The Stochastic Man

39

What a morning after! For me, for you, for all of New York! Not until night was beginning to fall, that first of January, was the full impact of the previous night’s wild events apparent, how many hundreds of citizens had perished in violence or in foolish misadventure or of mere exposure, how many shops had been looted, how many public monuments vandalized, how many wallets lifted, how many unwilling bodies violated. Had any city known a night like that since the sack of Byzantium? The populace had gone berserk, and no one had tried to restrain the fury, no one, not even the police. The first scattered reports had it that most of the officers of the law had joined the fun, and, as detailed investigations proceeded throughout the day, it turned out that that had in fact been the case: in the contagion of the moment the men in blue had often led rather than contained the chaos. On the late news came word that Police Commissioner Sudakis, taking personal responsibility for the debacle, had resigned. I saw him on the screen, face rigid, eyes reddened, his fury barely under control; he spoke raggedly of the shame he felt, the disgrace; he talked of the breakdown of morality, even of the decline of urban civilization; he looked like a man who had had no sleep for a week, a pitiful shattered embarrassment of a man, mumbling and coughing, and I prayed silently for the television people to have done with him and go elsewhere. Sudakis’ resignation was my own vindication, but I could take little pleasure in it. At last the scene shifted; we saw the rubble of a five-block area in Brooklyn that had been allowed to burn by absentminded firemen. Yes, yes, Sudakis has resigned. Of course. Reality is conserved; Carvajal’s infallibility is once more confirmed. Who could have anticipated such a turn of events? Not I, not Mayor Quinn, not even Sudakis; but Carvajal had.

I waited a few days, while the city slowly returned to normal; then I phoned Lombroso at his Wall Street office. He wasn’t there, of course. I told the answering machine to program a return call at his earliest convenience. All high city officials were with the mayor at Gracie Mansion virtually on a round-the-clock basis. Fires in every borough had left thousands homeless; the hospitals were stacked three tiers deep with victims of violence and accident; damage claims against the city, mainly for failure to provide proper police protection, were already in the billions and mounting hourly. Then, too, there was the damage to the city’s public image to deal with. Since entering office Quinn had painstakingly tried to restore the reputation New York had had in the middle of the twentieth century as the nation’s most exciting, vital, stimulating city, the true capital of the planet and the center of all that was interesting, a city that was thrilling yet safe for visitors. All that had been ruined in one orgiastic night more in keeping with the nation’s familiar view of New York as a brutal, insane, ferocious, filthy zoo. So I heard nothing from Lombroso until the middle of January, when things were fairly quiet again, and by the time he called I had given up hearing from him at all.

He told me what was going on at City Hall: the mayor, worried about the effects of the riot on his presidential hopes, was preparing a sheaf of drastic, almost Gottfriedesque, measures to maintain public order. The police shakeup would be accelerated, drug traffic would be restricted almost as severely as it had been before the liberalizations of the 1980s, an early-warning system would be put into effect to head off civic disturbances involving more than two dozen persons, et cetera, et cetera. It sounded wrongheaded to me, a rash, panicky response to a unique event, but my advice was no longer welcome and I kept my thoughts to myself.

“What about Sudakis?” I asked.

“He’s definitely out. Quinn refused his resignation and spent three full days trying to persuade him to stay, but Sudakis regards himself as permanently discredited here by the stuff his men did that night. He’s taken some small-town job in western Pennsylvania and he’s already gone.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean, has the accuracy of my prediction about Sudakis had any effect on Quinn’s attitude toward me?”

“Yes,” Lombroso said. “Definitely.”

“Is he reconsidering?”

“He thinks you’re a sorcerer. He thinks you may have sold your soul to the devil. Literally. Literally. Underneath all the sophistication, he’s still an Irish Catholic, don’t forget. In times of stress it surfaces in him. Around City Hall you’ve become the Antichrist, Lew.”

“Has he gone so crazy that he can’t see it might be useful to have somebody around who can tip him to things like the Sudakis resignation?”

“No hope, Lew. Forget about working for Quinn. Put it absolutely out of your mind. Don’t think about him, don’t write letters to him, don’t try to call him, don’t have anything to do with him. You might look into the idea of leaving the city, in fact.”

“Jesus. Why?”

“For your own good.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Bob, are you trying to tell me I’m in danger from Quinn?”

“I’m not trying to tell you anything,” he said, sounding nervous.

“Whatever you are doing, I’m not having any. I won’t believe Quinn’s as afraid of me as you think, and I completely refuse to believe he might take some sort of action against me. It isn’t credible. I know the man. I was practically his alter ego for four years. I—”

“Listen, Lew,” Lombroso said, “I’ve got to get off the line. You can’t imagine how much work is stacking up here.”

“All right. Thanks for returning my call.”

“And — Lew—”

“Yes?”

“It might be a good idea for you not to call me. Not even at the Wall Street number. Except in case of some dire emergency, of course. My own position with Quinn has been a little delicate ever since we tried to work that proxy deal, and now — and now — well, you understand, don’t you? I’m sure you understand.”