“When?”

“By autumn. The Times will do a front-page feature on the alienation of the Jewish electorate.”

“No,” I said. “I’ll send Lombroso to do the Kuwait dedication in Quinn’s place. That’ll shut Quinn up and also remind everybody that we’ve got a Jew right at the highest level of the municipal administration.”

“Oh, no, you can’t do that,” said Carvajal.

“Why not?”

“Because Quinn is going to speak. I saw him there.”

“What if I arrange to have Quinn go to Alaska that week?”

“Please, Lew. Believe me, it’s impossible for Quinn to be anywhere but at the Kuwait Bank Building on the day of the dedication. Impossible.”

“And impossible, too, I guess, for him to avoid making wisecracks about Israel, even if he’s warned not to do it?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe this. I think if I go to him tomorrow and say, Hey, Paul, my reading is the Jewish voters are getting restless, so maybe skip the Kuwait thing, he’ll skip it. Or else tone down his remarks.”

“He’ll go,” said Carvajal quietly.

“No matter what I say or do?”

“No matter what you say or do, Lew.”

I shook my head. “The future isn’t as inflexible as you think. We do have some say about events yet to come. I’ll talk to Quinn about the Kuwait ceremony.”

“Please don’t.”

“Why not?” I asked roughly. “Because you have some need to make the future turn out the right way?”

He seemed wounded by that. Gently he said, “Because I know the future always does turn out the right way. Do you insist on testing that?”

“Quinn’s interests are my interests. If you’ve seen him do something damaging to those interests, how can I sit still and let him go ahead and do it?”

“There’s no choice.”

“I don’t know that yet.”

Carvajal sighed. “If you raise the matter of the Kuwait ceremony with the mayor,” he said ponderously, “you will have had your last access to the things I see. ”

“Is that a threat?”

“A statement of fact.”

“A statement that tends to make your prophecy self-fulfilling. You know I want your help, so you seal my lips with your threat, so of course the ceremony comes off the way you saw it. But what’s the good of your telling me things if I’m not allowed to act on them? Why don’t you risk giving me free rein? Are you so unsure of the strength of your visions that you have to take this way of guaranteeing that they’ll come out right?”

“Very well,” Carvajal said mildly, without malice. “You have free rein. Do as you please. We’ll see what happens.”

“And if I speak to Quinn, will that mean a break between you and me?”

“We’ll see what happens,” he said.

He had me. Once again he had outplayed me; for how did I dare risk losing access to his vision, and how could I predict what his reaction to my treachery would be? I would have to let Quinn alienate the Jews next month, and hope to repair the damage later, unless I could find some way around Carvajal’s insistence on silence. Maybe I ought to discuss this with Lombroso.

I said, “How badly disenchanted are the Jews going to be with him?”

“Enough to cost him a lot of votes. He’s planning to run for re-election in ‘01, isn’t he?”

“If he isn’t elected President next year.”

“He won’t be,” Carvajal said. “We both know that. He won’t even run. But he’ll need to be re-elected mayor in 2001 if he wants to try for the White House three years later.”

“Definitely.”

“Then he ought not to alienate the New York City Jewish vote. That’s all I can tell you.”

I made a mental note to advise Quinn to start repairing his ties with the city’s Jews — visit some kosher delicatessens, drop in at a few synagogues on Friday night.

“Are you angry with me for what I said a little while back?” I asked.

“I never get angry,” Carvajal said.

“Hurt, then. You looked hurt when I said you need to make the future turn out the right way.”

“I suppose I was. Because it shows how little you’ve understood me, Lew. As if you really do think I’m under some neurotic compulsion to fulfill my own visions. As if you think I’d use psychological blackmail to keep you from upsetting the patterns. No, Lew. The patterns can’t be upset, and until you accept that, there can’t be any real kinship of thought between us, no sharing of vision. What you said saddened me because it revealed to me how far away from me you really are. But no, no, I’m not angry with you. Is it a good steak?”

“Magnificent,” I told him, and he smiled.

We finished the meal in virtual silence and left without waiting for the check. The club would bill him, I supposed. The tab must have run well over a hundred fifty dollars.

Outside, as we parted, Carvajal said, “Someday, when you see things yourself, you’ll understand why Quinn has to say what I know he’s going to say at the Kuwait Bank dedication.”

“When I see things myself?”

“You will.”

“I don’t have the gift.”

“Everyone has the gift,” he said. “Very few know how to use it.” He gave my forearm a quick squeeze and disappeared into the crowd on Wall Street.

I didn’t put through an immediate call to Quinn, but I came close to it. As soon as Carvajal was out of sight I found myself wondering why I should hesitate. Carvajal’s insights into things to come were demonstrably accurate; he had given me information important to Quinn’s career; my responsibility to Quinn overrode all other considerations. Besides, Carvajal’s concept of an inflexible, unchangeable future still seemed an absurdity to me. Anything that hadn’t happened yet had to be subject to change; I could change it and I would, for Quinn’s sake.

But I didn’t put through the call.

Carvajal had asked me — ordered me, threatened me, warned me — not to intervene in this thing. If Quinn failed to keep his date with the Kuwaitis, Carvajal would know why, and that might be the end of my fragile, tantalizing relationship with the strangely potent little man. But could Quinn skip the Kuwait dedication, even if I intervened? According to Carvajal, that was impossible. On the other hand, perhaps Carvajal was playing games within games, and what he really foresaw was a future in which Quinn didn’t attend the Kuwait function. In that case the script might call for me to be the agent of change, the one who prevented Quinn from keeping his date, and then Carvajal would be counting on me to be just contrary enough to help things work out the right way. That didn’t sound very plausible, but I had to take the possibility into account. I was lost in a maze of blind alleys. My sense of stochasticity would not hold. I no longer knew what I believed about the future or even the present, and the past itself was starting to look uncertain. I think that luncheon with Carvajal began the process of stripping me of what I once regarded as sanity.

I pondered for a couple of days. Then I went to Bob Lombroso’s celebrated office and dumped the whole business on him.

“I have a problem of political tactics,” I said.

“Why come to me instead of Haig Mardikian? He’s the strategist.”

“Because my problem involves concealing confidential information about Quinn. I know something that Quinn might want to know, and I’m not able to tell him. Mardikian’s such a gung-ho Quinn man that he’s likely to get the story out of me under a pledge of secrecy and then head straight to Quinn with it.”

“I’m a gung-ho Quinn man, too,” Lombroso said. “ You’rea gung-ho Quinn man.”

“Yes,” I said. “But you’re not so gung-ho that you’d breach a friend’s confidence for Quinn’s sake.”

“Whereas you think Haig would?”

“He might.”

“Haig would be upset if he knew you felt like that about him.”

“I know you aren’t going to report any of this to him,” I said. “I know you aren’t.”