Robert Silverberg - The Stochastic Man

Coming home was an adventure now.

One day the furniture was rearranged. Everything. All our carefully calculated effects were destroyed. Three days later I found the furniture in yet another pattern, even more clumsy. I made no comment either time and after about a week Sundara put things back the way they had been at first.

Sundara dyed her hair red. The effect was ghastly.

She kept a white cross-eyed cat for six days.

She begged me to accompany her to a Tuesday night process session, but when I agreed she canceled my appointment an hour before we were due to set out, and went alone, explaining nothing.

She was in the hands of the apostles of chaos. Love breeds patience; therefore I was patient with her. Whatever way she chose to wage her war on stasis, I was patient. This is only a phase, I told myself. Only a phase.

On the 9th day of May, 1999, between the hours of four and five in the morning, I dreamed that State Controller Gilmartin was being executed by a firing squad.

I can be so precise about the date and the time because it was a dream so vivid, so much like the eleven o’clock news unreeling on the screen of my mind, that it awakened me, and I mumbled a memo about it into my bedside recorder. I learned long ago to make notes on dreams of such intensity, because they often turn out to be premonitions. In dreams comes truth. Joseph’s Pharaoh dreamed he stood by a river out of which came seven plump cattle and seven scrawny ones — fourteen omens. Calpurnia saw the statue of her husband Caesar spouting blood the night before the ides of March. Abe Lincoln dreamed of hearing the subdued sobs of invisible mourners and beheld himself going downstairs to find a catafalque in the East Room of the White House, an honor guard of soldiers, a body in funeral vestments on the bier, a throng of weeping citizens. Who is dead in the White House? the dreaming President asks, and they tell him that the dead man is the President, slain by an assassin. Long before Carvajal entered my life I knew that the future’s moorings are weak, that floes of time break loose and drift back across the great sea to our sleeping minds. So I paid heed to my Gilmartin dream.

I saw him, plump, pale, sweating, a tall round-faced man with cold blue eyes, hauled into a bare dusty courtyard, a place of fierce sunlight and harsh sharp shadows, by a squad of scowling soldiers in black uniforms. I saw him struggling at his bonds, snuffling, twisting, beseeching, protesting his innocence. The soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder, lifting their rifles, an infinitely long moment of silent aiming. Gilmartin moaning, praying, whining, at the very end finding a scrap of dignity, pulling himself erect, squaring his shoulders, facing his killers defiantly. The order to fire, the crack of guns, the body jerking and writhing hideously, slumping against the ropes …

Now what to make of this? The promise of trouble for Gilmartin, who had made financial troubles for the Quinn administration and whom I didn’t like, or merely the hope of it? An assassination brewing, perhaps? Assassinations had been a big thing in the early ‘90s, bigger even than in the bloody Kennedy years, but I thought the fad had gone out of fashion again. Who would assassinate a drab hack like Gilmartin, anyway? Maybe what I was picking up was a premonition that Gilmartin would die of natural causes. Gilmartin boasted of his good health, though. An accident, then? Or maybe just metaphorical death — a lawsuit, a political squabble, a scandal, an impeachment?

I didn’t know how to interpret my dream or what to do about it, and ultimately I decided not to do anything. And so we missed the boat on the Gilmartin scandal, which indeed was what I was perceiving — no firing squad, no assassination for the controller, but shame, resignation, jail. Quinn could have made tremendous political capital out of it if it had been city investigators who exposed Gilmartin’s manipulations, if the mayor had risen in righteous wrath to say that the city was being short-changed and an audit was needed. But I failed to see the larger pattern, and it was a state accountant, not one of our people, who eventually blew the story open — how Gilmartin had been systematically diverting millions of dollars of state funds intended for New York City into the treasuries of a few small upstate towns, and thence into his own pockets and those of a couple of rural officials. Too late I realized that I had had two chances at knocking Gilmartin down, and I had fumbled both of them. A month before my dream Carvajal had given me that mysterious note. Keep an eye on Gilmartin, he had suggested. Gilmartin, oil gellation, Leydecker. Well?

“Talk to me about Carvajal,” I said to Lombroso.

“What do you want to know?”

“How well has he actually done in the market?”

“So well it’s uncanny. He’s cleared nine or ten million that I know of, just since ‘93. Maybe a lot more. I’m sure he works through several brokerage firms. Numbered accounts, dummy nominees, all sorts of tricks to hide how much he’s really been taking out of the Street.”

“He earns all of it from trading?”

“All of it. He gets in, rides a stock straight up, gets out. There were people in my office who made fortunes just by following his picks.”

“Is it possible,” I asked, “for anybody to outguess the market that consistently over so many years?”

Lombroso shrugged. “I suppose a few people have done it. We have our legends of great traders all the way back to Bet-a-Million Gates. Nobody I know has been as consistent as Carvajal.”

“Does he have inside information?”

“He can’t have. Not on so many different companies. It has to be pure intuition. He just buys and sells, buys and sells, and reaps his profits. Came in cold one day, opened an account, no bank references, no Wall Street connections. Always cash transactions, never margin. Spooky.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Quiet little man. Sat watching the tape, put in his orders. No fuss, no chatter, no excitement.”

“Is he ever wrong?”

“He’s taken some losses, yes. Small ones. Small losses, big winnings.”

“I wonder why.”

“Why what?” Lombroso asked.

“Why any losses at all?”

“Even Carvajal has to be fallible.”

“Really?” I said. “Maybe he takes the losses for strategic effect. Calculated setbacks, to encourage people to believe he’s human. Or to keep others from automatically backing his picks and distorting the fluctuations.”

“Don’t you think he’s human, Lew?”

“I think he’s human, yes.”

“But—?”

“But with a very special gift.”

“For picking stocks that are going to go up. Very special.”

“More than that.”

“More how?”

“I’m not ready to say.”

“Why are you afraid of him, Lew?” Lombroso said.

“Did I say I was? When?”

“The day he came here, you told me he made you feel creepy, that he gives off scary vibes. Remember?”

“I suppose I did.”

“You think he’s practicing witchcraft? You think he’s some kind of magician?”

“I know probability theory, Bob. If there’s one thing I do know, it’s probability theory. Carvajal’s done a couple of things that go beyond normal probability curves. One is his stockmarket performance. Another is this Gilmartin thing.”

“Perhaps Carvajal gets his newspapers delivered a month in advance,” Lombroso said.

He laughed. I didn’t.

I said, “I have no hypotheses at all. I only know that Carvajal and I operate in the same kind of business, and that he’s so much better at it than I am there’s no comparison. What I tell you now is that I’m baffled and a little frightened.”