospitality he settled me on the battered living-room sofa and apologized for having neither drink nor drug to offer me. He was not an indulger, he explained, and very little was sold in this neighborhood. “It doesn’t matter,” I said grandly, “A glass of water will be fine.”

  The water was tepid and faintly rusty. That’s fine, too, I told myself. I sat unnaturally upright, spine rigid, legs tense. Carvajal, perching on the cushion of the armchair to my right, observed, “You look uncomfortable, Mr. Nichols.”

  “I’ll unwind in a minute or two. The trip out here—”

  “Of course.”

  “But no one bothered me in the street. I have to confess I was expecting trouble, but—”

  “I told you no harm would come.”

  “Still—”

  “But I told you,” he said mildly. “Didn’t you believe me? You should have believed me, Mr
. Nichols. You know that.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” I said, thinking, Gilmartin, gellation, Leydecker. Carvajal offered me more water. I smiled mechanically and shook my head. There was a sticky silence. After a moment I said, “This is a strange part of town for a person like you to choose.”

  “Strange? Why?”

  “A man of your means could live anywhere in the city.”

  “I know.”

  “Why here, then?”

  “I’ve always lived here,” he said softly. “This is the only home I’ve ever known. These furnishings belonged to my mother, and some to her mother. I hear the echoes of familiar voices in these rooms, Mr. Nichols. I feel the living presence of the past. Is that so odd, to go on living where one has always lived?”

  “But the neighborhood—”

  “Has deteriorated, yes. Sixty years bring great changes. But the changes haven’t been perceptible to me in any important way. A gentle decline, year by year, then perhaps a steeper decline, but I make allowances, I make adjustments, I grow accustomed to what is new and make it part of what has always been. And everything is so familiar to me, Mr. Nichols—the names written in the wet cement when the pavement was new long ago, the great ailanthus tree in the schoolyard, the weatherbeaten gargoyles over the doorway of the building across the street. Do you understand what I’m saying? Why should I leave these things for a sleek Staten Island condo?”

  “The danger, for one.”

  “There’s no danger. Not for me. These people regard me as the little man who’s always been here, the symbol of stability, the one constant in a universe of entropic flow. I have a ritualistic value for them. I’m some sort of good-luck token, perhaps. At any rate no one who lives here has ever molested me. No one ever will.”

  “Can you be sure of that?”

  “Yes,” he said, with monolithic assurance, looking straight into my eyes, and I felt that chill again, that sense of standing on the rim of an abyss beyond my fathoming. There was another long silence. There was force flowing from him—a power altogether at odds with his drab appearance, his mild manner, his numb, burned-out expression—and that force immobilized me. I might have been sitting frozen for an hour. At length he said, “You wanted to ask me some questions, Mr. Nichols.”