The Search for the Dice Man. Luke Rhinehart

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      ‘Those figures could have been fabricated.’

      I sighed. The trouble with Wall Street was that since so many people cheated it was hard for an honest man to be trusted.

      ‘Then why haven’t we fabricated the figures for the last eight weeks?’ I asked. ‘If we’re cheating, why stop cheating?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ said Mr Potter. ‘Perhaps you’re just being clever.’

      ‘Mr Potter, sir,’ I said, ‘for you to lose your money the firm of Blair, Battle and Pike would have to go bust. You don’t seri –’

      ‘Like Drexel, Burnham. Lambert,’ said Mr Poner.

      With the phone gripped between my right shoulder and ear, I snapped a wooden pencil in two and resisted the urge to throw the fragments across the room.

      ‘Normally, as you know,’ I answered coldly, ‘we ask clients to commit their funds for one full year. If you wish to withdraw your money I’ll personally recommend we make an exception, but you’ll have to take your 7 per cent loss. If you want your guaranteed 2 per cent profile you’ll have to wait the full year.’

      The silence on the other end of the line made me know I’d scored a direct hit.

      ‘Mmmm,’ said Mr Potter, and within thirty seconds he had hung up, having indicated he wanted to stay in the fund.

      I finally smiled and dropped the two pieces of pencil into the metal waste-paper bin. The other thing that made the BBP Fund unique was that BBP, in return for guaranteeing the investors against losses, was taking one-third of the investors’ profits, the highest profit percentage in the industry.

      I tipped back in my swivel chair and felt a little angry at Potter and his ilk. No one seemed to appreciate what I’d accomplished since October 1987.

      Up until that month – all through the 1980s – BB&P had made money the way most firms did – the old-fashioned way: by doing nothing. That is, they bought and sold stocks for other people and themselves, using all sorts of interesting theories or no theories at all, and despite all their efforts or lack thereof they made money.

      For most of the eighties if you had money you made money. You bought a condominium – you were clever. You bought a stock, any stock, you were a genius. You bought a house, any house, you were sharp. It was an era when rich dumb guys finished first and richer dumb guys finished even firster.

      Until October 1987, anyway. Then a funny thing happened. Almost everyone who for at least five years had been a genius was suddenly in one calamitous day a jerk. Seldom in human history have so many bright wealthy men awakened in just one day to discover such an unambiguous truth: that they were neither so bright nor so wealthy. Their clever condominiums became rather quickly empty and unsellable. Their genius junk bonds became ungenial junk bondage.

      We humans don’t take kindly to such awakenings. I suppose that when you lose several trillion dollars in one day you can be pardoned for not saying the obvious: all the wisdom of the previous five years had just been normal human stupidity. I’d happened to bet right on that horrible day but later I’d come to wonder whether if I’d been more mature and less cocky I might have examined 19 October 1987 a lot more carefully. Its most obvious lesson, I, like everyone else, never learned: what the market does on any given day may bear no resemblance to what it has ever done before.

      Then my secretary marched into the room without buzzing. Miss Claybell was a chubby middle-aged woman who consistently wore clothing that looked as if it had been collected from church bazaars, applied too much make-up and never had an original thought. However, she was everything I wanted in a secretary – reasonable, unemotional, efficient, obedient and totally dedicated. Her very unemotional efficiency meant, however, that her slipping into my inner office unannounced must mean something was up.

      ‘There are two gentlemen to see you,’ she announced. ‘They say they’re FBI agents.’

2

      At first I felt nothing; I just stared back at her, tipped forward in my chair and lowered my arms from behind my head.

      ‘FBI agents?’ I echoed vaguely.

      ‘They won’t say why they want to question you.’

      I looked up at Miss Claybell neutrally, but with my heart now pumping panic and my mind desperately searching for the crime I must have committed. But since I was compulsively honest in all Wall Street financial dealings, my mind was filled with unpaid parking tickets, with a nineteen-year-old Goldman Sachs broker trainee I had seduced and abandoned, a 1987 income tax return that contained several creative deductions.

      ‘Should I show them in?’ Miss Claybell asked, watching me with that bland composure that made everyone else at Blair, Battle and Pike seem slightly panicky.

      I came slowly to my feet, still staring at her uncertainly. I had an urge to pace, but managed to hold my feet to the floor, although my upper body rocked back and forth and my right hand was wrestling with pocket change.

      ‘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.’

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