‘Did she say she’d ever met this Luke Rhinehart?’
‘Met your father?’ echoed Lyman, grinning. ‘No, she says she met some people who claimed they had seen him in the commune – one girl even claimed the Big Dice Daddy fucked her in the orgy room – but our source herself never saw him.’
‘Why didn’t your paper send someone to the commune to dig up some more juicy stuff?’
‘Funny you should ask,’ said Lyman, poking at his nose with the eraser end of a pencil. ‘Griggs wanted to go for it but seems the girl couldn’t tell east from west or Paris from Pittsburgh. She says a girlfriend drove her there through a lot of back-country roads someplace down in Virginia or North Carolina or Kentucky. We spent about half an hour over some road maps with her and we might as well have been throwing darts. We couldn’t narrow it down any better than a big circle of more than a hundred and fifty miles’ diameter. Turns out she was asleep or stoned most of the way.’
‘She doesn’t sound like too reliable a source.’
‘Reliable source!’ snorted Lyman with a grin. ‘Christ, compared to some of our sources she was integrity incarnate. She was simple, sincere and spacey. Everything in that article of mine is the God’s truth by the standards of the World Star.’
‘So the commune exists and people say that my father is there,’ I suggested, looking at Lyman sceptically.
‘Yep.’
‘Is there a chance I can talk to the girl?’
‘Sure, there’s a chance,’ said Lyman, tipping forward in his chair and vaguely shuffling among some of the papers on his desk. ‘But not much of a one. She gave us a phone number in Pennsylvania where she said she was going, but when I phoned there a week ago to ask her something, they said she’d never showed up and they wanted nothing to do with her.’
‘Can I have that phone number?’ I asked.
Lyman was still groping absently at his papers.
‘The number?’ he said and finally looked up at me. ‘Of course not,’ he added. ‘We have to protect our sources.’
More than two months before Larry had been visited by the FBI Jeff had known he could take it no more. He saw clearly that there was some Malignant Force permeating the financial markets that was perversely working to thwart his every move. Whenever he or Larry would be making a profit on a trade Jeff would be furiously wondering how this Malignant Force was using this temporary profit to trick them into a much greater loss. Jeff had concluded then that every profitable trade was in fact a demonic trick to lure Jeff on, to give him a false sense of hope, to make him believe that he still might possibly make money as a futures trader.
He couldn’t tell Larry about his new discovery. Larry was an agnostic. Larry had no sense of the Divine which moved through and controlled all things, especially the Malignant Divine. But Jeff knew. Jeff was a believer. The Gods did not take kindly to mere humans presuming to be able to predict the future. And what was futures trading if not the arrogant act of a man thinking he could predict the direction of the price of something? The Greeks called it hubris. The Hebrews called it pride. The results were the same: the arrogant presumer ended up a cripple, a crackpot or a clutz.
Jeff had finally decided to do something to end his madness. No longer would he challenge the Gods’ domain over the future. He would never again presume to know something that only the Gods could know. He would become religious. He would honour the Gods. He would acknowledge that only factual knowledge should or could be used to take an investment position. He solemnly vowed that he would never voluntarily trade again except on the basis of privileged insider information. That, he knew, the Gods could accept.
Cheating was not presumptuous. Indeed, the Gods expected it of man. Cheating was a man’s way of acknowledging that he knew no way of beating the laws of chance. Cheating was, in fact, the rational man’s answer to the great Mystery of Life. Some men of course simply surrendered to the laws of chance and let themselves be buried by random events, content to be rich or poor on the basis of something no more purposeful than the toss of a coin. Not Jeff. Not a full American. The American way was to attack the unexpected, eliminate the unexpected, control the unexpected. In the futures markets there was only one reliable way: you cheated.
It was an incredible breakthrough for Jeff when he had this religious conversion. He felt like a gay must feel who, after many years of trying to go straight, suddenly and finally gives in to his deepest desires, and becomes what he fundamentally is. He’d known for almost a year of a certain person, X, who was able to give insider information to certain people, information which tended to make those certain people look very brilliant to others who had no such means of being certain. It had filled Jeff with gloomy and agonized anguish to know that Pete Riddles of Shearson was getting promoted and doubting his bonus because he accepted that certain person’s info, while Jeff, corrupted by the influence of Larry, still desperately believed that intelligence and skill could permit him to triumph over the future and futures and the Gods.
But then, luckily, Larry’s system had begun to produce losses with almost the same dull consistency that it used to produce gains. The Gods were beginning to make their move on Larry. Jeff would save Larry. Jeff would confess his hubris to the Gods, agree never to challenge their domain over the future again, and make money for BB&P by cheating – the way every great American had made his success.
He had phoned the certain person for the first time two months before Larry’s papa problems had come crashing down on him. He made his first trade based on insider information two weeks later. It had involved going short the Japanese yen the day before the US balance of trade figures were to be released. Since BB&P already were short some yen contracts Jeff was able to use his discretion to triple the position. The next day the BB&P Fund had its best profit in more than a month, and Larry had gloated that maybe their little slump was over.
Three weeks later Jeff had scored a smaller coup when ‘X’ had given him advance information on an FDA approval of an anti-Aids drug that would make a certain biotech stock soar. Jeff had quietly bought shares of the stock for various of his managed accounts and some call options also, mostly in his Aunt Mildred’s account. He’d mildly recommended the shares to Brad Burner, but not in a pushy way and Brad had ignored it. When the biostock shot up after the FDA approval of its drug, Jeff himself didn’t make any money – in fact he lost some since he had to give 20 per cent of his profits in cash to ‘X’ – but his personal stock with Brad and his clients rose considerably. For a few mad moments Jeff almost relaxed.
Now Jeff was considering a new trade based on his third surreptitious phone call to his certain person. The information he’d been given was simple: at 10 A.M. the following Wednesday, an hour and a half after bond futures trading started, the government would release the beige book report on the state of the American economy. That report, so the certain person indicated, would show that the nation’s economy was much weaker than expected. The bond market would rally. Bond futures might even soar. Jeff planned, over the next three trading days, to quadruple the long position in bond futures in the BB&P Fund and accumulate at least a million dollars of long-term government bonds for his clients and the house bond fund. In five days, if things were announced as the certain person said they would be, bond prices would rise sharply. So would bond futures.
Thus, humbly asking the Gods not to send an earthquake, revolution or presidential assassination between Friday and the following Wednesday at ten and thus mess up the works, Jeff promised the Gods to take his profits that day at noon. Far be it from him to predict what the market would do on its own without any advanced news from an insider.
FROM LUKE’S JOURNAL
Socrates once won first prize in an Athenian