The Search for the Dice Man

‘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.

‘Oh, Jesus, him,’ he said affably. ‘That guy just about drove Putt into the loony bin.’

‘You remember the case?’

‘Sure,’ said Cooper. ‘I mean how many guys accused of something tell us the dice told them to do it? Drove Putt bananas. One day this guy Rhinehart would confess to half the things we were after him for, and the next he’d say the dice had told him to lie in confessing, but that now the truth was that he was innocent. ’Course the dice told him to say that too. Poor Putt.’

‘Where might I find him?’

‘Putt thought Rhinehart was a murderer, embezzler, rapist, forger, traffic violator and general all-round menace.’ Cooper went on, ignoring the question. ‘But until that lime he helped those Commie radicals raid the TV station he could never prove anything. Had to go after him for breaking FCC regulations. Putt was on the case for seven months officially and two years after that on his own – after Rhinehart jumped bail.’

‘Did he find any leads?’

‘Not so you’d notice,’ said Cooper. ‘He got pretty closed-mouth about it after a while, though. A little nuts, you know? He told me once just before he left the force that he prayed every night that God would give the man what he deserved. “What’s that?” I asked. “Castration and dismemberment,” says Putt.’ Detective Cooper laughed.

‘Do you have any idea how I might locate this Mr Putt?’ I pressed again, irritably.

‘Sure,’ said Cooper. ‘Try the FBI. Putt got his law degree and joined the bureau. He likes to wear suits.’

I couldn’t decide whether to pursue the Putt lead into the FBI or not. It seemed a little silly to go and ask them where Luke was when just two weeks before they had come to me with the same question. Instead I decided to see what I could find out from the World Star.

Kurt Lyman was a ton of fun. He received me in his office at the World Star with a hearty handshake and a big grin. He was a small wiry man whose conviviality seemed inconsistent with his slight build. His office was a mess and throughout our talk a chunky secretary kept scurrying in and out, scavenging for papers or notes either on the desk or in a file cabinet, but ignoring Lyman and me as if we were custodial help.

‘So you’re the guy’s son, huh?’ asked Lyman after he had motioned me to a chair still slightly buried in papers and had himself sprawled back in the tip back chair behind his desk. ‘He must be raking in millions, right?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ I answered irritably. ‘I haven’t seen him in years and need to locate him.’

‘Hey, if I had a daddy who was worshipped by thousands of assholes with money I’d want to find him too.’

I did a wondrous job of not showing active displeasure.

‘You indicated in your article that no one seemed to know for sure where this Luke Rhinehart was,’ I went on. ‘Do you have any ideas about where I might look for my father or how I might find him? I assume you have a lot of material that you didn’t include in your article.’

‘Hey, I never even went to the place,’ Lyman countered easily. ‘The whole article is based on this girl who came to us. Even the photo of the church comes from some Polaroid she took when she was there.’

‘Did she say she’d ever met this Luke Rhinehart?’

‘Met your father?’ echoed Lyman, grinning. ‘No, she says she met some people who claimed they had seen him in the commune – one girl even claimed the Big Dice Daddy fucked her in the orgy room – but our source herself never saw him.’

‘Why didn’t your paper send someone to the commune to dig up some more juicy stuff?’

‘Funny you should ask,’ said Lyman, poking at his nose with the eraser end of a pencil. ‘Griggs wanted to go for it but seems the girl couldn’t tell east from west or Paris from Pittsburgh. She says a girlfriend drove her there through a lot of back-country roads someplace down in Virginia or North Carolina or Kentucky. We spent about half an hour over some road maps with her and we might as well have been throwing darts. We couldn’t narrow it down any better than a big circle of more than a hundred and fifty miles’ diameter. Turns out she was asleep or stoned most of the way.’

‘She doesn’t sound like too reliable a source.’

‘Reliable source!’ snorted Lyman with a grin. ‘Christ, compared to some of our sources she was integrity incarnate. She was simple, sincere and spacey. Everything in that article of mine is the God’s truth by the standards of the World Star.’

‘So the commune exists and people say that my father is there,’ I suggested, looking at Lyman sceptically.

‘Yep.’

‘Is there a chance I can talk to the girl?’

‘Sure, there’s a chance,’ said Lyman, tipping forward in his chair and vaguely shuffling among some of the papers on his desk. ‘But not much of a one. She gave us a phone number in Pennsylvania where she said she was going, but when I phoned there a week ago to ask her something, they said she’d never showed up and they wanted nothing to do with her.’

‘Can I have that phone number?’ I asked.

Lyman was still groping absently at his papers.

‘The number?’ he said and finally looked up at me. ‘Of course not,’ he added. ‘We have to protect our sources.’

13

More than two months before Larry had been visited by the FBI Jeff had known he could take it no more. He saw clearly that there was some Malignant Force permeating the financial markets that was perversely working to thwart his every move. Whenever he or Larry would be making a profit on a trade Jeff would be furiously wondering how this Malignant Force was using this temporary profit to trick them into a much greater loss. Jeff had concluded then that every profitable trade was in fact a demonic trick to lure Jeff on, to give him a false sense of hope, to make him believe that he still might possibly make money as a futures trader.

He couldn’t tell Larry about his new discovery. Larry was an agnostic. Larry had no sense of the Divine which moved through and controlled all things, especially the Malignant Divine. But Jeff knew. Jeff was a believer. The Gods did not take kindly to mere humans presuming to be able to predict the future. And what was futures trading if not the arrogant act of a man thinking he could predict the direction of the price of something? The Greeks called it hubris. The Hebrews called it pride. The results were the same: the arrogant presumer ended up a cripple, a crackpot or a clutz.

Jeff had finally decided to do something to end his madness. No longer would he challenge the Gods’ domain over the future. He would never again presume to know something that only the Gods could know. He would become religious. He would honour the Gods. He would acknowledge that only factual knowledge should or could be used to take an investment position. He solemnly vowed that he would never voluntarily trade again except on the basis of privileged insider information. That, he knew, the Gods could accept.

Cheating was not presumptuous. Indeed, the Gods expected it of man. Cheating was a man’s way of acknowledging that he knew no way of beating the laws of chance. Cheating was, in fact, the rational man’s answer to the great Mystery of Life. Some men of course simply surrendered to the laws of chance and let themselves be buried by random events, content to be rich or poor on the basis of something no more purposeful than the toss of a coin. Not Jeff. Not a full American. The American way was to attack the unexpected, eliminate the unexpected, control the unexpected. In the futures markets there was only one reliable way: you cheated.

It was an incredible breakthrough for Jeff when he had this religious conversion. He felt like a gay must feel who, after many years of trying to go straight, suddenly and finally gives in to his deepest desires, and becomes what he fundamentally is. He’d known for almost a year of a certain person, X, who was able to give insider information to certain people, information which tended to make those certain people look very brilliant to others who had no such means of being certain. It had filled Jeff with gloomy and agonized anguish to know that Pete Riddles of Shearson was getting promoted and doubting his bonus because he accepted that certain person’s info, while Jeff, corrupted by the influence of Larry, still desperately believed that intelligence and skill could permit him to triumph over the future and futures and the Gods.

But then, luckily, Larry’s system had begun to produce losses with almost the same dull consistency that it used to produce gains. The Gods were beginning to make their move on Larry. Jeff would save Larry. Jeff would confess his hubris to the Gods, agree never to challenge their domain over the future again, and make money for BB&P by cheating – the way every great American had made his success.

He had phoned the certain person for the first time two months before Larry’s papa problems had come crashing down on him. He made his first trade based on insider information two weeks later. It had involved going short the Japanese yen the day before the US balance of trade figures were to be released. Since BB&P already were short some yen contracts Jeff was able to use his discretion to triple the position. The next day the BB&P Fund had its best profit in more than a month, and Larry had gloated that maybe their little slump was over.

Three weeks later Jeff had scored a smaller coup when ‘X’ had given him advance information on an FDA approval of an anti-Aids drug that would make a certain biotech stock soar. Jeff had quietly bought shares of the stock for various of his managed accounts and some call options also, mostly in his Aunt Mildred’s account. He’d mildly recommended the shares to Brad Burner, but not in a pushy way and Brad had ignored it. When the biostock shot up after the FDA approval of its drug, Jeff himself didn’t make any money – in fact he lost some since he had to give 20 per cent of his profits in cash to ‘X’ – but his personal stock with Brad and his clients rose considerably. For a few mad moments Jeff almost relaxed.

Now Jeff was considering a new trade based on his third surreptitious phone call to his certain person. The information he’d been given was simple: at 10 A.M. the following Wednesday, an hour and a half after bond futures trading started, the government would release the beige book report on the state of the American economy. That report, so the certain person indicated, would show that the nation’s economy was much weaker than expected. The bond market would rally. Bond futures might even soar. Jeff planned, over the next three trading days, to quadruple the long position in bond futures in the BB&P Fund and accumulate at least a million dollars of long-term government bonds for his clients and the house bond fund. In five days, if things were announced as the certain person said they would be, bond prices would rise sharply. So would bond futures.

Thus, humbly asking the Gods not to send an earthquake, revolution or presidential assassination between Friday and the following Wednesday at ten and thus mess up the works, Jeff promised the Gods to take his profits that day at noon. Far be it from him to predict what the market would do on its own without any advanced news from an insider.

FROM LUKE’S JOURNAL

Socrates once won first prize in an Athenian quiz game by answering that he knew nothing, but his answer has won few prizes since. Men continue to be ignorant of their ignorance, illuded by illusions. Playliving begins with the assumption that men are fools and the wisest man is he who plays the role to the hilt. Men’s lives are based 90 per cent on lies; about the other 10 per cent we don’t yet know enough to be sure.

Illusion and inconsistency are the two great enemies of Truth and Honesty, those twin deities of Western man which have caged him in the house of boredom. Both are basic to man’s fulfilment and happiness.

In living life freely any insight held more than the moment appropriate to it becomes an illusion and a snare. For every name, idea, insight applied over any period of time deadens that part of the universe it touches. To name is to experience. To name a part of the flow always the same way is to experience it always the same way and thus to die to life. To live freshly entails continually re-creating experience, continually unlearning, continually destroying the old names, the old truths, and creating a new world and fresh experience by giving to the flow new names.

14

It had taken Miss Claybell more than a half dozen calls to locate Agent Nathaniel Putt. He worked in the Washington bureau. When Larry got back from his less than successful trip to Mr Lyman he phoned Putt and told him who he was and what he wanted. Putt said it might be helpful if they could meet. Larry derided this was too important to delegate to Miss Claybell, and Honoria was tied up, so he flew alone to Washington.

Putt turned out to be quite different from the image conjured up by Detective Cooper’s stories. He was a large florid man in his fifties with a face that looked as if it had seen every crime ever committed and was therefore a bit sceptical about the human race. But he seemed subdued and only marginally interested in Luke Rhinehart.

‘You’re his son, are you?’ Putt asked, after seeming to browse through some of the file he had brought out on Rhinehart.

‘Yes, I am,’ said Larry. ‘I’d like to locate him.’

‘Well, I can’t see how we can help you,’ said Putt. ‘The bureau was on the case for a few years but didn’t come up with anything. Then Carter got into office and discouraged us from chasing kooks and suggested we consider crooks instead. The file’s been inactive for fifteen years – not closed but inactive.’

‘But I thought –’ Larry began.

‘Actually, old Luke here is still wanted on about a half dozen federal charges. But he’s probably long dead and buried. We got two or three reports of his death No corpse unfortunately.’

‘But I thought – two weeks ago two agents who questioned me said he was wanted for what he was doing now!’

Putt peered at Larry over his thick horn-rimmed glasses. ‘What agents?’ he asked.

‘FBI agents,’ Larry countered. ‘Two tall skinny guys. One of them left me his card. Here …’ He took out his wallet. ‘See. A man named Hayes.’

Putt leaned forward to accept the card from Larry, sniffed at it, turned it over, and then shook his head.

‘Oh, them,’ he said. ‘Just routine. The bureau has to follow up on every open case at least once every three years. They were just going through the motions.’

‘It didn’t seem that way to me,’ Larry said.

‘Nevertheless,’ said Putt, slipping the card into the file. ‘I’m afraid we can’t help you locate Rhinehart.’

‘What about his followers?’ asked Larry. ‘Didn’t they form communities around the country – little dicedoms or something like that?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Putt, looking down at his file and then slipping back into his chair. ‘According to the file here we sent agents into two or three of them.’ As Putt perused the file the furrows on his brow grew and his flushed face flushed further. ‘Seems that two of the agents left the agency without ever filing a report. The one agent who did file one claimed that nothing anyone ever said at this place was reliable so he had no new idea where Rhinehart might be.’ A nervous tic rubberbanded twice across Putt’s cheek and then subsided.

‘But do you have the addresses of some of these places?’

Putt looked a long time at Larry and then excused himself for a few minutes. He was away half an hour.

When he returned he again stared a long moment at Larry.

‘You’re determined to find your father, are you?’

‘I am,’ said Larry.

‘OK then,’ said Pull. ‘Maybe we can be of help. We’re pretty sure that there’s one of these dice centres still in existence. It’s, ah, it’s a place called Lukedom – but it’s not on any map. We’re not actually sure where it is – someplace in West Virginia or Tennessee we think, but since the case is inactive we haven’t pursued it. You interested?’

‘Of course,’ said Larry. ‘But that’s not much to go on.’

‘There’s a lady,’ said Putt. ‘An Arlene Ecstein. She might know. She was Rhinehart’s mistress or something back when everyone was crazy. Her husband was a big deal in the movement. We even think the husband, Jake Ecstein, might be behind some of these dice communes. Anyway, if I were trying to find Rhinehart I’d question her.’

‘I remember Mrs Ecstein,’ said Larry, frowning. ‘My God, she became the flakiest of them all.’

‘Yeah,’ said Putt. ‘I think you’re right. She’s probably not too reliable.’

‘You know where she is?’

‘Got an address,’ Putt replied, looking down at his file. ‘It’s five or six years old. Might help.’

After Agent Putt had escorted Larry to his door, walking with a big slow lumbering waddle, he closed the door slowly behind him. Then he slammed one fist into another and his eyes blazed. He almost leapt to his desk and punched out a number.

‘Get me Macavoy!!’ he barked. ‘Get him in here!’

While he waited, he phoned to reserve a car for Macavoy and then began pacing back and forth. For fifteen years – ever since he’d been denied a promotion because of his failures on the case – he’d been after this guy Rhinehart and come up blank every time. He’d watched as the man’s influence had waxed and waned, but always spreading pornography, promiscuity, Aids, herpes, dope, violence, unwed mothers and welfare cheats. Now his kid, who must be as nutty as his father but seemed to hide it better, had finally decided to try to find his old man. It could well be the break Putt had been looking for all these years.

When Macavoy entered he stood at polite attention until Putt turned to him. Macavoy was a deadly serious young man, an agent for only two years and convinced that two-thirds of being a successful agent lay in being steadily sombre and serious.

‘Rhinehart’s son has decided to try to find his father,’ Putt announced gruffly, his bloodshot eyes blazing.

‘How is this going to help us?’ Macavoy asked.

‘These dicequeers won’t talk to cops or reporters or us,’ Putt answered. ‘But they may be willing to talk to someone whose last name is Rhinehart and happens to be the bastard’s son. Putt stopped pacing and made a facial expression which may have been a smile.

‘I want you to put a loose tail on this kid,’ he went on. ‘Stick with him for as long as he’s going after Rhinehart senior. Stick with him until he leads us to the old madman himself.’

‘You mean Rhinehart senior?’

‘That’s right. Rhinehart. The worst threat to American society since Karl Marx.’ Macavoy nodded soberly.

15

Arlene Ecsiein’s phone number was in the Queens phone book, and it turned out she lived in Hempstead, Long Island, not exactly a bastion of kookiness. Larry was surprised on phoning her to find himself talking to a gentle grandmotherly woman who tended to babble on a bit about ‘dear old Luke’ and ‘your wonderful mother’, and ‘wasn’t it a shame …’ and so on.

He reported his meeting with Putt and his follow-up phone call to Arlene and his memories of her to Honoria and Kim at the Battles’ Upper East Side luxury apartment. Luke’s seduction of Arlene had been his first dice decision, his first step on his ‘downward path to self-destruction’ as Larry put it, or ‘first test of the malleability of the human soul’ as Luke’s followers had since put it. In any case, as Larry explained, Arlene had soon become a fanatic practitioner of the dicelife, blossoming from a frustrated and unfulfilled childless housewife to an earthy mother, career woman and ‘slut’ – the last word being Larry’s interpretation of her subsequent dicelife. Larry hadn’t seen her since he was a boy. At first Honoria had seemed put off by Larry’s recitation, but when Kim seemed eager to meet Arlene, Honoria wisely decided she would go with her fiancé.

It turned out that Arlene lived in one half of a somewhat run-down duplex in a mostly white neighbourhood that looked as if it was struggling to maintain its dignity. The doorbell didn’t work, so Larry had to bang several times on the old wooden door.

When it opened, Larry and a tense, wary Honoria found themselves facing a large, white-haired lady wearing a long brown dress with a black shawl thrown over her upper half. She peered at them through thick glasses and then smiled warmly.

‘My, how you’ve grown,’ she said, as if imitating every ancient relative since the beginning of time. ‘I’d never have recognized you if you hadn’t phoned first. How’s your father?’

Of course that’s what Larry wanted to know, so her asking was a bit of a setback. But Arlene didn’t seem to expect an answer and went babbling happily on about the good old days and wasn’t it a shame and sugar? milk? or lemon? in the tea. As Arlene bustled away towards her tiny kitchen Larry and Honoria exchanged discouraged looks from the deep ancient armchairs they found themselves buried in.