The Stochastic Man

33

I rented an apartment for myself in Manhattan, a three-room furnished job in an old, once-luxurious high rise on East Sixty-third near Second Avenue, which is an old, once-luxurious neighborhood not yet seriously into disrepair. The building’s pedigree was evidenced by an assortment of security devices dating from the 1960s or thereabouts through the early 1990s, everything from police locks and hidden peepholes up to early-model filter mazes and velocity screens. The furniture was simple and timeless in style, venerable and utilitarian, couches and chairs and bed and tables and bookcases and stuff of that sort, so anonymous as to be invisible. I felt invisible, too, after I was completely moved in and the movers and the building superintendent had gone away, leaving me standing alone in my new living room like an ambassador newly arrived from nowhere to take up residence in limbo. What was this place, and how had it happened that I was living here? Whose chairs are these? Whose fingerprints on the bare blue walls?

Sundara had let me take some of the paintings and sculptures, and I set them up here and there; they had seemed magnificently integral to the lavish textures of our Staten Island condo, but here they looked awkward and u

He grunted his approval and said, “You have a view of Second Avenue from your bedroom window?”

“Yes. And Sixty-third Street from the living room. Why?”

“Light blue walls?”

“Yes.”

“A dark couch?”

“Yes. Why do you want to know all this?”

“I’m just checking,” he said. “To make certain you found the right place.”

“You mean, that I found the one you’ve been seeing? ”

“That’s right.”

“Was there any doubt?” I asked. “Have you stopped trusting the things you see? ”

“Not for a moment. But do you?”

“I trust you, I trust you. What color is my bathroom sink?”

“I don’t know,” Carvajal said. “I’ve never bothered to notice. But your refrigerator is light brown.”

“Okay, already. I’m impressed.”

“I hope so. Are you ready to take notes?”

I found a scratchpad. “Go ahead,” I said.

“Thursday, October twenty-first. Qui

I took it all down, shaking my head as usual, hearing Qui

I was at City Hall the customary time the next day — it felt a little odd taking a cab downtown via Second Avenue instead of podding over from Staten Island — and by half past nine I had my latest batch of memos ready for the mayor. I sent them in. A little after ten my intercom bleeped and a voice said that Deputy Mayor Mardikian wanted to see me.

There was going to be trouble. I felt it intuitively as I went down the hall, and I saw it all over Mardikian’s face as I entered his office. He looked uncomfortable — edgy, off center, tense. His eyes were too bright and he was chewing at the corner of his lip. My newest memoranda were spread out in a diamond-shaped pattern on his desk. Where was the smooth, slick, lacquer-finish Mardikian? Gone. Gone. And this rattled, jangled man before me was in his place.

He said, hardly looking up at me, “Lew what the hell is this garbage about Ricciardi?”

“It’s advisable to remove him from his current job.”

“I know it’s advisable. You just advised us. Why is it advisable?”

“Long-range dynamics dictate it,” I said, trying to bluff. “I can’t give you any convincing and concrete reason, but my feeling is that it’s unwise to keep a man in that job who’s so closely identified with the Italian-American community here, especially the real estate interests within that community. Lewisohn’s a good neutral non-abrasive figure who might be safer in that slot next year as we approach the mayoralty election, and—”

“Quit it, Lew.”

“What?”

“Knock it off. You aren’t telling me a thing. You’re just giving me a lot of noise. Qui

“My hunches have always—”

“Wait,” Mardikian said. “This Louisiana thing. Christ! Thibodaux is the antithesis of everything Qui

“I can’t explain it, Haig.”

“You can’t explain it? You can’t explain it? You give the mayor a highly explicit instruction like this, or like the Ricciardi thing, something that obviously has to have been the product of a whole lot of complicated thinking, and you don’t know why? If you don’t know why, how are we supposed to? Where’s the rational basis for our actions? You want the mayor to be wandering around like a sleepwalker, like some sort of zombie, just doing as you say and not knowing why? Come on, kid! A hunch is a hunch, but we’ve hired you to make rational comprehensible projections, not to be a soothsayer.”

Quietly I said, after a long wobbly pause, “Haig, I’ve been going through a lot of bad stuff lately, and I don’t have much reserve of energy. I don’t want to have a heavy hassle with you now. I’m just asking you to take it on faith that there’s logic in the things I propose.”

“I can’t.”

“Please?”

“Look, I realize that having your marriage fall apart has really ripped you up, Lew, but that’s exactly why I have to challenge what you’ve handed in today. For months now you’ve been giving us these weird trips to do, and sometimes you justify them convincingly and sometimes you don’t, sometimes you give us the most shamelessly cockeyed reasons for some course of action, and without exception Qui