a condominium – you were clever. You bought a stock, any stock, you were a genius. You bought a house, any house, you were sharp. It was an era when rich dumb guys finished first and richer dumb guys finished even firster.
Until October 1987, anyway. Then a funny thing happened. Almost everyone who for at least five years had been a genius was suddenly in one calamitous day a jerk. Seldom in human history have so many bright wealthy men awakened in just one day to discover such an unambiguous truth: that they were neither so bright nor so wealthy. Their clever condominiums became rather quickly empty and unsellable. Their genius junk bonds became ungenial junk bondage.
We humans don’t take kindly to such awakenings. I suppose that when you lose several trillion dollars in one day you can be pardoned for not saying the obvious: all the wisdom of the previous five years had just been normal human stupidity. I’d happened to bet right on that horrible day but later I’d come to wonder whether if I’d been more mature and less cocky I might have examined 19 October 1987 a lot more carefully. Its most obvious lesson, I, like everyone else, never learned: what the market does on any given day may bear no resemblance to what it has ever done before.
Then my secretary marched into the room without buzzing. Miss Claybell was a chubby middle-aged woman who consistently wore clothing that looked as if it had been collected from church bazaars, applied too much make-up and never had an original thought. However, she was everything I wanted in a secretary – reasonable, unemotional, efficient, obedient and totally dedicated. Her very unemotional efficiency meant, however, that her slipping into my inner office unannounced must mean something was up.
‘There are two gentlemen to see you,’ she announced. ‘They say they’re FBI agents.’
At first I felt nothing; I just stared back at her, tipped forward in my chair and lowered my arms from behind my head.
‘FBI agents?’ I echoed vaguely.
‘They won’t say why they want to question you.’
I looked up at Miss Claybell neutrally, but with my heart now pumping panic and my mind desperately searching for the crime I must have committed. But since I was compulsively honest in all Wall Street financial dealings, my mind was filled with unpaid parking tickets, with a nineteen-year-old Goldman Sachs broker trainee I had seduced and abandoned, a 1987 income tax return that contained several creative deductions.
‘Should I show them in?’ Miss Claybell asked, watching me with that bland composure that made everyone else at Blair, Battle and Pike seem slightly panicky.
I came slowly to my feet, still staring at her uncertainly. I had an urge to pace, but managed to hold my feet to the floor, although my upper body rocked back and forth and my right hand was wrestling with pocket change.
‘Yes,’ I managed. But as Miss Claybell turned to leave I realized a futures trader being questioned by federal agents was bound to arouse a lot of not totally favourable conjecture.
‘And I want you to be present,’ I added.
She hesitated, nodded, and then, leaving the door open, disappeared.
The two men who soon entered looked like slightly unsuccessful businessmen who’d come to try to sell me some penny stocks or a supplemental health insurance policy. They introduced themselves as Hayes and Macavoy. They sat down stiffly in the two extra chairs while Miss Claybell, memo pad in hand, stood unobtrusively – or as unobtrusively as someone who dressed like Queen Victoria could – near the door, which she gently dosed.
The one called Hayes, a hollow-cheeked man in need of a shave, glanced briefly back at her.
‘We’re here to question just you, Mr Rhinehart,’ he said. ‘Your secretary can go.’
‘She’s staying,’ I countered quickly. ‘I want a written record of our conversation.’
Hayes looked so expressionlessly at me that it was like looking at a computer screen whose language I didn’t know.
‘Have it your way,’ Hayes said. After the briefest of glances at Macavoy he cleared his throat and continued. ‘Is Luke Rhinehart your father?’
That stopped me cold. Parking tickets, male chauvinism and creative IRS deductions all disappeared, and I was left with the image of the big smiling father I’d barely known.
‘Was my father,’ I said.
Hayes stared hard.
‘You believe your father is dead?’ he asked.
‘No, I mean Luke Rhinehart was my father until he deserted his family over fifteen years ago.’
‘I see,’ said Hayes. ‘And do you know where he is now?’
‘No.’
‘When did you last speak to him?’ Macavoy suddenly interjected. He was a slender man too, but taller, gangling, younger than Hayes. He looked like a prematurely aged teenage hoopster.
‘Ten years ago,’ I answered.
‘What was the occasion?’
‘My mother … had been killed in a car accident a week earlier,’ I said as calmly as I could. ‘He called to ask if my sister and I wanted to come live with him.’
Hayes and Macavoy waited for me to go on.
‘Well?’ Hayes finally asked.
‘It was the first and only contact I’d had with him since he’d disappeared five years before. I told him to go to hell.’
Hayes blinked once and then nodded.
‘And you’ve had no contact with him since?’ he asked.
‘None.’
‘But you’ve had contact with his followers.’
‘They’ve occasionally harassed me, if that’s what you mean,’ I said irritably.
‘How have they harassed you?’
‘By showing up. By telling me how my father has transformed their lives. Or ruined their lives. By being assholes.’
Macavoy coughed.
‘Didn’t any of them ever bring you a message from your father?’
‘No.’
‘Or told you some of the marvellous things your father is doing?’ There was a sarcastic bite in the question.
‘Look,’ I snapped, abruptly standing. ‘I really don’t want to talk about this. How can you possibly be interested in pursuing my father for the stupid things he did fifteen or twenty years ago?’
Hayes looked at me a moment and then exchanged glances with Macavoy.
‘We’re not interested in what your father did twenty years ago,’ he finally said. ‘We’re interested in what he’s doing right now.’
I hesitated.
‘Right now!?’ I managed.
‘Yes.’
‘And what do you think he’s doing right now?’ I asked, sinking slowly back down into my chair.
‘We can’t go into that,’ said Macavoy. ‘Let me ask you this: has anyone been acting strangely around you lately?’
I stared at him a moment and then laughed.
‘Everyone. All the time. What else is new?’
‘I mean has anyone new come into your life that struck you as odd?’ the gangly hoopster persisted.
‘No,’ I said irritably. ‘What are you driving at?’
‘We have reason to believe that your father may try to