The Stochastic Man

34

I took a vacation. Not the beaches of Hawaii — too crowded, too hectic, too far away — and not the hunting lodge in Canada, for the snows of late autumn would already be descending there; I went off to golden California, Carlos Socorro’s California, to magnificent Big Sur, where another friend of Lombroso’s conveniently managed to own an isolated redwood cottage on an acre of clifftop overlooking the ocean. For ten restless days I lived in rustic solitude, with the densely wooded slopes of the Santa Lucia Mountains, dark and mysterious and ferny, to my back, and the broad breast of the Pacific before me, five hundred feet below. It was, they had assured me, the finest time of the year in Big Sur, the idyllic season that separates the summer’s fogs from the winter’s rains, and indeed it was so, with warm sunlit days and cool starry nights and an astonishing purple and gold sunset every evening. I hiked in the silent redwood groves, I swam in chilly, swift mountain streams, I scrambled down rocks thick with cascading glossy-leaved succulents to the beach and the turbulent surf. I watched cormorants and gulls at their dinners, and, one morning, a comical sea otter, swimming belly-up fifty meters off shore as he munched on a crab. I read no newspapers. I made no telephone calls. I wrote no memoranda.

But peace eluded me. I thought too much about Sundara, wondering in a blank, baffled way how I had come to lose her; I fretted about dreary political matters that any sane man would have banished from his mind in such stunning surroundings; I invented complex entropic catastrophes that might occur if Quinn failed to go to Louisiana. Living in paradise, I contrived to be twitchy and tense and ill at ease.

Yet slowly I allowed myself to feel refreshed. Slowly the magic of the lush coastline, miraculously preserved throughout a century in which almost everything else had been spoiled, worked itself on my stale and tangled soul.

Possibly I saw for the first time while I was in Big Sur.

I’m not sure. Months of proximity to Carvajal hadn’t yet produced any definite results. The future sent me no messages that I could read. I knew now the tricks Carvajal used to induce the state, I knew the symptoms of an oncoming vision, I felt certain that before much longer I’d be seeing, but I had had no certain visionary experience, and the harder I tried to attain one, of course, the more distant my goal appeared. But there was one odd moment late in my stay in Big Sur. I had been to the beach, and now, toward the end of the afternoon, I was climbing swiftly up the steep trail to the cottage, getting tired fast, breathing hard, enjoying the heady dizziness that was coming over me as I deliberately pushed heart and lungs to their limits. Reaching a sharp switchback, I paused for a moment, turning to look back and down, and the glare of the dipping sun reverberating off the surface of the sea hit me and dazzled me, so that I swayed and shivered and had to clutch at a bush to keep from falling. And in that moment it seemed to me — it seemed, it was only an illusory sensation, a brief subliminal flicker — that I was staring through the golden fire of the sunlight into a time not yet arrived, that I beheld a vast rectangular green banner rippling above a mighty concrete plaza, and the face of Paul Quinn looked at me out of the center of the banner, a powerful face, a commanding face, and the plaza was full of people, thousands of them jammed together, hundreds of thousands, waving their arms, shouting wildly, saluting the banner, a mob, an immense collective entity lost in hysteria, in Quinn-worship. It could just as easily have been 1934, Nuremberg, a different face on the banner, weird hyperthyroid eyes and stiff black mustache, and what they were shouting could just as easily have been Sieg! Heil! Sieg! Heil! I gasped and fell to my knees, stricken by dizziness, fear, amazement, awe, I know not what, and I moaned and put my hands to my face, and then the vision was gone, then the afternoon breeze swept banner and mob from my throbbing brain, and nothing lay before me but the endless Pacific.

Did I see? Had the veil of time parted for me? Was Quinn the coming fьhrer, was he tomorrow’s duce? Or had my weary mind conspired with my weary body to spawn a quick paranoid flash, crazy imaginings and nothing more? I didn’t know. I still don’t. I have my theory, and my theory is that I saw, but never have I seen that banner again, never have I heard the terrible resonating shouts of that ecstatic mob, and until the day of the banner is actually upon us I will not know the truth.

Eventually, deciding that I had sequestered myself in the woods long enough to re-establish my standing at City Hall as a stable and trustworthy adviser, I drove up to Monterey, hopped the coastal pod to San Francisco, and flew home to New York, to my dusty, untended flat on Sixty-third Street. Not much had changed. The days were shorter, now that November had come, and autumn’s haze had yielded to the first sharp blasts of the onrushing winter, slicing crosswise through the city from river to river. The mayor, mirabile dictu, had been to Louisiana and, to the displeasure of the New York Times ’ editorial writers, had advocated construction of the dubious Plaquemines Dam, had been photographed embracing Governor Thibodaux: Quinn looked sourly determined, smiling the way a man might smile who had been hired to hug a cactus.

Next I went out to Brooklyn to visit Carvajal.

It was a month since I had seen Carvajal, but he looked very much more than a month older — sallow, shrunken, eyes dim and watery, a tremor in his hands. He hadn’t seemed so wasted and worn since our first meeting, in Bob Lombroso’s office, back in March; all the strength he had gained in the spring and summer now was gone from him, all the sudden vitality which perhaps he had drawn from his relationship with me. Not perhaps: surely. For, minute by minute, as we sat and talked, color returned to him, the gleam of energy reappeared in his features.

I told him what had happened on the hillside in Big Sur. He may have smiled. “Possibly a beginning,” he said softly. “Eventually it has to start. Why not there?”

“If I did see, though, what did the vision mean? Quinn with banners? Quinn exciting a mob?”

“How would I know?” Carvajal asked.

“You haven’t ever seen anything like that?”

“Quinn’s true time is after mine,” he reminded me. His eyes reproached me mildly. Yes: this man had less than six months to live, and knew it, down to the hour, to the moment. He said, “Possibly you can remember how old Quinn seemed to be, in your vision. The color of the hair, the lines in the face …”

I tried to remember. Quinn was only thirty-nine now. How old was the man whose face had filled that great banner? I had recognized him instantly as Quinn, so the changes couldn’t have been great. Jowlier than the present Quinn? The blond hair graying at the temples? The lines of that iron grin more deeply incised? I didn’t know. I hadn’t noticed. Only a fantasy, perhaps. Hallucination born of fatigue. I apologized to Carvajal; I promised to do better the next time, if I were to be granted a next time. He assured me there would be. I would see, he said firmly, growing more animated. He was more vigorous the longer we were together. I would see, no doubt of that.

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? I’m 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.”