The Search for the Dice Man Read Free Page B

for.
    Nevertheless, there were times when he wished he’d accepted Luke’s offer to take him in after his mother’s death, since from that moment on he’d been on his own and broke. He’d had to work full-time every summer and part-time during all his college years, while most of his classmates were apparently free to loaf. In reaction against his father he’d come to believe passionately in the value of control, order and reason. His psychiatrists pointed out that making a religion of order was a dramatic rejection of his father’s interest in irrationality and chance, and that he’d even chosen his profession in reaction against his father. One of the more notorious features of Luke’s diceliving had been his followers’ remarkable success at picking profitable stocks and bonds using the dice. At Wharton Business School Larry had determined to prove the value of reason and research over his father’s bastard deity, Chance.
    But in the last five years of conquering chance with his trend lines, resistance areas, momentum figures, stochastics, point and figure charts and Eliot Waves, how often some chance event would send a market reeling in a direction contrary to that predicted by all his indicators! And how annoying that, even without any measurable chance event, markets somehow refused to perform as all his technical indicators forecast they would.
    Despite Larry trying to picture his father before he’d taken up his quixotic quest for the cure to human misery, he had absolutely no memories of him before the age of eight. That was a sure sign of repression, Dr Bickers had assured him. He groaned at the thought of having to talk toDr Bickers about this FBI visit: how the man would smirk at this archetypal return of the father. And he grimaced too at realizing that despite his dislike of Dr Bickers he seemed to be consulting psychotherapists almost as often as his father used to consult the dice. He ought to bill his father.
    Over the years he’d think he was making progress, announce to friends that he’d finally made a key breakthrough, and then a few weeks later tell these same friends that his therapist was a charlatan – and possibly a secret diceperson.
    His reveries were abruptly interrupted by an official buzz from Miss Claybell: Mr Battle wanted to see him in his office immediately.
    Ah, yes. Nothing like a visit from the FBI to make a trader’s boss want to have a chat.

4
    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