The Stochastic Man

19

A week after my visit to Carvajal he phoned to ask if I cared to have lunch with him the next day. So I met him, at his suggestion, at the Merchants and Shippers Club down in the financial district.

The venue surprised me. Merchants and Shippers is one of those venerable Wall Street watering holes populated exclusively by high-echelon brokers and bankers on a members-only basis, and when I say exclusively I mean that even Bob Lombroso, who is a tenth-generation American and very much a power on the Street, is tacitly barred from membership by his Judaism and chooses not to make a fuss about it. As in all such places, wealth alone isn’t enough to get you in: you must be clubbable, a congenial and decorous man of the right ancestry who went to the right schools and belongs to the right firm. So far as I could see, Carvajal had nothing going for him along those lines. His richesse was nouveau and he was by nature an outsider, with none of the required prep-school background and high corporate affiliations. How had he managed to wangle a membership?

“I inherited it,” he told me smugly as we settled into cozy, resilient well-upholstered chairs beside a window sixty floors above the turbulent street. “One of my forefathers was a founding member, in 1823. The charter provides that the eleven founding memberships descend automatically to the eldest sons of eldest sons, world without end. Some very disreputable sorts have marred the sanctity of the organization because of that clause.” He flashed a sudden and surprisingly wicked grin. “I come here about once every five years. You’ll notice I’ve worn my best suit.”

Indeed he had — a pleated gold and green herringbone doublet that was perhaps a decade past its prime but still had far more glitter and dash than the rest of his dim and fusty wardrobe. Carvajal, in fact, seemed considerably transformed today, more animated, more vigorous, even playful, distinctly younger than the bleak and ashen man I had come to know.

I said, “I didn’t realize you had ancestors.”

“There were Carvajals in the New World long before the Mayflower set out for Plymouth. We were very important in Florida in the early eighteenth century. When the English a

A shiver rippled along my backbone. “You saw me here with you, more than forty years ago?”

He nodded nonchalantly and in the same gesture swung around to summon a waiter, stabbing the air with his forefinger as imperiously as though he were J. P. Morgan. The waiter hurried to Carvajal’s side and greeted him obsequiously by name. Carvajal ordered a martini for me — because he had seen it long ago? — and dry sherry for himself.

“They treat you courteously here,” I remarked.

“It’s a point of honor for them to treat every member as if he’s the Czar’s cousin,” Carvajal said. “What they say about me in private is probably less flattering. My membership is going to die with me, and I imagine the club will be relieved that no more shabby little Carvajals will deface the premises.”

The drinks arrived almost at once. Solemnly we dipped glasses at each other in a perfunctory vestigial toast.

“To the future,” Carvajal said, “the radiant, beckoning future,” and broke into hoarse laughter.

“You’re in lively spirits today.”

“Yes, I feel bouncier than I have in years. A second springtime for the old man, eh? Waiter! Waiter! ”

Again the waiter hustled over. To my astonishment Carvajal now ordered cigars, selecting two of the most costly from the tray the cigar girl brought. Once more the wicked grin. To me he said, “Are you supposed to save these things for after the meal? I think I want mine right away.”

“Go ahead. Who’ll stop you?”

He lit up, and I joined him. His ebullience was disconcerting and almost frightening. At our other two meetings Carvajal had appeared to be drawing on reservoirs of strength long since overdrawn, but today he seemed speedy, frantic, full of a wild energy obtained from some hideous source: I speculated about mysterious drugs, transfusions of bull’s blood, illicit transplants of organs ripped from unwilling young victims.

He said suddenly, “Tell me, Lew, have you ever had moments of second sight?”

“I think so. Nothing as vivid as what you must experience, of course. But I think many of my hunches are based on flickers of real vision — subliminal flickers that come and go so fast I don’t acknowledge them.”

“Very likely.”

“And dreams,” I said. “Often in dreams I have premonitions and presentiments that turn out to be correct. As though the future is floating toward me, knocking at the gates of my slumbering consciousness.”

“The sleeping mind is much more receptive to things of that sort, yes.”

“But what I perceive in dreams comes to me in symbolic form, a metaphor rather than a movie. Just before Gilmartin was caught I dreamed he was being hauled before a firing squad, for example. As though the right information was reaching me, but not in literal one-to-one terms.”

“No,” Carvajal said. “The message came accurately and literally, but your mind scrambled and coded it, because you were asleep and unable to operate your receptors properly. Only the waking rational mind can process and integrate such messages reliably. But most people who are awake reject the messages altogether, and when they are asleep their minds do mischief to what comes in.”