Gilmartin.

Gellation.

One tip remained: Socorro for Leydecker before summer. Get to him early.

Cryptic and opaque, like most oracular pronouncements. I was entirely stopped by it. No stochastic technique at my command yielded a useful projection. I doodled a dozen scenarios and they all came out bewildering and meaningless. What kind of professional prophet was I when I was handed three solid clues to future events and I could turn a trick on but one out of the three?

I began to think I ought to pay a call on Carvajal.

Before I could do anything, though, stunning news rolled out of the West. Richard Leydecker, governor of California, titular leader of the New Democratic Party, front-running candidate for the next presidential nomination, dropped dead on a Palm Springs golf course on Memorial Day at the age of fifty-seven, and his office and power descended to Lieutenant-Governor Carlos Socorro, who thereby became a mighty political force in the land by virtue of his control of the country’s wealthiest and most influential state.

Socorro, who now would command the huge California delegation at next year’s national New Democratic convention, began making king-making noises at his very first press conferences, two days after Leydecker’s death. He managed to suggest, apropos of practically nothing, that he regarded Senator Eli Kane of Illinois as the most promising choice for next year’s New Democratic nomination — thereby setting instantly into motion a Kane-for-President boom that would become overwhelming in the next few weeks.

I had been thinking about Kane myself. When the news of Leydecker’s death came in, my immediate calculation was that Quinn should now make a play for the top nomination instead of the vice-presidency — why not grab the extra publicity now that we no longer needed to fear a murderous struggle with the omnipotent Leydecker? — but that we still should contrive things so that Quinn lost out on the convention floor to some older and less glamorous man, who then would go on to be trounced by President Mortonson in November. Quinn thus would inherit the fragments of the party to rebuild for 2004. Somebody like Kane, a distinguished-looking but hollow party-line politician, would be an ideal man for the role of the villain who deprives the dashing young mayor of the nomination.

For Quinn to move into serious contention against Kane, though, we would need Socorro’s support. Quinn was still an obscure figure to much of the country, and Kane was famous and beloved in the vast mid-American heartland. Backing from California, giving Quinn the delegates from the two biggest states if not much else, would enable him to make a decent losing fight against Kane. I figured that we would let a tasteful interval go by, perhaps a week, and then start making overtures to Governor Socorro. But Socorro’s instant endorsement of Kane changed everything overnight and undercut Quinn completely. Suddenly there was Senator Kane touring California at the side of the new governor and emitting orotund bleats of praise for Socorro’s administrative skills.

The fix was in and Quinn was out. A Kane-Socorro ticket was obviously in the making, and they would steamroller into next year’s convention with a first-ballot nomination locked up. Quinn would merely look quixotic and ingenuous, or, worse, disingenuous, if he tried to mount a floor fight. We had failed to get to Socorro in time, despite Carvajal’s tip, and Quinn had lost a chance to acquire a potent ally. No fatal damage had been done to Quinn’s 2004 presidential chances, but our tardiness had been costly all the same.

Oh, the chagrin, the same, the obloquy! Oh, the bitter onus, Nichols! Here, says the strange little man, here is a piece of paper with three pieces of the future written on it. Take such action as your own prophetic skills tell you is desirable. Fine, you say, thanks a million, and your skills tell you nothing, and nothing is what you do. And the future slides down around your ears to become the present, and you see quite clearly the things you should have done, and you look foolish in your own eyes.

I felt humble. I felt worthless.

I felt that I had failed some sort of test.

I needed guidance. I went to Carvajal.

This is a place where a millionaire gifted with second sight lives? A small grimy flat in a squat dilapidated ninety-year-old apartment house just off Flatbush Avenue in deepest Godforsaken Brooklyn? Going there was an experiment in foolhardiness. I knew — anybody in the municipal administration quickly gets to know — which areas of the city had been written off as out of bounds, beyond hope of redemption, outside the rule of law. This was one of them. Beneath the veil of time and decay I could see the bones of old residential respectability here; it had been a district of lower-middle-class Jews once, a neighborhood of kosher butchers and unsuccessful lawyers, and then lower-middle-class black, and then slum black, probably with Puerto enclaves, and now it was just a jungle, a corroding wasteland of crumbling little red-brick semidetached two-family houses and soot-filmed six-story apartment buildings, inhabited by drifters, sniffers, muggers, muggers of muggers, feral cat packs, short-pants gangs, elephant rats, and Martin Carvajal. "There?" I blurted when, having suggested a meeting to Carvajal, he suggested we hold it at his home. I suppose it was tactless to be so astonished at where he lived. He replied mildly that no harm would come to me. “I think I’ll arrange for a police escort anyway,” I said, and he laughed and said that was the surest way to invite trouble, and he told me again, firmly, to have no fear, that I would be in no peril if I came alone.

The inner voice whose promptings I always obey told me to have faith, so I went to Carvajal without a police escort, though not without fear.

No cab would go into that part of Brooklyn and pod service, of course, does not reach places like that. I borrowed an unmarked car from the municipal pool and drove it myself, not having the gall to risk a chauffeur’s life out there. Like most New Yorkers, I drive infrequently and poorly, and the ride had perils of its own. But in time I came, undented if not undaunted, to Carvajal’s street. Filth I had expected, yes, and rotting mounds of garbage in the street, and the rubble-strewn sites of demolished buildings looking like the gaps left by knocked-out teeth; but not the dry blackened corpses of beasts in the streets — dogs, goats, pigs? — and not the woody-stemmed weeds cracking through the pavement as if this were some ghost town, and not the reek of human dung and urine, and not the ankle-deep swirls of sand. A blast of oven heat hit me when I emerged, timidly and with misgivings, from the coolness of my car. Though this was only early June, a terrible late-August heat baked these miserable ruins. This is New York City? This might have been an outpost in the Mexican desert a century ago.

I left the car set on full alarm. Myself, I was carrying a top-strength anti-personnel baton and wearing a hip-hugging security cone warranted to knock any malefactor a dozen meters. Still I felt hideously exposed as I crossed the dreary pavement, knowing I had no defense against a casual sniper pot-shotting from above. But though a few sallow-faced inhabitants of this horrendous village eyed me sourly from the darkness behind their cracked and jagged windows, though a few lean-hipped street cowboys gave me long bleak glances, no one approached me, no one spoke to me, there were no fourth-floor fusillades. Entering the sagging building where Carvajal lived, I felt almost relaxed: maybe the neighborhood had been much maligned, maybe its dark reputation was a product of middle-class paranoia. Later I learned I would never have lasted sixty seconds outside my automobile if Carvajal hadn’t given orders insuring my safety. In this parched jungle he had immense authority; to his fierce neighbors he was a sort of warlock, a sacred totem, a holy fool, respected and feared and obeyed. His gift of vision, no doubt, used judiciously and with overwhelming impact, had made him invulnerable here — in the jungle no one trifles with a shaman — and today he had spread his mantle over me.