Stochastic Man Read Free

went to private school together—the Dalton, circa 1980-82, where we played a lot of basketball—and we’ve kept in touch ever since. He’s a slick lynx-eyed lawyer about three meters tall who wants to be, among many other things, the first United States Attorney General of Armenian ancestry and probably will be
    (Probably? How can I doubt it?) On a sweltering August afternoon he phoned to say, “Sarkisian is having a big splash tonight. You’re invited. I guarantee that something good will come out of it for you.” Sarkisian is a real estate operator who, so it seems, owns both sides of the Hudson River for six or seven hundred kilometers.
    “Who’ll be there?” I asked. “Aside from Ephrikian, Missakian, Hagopian, Manoogian, Garabedian, and Boghosian.”
    “Berberian and Khatisian,” he said. “Also—” And Mardikian ran off a brilliant, a dazzling, list of celebrities from the world of finance, politics, industry, science, and the arts, ending with “—and Paul Quinn.” Meaningful emphasis on that final name.
    “Should I know, him, Haig?”
    “You should, but right now you probably don’t. At present he’s the assemblyman from Riverdale. A man who’ll be going places in public life.”
    I didn’t particularly care to pass my Saturday night hearing some ambitious young Irish pol explain his plan for revamping the galaxy, but on the other hand I had done a few projective jobs for politicians before and there was money in it, and Mardikian probably knew what was good for me. And the guest list was irresistible. Besides, my wife was spending August as a guest of a temporarily shorthanded six-group in Oregon and I suppose I entertained some hopeful fantasy of going home that evening with a sultry dark-haired Armenian lady.
    “What time?” I asked.
    “Nine,” Mardikian said.
    So to Sarkisian’s place: a triplex penthouse atop a ninety-story circular alabaster-and-onyx condo tower on a Lower West Side offshore platform. Blank-faced guards who might just as well have been constructs of metal and plastic checked my identity, scanned me for weapons, and admitted me. The air within was a blue haze. The sour, spicy odor of powdered bone dominated everything: we were smoking doped calcium that year. Crystalline oval windows like giant portholes ringed the entire apartment. In the eastward-facing rooms the view was blocked by the two monolithic slabs of the World Trade Center, but elsewhere Sarkisian did provide a decent 270-degree panorama of New York Harbor, New Jersey, the West Side Expressway, and maybe some of Pennsylvania. Only in one of the giant wedge-shaped rooms were the portholes opaqued, and when I went into an adjoining wedge and peered at a sharp angle I found out why: that side of the tower faced the still undemolished stump of the Statue of Liberty, and Sarkisian apparently didn’t want the depressing sight to bring his guests down. (This was the summer of ‘95, remember, which was one of the more violent years of the decade, and the bombing still had everyone jittery.)
    The guests! They were as promised, a spectacular swarm of contraltos and astronauts and quarterbacks and chairpersons of the board. Costumes ran to formal-flamboyant, with the expectable display of breasts and genitalia but also the first hints, from the avant-garde, of die fin-de-siècle love of concealment that now has taken over, high throats and tight bandeaus. Half a dozen of the men and several of the women affected clerical garb and there must have been fifteen pseudo generals bedecked with enough medals to shame an African dictator. I was dressed rather simply, I thought, in a pleatless radiation-green singlet and a three-strand bubble necklace. Though the rooms were crowded, the flow of the party was far from formless, for I saw eight or ten big swarthy outgoing men in subdued clothing, key members of Haig Mardikian’s ubiquitous Armenian mafia, distributed equidistantly through the main room like cribbage pegs,