Robert Silverberg - The Stochastic Man

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. Quinn will fly to Louisiana next week for a meeting with Governor Thibodaux. Afterward Quinn issues a statement declaring his support for the Plaquemines Project. When he gets back to New York he fires Housing Commissioner Ricciardi and gives the job to Charles Lewisohn. Ricciardi is named to the Racing Authority. And then—”

I took it all down, shaking my head as usual, hearing Quinn mutter, What’s Thibodaux to me? Why should I give a crap about the Plaquemines Dam? I thought dams were obsolete anyway. And Ricciardi’s been doing a reasonably good job, considering his limited intelligence; won’t it offend the Italians if I kick him upstairs like that? Et cetera, et cetera. More and more frequently these days I had been coming to Quinn with bizarre stratagems, inexplicable and implausible, for now the pipeline from Carvajal was flowing freely out of the immediate future, carrying advice for me to relay to Quinn on how best to maneuver and manipulate; Quinn went along with everything I suggested, but sometimes I was hard put to make him do the things I asked him to do. One of these days he’d turn down an idea outright and would not be budged; what would happen then to Carvajal’s unalterable future?

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. Quinn thinks Ricciardi’s been doing decent work and he’s upset about your memo, and when I ask you for supportive data you just shrug and say it’s a hunch. Now also—”

“My hunches have always—”

“Wait,” Mardikian said. “This Louisiana thing. Christ! Thibodaux is the antithesis of everything Quinn has been trying to stand for. Why in hell should the mayor haul his ass all the way down to Baton Rouge to embrace an antediluvian bigot and espouse a useless and controversial and ecologically risky dam-building project? Quinn’s got everything to lose and nothing visible to gain from that, unless you think it’ll help him get the redneck vote in 2004 and you think the redneck vote is going to be vital to his chances, which God help us all if it is. Well?”

“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 Quinn has ultimately gone along with all your advice, frequently against his own better judgment. And I have to admit that so far everything has worked out surprisingly well. But now, but now—” He looked up, and his eyes drilled into mine. “Frankly, Lew, we’re starting to have some doubts about your stability. We don’t know if we ought to trust your suggestions as blindly as we have in the past.”

“Jesus!” I cried. “You think that breaking up with Sundara has destroyed my sanity?”

“I think it’s taken a lot out of you,” Mardikian said, speaking more gently. “You yourself used the phrase about not having much reserve of energy. Frankly, Lew, we think you’re under a strain, we think you’re fatigued, weary, groggy, that you’ve overtaxed yourself seriously, that you can use a rest. And we—”

“Who’s we? ”

“Quinn. Lombroso. Me.”

“What has Lombroso been saying about me?”

“Mainly that he’s been trying to get you to take a vacation since last August.”

“What else?”

Mardikian looked puzzled. “What do you mean, what else? What do you think he’d say? Christ, Lew, you’re sounding awfully paranoid all of a sudden. Bob’s your friend, remember? He’s on your side. We’re all on your side. He told you to go up to so-and-so’s hunting lodge, but you wouldn’t. He’s worried about you. We all are. Now we’d like to put it a little more strongly. We feel you need a rest, Lew, and we want you to take one. City Hall won’t fall apart if you aren’t around for a few weeks.”

“Okay. I’ll go on vacation. I could use one, sure. But one favor, first.”

“Go on.”

“The Thibodaux thing and the Ricciardi thing. I want you to put them through and have Quinn do them.”

“If you’ll give me some plausible justification.”