The Search for the Dice Man. Luke Rhinehart

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СКАЧАТЬ I paced back and forth across my large loft living room, from the wall of bookcases with scruffy paperbacks to my trading corner with computers and fax and reference books, I realized that I felt more engaged by this decision to find my father than I had by anything in years. It almost seemed as if I’d been treading water most of my life but now at last was starting to swim out at full power. Confronting my father and all he had done to poison my life – and was now doing again! – seemed right, seemed to energize my being in a way my trading and getting and spending wasn’t. At last I was to meet the enemy. The great personal quest of my life had begun.

      Larry’s highly personal quest naturally included using his secretary, and Miss Claybell proved to be as efficient a demon digging into Luke Rhinehart’s past as she was at digging into the dirt behind corporate reports. From the New York Library she brought Larry back copies of an amazing array of old newspaper and magazine articles about Luke and his dice followers, most from the early seventies; after that Luke dropped from sight. Occasionally they stumbled upon some reference to him in more recent articles or books about the counterculture of the sixties and early seventies, most references referring to him in the past tense – as if he were already dead.

      In fact, Miss Claybell discovered two or three pulp magazines that did in fact report his death. One story had Luke tragically dying while wrestling with an alligator – a one chance in thirty-six option supposedly chosen by the dice. Since the alligator had ended up with the upper third of Luke’s body, identification was a bit tenuous, but The Investigator was certain of the facts.

      Another story had Luke dying of a heart attack while enjoying an orgy at one of his still existing dice centre communes. In this case, reported The Nation’s Reporter, Luke’s body had been cremated in an elaborate religious ceremony attended by all eighty of the commune members. One former ‘bride’ allegedly tried to throw herself on the funeral pyre, but was restrained by less fanatic hands.

      There were also references to Dr Jake Ecstein, Luke’s old friend and colleague, and to the numerous articles and books Jake had written in the seventies about chance and personality. But references to Jake too tailed off to nothing. The library seemed to be a dead end.

      And in other ways too that week was an unproductive one for Larry. He was trading exactly as he had for most of the last four years, but remained in his trading slump. And knowing that the Nagasaki Somu Bank had invested fifteen million dollars in the BB&P Futures Fund didn’t help Larry’s peace of mind. Fifteen million had seemed like small potatoes when Mr Battle had given him the news on Monday, and it was also discouraging that the Japanese insisted that Larry provide a complete accounting of every trade to good old Akito, who was staying on in New York as manager of their New York branch. Knowing that Akito and a many-billion-dollar bank were watching over his shoulder made each tiny reversal that week twice as painful as usual. Now. just when it would be most helpful for a few of his indicators to work like clockwork, they were working like Mexican jumping beans, only with even less reliable predictability.

      Jeff Cannister came into Larry’s office on Thursday of that week looking as hunched-over and pale as Larry had ever seen him.

      ‘The sky is falling,’ said Jeff blankly and, without another word, left as quickly as he’d entered.

      Larry stared after him for a long moment and then had the uneasy feeling that Jeff had finally flipped: that the losses, which were unnerving the usually cool-headed Larry, had crushed the last remnant of sanity of the excitable Jeff. With reluctance and dread he shuffled out of his office to find Jeff and see just how serious it was.

      Jeff was standing in the middle of the large open office area and staring blankly at a monitor in an unoccupied cubicle. Larry eased up to him cautiously.

      ‘How’s it going?’ Larry asked with as much casualness as his frayed nerves could manufacture.

      ‘The sky is falling,’ said Jeff, in the same dull voice he’d used in the office, a nerve jumping in his jawline.

      ‘Uh, how badly is it falling?’ asked Larry carefully. ‘Has it broken through support areas?’

      Jeff continued to stare at the monitor for a long moment and then turned blankly to Larry.

      ‘The centre will not hold,’ Jeff announced dully.

      ‘Which centre?’ asked Larry, hoping no one was watching, no one hearing.

      ‘The centre,’ announced Jeff.

      ‘Ahhh,’ said Larry, ‘that one.’

      ‘The market’s in free fall,’ went on Jeff.

      Larry glanced quickly at the monitor to reassure himself that Jeff was not reporting a factual condition of the market and saw that the stock market was doing nothing unusual. In fact, none of the futures markets was doing anything unusual either, unless you counted losing money for BB&P.

      ‘Free fall,’ echoed Larry nervously.

      ‘The nail is in the coffin,’ said Jeff.

      ‘Ahhh.’

      ‘The last helicopter has left the roof.’

      Larry took Jeff gently by the elbow and began to steer him towards the elevators. There was a doctor on duty on the third floor, a psychiatrist actually, for exactly this son of development.

      ‘Après moi, le déluge,’ said Jeff.

      Larry smiled heartily at a Vice-President for Business Affairs whom they passed.

      ‘Mighty Casey has struck out,’ announced Jeff.

      At the elevators Larry pushed the down button and waited impatiently. He suddenly realized that Jeff was the calmest Larry had ever seen him, pale and dull-eyed, but totally calm.

      ‘The missiles have left their silos and no one remembers the recall code,’ said Jeff, looking suddenly at Larry with a slight frown of worry.

      ‘It’s just war games,’ Larry suggested.

      Jeff stared at him for a minute, and then, as the elevator arrived, sighed.

      ‘And worst of all,’ said Jeff, and at last his face broke into its more familiar lines of anxiety and pain and his voice became a cry of anguish, ‘our gold positions are down another point and a half.’

      Of course as soon as Jeff began wailing uncontrollably about a point and a half movement in the price of gold, Larry knew he was totally sane and needed no medical help.

12

      When Miss Claybell had exhausted the resources of the NY Public Library I had her begin calling the New York City Police Department to see if they were still involved in the case. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on what mood I was in, no one seemed ever to have heard of Luke Rhinehart, repeatedly suggesting to Miss Claybell that she try lost and found. When Miss Claybell asked about the Lieutenant Nathaniel Putt who had been a prominent pursuer of Luke twenty years before, no one had heard of Putt either. Finally she located a Detective Cooper in the 20th Precinct who was reputedly an old friend of Putt’s, and he agreed to talk to me.

      He turned out to be a hollow-voiced man who listened stonily until I mentioned the Dice Man.

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