Enough Rope

by Lawrence Block

  “No.”

  “I wonder if I would.” They fell silent, and after perhaps five minutes he said, “My father was a soldier, he was killed in the war when I was just a baby. That’s why I named the dog Soldier.”

  Engleman didn’t say anything.

  “Except I think my mother was lying,” he went on. “I don’t think she was married, and I have a feeling she didn’t know who my father was. But I didn’t know that when I named the dog. When you think about it, it’s a stupid name anyway for a dog, Soldier. It’s probably stupid to name a dog after your father, as far as that goes.”

  Sunday he stayed in the room and watched sports on television. The Mexican place was closed; he had lunch at Wendy’s and dinner at a Pizza Hut. Monday at noon he was back at the Mexican café. He had the newspaper with him, and he ordered the same thing he’d ordered the first time, the chicken enchiladas.

  When the waitress brought coffee afterward, he asked her, “When’s the wedding?”

  She looked utterly blank. “The wedding,” he repeated, and pointed at the ring on her finger.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, I’m not engaged or anything. The ring was my mom’s from her first marriage. She never wears it, so I asked could I wear it, and she said it was all right. I used to wear it on the other hand but it fits better here.”

  He felt curiously angry, as though she’d betrayed the fantasy he’d spun out about her. He left the same tip he always left and took a long walk around town, gazing in windows, wandering up one street and down the next.

  He thought, Well, you could marry her. She’s already got the engagement ring. Ed’ll print your wedding invitations, except who would you invite?

  And the two of you could get a house with a fenced yard, and buy a dog.

  Ridiculous, he thought. The whole thing was ridiculous.

  At dinnertime he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to go back to the Mexican café but he felt perversely disinclined to go anywhere else. One more Mexican meal, he thought, and I’ll wish I had that gun back so I could kill myself.

  He called Engleman at home. “Look,” he said, “this is important. Could you meet me at your shop?”

  “When?”

  “As soon as you can.”

  “We just sat down to dinner.”

  “Well, don’t ruin your meal,” Keller said. “What is it, seven-thirty? How about if you meet me in an hour.”

  He was waiting in the photographer’s doorway when Engleman parked the Honda in front of his shop. “I didn’t want to disturb you,” he said, “but I had an idea. Can you open up? I want to see something inside.”

  Engleman unlocked the door and they went in. Keller kept talking to him, saying how he’d figured out a way he could stay in Roseburg and not worry about the man in White Plains. “This machine you’ve got,” he said, pointing to one of the copiers. “How does this work?”

  “How does it work?”

  “What does that switch do?”

  “This one?”

  Engleman leaned forward, and Keller got the loop of wire out of his pocket and dropped it around the other man’s neck. The garrote was fast, silent, deadly. Keller made sure Engleman’s body was where it couldn’t be seen from the street, made sure to wipe his prints off any surfaces he might have touched. He turned off the lights, closed the door behind him.

  He had already checked out of the Douglas Inn, and now he drove straight to Portland, with the Ford’s cruise control set just below the speed limit. He drove half an hour in silence, then turned on the radio and tried to find a station he could stand. Nothing pleased him and he gave up and switched it off.

  Somewhere north of Eugene he said, “Jesus, Ed, what else was I going to do?”

  He drove straight through to Portland and got a room at the ExecuLodge near the airport. In the morning he turned in the Hertz car and dawdled over coffee until his flight was called.

  He called White Plains as soon as he was on the ground at JFK. “It’s all taken care of,” he said. “I’ll come by sometime tomorrow. Right now I just want to get home, get some sleep.”

  The following afternoon in White Plains Dot asked him how he’d liked Roseburg.

  “Really nice,” he said. “Pretty town, nice people. I wanted to stay there.”

  “Oh, Keller,” she said. “What did you do, look at houses?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Every place you go,” she said, “you want to live there.”

  “It’s nice,” he insisted. “And living’s cheap compared to here. A person could have a decent life.”

  “For a week,” she said. “Then you’d go nuts.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Come on,” she said. “Roseburg, Oregon? Come on.”

  “I guess you’re right,” he said. “I guess a week’s about as much as I could handle.”

  A few days later he was going through his pockets before taking some clothes to the cleaners. He found the Roseburg street map and went over it, remembering where everything was. Quik-Print, the Douglas Inn, the house on Cowslip. The Mexican café, the other places he’d eaten. The gun shop. The houses he’d looked at.

  He folded the map and put it in his dresser drawer. A month later he came across it, and for a moment he couldn’t place it. Then he laughed. And tore it in half, and in half again, and put it in the trash.

  Keller’s Therapy

  “I had this dream,” Keller said. “Matter of fact I wrote it down, as you suggested.”

  “Good.”

  Before getting on the couch Keller had removed his jacket and hung it on the back of a chair. He moved from the couch to retrieve his notebook from the jacket’s inside breast pocket, then sat on the couch and found the page with the dream on it. He read through his notes rapidly, closed the book, and sat there, uncertain how to proceed.

  “As you prefer,” said Breen. “Sitting up or lying down, whichever is more comfortable.”

  “It doesn’t matter?”

  “Not to me.”

  And which was more comfortable? A seated posture seemed more natural for conversation, while lying down on the couch had the weight of tradition on its side. Keller, who felt driven to give this his best shot, decided to go with tradition. He stretched out, put his feet up.

  He said, “I’m living in a house, except it’s almost like a castle. Endless passageways and dozens of rooms.”

  “Is it your house?”

  “No, I just live here. In fact I’m a kind of servant for the family that owns the house. They’re almost like royalty.”

  “And you are a servant.”

  “Except I have very little to do, and I’m treated like an equal. I play tennis with members of the family. There’s this tennis court in back of the house.”

  “And this is your job? To play tennis with them?”

  “No, that’s an example of how they treat me as an equal. And I eat at the same table with them, instead of eating downstairs with the servants. My job is the mice.”

  “The mice?”

  “The house is infested with mice. I’m having dinner with the family, I’ve got a plate piled high with good food, and a waiter in black tie comes in and presents a covered dish. I lift the cover and there’s a note on it, and it says, ‘Mice.’ “

  “Just the single word?”

  “That’s all. I get up from the table and I follow the servant down a long hallway, and I wind up in an unfinished room in the attic. There are tiny mice all over the room, there must be twenty or thirty of them, and I have to kill them.”

  “How?”

  “By crushing them underfoot. That’s the quickest and most humane way, but it bothers me and I don’t want to do it. But the sooner I finish, the sooner I can get back to my dinner, and I’m very hungry.”

  “So you kill the mice?”

  “Yes,” Keller said. “One almost gets away but I stomp on it just as it’s getting out the door. And then I’m back at the dinner table and everybody�
��s eating and drinking and laughing, and my plate’s been cleared away. Then there’s a big fuss, and finally they bring my plate back from the kitchen, but it’s not the same food as before. It’s . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Mice,” Keller said. “They’re skinned and cooked, but it’s a plateful of mice.”

  “And you eat them?”

  “That’s when I woke up,” Keller said. “And not a moment too soon, I’d have to say.”

  “Ah,” Breen said. He was a tall man, long-limbed and gawky, wearing chinos and a dark green shirt and a brown corduroy jacket. He looked to Keller like someone who had been a nerd in high school, and who now managed to look distinguished, in an eccentric sort of way. He said “Ah” again, and folded his hands, and asked Keller what he thought the dream meant.

  “You’re the doctor,” Keller said.

  “You think it means that I am the doctor?”

  “No, I think you’re the one who can say what it means. Maybe it just means I shouldn’t eat Rocky Road ice cream right before I go to bed.”

  “Tell me what you think the dream might mean.”

  “Maybe I see myself as a cat.”

  “Or as an exterminator?”

  Keller didn’t say anything.

  “Let us work with this dream on a very superficial level,” Breen said. “You’re employed as a corporate troubleshooter, except that you used another word for it.”

  “They tend to call us expediters,” Keller said, “but troubleshooter is what it amounts to.”

  “Most of the time there is nothing for you to do. You have considerable opportunity for recreation, for living the good life. For tennis, as it were, and for nourishing yourself at the table of the rich and powerful. Then mice are discovered, and it is at once clear that you are a servant with a job to do.”

  “I get it,” Keller said.

  “Go on, then. Explain it to me.”

  “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? There’s a problem and I’m called in and I have to drop what I’m doing and go and deal with it. I have to take abrupt arbitrary action, and that can involve firing people and closing out whole departments. I have to do it, but it’s like stepping on mice. And when I’m back at the table and I want my food—I suppose that’s my salary?”

  “Your compensation, yes.”

  “And I get a plate of mice.” He made a face. “In other words, what? My compensation comes from the destruction of the people I have to cut adrift. My sustenance comes at their expense. So it’s a guilt dream?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s guilt. My profit derives from the misfortunes of others, from the grief I bring to others. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “On the surface, yes. When we go deeper, perhaps we will begin to discover other connections. With your having chosen this job in the first place, perhaps, and with some aspects of your childhood.” He interlaced his fingers and sat back in his chair. “Everything is of a piece, you know. Nothing exists alone and nothing is accidental. Even your name.”

  “My name?”

  “Peter Stone. Think about it, why don’t you, between now and our next session.”

  “Think about my name?”

  “About your name and how it suits you. And”—a reflexive glance at his wristwatch—“I’m afraid our hour is up.”

  Jerrold Breen’s office was on Central Park West at Ninety-fourth Street. Keller walked to Columbus Avenue, rode a bus five blocks, crossed the street, and hailed a taxi. He had the driver go through Central Park, and by the time he got out of the cab at Fiftieth Street he was reasonably certain he hadn’t been followed. He bought coffee in a deli and stood on the sidewalk, keeping an eye open while he drank it. Then he walked to the building where he lived, on First Avenue between Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth. It was a prewar high-rise, with an Art Deco lobby and an attended elevator. “Ah, Mr. Keller,” the attendant said. “A beautiful day, yes?”

  “Beautiful,” Keller agreed.

  Keller had a one-bedroom apartment on the nineteenth floor. He could look out his window and see the UN building, the East River, the borough of Queens. On the first Sunday in November he could watch the runners streaming across the Queensboro Bridge, just a couple of miles past the midpoint of the New York marathon.

  It was a spectacle Keller tried not to miss. He would sit at his window for hours while thousands of them passed through his field of vision, first the world-class runners, then the middle-of-the-pack plodders, and finally the slowest of the slow, some walking, some hobbling. They started in Staten Island and finished in Central Park, and all he saw was a few hundred yards of their ordeal as they made their way over the bridge into Manhattan. Sooner or later the sight always moved him to tears, although he could not have said why.

  Maybe it was something to talk about with Breen.

  It was a woman who had led him to the therapist’s couch, an aerobics instructor named Donna. Keller had met her at the gym. They’d had a couple of dates, and had been to bed a couple of times, enough to establish their sexual incompatibility. Keller still went to the same gym two or three times a week to raise and lower heavy metal objects, and when he ran into her they were friendly.

  One time, just back from a trip somewhere, he must have rattled on about what a nice town it was. “Keller,” she said, “if there was ever a born New Yorker, you’re it. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “But you’ve always got this fantasy, living the good life in Elephant, Montana. Every place you go, you dream up a whole life to go with it.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Who’s saying it’s bad? But I bet you could have fun with it in therapy.”

  “You think I need to be in therapy?”

  “I think you’d get a lot out of therapy,” she said. “Look, you come here, right? You climb the Stair Monster, you use the Nautilus.”

  “Mostly free weights.”

  “Whatever. You don’t do this because you’re a physical wreck.”

  “I do it to stay in shape.”

  “And because it makes you feel good.”

  “So?”

  “So I see you as all closed in and trying to reach out,” she said. “Going all over the country and getting real estate agents to show you houses you’re not going to buy.”

  “That was only a couple of times. And what’s so bad about it, anyway? It passes the time.”

  “You do these things and don’t know why,” she said. “You know what therapy is? It’s an adventure, it’s a voyage of discovery. And it’s like going to the gym. It’s . . . look, forget it. The whole thing’s pointless anyway unless you’re interested.”

  “Maybe I’m interested,” he said.

  Donna, not surprisingly, was in therapy herself. But her therapist was a woman, and they agreed he’d be more comfortable working with a man. Her ex-husband had been very fond of his therapist, a West Side psychologist named Breen. Donna had never met the man herself, and she wasn’t on the best of terms with her ex, but—

  “That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll call him myself.”

  He’d called Breen, using Donna’s ex-husband’s name as a reference. “But I doubt that he even knows me by name,” he said. “We got to talking a while back at a party and I haven’t seen him since. But something he said struck a chord with me, and, well, I thought I ought to explore it.”

  “Intuition is a powerful teacher,” Breen said.

  Keller made an appointment, giving his name as Peter Stone. In his first session he talked some about his work for a large and unnamed conglomerate. “They’re a little old-fashioned when it comes to psychotherapy,” he told Breen. “So I’m not going to give you an address or telephone number, and I’ll pay for each session in cash.”

  “Your life is filled with secrets,” Breen said.

  “I’m afraid it is. My work demands it.”

  “This is a place where you can be honest and open. The idea is
to uncover those secrets you’ve been keeping from yourself. Here you are protected by the sanctity of the confessional, but it’s not my task to grant you absolution. Ultimately, you absolve yourself.”

  “Well,” Keller said.

  “Meanwhile, you have secrets to keep. I can respect that. I won’t need your address or telephone number unless I’m forced to cancel an appointment. I suggest you call in to confirm your sessions an hour or two ahead of time, or you can take the chance of an occasional wasted trip. If you have to cancel an appointment, be sure to give me twenty-four hours’ notice. Or I’ll have to charge for the missed session.”

  “That’s fair,” Keller said.

  He went twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays, at two in the afternoon. It was hard to tell what they were accomplishing. Sometimes Keller relaxed completely on the sofa, talking freely and honestly about his childhood. Other times he experienced the fifty-minute session as a balancing act; he was tugged in two directions at once, yearning to tell everything, compelled to keep it all a secret.

  No one knew he was doing this. Once when he ran into Donna she asked if he’d ever given the shrink a call, and he’d shrugged sheepishly and said he hadn’t. “I thought about it,” he said, “but then somebody told me about this masseuse, she does a combination of Swedish and shiatsu, and I’ve got to tell you, I think it does me more good than somebody poking and probing at the inside of my head.”

  “Oh, Keller,” she’d said, not without affection. “Don’t ever change.”

  It was on a Monday that he recounted the dream about the mice. Wednesday morning his phone rang, and it was Dot. “He wants to see you,” she said.

  “Be right out,” he said.

  He put on a tie and jacket and caught a cab to Grand Central and a train to White Plains. There he caught another cab and told the driver to head out Washington Boulevard and let him off at the corner of Norwalk. After the cab drove off he walked up Norwalk to Taunton Place and turned left. The second house on the right was a big old Victorian with a wraparound porch. He rang the bell and Dot let him in.

  “The upstairs den,” she said. “He’s expecting you.”