The Search for the Dice Man Page 8

  But even as I pretended to throw myself into my trading and my life with Honoria I felt the pull of Lukedom. I finally decided that if I went the weekend before election day then even if I had to stay longer than two days at least the Tuesday of the election the markets would be closed and I’d miss only one day of trading.

  Honoria didn’t want to go with me. For one thing she couldn’t afford to take any days off from Salomon Brothers, not even the Monday before election day. For another, that part of Virginia was the pits as far as she could tell. Lukedom appeared to be located at the far southern end of the stale, buried in barren stripmine hills, probably surrounded by people who had starred in the film Deliverance. Kim seemed interested in going, but I knew that Honoria might not take too kindly to my travelling alone with Kim, so I pretended I didn’t notice her interest.

  Still, I decided to make one last effort to get Honoria to come with me. I arranged to meet her at ‘Wipples’, a fashionable financial district bar best known for having one whole wall on which customers had over the years written various stock, bond and futures recommendations. They also dated and signed them. ‘Wipples’ then saw to it that the best always remained, despite the efforts of their authors to remove them. Hence customers were able to note that one well-known Wall Street guru had urged clients to ‘sell everything’ in August 1982 just before stock were to lake off like a missile launch. Another wrote in September 1987 that the market would hit 3,000 by mid-October Instead it hit 1,750. But except for the wall – to which I’d wisely never contributed – the place was a simple, unpretentious bar that humbly charged all the traffic would bear.

  Which was considerable The bar had a reputation for being the place one went after a particularly brilliant or lucky financial coup, so going there implied one was brilliant or lucky. At any rate it implied you could afford to pay ten dollars for a shot of whisky, which certainly showed something.

  When I arrived Kim was with Honoria, and wearing a dress, one of those new short spandex things, black, that hugged the body and begged you to watch each vibration. Since it was mid-thigh-length Kim’s black-stockinged legs stuck invitingly out beneath the table. I hadn’t seen much of her since she’d gotten a part-time job promoting some Upper East Side health club.

  Honoria, like most of the other female patrons, was dressed in a more sedate and stylish manner, a mauve and white business suit which, with her blonde hair, was dramatic. As I sat down at the booth with them I couldn’t help feel my male ego swell – the two foxiest ladies in the joint.

  Kim, as far as I knew, normally avoided Wall Street types – except maybe the rebels and losers – and couldn’t usually spend much time with Honoria, their lifestyles overlapping only in that both ate, slept and peed. As Honoria waved at me, I wondered vaguely why Kim was here.

  I ordered the cheapest drink on the menu: I hated overpaying for a drink as much as overpaying for a security. Then I again urged Honoria to accompany me on my drive south to find my father.

  ‘As I understand it,’ Honoria responded, shaking her head with a mock groan, ‘I am being asked to visit a hippie commune caught in some time warp left over from the sixties. Is that right?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But I really don’t care one way or another.’

  ‘That Arlene Ecstein certainly didn’t turn out to be a hippie,’ suggested Kim.

  ‘That’s true,’ said Honoria. ‘If your father has degenerated into the male equivalent of Mrs Ecstein, then I suppose our worst worry would be that we’ll be bored to death.’

  ‘But it would be nice if some of the sixties was still alive today,’ Kim went on. ‘That two or three people still existed who weren’t chained to chasing money and ripping each other off.’

  ‘In those days,’ said Honoria, ‘parents were so stupidly liberal, their rebellious children didn’t have to worry about money – doting parents sent moneygrams. Today we know better. Rebellious youth are disinherited before their hair even reaches the back of their neck. Reserve your compassion for condors and spotted owls.’

  ‘Actually it’s that we know better now,’ I said, thinking that the sixties and my father were part of the same sickness. ‘We want to make something of our lives instead of drifting with some flow that eventually strands us in a bog.’

  ‘Yes, but the flowing and the bogs often seem so much more interesting than the upward march on the treadmill,’ said Kim, grinning a challenge at me.

  ‘Nonsense,’ snapped Honoria, wriggling her bottom on the chair in annoyance. ‘What’s wrong with minding the store? Perhaps for you and the sixties the treadmill symbolizes repetitious drudgery. For us it symbolizes staying in shape and getting ahead.’

  ‘Maybe so, but getting ahead for what?’ countered Kim, her eyes getting brighter and a flush appearing on her cheeks. ‘Staying in shape for what? As far as I can see people stay in shape in order to do better on the treadmill, and get ahead in order to get further ahead. Where’s the joy? Where’s the payoff?’

  ‘The payoff is a six-figure income,’ said Honoria. ‘Not to mention that you yourself are being paid to get people to pay good money to use the treadmills.’

  ‘Touché,’ said Kim with a grin. ‘But I’d still like to know if a place exists where people don’t care about the amount of their income.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure you can find them all over,’ conceded Honoria. ‘And they’re undoubtedly living in wrecks and hovels. You know, Kim, you might be living in one yourself if it weren’t for us treadmill types.’

  ‘Touché again!’ Kim said. ‘But remember, I often have lived in tents, teepees, shacks and hovels. I just visit you and Uncle Willy every now and then to get back to my roots.’

  ‘You’d probably be right at home in Lukedom, then,’ commented Honoria, signalling to a passing waiter for another drink.

  ‘This is all very nice,’ I interrupted, shaking my head at the sparring, and then addressing Honoria. ‘But I’d still like you to come with me.’ I reached across and took her hand and went on with an exaggerated seriousness. ‘Come and console me as I plunge into the lower depths in an effort to redeem my long-lost father and win your hand in marriage.’

  ‘Silly boy,’ said Honoria, mollified. ‘I think the myth insists the prince go off by himself and slay the dragon. He doesn’t drag the princess along with him.’

  ‘That’s right,’ agreed Kim. ‘Maybe you should take me instead. I’ll be Sancho Panza to your Don Quixote. And then maybe I’ll stay in Lukedom and become a cube or whatever you call your father’s followers.’

  ‘I call them jerks,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, take Kim,’ said Honoria, stiffening. ‘She won’t mind a little mud and diarrhoea and, fitting in, she might find out things you couldn’t.’

  ‘I’m not taking Kim,’ I said firmly, fighting the racing of my pulse at the prospect. ‘I want you to go – just for a few days. It’ll certainly be more interesting than another trek upstate.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Honoria. As she paused to reconsider, she finished the last of her drink. ‘Just until Sunday night. You promise?’

  ‘Hey, I either find my father or get a lead or I don’t. How long can it take to get an address?’

  ‘You don’t love me,’ moped Kim exaggeratedly. ‘You prefer your fiancée to me.’

  ‘It can take a long lime to get an address – as the FBI has discovered,’ commented Honoria, her mind on the business trip and ignoring Kim’s taunt.

  ‘Well?’ I persisted, still holding Honoria’s hand.

  ‘I suppose I’ll have to come along just to keep you out of trouble,’ sighed Honoria.

  I smiled and released her hand.

  ‘Good,’ I announced, having managed to keep chaos again at bay.

  Although also smiling, Kim shook her head.

  ‘Lukedom will be wasted on you two,’ said Kim. ‘It’ll be like sending two nuns to a Playboy mansion.’

  ‘Or two Kims to a meeting of securities analysts.’ countered Honoria, standi
ng up to leave. ‘But duty calls.’

  ‘Says who?’ said Kim.

  On our drive south, Honoria and I stayed that first night at a small motel in northern Virginia, arriving at about ten, Honoria a trifle irritated that we’d passed up a Holiday Inn a half-hour earlier and had to settle for something called ‘The Molvadian Motel’ on the outskirts of nowhere. Actually the room was indistinguishable from one in a Holiday Inn – except perhaps to the two architects involved – and the television offerings were absolutely identical.

  Being young and engaged, and intelligent and well brought up, we got right to it after quick showers and made hot and horny love for forty minutes. Then we found our attentions wandering to a PBS special on the greenhouse effect. This led us naturally to a serious discussion of the investment possibilities inherent in Long Island and Miami being three feet under water and the Berkshires becoming the new sun belt – possibly the new east coast line as well. We were both annoyed that the greenhouse effect would apparently take effect only very slowly over the next half-century, thus minimizing the possibilities of dramatic short-term capital gains.

  Nevertheless, we concluded that we should be bullish on the American midwest and sell short the south east, since the latter was likely to become either a desert or part of the Atlantic Ocean, either of which alternatives would decrease its value. We discussed ways of selling short the south east but could think of nothing better than shorting the stock of Disney whose Disney World in Orlando, unless convened to an underwater theme park, would suffer a pronounced decrease in both gross and net. Cotton prices would soar. Companies involved in building bridges would do well. Perhaps boat-building would make a comeback.

  We were soon as deeply engrossed in our speculations about how to play the greenhouse effect as we had been earlier in our lovemaking, the only difference being we reached no climax in our discussion. Instead Honoria suddenly found our speculations the most boring and unproductive thing she’d done in weeks and announced she was going to sleep. I made a few tentative pokes with various parts of my anatomy at various parts of hers, but receiving nothing more encouraging than a rather unsexy mooing sound, I soon rolled over to go to sleep. However, I spent the next fifteen minutes daydreaming about cornering the market in sugar beets just before the millions of acres of sugar beet fields were flooded, thus becoming the richest man in the world since the Hunt family. Vaguely, just as I fell asleep, I remembered that the Hunt brothers had recently declared bankruptcy.

  FROM LUKE’S JOURNAL

  In the beginning was Chance, and Chance was with God and Chance was God: of this much we and sophisticated twentieth-century scientists are certain. While the old physics saw purpose, the new sees chance. When the old saw reassuring and ubiquitous causal nexus, the new sees ubiquitous randomness. When the old probed deeper they always found cause; when the modern physicist probes deeper he always finds chance.

  ‘Was God playing dice when he created the universe?’ The New York Times asked a Nobel Prize-winning biologist.

  ‘Yes,’ was the reply.

  17

  The next day we ploughed on. Crossing the flat heartland of the central valley of Virginia I concluded that after you’d seen one cornfield you’d seen them all – unless of course I was long or short corn futures, in which case I’d have gotten out of the car every thirty miles to measure the height of the corn.

  After two hours I took over the driving and Honoria settled back into the passenger seat. But I continued a silent brooding that had begun at breakfast and Honoria apparently noticed it.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘the reason you’re all hung up about your father is the old cliché that you’re probably more like him than you admit.’

  ‘I’m nothing like him,’ I said.

  ‘Not in any way?’ she persisted.

  ‘I suppose we both like the excitement of taking risks,’ I finally said. ‘That’s the only thing we have in common.’

  ‘Taking risks?’ said Honoria with a frown. ‘How so?’

  ‘That’s my job!’ I said with some exasperation. ‘You know that. There are two kinds of trading in futures. As you know, the whole purpose of hedging is to reduce risk – a kind of insurance policy against other positions one has in other markets. But I’m not a hedger. Jeff is our firm’s hedger. My job is to make money for clients by pure speculation.’

  ‘Gambling, you mean.’

  ‘It’s not gambling!’ I shot back, taking a hand off the wheel to gesture emphatically. ‘It’s intelligent risk-taking. I suppose you could call it loaded-dice risk-taking. Gamblers at something like roulette or craps rely totally on chance, whereas I rely on knowledge, skill and analysis to overcome chance.’

  ‘But if your knowledge always beats out chance then there’s no risk,’ said Honoria with annoying reasonableness.

  ‘Damn it,’ I said. ‘It’s still risk-taking! I sometimes lose millions in a week! It’s just that in the long run my knowledge and skill beat out the pure diceplayer – beat out chance.’

  ‘You don’t have to get so excited,’ Honoria said, reaching forward to retrieve a map that had fallen on to the floor.

  ‘Look at it this way,’ I said a little more calmly. ‘I like sailing in strong winds. That’s risk-taking. But I like to prepare my boat carefully, have a skilled crew member aboard with me. and carry all the latest safety equipment. But it’s still risk-taking – intelligent risk-taking.’ I frowningly thought of my father. ‘My father, on the other hand, also liked to sail. But he thought nothing of taking some junkheap out on to the ocean without charts or safety equipment or weather projections and with a crew that had never been further out to sea than a bathtub. That’s what I call stupid risk-taking – gambling, if you will. And of course his dice decisions were the stupidest gambling of all.

  ‘I see what you’re driving at,’ said Honoria. ‘But it seems to me that the whole meaning of risk-taking is that you subject yourself to …’ she hesitated to say the word, maybe fearing it would provoke a diatribe, ‘… letting chance into your life.’

  I didn’t explode.

  ‘Well, maybe,’ I said. ‘I guess my futures speculation is a declaration of war against chance. But as you said, if chance were actually beaten, then the game and the risk and the fun would be over. Yeah, I see that, but my father somehow wants to turn that fact into some sort of worship of chance as the great liberator or life-enhancer. What he failed to admit was that too much chance is like too much order – it ruins the fun. The only thing worse than fascist order is total anarchy, and that’s what diceliving leads to.’

  ‘Well, I agree completely,’ said Honoria.

  ‘So,’ I concluded, hoping I’d won whatever argument we’d been having, ‘both my father and I enjoy risk-taking, enjoy – I admit it – the existence of chance, but I see it as an adversary that must be continually overcome while he saw it as a … as a …’

  ‘As a friend whom he liked playing with,’ finished Honoria.

  ‘Mmmmm,’ I muttered, feeling that somehow I hadn’t won the argument quite as convincingly as I would have liked.

  When I finally turned my car off the last paved highway shown on Arlene’s map we were deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southern Virginia. The dirt road the sketchmap put us on was deeply rutted and narrow. It curved and climbed and dipped through spectacular fall scenery which neither Honoria nor I noticed in the least, both being too busy feeling annoyed at being lost and pummelled around by the ruts and potholes. My Mercedes bottomed out half a dozen times, was coated with a quarter-inch of dust, and hated going in low gear almost as much as I did. If I loved my car as much as did most healthy American men I’d have been in tears.

  Finally the tortuous road spilled out on to a wider dirt road, and fifty yards from the intersection was a gate and a guardhouse with a tiny sign that said simply ‘Lukedom’. We had arrived.

  When we came to a halt near the guardhouse a young man emerged dressed in a uniform of some kind – military ca
p, jacket, boots and trousers, but each apparently of some different military service. He approached the window on my side with a decidedly unmilitary amble. I was already feeling annoyed.

  He leaned down and peered in at us.

  ‘Password?’ he asked.

  ‘Fuck the password,’ I shot back. ‘Just let us in.’

  ‘No problem,’ said the guard, amiably enough. ‘But you have to give me the password.’

  Honoria leaned towards the guard.

  ‘Chance,’ she said.

  The guard shook his head but continued to lean in.

  ‘Look, we don’t know the password,’ I said. ‘All we wan –’

  ‘You have to guess,’ said the guard.

  ‘Garbage, I said.

  The guard shook his head.

  ‘You each get one more try,’ he added helpfully.

  ‘Dice,’ said Honoria.

  ‘Bullshit,’ I suggested.

  The guard peered down at a small green notebook that appeared in one hand.

  ‘Close,’ he said, ‘but no cigar.’ He straightened. ‘The password is “February”,’ he said.

  ‘February,’ I echoed, wondering whether there was a method to the madness or if it was all a practical joke. ‘All right then, “February” I’ve said it. Let us in.’

  The guard looked in at me neutrally.

  ‘I’m afraid there’s a new password now,’ he said, looking sympathetic.

  It was some some of test. There must be some mad method behind it.

  ‘May I ask how you can change the password on a moment’s notice?’ I said. ‘How will people who know the old one now know the new one?’

  The guard shook his head sympathetically.

  ‘A password isn’t something you know,’ he said. ‘It’s something you guess.’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ muttered Honoria.

  ‘Nope,’ said the guard.