The Search for the Dice Man Read Online Free

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 cubiclehideaway. ‘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