The Stochastic Man

“I’m not going to show this to Qui

“You have to,” I said without much conviction.

“You know what’ll happen if I do? He’ll have your ass, Lew. I had to do half a day of fancy dancing over Ricciardi and the Louisiana trip, and the things Qui

“All of you think that. Well, I’m not. I had a nice sweet vacation in California and I’ve never felt better in my life. And come next January this town is going to need a new police commissioner.”

“No, Lew.”

“No?”

Mardikian grunted heavily. He was tolerating me, humoring me; but he was sick of me and my predictions, I knew. He said, “After I got your memo I called in Sudakis and told him there’s a rumor going around that he’s thinking of quitting. I didn’t attribute it. I let him think I got it from one of the boys in the press corps. You should have seen his face, Lew. You’d have thought I’d called his mother a Turk. He swore by seventy saints and fifty angels that the only way he’d leave his job was if the mayor fired him. I can usually tell when a man’s putting me on, and Sudakis was as sincere as anybody I’ve ever seen.”

“All the same, Haig, he’s going to quit in a month or two.”

“How can that be?”

“Unexpected circumstances do arise.”

“Such as?”

“Anything. Reasons of health. A sudden scandal in the department. A megabuck job offer from San Francisco. I don’t know what the exact reason will be. I’m just telling you—”

“Lew, how can you possibly know what Sudakis is going to do in January when not even Sudakis does?”

“I know,” I insisted.

“How can you?”

“It’s a hunch.”

“A hunch. A hunch. You keep saying that. It’s one hunch too many, Lew. Your skill has to do with interpretation of trends, not with individual predictive instances, right, but more and more you’ve been coming in with these isolated shots, these crystal-ball stunts, these—”

“Haig, have any of them been wrong?”

“I’m not sure.”

“None. Not a one. A lot of them haven’t proved out yet, one way or the other, but there isn’t one that’s been contradicted by later developments, no recommended course of action that has definitely been shown to be unwise, no—”

“All the same, Lew, I told you the last time, we don’t believe in soothsayers around here. Stick to broad projections of visible trends, will you?”

“I’m only looking out for Qui

“Sure. But I think you ought to start looking out more for your own.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“That unless your work here takes on, well, a less unconventional tone, the mayor may have to terminate your services.”

“Crap. He needs me, Haig.”

“He’s starting not to think so. He’s starting to think you may even be a liability.”

“He doesn’t realize how much I’ve done for him, then. He’s a thousand kilometers closer to the White House than he would ever have been without me. Listen, Haig, whether or not you and Qui

“I won’t. For your own protection,” Mardikian said.

“Don’t be obstinate.”

“Obstinate? Obstinate? I’m trying to save your neck.”

“What would it hurt if Qui

Mardikian said, “Nobody says you have to be a hundred percent right, and of course there’d be no harm in opening a quiet contingency search for a new police commissioner. The harm I’m trying to avoid is to you. Qui

“It isn’t luck, Haig,” I told him quietly.

“What?”

“I’m not using stochastic processes at all. I’m not operating by guesswork. I see, is what I’m saying. I’m able to look into the future and hear conversations, read headlines, observe events, I can dredge all sorts of data out of time to come.” It was only a small lie, displacing Carvajal’s powers to myself. Operationally the results were the same, whichever one of us was doing the seeing. “That’s why I can’t always give supporting data to explain my memos,” I said. “I look into January, I see Sudakis resigning, and that’s all, I don’t know why, I don’t yet perceive the surrounding structure of cause and effect, only the event itself. It’s different from projection of trends, it’s something else entirely, wilder, a lot less plausible, but more reliable, a hundred percent reliable, one hundred percent! Because I can see what’s going to happen.”

Mardikian was silent a very long time.

He said, finally, in a hoarse, cottony voice, “Lew, are you serious?”

“Extremely.”

“If I go and get Qui

“Yes.”

“Wait here,” he said.

I waited. I tried not to think about anything. Keeping mind a blank, let the stochasticity flow: had I blundered, had I overplayed my hand? I didn’t believe so. I believed the time had come for me to reveal something of what I was really up to. For the sake of plausibility I hadn’t bothered to mention Carvajal’s role in the process, but otherwise I had held nothing back, and I felt a great release from tension, I felt a warm flood of relief surging in me, now that I had come out at last from behind my cover.

After what may have been fifteen minutes Mardikian returned. The mayor was with him. They took a few steps into the office and halted side by side near the door, an oddly mismatched pair, Mardikian dark and absurdly tall, Qui

Mardikian said, “Tell the mayor what you told me, Lew.”

Blithely I repeated my confession of second sight, using, as far as was possible, the same phrases. Qui

“Since the begi

“Four years, almost. And how long is it since you’ve had a direct pipeline into the future?”

“Not long. Only since last spring. You remember, when I urged you to get that oil-gellation bill through the City Council, just before those tankers broke up off Texas and California? It was about then. I wasn’t just guessing. And then, the other things, the ones that sometimes seemed so weird—”

“Like having a crystal ball,” Qui

“Yes. Yes. You remember, Paul, the day you told me you had decided to make a run for the White House in ‘04, what you said to me? You told me, You’re going to be the eyes that see into the future for me. You didn’t know how right you were!”

Qui

He said, “I thought if you just went off to rest for a couple of weeks, Lew, it would help you get yourself together. But now I see the problem runs much deeper than that.”

“What?”

“You’ve been a good friend and a valuable adviser for four years. I won’t underestimate the value of the help you’ve provided. Maybe you were getting your ideas from close intuitive analysis of trends, or maybe from computers, or maybe a genie was whispering things in your ear, but wherever you got it, you were giving me useful advice. But I can’t risk keeping you on the staff after what I’ve heard. If word gets around that Paul Qui