Читать книгу The Search for the Dice Man - Luke Rhinehart - Страница 11

Mr Battle’s being both the head of the firm as well as Honoria’s father meant that his every word, sigh and stare had significance for me far beyond its merit. Every time I had a losing trade it not only meant a few fewer digits in the asset column, but also that my son-in-law rating went down several points. Rains failing to fall mainly in the plains constituted not merely a small financial disaster, but also a threat to my marriage, a marriage I devoutly and greedily desired. And there’d been far too many rains not in the plains recently.

When I neared the old man’s cavernous office I veered off into the executives’ men’s room to do a bit of grooming. Mr Battle was a stickler for appearances. A trader with shirt unbuttoned, tie and hair askew was a man communicating not concentration and busy-ness, but rather a state of being overwhelmed. Since most traders were overwhelmed, such normal grooming was elsewhere the norm, but not at BB&P. Mr Battle wanted his traders all to look as if they’d just emerged from a men’s fashion ad in the Sunday New York Times magazine section – cool, elegant and unflustered – million-dollar profits something they pulled off between aperitifs.

‘A tie is a symbol,’ he’d explained to me once when he’d caught me alone in my office with my tie off. ‘A symbol of caring about power. If it doesn’t always represent actual membership in the successful levels of society, it at least represents the wish to do so. Failure to wear a tie represents either rebellion against or indifference to everything that counts.’

‘But I’m alone in here, sir,’ I’d protested.

‘God sees,’ he said.

Mr Battle had been one of the three founding members of the firm back in 1977, Blair having the money. Pike being the brainy trader, and Mr Battle contributing a little money, his high social standing and extensive social and financial connections. Blair and Pike had had the goodness to die over the next decade, leaving Mr Battle as majority owner and de facto boss. He was legendary for his ability to charm the rich into sharing their wealth with BB&P (‘investing’), but hopelessly out of his depth in any intricate financial dealings. As long as I made money for BB&P and seemed a socially acceptable and presentable young man, I’d be in his favour. If ever I began to lose money for the firm or, even worse, turned out to be black or Jewish or the son of mongoloids, I’d be dropped with peremptory swiftness.

As I stared into the mirror to straighten my lie and brush my hair, I knew that I was not cool, would never be elegant and was as flustered as I ever got, since the thing that really flustered me was my damn father.

‘Seeing the chief honcho, huh?’ a voice said from behind me.

Changing the angle of my vision I spotted in the mirror the lugubrious face of Vic Lissome, the onetime Chief Trader I’d replaced three years earlier. Vic was seated in an open cubicle, fully clothed, reading the National Inquirer, a periodical much favoured by traders. Reading it kept them in touch ‘with the pulse of the nation’, said Vic, although I felt it kept them in touch primarily with three-headed dogs and childbearing men.

‘Yeah,’ I replied. Many people at BB&P assumed that I was a suck artist who’d somehow managed to wrap Mr Battle around my little finger, when in fact I usually lived in mortal terror of Mr Battle. I felt that everything I’d achieved had been achieved despite Mr Battle’s preferences rather than because of them.

‘You look like shit,’ said Vic helpfully from his cubicle hideaway. ‘You look like you just got hit with a Saddam Hussein.’

Ever since that August day two months earlier when Saddam Hussein had unexpectedly sent his troops into Kuwait to conquer six infantrymen and a mentally ill housewife (the only documented resisters) and thus sent various futures markets reeling off in new directions, any unexpected news development had been called, genetically, a Saddam Hussein. This ‘in’ argot would last until the next notable Saddam Hussein.

‘Actually it’s more a minor domestic problem,’ I said, not wanting to have to talk to Vic about the failure of the rains.

‘Domestic?’ said Vic. ‘You mean the old fart is not too happy with your porking his daughter?’

‘I got to go, Vic’ I said, moving quickly to the door. ‘A man who is late is a man who is not there.’

This last line was not my own but a famous quotation from Mr Battle, a man noted for pithy sayings of questionable value.

‘Ah, Rhinehart!’ he said from behind his desk, a gigantic monstrosity of glass and metal tubing that closely resembled a glass pingpong table without the net. He was a large, good-looking man with beefsteak jowls and he dressed with immaculately tailored dignity. With his magnificent sweep of bushy hair nicely streaked with grey, he usually looked as if he was posing for an ad for some exotic liqueur.

‘What’s this about the FBI raiding your office?’ he went on.

‘Raiding my office?’ I echoed uneasily. ‘It wasn’t anything like that.’

‘One FBI agent talking to someone is an inquiry,’ countered Mr Battle, spouting one of his aphorisms. ‘Two agents is a raid.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, stopping to stand in front of the desk like a pupil before his principal.

‘Exactly. Now tell me all about it. I believe in confronting unpleasantness immediately and wrestling it to the ground.’

‘There, uh, was no, is no unpleasantness. The FBI was making an inquiry about someone I haven’t seen in more than fifteen years. I couldn’t help them and they left.’

‘Really!?’ exclaimed Mr Battle, scrutinizing me as if wondering if I’d really thought he’d swallow that one. ‘Fifteen years It must have been a pretty horrendous crime. Who was it, some serial killer?’

‘They didn’t say why they were seeking the man,’ I said. ‘They were vague and ambiguous. But I can assure you the whole thing has nothing to do with me or my work here at BB&P.’

Mr Battle continued to gaze at me as if wondering why I was telling all these lies.

‘And who is this man the FBI is so curious about that they seek out people who haven’t seen him in fifteen years?’

Oh, Jesus. Here it comes. Everything I’d been trying to hide.

‘Uh, a relative, sir. A man who disappeared a long ti – fifteen years ago.’

‘A relative!’ said Mr Battle. ‘That could be distressing. Not a close relative, I hope.’

Oh, Jesus.

‘I … uh … was never close to him.’

‘Who is it, an uncle?’

I stared back at Mr Battle numbly.

‘My father,’ I said.

Mr Battle looked not surprised but confused.

‘But your father is dead.’

‘Uh, not necessarily.’

‘Not necessarily! I distinctly remember when reviewing your personnel file a few months ago that both your parents were deceased!’

‘Uh, yes, sir. My mother was killed in an auto accident and my father hasn’t been seen or heard from in – more than a decade. I, uh, assumed that he was dead.’

‘And now you discover he is a serial killer!?’

‘No, no, I’m sure he’s not – the FBI didn’t say why they wanted to contact him.’

‘Contact him!’ Mr Battle exclaimed, now sitting ramrod-straight in his chair and glaring at me. ‘Arrest him, you mean! My God, man, you must have some idea why they’re looking for him!?’

‘I really don’t!’ I answered, feeling myself squirming. ‘Years ago – almost twenty years ago – he got in some trouble with the FCC for disrupting a television programme and the unauthorized release of mental patients, and, uh, a few other matters. But the FBI indicated they wished to see him now about something else.’

Mr Battle, still eyeing me, rose from his chair and moved slowly forward with the soft tread of a predator about to pounce on its prey before the hypnotic spell was broken.

‘This is a serious business, my boy,’ he said.

‘Yes – I mean no. I’m sure my father hasn’t done anything serious. I think they just wanted to talk to him about something.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Mr Battle, coming to a halt three feet away and gazing at me again with that sceptical-physician stare that implied he was still seeking the exact nature of my fatal illness. ‘The FBI doesn’t send two men to question a son who hasn’t seen his father in fifteen years because they only want to talk to the man.’

Mr Battle stared on another moment and then turned away with a sigh.

‘This won’t do, Larry, won’t do,’ he said as he slowly returned around the pingpong table to his seat behind it. ‘I can’t have my daughter marrying the son of someone on the FBI’s “most wanted” list.’ With another sigh he sat down and swung around to face me.

‘I want her to marry the son of a man who is respectably deceased. I think you may tell people that this FBI visit was to ask you about a former employee. Do you understand?’

‘I think I do.’

‘It’s safe to say it’s in your interest to see that your father stays boringly buried.’

‘I agree, but suppose –’

‘Your personnel file states that your father is no longer alive,’ Mr Battle said, beginning to shuffle some papers on his desk. ‘Let us be content with the official truth.’

He then rang for his secretary and turned to gaze at the monitor on his desk – the interview was over. Until I could prove otherwise, my father would probably remain, in Mr Battle’s mind, a corpse and a mass murderer.