The Stochastic Man

15

On the 9th day of May, 1999, between the hours of four and five in the morning, I dreamed that State Controller Gilmartin was being executed by a firing squad.

I can be so precise about the date and the time because it was a dream so vivid, so much like the eleven o’clock news unreeling on the screen of my mind, that it awakened me, and I mumbled a memo about it into my bedside recorder. I learned long ago to make notes on dreams of such intensity, because they often turn out to be premonitions. In dreams comes truth. Joseph’s Pharaoh dreamed he stood by a river out of which came seven plump cattle and seven scrawny ones — fourteen omens. Calpurnia saw the statue of her husband Caesar spouting blood the night before the ides of March. Abe Lincoln dreamed of hearing the subdued sobs of invisible mourners and beheld himself going downstairs to find a catafalque in the East Room of the White House, an honor guard of soldiers, a body in funeral vestments on the bier, a throng of weeping citizens. Who is dead in the White House? the dreaming President asks, and they tell him that the dead man is the President, slain by an assassin. Long before Carvajal entered my life I knew that the future’s moorings are weak, that floes of time break loose and drift back across the great sea to our sleeping minds. So I paid heed to my Gilmartin dream.

I saw him, plump, pale, sweating, a tall round-faced man with cold blue eyes, hauled into a bare dusty courtyard, a place of fierce sunlight and harsh sharp shadows, by a squad of scowling soldiers in black uniforms. I saw him struggling at his bonds, snuffling, twisting, beseeching, protesting his innocence. The soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder, lifting their rifles, an infinitely long moment of silent aiming. Gilmartin moaning, praying, whining, at the very end finding a scrap of dignity, pulling himself erect, squaring his shoulders, facing his killers defiantly. The order to fire, the crack of guns, the body jerking and writhing hideously, slumping against the ropes …

Now what to make of this? The promise of trouble for Gilmartin, who had made financial troubles for the Quinn administration and whom I didn’t like, or merely the hope of it? An assassination brewing, perhaps? Assassinations had been a big thing in the early ‘90s, bigger even than in the bloody Kennedy years, but I thought the fad had gone out of fashion again. Who would assassinate a drab hack like Gilmartin, anyway? Maybe what I was picking up was a premonition that Gilmartin would die of natural causes. Gilmartin boasted of his good health, though. An accident, then? Or maybe just metaphorical death — a lawsuit, a political squabble, a scandal, an impeachment?

I didn’t know how to interpret my dream or what to do about it, and ultimately I decided not to do anything. And so we missed the boat on the Gilmartin scandal, which indeed was what I was perceiving — no firing squad, no assassination for the controller, but shame, resignation, jail. Quinn could have made tremendous political capital out of it if it had been city investigators who exposed Gilmartin’s manipulations, if the mayor had risen in righteous wrath to say that the city was being short-changed and an audit was needed. But I failed to see the larger pattern, and it was a state accountant, not one of our people, who eventually blew the story open — how Gilmartin had been systematically diverting millions of dollars of state funds intended for New York City into the treasuries of a few small upstate towns, and thence into his own pockets and those of a couple of rural officials. Too late I realized that I had had two chances at knocking Gilmartin down, and I had fumbled both of them. A month before my dream Carvajal had given me that mysterious note. Keep an eye on Gilmartin, he had suggested. Gilmartin, oil gellation, Leydecker. Well?

“Talk to me about Carvajal,” I said to Lombroso.

“What do you want to know?”

“How well has he actually done in the market?”

“So well it’s uncanny. He’s cleared nine or ten million that I know of, just since ‘93. Maybe a lot more. I’m sure he works through several brokerage firms. Numbered accounts, dummy nominees, all sorts of tricks to hide how much he’s really been taking out of the Street.”

“He earns all of it from trading?”

“All of it. He gets in, rides a stock straight up, gets out. There were people in my office who made fortunes just by following his picks.”

“Is it possible,” I asked, “for anybody to outguess the market that consistently over so many years?”

Lombroso shrugged. “I suppose a few people have done it. We have our legends of great traders all the way back to Bet-a-Million Gates. Nobody I know has been as consistent as Carvajal.”

“Does he have inside information?”

“He can’t have. Not on so many different companies. It has to be pure intuition. He just buys and sells, buys and sells, and reaps his profits. Came in cold one day, opened an account, no bank references, no Wall Street connections. Always cash transactions, never margin. Spooky.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Quiet little man. Sat watching the tape, put in his orders. No fuss, no chatter, no excitement.”

“Is he ever wrong?”

“He’s taken some losses, yes. Small ones. Small losses, big winnings.”

“I wonder why.”

“Why what?” Lombroso asked.

“Why any losses at all?”

“Even Carvajal has to be fallible.”

“Really?” I said. “Maybe he takes the losses for strategic effect. Calculated setbacks, to encourage people to believe he’s human. Or to keep others from automatically backing his picks and distorting the fluctuations.”

“Don’t you think he’s human, Lew?”

“I think he’s human, yes.”

“But—?”

“But with a very special gift.”

“For picking stocks that are going to go up. Very special.”

“More than that.”

“More how?”

“I’m not ready to say.”

“Why are you afraid of him, Lew?” Lombroso said.

“Did I say I was? When?”

“The day he came here, you told me he made you feel creepy, that he gives off scary vibes. Remember?”

“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 would 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.