The Search for the Dice Man

When Arlene had returned she served them lukewarm tea with some stale Stella Dora biscuits. Then with a loud groan she settled herself down into the overstuffed couch.

‘The arthritis does get to one over the years,’ she said. ‘I hope it hasn’t hit poor Luke.

‘We were wondering where Dr Rhinehart might be,’ said Honoria, wanting to get to the point. ‘Have you heard from him recently?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Arlene ‘Luke hasn’t written or phoned me in years and years. He has to lie low, you know. The police are after him.’

‘We know,’ said Honoria. ‘Where was he the last time he wrote or phoned?’

‘Oh, that was years ago,’ said Arlene, looking off into space. ‘I’m sure he’s moved since then.’

‘Where was it?’ asked Larry.

‘Oh, here in New York, I guess,’ Arlene answered. ‘It’s all rather vague now. He wasn’t much for precision.’

‘Where’s your husband?’ Honoria asked.

‘Oh, Jake’s down south, I think,’ said Arlene. ‘He’s become a guru or priest or something, I hear, but still writing books. He’ll never stop writing books.’

‘I see,’ said Honoria.

‘He always wanted to be a king or a president, but I guess he’s had to settle for a smaller kingdom.’

‘And where exactly in the south?’ asked Larry.

‘Well, now, let me see,’ said Arlene, frowning. ‘A little town in Virginia I think. Not even on the map. Lukedom. Jake named it after your father.’

Larry and Honoria both sat up straighter in their chairs.

‘Do you know where it is?’ asked Honoria.

‘Oh, my, no,’ said Arlene. ‘Jake says it’s not on any map. That’s why he had to send me instructions about how to get there.’

‘You have instructions about how to get there!?’ said Larry.

Arlene looked surprised.

‘My goodness, that’s right,’ she said. ‘I guess I do. I never went, so I never even bothered to read them, but I know he sent them. I wonder what I did with that letter.’

While Larry and Honoria sat on the edge of their chairs – or as close as the deep, broken-springed chairs would permit – and exchanged glances, Arlene bumbled up off the couch to putter around her desk, mumbling happy apologies for her sloppiness and finally returning with a big smile and a letter.

‘See,’ she said. ‘I told you Jake had written instructions and here they are.’ She adjusted her glasses and peered down at the paper. ‘Lukedom. Dirt-road route to Lukedom. Were you thinking of visiting Jake?’

‘Yes,’ said Honoria. ‘Larry is interested in seeing his father and we thought this tittle village might have some people in it – Dr Ecstein, for example – who might have some idea where he is.’

‘How nice!’ said Arlene. ‘You’re going to see your father! Do say hello to him for me and tell that naughty man to write.’

Larry nodded, and a few minutes later, sketchmap in hand, he and Honoria said goodbye to Arlene. She wanted to have them take some of the stale Stella Dora cookies and offered to throw in some son of frozen pie she had made the previous year, but they politely declined. She told them to give Jake a big kiss for her and tell him she was getting along just fine. She said she’d like to find Lukie too and give him a piece of her mind. She was still babbling away when they finally managed to leave.

Larry and Honoria edged carefully down the old wooden stairs into the smelly night of Hempstead and were soon back in Larry’s Mercedes speeding towards Manhattan.

After Arlene had closed the door behind her two visitors, she grinned, shook her head, and began to shuffle back into the living room. Then she stopped in front of an old full-length mirror and looked at herself. She stretched and smiled again.

Then she reached up and began pulling at her white hair until, with a sudden wrench, the entire white wig came sliding off, revealing a mass of jet-black hair pinned down. After putting the white wig in a cardboard box with others on a closet shelf, she reached back and unpinned her hair, sending a cascade of touched-up black hair down on to her shoulders. She shook her head and smiled.

She checked her watch, frowned and took off her black shawl. Then, as she began to walk with a decidedly younger step towards the bathroom she flipped her shawl into a bedroom as she passed. On the way she took off her thick glasses and left them on a shelf in the hall. In front of the mirror in the bathroom she began to insert contact lenses into her eyes. When she’d finished she began to apply ‘the works’, as she called the creams, mascaras, eyeshadow, line erasers, blushers that were any woman’s staple when she wanted to look younger. This done, she left for the bedroom to change her clothes and prepare for her evening out.

But twenty minutes after Larry and Honoria had left there was a knock on the door of Arlene’s duplex. It was Agent Macavoy. He had dutifully followed Larry’s Mercedes and knew, when they had arrived at Browning Street in Hempstead, that the two were questioning Arlene Ecstein. After they’d left, he decided it might be worthwhile if he had a few words with the lady. If she told him what she’d told them it would simplify his surveillance.

The door was finally opened. A big-busted woman wearing a low-cut flaming-red dress and high heels greeted him with a slow smile. If Arlene had looked well into her fifties for Larry and Honoria, she looked closer to a well-preserved and heavily endowed forty now.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘What can I do for you?’

Agent Macavoy pulled out his FBI identification and held it in front of her face.

‘Mrs Ecstein?’ he said coldly. ‘Macavoy, FBI. A few questions.’

Arlene didn’t even glance at his ID, but simply swung the door open wide and invited him in.

‘Sure,’ said Arlene. ‘I was just going out, but I love answering questions.’ She walked over to her desk and, with her back to Macavoy – for a moment he worried that she might be going for a weapon – she seemed to fiddle with something there before turning. As she came towards him he saw that it was just a couple of dice.

‘So,’ she said, coming back up to him with a smile. ‘What can I do for you?’

Macavoy halted at her approach and looked at her severely, hoping to put her in a properly respectful if not fearful frame of mind.

Arlene ran her tongue around her lips and idly routed her shoulders so that her breasts momentarily swelled up towards the neckline of her low-cut dress then receded – two round white tides swelling and receding.

‘Few questions,’ said Macavoy. ‘Like did you tell your recent visitors where they might find –’

‘My God, you’re a hunk,’ said Arlene, reaching her two hands up briefly to knead each of Macavoy’s shoulders and eyeing him up and down. ‘You work out every day?’

‘Uh, every other day,’ said Macavoy, taken aback and actually retreating a step. ‘Uh, Luke Rhinehart, Mrs Ecstein. Did you –’

‘No, no, more than that,’ said Arlene, moving her hands inside his suit jacket to his chest and squeezing through his shirt the muscles around his nipples. ‘You must have played football or lifted weights, right?’

Macavoy was retreating sideways now, into the living room.

‘Basketball actually,’ said Macavoy ‘But, uh, what did you tell –’

‘And a belly like a steel wall.’ said Arlene, whose fingers were kneading his abdomen as the two of them danced slowly from the hallway across the living room, Macavoy retreating, Arlene effortlessly advancing.

‘Look, Mrs Ecstein, I –’

‘And thighs like –’

‘Aghhhh!!’ said Macavoy as Arlene’s fingers probed his inner thighs so suddenly he actually jumped, almost breaking their physical contact.

‘Great hard haunches of bullmeat,’ concluded Arlene.

16

After meeting Arlene Ecstein I confess I began to have some doubts about my quest. Arlene was so harmless that it rubbed off on to Luke: I seemed to be making a mountain out of a molehill. Besides, I didn’t see how I could spare the time to go down into the southern wilderness to search for a man who probably wasn’t there. And a pan of me was equally afraid he would be there. I passed over the first weekend I might have gone by escorting Honoria to a gala charity ball given by several old-line Wall Streeters as a way of showing their commitment to the needy – whether the ‘needy’ referred to those to whom a bit of the money raised eventually trickled down or to the socialites themselves was unclear.

The following week was a hectic one, marked primarily by Jeff’s ‘hunch’ on bonds and bond futures proving to be a good one; our BB&P Futures Fund soared almost 6 per cent in one day. Akito phoned and complained he couldn’t tell from my indicators why I’d taken such a large bond futures position and then, after making good profits in just two days, gone flat. I hemmed and hawed and concocted a series of mostly fictitious variables to disguise the fact that I’d taken a large position because one of my most unstable traders had a hunch, and gone flat for the same reason.

In his new strange state Jeff seemed to want to go flat in almost everything. It was like pulling teeth to get the poor man to go long or short anything, Jeff inevitably muttering darkly about risks and ‘challenging the Gods’, and only going away to execute the orders because he knew I’d have to fire him if he didn’t.

But even as I pretended to throw myself into my trading and my life with Honoria I felt the pull of Lukedom. I finally decided that if I went the weekend before election day then even if I had to stay longer than two days at least the Tuesday of the election the markets would be closed and I’d miss only one day of trading.

Honoria didn’t want to go with me. For one thing she couldn’t afford to take any days off from Salomon Brothers, not even the Monday before election day. For another, that part of Virginia was the pits as far as she could tell. Lukedom appeared to be located at the far southern end of the stale, buried in barren stripmine hills, probably surrounded by people who had starred in the film Deliverance. Kim seemed interested in going, but I knew that Honoria might not take too kindly to my travelling alone with Kim, so I pretended I didn’t notice her interest.

Still, I decided to make one last effort to get Honoria to come with me. I arranged to meet her at ‘Wipples’, a fashionable financial district bar best known for having one whole wall on which customers had over the years written various stock, bond and futures recommendations. They also dated and signed them. ‘Wipples’ then saw to it that the best always remained, despite the efforts of their authors to remove them. Hence customers were able to note that one well-known Wall Street guru had urged clients to ‘sell everything’ in August 1982 just before stock were to lake off like a missile launch. Another wrote in September 1987 that the market would hit 3,000 by mid-October Instead it hit 1,750. But except for the wall – to which I’d wisely never contributed – the place was a simple, unpretentious bar that humbly charged all the traffic would bear.

Which was considerable The bar had a reputation for being the place one went after a particularly brilliant or lucky financial coup, so going there implied one was brilliant or lucky. At any rate it implied you could afford to pay ten dollars for a shot of whisky, which certainly showed something.

When I arrived Kim was with Honoria, and wearing a dress, one of those new short spandex things, black, that hugged the body and begged you to watch each vibration. Since it was mid-thigh-length Kim’s black-stockinged legs stuck invitingly out beneath the table. I hadn’t seen much of her since she’d gotten a part-time job promoting some Upper East Side health club.

Honoria, like most of the other female patrons, was dressed in a more sedate and stylish manner, a mauve and white business suit which, with her blonde hair, was dramatic. As I sat down at the booth with them I couldn’t help feel my male ego swell – the two foxiest ladies in the joint.

Kim, as far as I knew, normally avoided Wall Street types – except maybe the rebels and losers – and couldn’t usually spend much time with Honoria, their lifestyles overlapping only in that both ate, slept and peed. As Honoria waved at me, I wondered vaguely why Kim was here.

I ordered the cheapest drink on the menu: I hated overpaying for a drink as much as overpaying for a security. Then I again urged Honoria to accompany me on my drive south to find my father.

‘As I understand it,’ Honoria responded, shaking her head with a mock groan, ‘I am being asked to visit a hippie commune caught in some time warp left over from the sixties. Is that right?’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But I really don’t care one way or another.’

‘That Arlene Ecstein certainly didn’t turn out to be a hippie,’ suggested Kim.

‘That’s true,’ said Honoria. ‘If your father has degenerated into the male equivalent of Mrs Ecstein, then I suppose our worst worry would be that we’ll be bored to death.’

‘But it would be nice if some of the sixties was still alive today,’ Kim went on. ‘That two or three people still existed who weren’t chained to chasing money and ripping each other off.’

‘In those days,’ said Honoria, ‘parents were so stupidly liberal, their rebellious children didn’t have to worry about money – doting parents sent moneygrams. Today we know better. Rebellious youth are disinherited before their hair even reaches the back of their neck. Reserve your compassion for condors and spotted owls.’

‘Actually it’s that we know better now,’ I said, thinking that the sixties and my father were part of the same sickness. ‘We want to make something of our lives instead of drifting with some flow that eventually strands us in a bog.’

‘Yes, but the flowing and the bogs often seem so much more interesting than the upward march on the treadmill,’ said Kim, grinning a challenge at me.

‘Nonsense,’ snapped Honoria, wriggling her bottom on the chair in annoyance. ‘What’s wrong with minding the store? Perhaps for you and the sixties the treadmill symbolizes repetitious drudgery. For us it symbolizes staying in shape and getting ahead.’

‘Maybe so, but getting ahead for what?’ countered Kim, her eyes getting brighter and a flush appearing on her cheeks. ‘Staying in shape for what? As far as I can see people stay in shape in order to do better on the treadmill, and get ahead in order to get further ahead. Where’s the joy? Where’s the payoff?’

‘The payoff is a six-figure income,’ said Honoria. ‘Not to mention that you yourself are being paid to get people to pay good money to use the treadmills.’

‘Touché,’ said Kim with a grin. ‘But I’d still like to know if a place exists where people don’t care about the amount of their income.’

‘Oh, I’m sure you can find them all over,’ conceded Honoria. ‘And they’re undoubtedly living in wrecks and hovels. You know, Kim, you might be living in one yourself if it weren’t for us treadmill types.’

‘Touché again!’ Kim said. ‘But remember, I often have lived in tents, teepees, shacks and hovels. I just visit you and Uncle Willy every now and then to get back to my roots.’

‘You’d probably be right at home in Lukedom, then,’ commented Honoria, signalling to a passing waiter for another drink.

‘This is all very nice,’ I interrupted, shaking my head at the sparring, and then addressing Honoria. ‘But I’d still like you to come with me.’ I reached across and took her hand and went on with an exaggerated seriousness. ‘Come and console me as I plunge into the lower depths in an effort to redeem my long-lost father and win your hand in marriage.’

‘Silly boy,’ said Honoria, mollified. ‘I think the myth insists the prince go off by himself and slay the dragon. He doesn’t drag the princess along with him.’

‘That’s right,’ agreed Kim. ‘Maybe you should take me instead. I’ll be Sancho Panza to your Don Quixote. And then maybe I’ll stay in Lukedom and become a cube or whatever you call your father’s followers.’

‘I call them jerks,’ I said.

‘Yes, take Kim,’ said Honoria, stiffening. ‘She won’t mind a little mud and diarrhoea and, fitting in, she might find out things you couldn’t.’

‘I’m not taking Kim,’ I said firmly, fighting the racing of my pulse at the prospect. ‘I want you to go – just for a few days. It’ll certainly be more interesting than another trek upstate.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Honoria. As she paused to reconsider, she finished the last of her drink. ‘Just until Sunday night. You promise?’

‘Hey, I either find my father or get a lead or I don’t. How long can it take to get an address?’

‘You don’t love me,’ moped Kim exaggeratedly. ‘You prefer your fiancée to me.’

‘It can take a long lime to get an address – as the FBI has discovered,’ commented Honoria, her mind on the business trip and ignoring Kim’s taunt.

‘Well?’ I persisted, still holding Honoria’s hand.

‘I suppose I’ll have to come along just to keep you out of trouble,’ sighed Honoria.

I smiled and released her hand.

‘Good,’ I announced, having managed to keep chaos again at bay.

Although also smiling, Kim shook her head.

‘Lukedom will be wasted on you two,’ said Kim. ‘It’ll be like sending two nuns to a Playboy mansion.’

‘Or two Kims to a meeting of securities analysts.’ countered Honoria, standing up to leave. ‘But duty calls.’

‘Says who?’ said Kim.

On our drive south, Honoria and I stayed that first night at a small motel in northern Virginia, arriving at about ten, Honoria a trifle irritated that we’d passed up a Holiday Inn a half-hour earlier and had to settle for something called ‘The Molvadian Motel’ on the outskirts of nowhere. Actually the room was indistinguishable from one in a Holiday Inn – except perhaps to the two architects involved – and the television offerings were absolutely identical.

Being young and engaged, and intelligent and well brought up, we got right to it after quick showers and made hot and horny love for forty minutes. Then we found our attentions wandering to a PBS special on the greenhouse effect. This led us naturally to a serious discussion of the investment possibilities inherent in Long Island and Miami being three feet under water and the Berkshires becoming the new sun belt – possibly the new east coast line as well. We were both annoyed that the greenhouse effect would apparently take effect only very slowly over the next half-century, thus minimizing the possibilities of dramatic short-term capital gains.

Nevertheless, we concluded that we should be bullish on the American midwest and sell short the south east, since the latter was likely to become either a desert or part of the Atlantic Ocean, either of which alternatives would decrease its value. We discussed ways of selling short the south east but could think of nothing better than shorting the stock of Disney whose Disney World in Orlando, unless convened to an underwater theme park, would suffer a pronounced decrease in both gross and net. Cotton prices would soar. Companies involved in building bridges would do well. Perhaps boat-building would make a comeback.

We were soon as deeply engrossed in our speculations about how to play the greenhouse effect as we had been earlier in our lovemaking, the only difference being we reached no climax in our discussion. Instead Honoria suddenly found our speculations the most boring and unproductive thing she’d done in weeks and announced she was going to sleep. I made a few tentative pokes with various parts of my anatomy at various parts of hers, but receiving nothing more encouraging than a rather unsexy mooing sound, I soon rolled over to go to sleep. However, I spent the next fifteen minutes daydreaming about cornering the market in sugar beets just before the millions of acres of sugar beet fields were flooded, thus becoming the richest man in the world since the Hunt family. Vaguely, just as I fell asleep, I remembered that the Hunt brothers had recently declared bankruptcy.

FROM LUKE’S JOURNAL

In the beginning was Chance, and Chance was with God and Chance was God: of this much we and sophisticated twentieth-century scientists are certain. While the old physics saw purpose, the new sees chance. When the old saw reassuring and ubiquitous causal nexus, the new sees ubiquitous randomness. When the old probed deeper they always found cause; when the modern physicist probes deeper he always finds chance.

‘Was God playing dice when he created the universe?’ The New York Times asked a Nobel Prize-winning biologist.

‘Yes,’ was the reply.

17

The next day we ploughed on. Crossing the flat heartland of the central valley of Virginia I concluded that after you’d seen one cornfield you’d seen them all – unless of course I was long or short corn futures, in which case I’d have gotten out of the car every thirty miles to measure the height of the corn.

After two hours I took over the driving and Honoria settled back into the passenger seat. But I continued a silent brooding that had begun at breakfast and Honoria apparently noticed it.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘the reason you’re all hung up about your father is the old cliché that you’re probably more like him than you admit.’

‘I’m nothing like him,’ I said.

‘Not in any way?’ she persisted.

‘I suppose we both like the excitement of taking risks,’ I finally said. ‘That’s the only thing we have in common.’

‘Taking risks?’ said Honoria with a frown. ‘How so?’

‘That’s my job!’ I said with some exasperation. ‘You know that. There are two kinds of trading in futures. As you know, the whole purpose of hedging is to reduce risk – a kind of insurance policy against other positions one has in other markets. But I’m not a hedger. Jeff is our firm’s hedger. My job is to make money for clients by pure speculation.’

‘Gambling, you mean.’

‘It’s not gambling!’ I shot back, taking a hand off the wheel to gesture emphatically. ‘It’s intelligent risk-taking. I suppose you could call it loaded-dice risk-taking. Gamblers at something like roulette or craps rely totally on chance, whereas I rely on knowledge, skill and analysis to overcome chance.’

‘But if your knowledge always beats out chance then there’s no risk,’ said Honoria with annoying reasonableness.

‘Damn it,’ I said. ‘It’s still risk-taking! I sometimes lose millions in a week! It’s just that in the long run my knowledge and skill beat out the pure diceplayer – beat out chance.’

‘You don’t have to get so excited,’ Honoria said, reaching forward to retrieve a map that had fallen on to the floor.

‘Look at it this way,’ I said a little more calmly. ‘I like sailing in strong winds. That’s risk-taking. But I like to prepare my boat carefully, have a skilled crew member aboard with me. and carry all the latest safety equipment. But it’s still risk-taking – intelligent risk-taking.’ I frowningly thought of my father. ‘My father, on the other hand, also liked to sail. But he thought nothing of taking some junkheap out on to the ocean without charts or safety equipment or weather projections and with a crew that had never been further out to sea than a bathtub. That’s what I call stupid risk-taking – gambling, if you will. And of course his dice decisions were the stupidest gambling of all.

‘I see what you’re driving at,’ said Honoria. ‘But it seems to me that the whole meaning of risk-taking is that you subject yourself to …’ she hesitated to say the word, maybe fearing it would provoke a diatribe, ‘… letting chance into your life.’

I didn’t explode.

‘Well, maybe,’ I said. ‘I guess my futures speculation is a declaration of war against chance. But as you said, if chance were actually beaten, then the game and the risk and the fun would be over. Yeah, I see that, but my father somehow wants to turn that fact into some sort of worship of chance as the great liberator or life-enhancer. What he failed to admit was that too much chance is like too much order – it ruins the fun. The only thing worse than fascist order is total anarchy, and that’s what diceliving leads to.’