‘Yes,’ I managed. But as Miss Claybell turned to leave I realized a futures trader being questioned by federal agents was bound to arouse a lot of not totally favourable conjecture.
‘And I want you to be present,’ I added.
She hesitated, nodded, and then, leaving the door open, disappeared.
The two men who soon entered looked like slightly unsuccessful businessmen who’d come to try to sell me some penny stocks or a supplemental health insurance policy. They introduced themselves as Hayes and Macavoy. They sat down stiffly in the two extra chairs while Miss Claybell, memo pad in hand, stood unobtrusively – or as unobtrusively as someone who dressed like Queen Victoria could – near the door, which she gently dosed.
The one called Hayes, a hollow-cheeked man in need of a shave, glanced briefly back at her.
‘We’re here to question just you, Mr Rhinehart,’ he said. ‘Your secretary can go.’
‘She’s staying,’ I countered quickly. ‘I want a written record of our conversation.’
Hayes looked so expressionlessly at me that it was like looking at a computer screen whose language I didn’t know.
‘Have it your way,’ Hayes said. After the briefest of glances at Macavoy he cleared his throat and continued. ‘Is Luke Rhinehart your father?’
That stopped me cold. Parking tickets, male chauvinism and creative IRS deductions all disappeared, and I was left with the image of the big smiling father I’d barely known.
‘Was my father,’ I said.
Hayes stared hard.
‘You believe your father is dead?’ he asked.
‘No, I mean Luke Rhinehart was my father until he deserted his family over fifteen years ago.’
‘I see,’ said Hayes. ‘And do you know where he is now?’
‘No.’
‘When did you last speak to him?’ Macavoy suddenly interjected. He was a slender man too, but taller, gangling, younger than Hayes. He looked like a prematurely aged teenage hoopster.
‘Ten years ago,’ I answered.
‘What was the occasion?’
‘My mother … had been killed in a car accident a week earlier,’ I said as calmly as I could. ‘He called to ask if my sister and I wanted to come live with him.’
Hayes and Macavoy waited for me to go on.
‘Well?’ Hayes finally asked.
‘It was the first and only contact I’d had with him since he’d disappeared five years before. I told him to go to hell.’
Hayes blinked once and then nodded.
‘And you’ve had no contact with him since?’ he asked.
‘None.’
‘But you’ve had contact with his followers.’
‘They’ve occasionally harassed me, if that’s what you mean,’ I said irritably.
‘How have they harassed you?’
‘By showing up. By telling me how my father has transformed their lives. Or ruined their lives. By being assholes.’
Macavoy coughed.
‘Didn’t any of them ever bring you a message from your father?’
‘No.’
‘Or told you some of the marvellous things your father is doing?’ There was a sarcastic bite in the question.
‘Look,’ I snapped, abruptly standing. ‘I really don’t want to talk about this. How can you possibly be interested in pursuing my father for the stupid things he did fifteen or twenty years ago?’
Hayes looked at me a moment and then exchanged glances with Macavoy.
‘We’re not interested in what your father did twenty years ago,’ he finally said. ‘We’re interested in what he’s doing right now.’
I hesitated.
‘Right now!?’ I managed.
‘Yes.’
‘And what do you think he’s doing right now?’ I asked, sinking slowly back down into my chair.
‘We can’t go into that,’ said Macavoy. ‘Let me ask you this: has anyone been acting strangely around you lately?’
I stared at him a moment and then laughed.
‘Everyone. All the time. What else is new?’
‘I mean has anyone new come into your life that struck you as odd?’ the gangly hoopster persisted.
‘No,’ I said irritably. ‘What are you driving at?’
‘We have reason to believe that your father may try to get in touch with you,’ said Hayes.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Good,’ said Hayes. He stood. ‘But when you do, we want you to get in touch with us. Immediately.’ He reached across the desk and handed me a card.
‘May I ask why my father, after all these years, might now want to get in touch with me?’
Macavoy too now rose.
‘He’s your dice daddy,’ Hayes said. ‘Maybe the dice will tell him to.’
3
His father – his father was still alive somewhere.
After everyone had left the office, Larry sat frozen in his chair, trying to control the trembling in his hands, his lips, even his gut. The man whose betrayal had poisoned his life was now injecting some new infection into its present flow.
A successful psychiatrist, in the late sixties Luke had thought he’d discovered the cure for human misery: injecting chance systematically into one’s life. He thought he could break down the normal stuck-in-the-mud personality and thus expand human experience, role-playing, and creativity. He embarked on the mad enterprise of trying to explore the malleability and multiplicity of the human soul. He introduced himself and his patients to diceliving – the making of life decisions by casting dice. His theory was that humans tended to get stuck in trying to live with one set of beliefs, attitudes and behaviour – one self – when the healthy human would be better off feeling free to be many selves, with many inconsistent attitudes and behaviours.
In dice therapy he encouraged his patients to create a variety of optional actions or roles, and let the dice choose their behaviour for a given hour, day or week. The goal was to break down the usual single stuck self and discover new habits, loves and lives.
Of course in successfully attacking his own personality, Luke broke up his family, ruined his professional standing, alienated friends, and broke enough laws to attract numerous law-enforcement agencies.
He also became somewhat famous – or notorious, dice therapy and diceliving becoming something of a fad in the early seventies. Luke became a minor cult figure like Timothy Leary or Ram Dass, seeming to symbolize the rejection of society’s traditional values in favour of individual creativity and multiplicity. By jumping bail after his trial and disappearing from sight, he gave his life a certain romantic aura lacking in other counterculture figures who were raking in dollars on the lecture circuit, but the aura faded as his disappearance seemed increasingly final. Total absence is a difficult state to keep exciting.
As he sat in the office that day trying to steady his hand on the flat desktop, Larry remembered bitterly that as an eight-year-old child he had liked his father’s dice games, both for their own sake and for Luke’s playing them with him. He’d once cast a fat red die and seen it choose the option that he go fight a bully who’d been hassling him for months. He remembered knocking the snotnose down, and never having any trouble with him again. For a week, anyway, the event had made him a believer in the dice.
Another afternoon he’d let the dice continually choose in which direction he walk and, giggling, he kept ending up with his nose against some building’s walls.
But his father had become increasingly erratic. He remembered one morning Luke’s eating his eggs with his fingers and grunting like some animal, the eggs mostly not making it into his mouth, he and his sister giggling, Larry’s mother in the background silently glaring. And he remembered his father, who never bought a Christmas present for anyone, unexpectedly bringing home half a dozen presents to both him and his sister, including a gigantic five-foot-high bear that he’d loved for years. And of Luke’s striding around their apartment all one weekend, declar
ing in stentorian tones, like some Shakespearean actor, lines which were probably muddled quotations from plays somehow appropriate to what was happening.
But most of his memories of that time were less pleasant – of the tense parental silences, of his mother always shouting at his father and her fury when she caught Larry using the dice, shouting that if she ever caught him doing that again she’d send him to a foster home.
And when Luke finally disappeared without a word, Larry came to feel it was the dice themselves that had made him leave and ruined Larry’s life – hence his bitterness against not only his father but against everything his father had stood for.
Nevertheless, there were times when he wished he’d accepted Luke’s offer to take him in after his mother’s death, since from that moment on he’d been on his own and broke. He’d had to work full-time every summer and part-time during all his college years, while most of his classmates were apparently free to loaf. In reaction against his father he’d come to believe passionately in the value of control, order and reason. His psychiatrists pointed out that making a religion of order was a dramatic rejection of his father’s interest in irrationality and chance, and that he’d even chosen his profession in reaction against his father. One of the more notorious features of Luke’s diceliving had been his followers’ remarkable success at picking profitable stocks and bonds using the dice. At Wharton Business School Larry had determined to prove the value of reason and research over his father’s bastard deity, Chance.
But in the last five years of conquering chance with his trend lines, resistance areas, momentum figures, stochastics, point and figure charts and Eliot Waves, how often some chance event would send a market reeling in a direction contrary to that predicted by all his indicators! And how annoying that, even without any measurable chance event, markets somehow refused to perform as all his technical indicators forecast they would.
Despite Larry trying to picture his father before he’d taken up his quixotic quest for the cure to human misery, he had absolutely no memories of him before the age of eight. That was a sure sign of repression, Dr Bickers had assured him. He groaned at the thought of having to talk to Dr Bickers about this FBI visit: how the man would smirk at this archetypal return of the father. And he grimaced too at realizing that despite his dislike of Dr Bickers he seemed to be consulting psychotherapists almost as often as his father used to consult the dice. He ought to bill his father.
Over the years he’d think he was making progress, announce to friends that he’d finally made a key breakthrough, and then a few weeks later tell these same friends that his therapist was a charlatan – and possibly a secret diceperson.
His reveries were abruptly interrupted by an official buzz from Miss Claybell: Mr Battle wanted to see him in his office immediately.
Ah, yes. Nothing like a visit from the FBI to make a trader’s boss want to have a chat.
4
Mr Battle’s being both the head of the firm as well as Honoria’s father meant that his every word, sigh and stare had significance for me far beyond its merit. Every time I had a losing trade it not only meant a few fewer digits in the asset column, but also that my son-in-law rating went down several points. Rains failing to fall mainly in the plains constituted not merely a small financial disaster, but also a threat to my marriage, a marriage I devoutly and greedily desired. And there’d been far too many rains not in the plains recently.
When I neared the old man’s cavernous office I veered off into the executives’ men’s room to do a bit of grooming. Mr Battle was a stickler for appearances. A trader with shirt unbuttoned, tie and hair askew was a man communicating not concentration and busy-ness, but rather a state of being overwhelmed. Since most traders were overwhelmed, such normal grooming was elsewhere the norm, but not at BB&P. Mr Battle wanted his traders all to look as if they’d just emerged from a men’s fashion ad in the Sunday New York Times magazine section – cool, elegant and unflustered – million-dollar profits something they pulled off between aperitifs.
‘A tie is a symbol,’ he’d explained to me once when he’d caught me alone in my office with my tie off. ‘A symbol of caring about power. If it doesn’t always represent actual membership in the successful levels of society, it at least represents the wish to do so. Failure to wear a tie represents either rebellion against or indifference to everything that counts.’
‘But I’m alone in here, sir,’ I’d protested.
‘God sees,’ he said.
Mr Battle had been one of the three founding members of the firm back in 1977, Blair having the money. Pike being the brainy trader, and Mr Battle contributing a little money, his high social standing and extensive social and financial connections. Blair and Pike had had the goodness to die over the next decade, leaving Mr Battle as majority owner and de facto boss. He was legendary for his ability to charm the rich into sharing their wealth with BB&P (‘investing’), but hopelessly out of his depth in any intricate financial dealings. As long as I made money for BB&P and seemed a socially acceptable and presentable young man, I’d be in his favour. If ever I began to lose money for the firm or, even worse, turned out to be black or Jewish or the son of mongoloids, I’d be dropped with peremptory swiftness.
As I stared into the mirror to straighten my lie and brush my hair, I knew that I was not cool, would never be elegant and was as flustered as I ever got, since the thing that really flustered me was my damn father.
‘Seeing the chief honcho, huh?’ a voice said from behind me.
Changing the angle of my vision I spotted in the mirror the lugubrious face of Vic Lissome, the onetime Chief Trader I’d replaced three years earlier. Vic was seated in an open cubicle, fully clothed, reading the National Inquirer, a periodical much favoured by traders. Reading it kept them in touch ‘with the pulse of the nation’, said Vic, although I felt it kept them in touch primarily with three-headed dogs and childbearing men.
‘Yeah,’ I replied. Many people at BB&P assumed that I was a suck artist who’d somehow managed to wrap Mr Battle around my little finger, when in fact I usually lived in mortal terror of Mr Battle. I felt that everything I’d achieved had been achieved despite Mr Battle’s preferences rather than because of them.
‘You look like shit,’ said Vic helpfully from his cubicle hideaway. ‘You look like you just got hit with a Saddam Hussein.’
Ever since that August day two months earlier when Saddam Hussein had unexpectedly sent his troops into Kuwait to conquer six infantrymen and a mentally ill housewife (the only documented resisters) and thus sent various futures markets reeling off in new directions, any unexpected news development had been called, genetically, a Saddam Hussein. This ‘in’ argot would last until the next notable Saddam Hussein.
‘Actually it’s more a minor domestic problem,’ I said, not wanting to have to talk to Vic about the failure of the rains.
‘Domestic?’ said Vic. ‘You mean the old fart is not too happy with your porking his daughter?’
‘I got to go, Vic’ I said, moving quickly to the door. ‘A man who is late is a man who is not there.’
This last line was not my own but a famous quotation from Mr Battle, a man noted for pithy sayings of questionable value.
‘Ah, Rhinehart!’ he said from behind his desk, a gigantic monstrosity of glass and metal tubing that closely resembled a glass pingpong table without the net. He was a large, good-looking man with beefsteak jowls and he dressed with immaculately tailored dignity. With his magnificent sweep of bushy hair nicely streaked with grey, he usually looked as if he was posing for an ad for some exotic liqueur.
‘What’s this about the FBI raiding your office?’ he went on.
‘Raiding my office?’ I echoed uneasily. ‘It wasn’t anything like that.’
‘One FBI agent talking to someone is an inquiry,’ countered Mr Battle, spouting one of his aphorisms. ‘Two agents is a raid.’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said, stopping to stand in front of the desk like a pupil
before his principal.
‘Exactly. Now tell me all about it. I believe in confronting unpleasantness immediately and wrestling it to the ground.’
‘There, uh, was no, is no unpleasantness. The FBI was making an inquiry about someone I haven’t seen in more than fifteen years. I couldn’t help them and they left.’
‘Really!?’ exclaimed Mr Battle, scrutinizing me as if wondering if I’d really thought he’d swallow that one. ‘Fifteen years It must have been a pretty horrendous crime. Who was it, some serial killer?’
‘They didn’t say why they were seeking the man,’ I said. ‘They were vague and ambiguous. But I can assure you the whole thing has nothing to do with me or my work here at BB&P.’
Mr Battle continued to gaze at me as if wondering why I was telling all these lies.
‘And who is this man the FBI is so curious about that they seek out people who haven’t seen him in fifteen years?’
Oh, Jesus. Here it comes. Everything I’d been trying to hide.
‘Uh, a relative, sir. A man who disappeared a long ti – fifteen years ago.’
‘A relative!’ said Mr Battle. ‘That could be distressing. Not a close relative, I hope.’
Oh, Jesus.
‘I … uh … was never close to him.’
‘Who is it, an uncle?’
I stared back at Mr Battle numbly.
‘My father,’ I said.
Mr Battle looked not surprised but confused.
‘But your father is dead.’
‘Uh, not necessarily.’
‘Not necessarily! I distinctly remember when reviewing your personnel file a few months ago that both your parents were deceased!’
‘Uh, yes, sir. My mother was killed in an auto accident and my father hasn’t been seen or heard from in – more than a decade. I, uh, assumed that he was dead.’
‘And now you discover he is a serial killer!?’
‘No, no, I’m sure he’s not – the FBI didn’t say why they wanted to contact him.’