The Search for the Dice Man

‘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, declaring 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.’

‘Contact him!’ Mr Battle exclaimed, now sitting ramrod-straight in his chair and glaring at me. ‘Arrest him, you mean! My God, man, you must have some idea why they’re looking for him!?’

‘I really don’t!’ I answered, feeling myself squirming. ‘Years ago – almost twenty years ago – he got in some trouble with the FCC for disrupting a television programme and the unauthorized release of mental patients, and, uh, a few other matters. But the FBI indicated they wished to see him now about something else.’

Mr Battle, still eyeing me, rose from his chair and moved slowly forward with the soft tread of a predator about to pounce on its prey before the hypnotic spell was broken.

‘This is a serious business, my boy,’ he said.

‘Yes – I mean no. I’m sure my father hasn’t done anything serious. I think they just wanted to talk to him about something.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Mr Battle, coming to a halt three feet away and gazing at me again with that sceptical-physician stare that implied he was still seeking the exact nature of my fatal illness. ‘The FBI doesn’t send two men to question a son who hasn’t seen his father in fifteen years because they only want to talk to the man.’

Mr Battle stared on another moment and then turned away with a sigh.

‘This won’t do, Larry, won’t do,’ he said as he slowly returned around the pingpong table to his seat behind it. ‘I can’t have my daughter marrying the son of someone on the FBI’s “most wanted” list.’ With another sigh he sat down and swung around to face me.

‘I want her to marry the son of a man who is respectably deceased. I think you may tell people that this FBI visit was to ask you about a former employee. Do you understand?’

‘I think I do.’

‘It’s safe to say it’s in your interest to see that your father stays boringly buried.’

‘I agree, but suppose –’

‘Your personnel file states that your father is no longer alive,’ Mr Battle said, beginning to shuffle some papers on his desk. ‘Let us be content with the official truth.’

He then rang for his secretary and turned to gaze at the monitor on his desk – the interview was over. Until I could prove otherwise, my father would probably remain, in Mr Battle’s mind, a corpse and a mass murderer.

5

Larry’s session later that day with Dr Bickers began with Larry’s claiming that when he began to lose money in his trading it made him feel as if his whole life was getting out of control, and he wanted to be able to control this anxiety with something other than tranquillizers.

Dr Bickers, ignoring Larry’s usual complaint, asked why he was so upset this afternoon. Only then did Larry briefly mention the FBI visit to his office that morning.

Dr Bickers, scrunched in his chair like a shrivelled potato, rarely made more than two or three explicit comments during an entire hour and was content now to revert to his traditional commentary.

‘Mmmmm,’ he said.

‘No, no,’ Larry said irritably. ‘After these months now with you I don’t think my problems have anything to do with my father.’

As Dr Bickers reverted to his usual silence, Larry leaned back against the back of the deep leather chair he was sitting in, and with the memory of the damned FBI visit, felt his irritation rise.

‘Not that it’s been easy,’ he said, trying to give his voice a soft confidence he wasn’t exactly feeling.

‘After all, he deserted me when I was barely twelve, disappeared to go off and lead his own mad life with no thoughts for me or my mother or sister. As you know, for a while I let that act poison me just a bit, made me resent traits he had, mentions of him, every aspect of him that I noticed in myself …. But thanks to these sessions together, I really don’t think that he’s my problem any more. It’s the trading losses.’

Larry straightened himself in his sitting position and glanced at Dr Bickers, who was peering up at him expressionlessly, a wrinkled turtle peering at a passer-by.

‘Hey, it’s not easy. I have to endure constant reminders of his life and what it stood for – not only the physical garbage of the book he wrote and articles about him, but human garbage too – people showing up and telling me how much they adored him or hated him …. Me throwing them out after the first faint words of praise.’

Larry sighed.

‘It’s been hard,’ he went on, ‘but I’ve been toughened by it. By committing myself to order and reason I think I’ve managed to pretty much erase his presence from my life. Sitting here today I can say with some confidence that that he’s not an important factor in my life.’

‘Mmmmmm,’ said Dr Bickers’ voice from off to one side. It was his third major contribution to the day’s session. Agreement? Question? Larry was so used to rambling on he barely paused to wonder.

‘I suppose some sons might have succumbed to the temptation to follow in their father’s footsteps,’ he went on. ‘But not me. I’ve gone the opposite way. And hey, look, I’m rich, successful, well adjusted – except for these recent nightmares about being caught naked, too many calls and going bankrupt – and in five months I’ll be marrying Honoria! A beautiful woman who shares all my interests and – so I really can’t complain, despite my recent losses and having a father who betrayed and deserted me and will always stand as a symbol of irresponsibility.’

‘Mmmmmmm,’ said Dr Bickers firmly.

Larry stood up and began to pace.

‘… A man who stands for all that’s perverse in human nature, a man who was willing to destroy everything to pursue his harebrained theory, a theory that defies all that is sacred, dignified, restrained and decent in life, a man who was mad, besotted with sick sexual salaciousness, a slave to inconsistency, a man who couldn’t bother to bring up a son, a poor helpless child who worshipped him, but who this madman tempted into adoration and then abandoned for fifteen years, fifteen terrible, hateful monstrous abandoned years that I had to live through until this moment when I am … uh … at last … at last … uh … cured.’

White-faced, breathing heavily and with fists clenched, Larry stopped pacing and turned to face Dr Bickers.

Dr Bickers, his chin lowered toward his chest, glanced up over his rimless glasses.

‘Mmmmmm,’ he suggested.

6

‘Hubie’s Tavern’ was the local hangout for futures traders, and I headed there automatically after fleeing my unsatisfactory session with Bickers. Bond traders had a more elegant hangout (their ‘drinking establishment’) a few blocks down; stock brokers had a half dozen local pubs they indulged in; the clerks had their watering hole; presumably, the custodians had theirs too.

Since Hubie’s was home to two or three dozen young men (futures traders were mostly young men – there being no such thing as an old futures trader), all of whom considered themselves brilliant and daring, the tavern was considered lively and trendy. Actually it was noisy, crowded, smelly, dark and undistinguished, but since none of us ever looked at anything or anyone except each other and the occasional beautiful woman who made an appearance (a professional in every sense of the word), we thought it was terrific.

When I arrived I was immediately hailed by Brad Burner from a corner table and unthinkingly traipsed over. I didn’t usually join the daily after-hours parade to Hubie’s and had forgotten that I’d be forced to talk to people. Only as I was lowering myself into a chair did I notice that the other people in the booth were Jeff and Vic Lissome.

‘We know it’s been a bad day when Larry’s driven to drink,’ commented Brad, who was Vice President in charge of all trading and thus my only superior other than Mr Battle himself. Brad was a big, bluff man, good-looking in a rugged sort of way, who nevertheless wore clothes even more elegantly tailored than those of Mr Battle.

I slid in beside him.

‘Not a bad day at all,’ I said. ‘Just couldn’t resist seeing more of you guys.’

‘I think he’s forgetting about his two visitors today,’ said Vic, who as usual was himself quite far along the path of forgetfulness. ‘You guys must be in even worse shape than I thought.’

‘We didn’t do bad,’ said Jeff. ‘Especially compared to last week.’ Jeff had an innocence that often meant that no secret and no loss was ever long kept from the curious public at Hubie’s – or anywhere else Jeff went.

‘What’s this about visitors?’ asked Brad. ‘We getting some new clients?’

‘Yeah, tell us, Larry,’ said Vic. ‘How many shares of the BB&P Fund did the FBI order?’

‘FBI!?’ echoed Brad. Both he and Jeff looked at me in astonishment.

‘Yeah,’ I said casually. ‘They’re investigating the largest case of insider trading in history and have reason to believe Jeff’s involved.’

Jeff went so pale and looked so terrified that all three of us burst out into raucous laughter.

‘So what was it all about?’ Brad asked after we had all quieted down, although Jeff was as pale as before.

cThey wanted to find someone I knew once,’ I answered as casualty as I could. ‘I couldn’t help them. It had nothing to do with finances.’

‘Are you sure!?’ asked Jeff, as if his life depended on it.

‘I’m sure. And if we are involved in massive insider trading I sure as hell wish it would show up more on the bottom line.’

‘Yeah,’ said Brad, grinning broadly. ‘Another few months like you’ve been having and we’ll have to get Vic back in there, right, Vic?’