The Search for the Dice Man. Luke Rhinehart

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ