“Not to mention your little libel with the bogus letters to the Psychoanalytic Society. That was you, wasn’t it? Leading on that complete idiot up in Boston with such an elaborate fiction. Did you take your clothes off for him, as well . . . ?”
Virgil swept the hair away from her face again, leaning back slightly in her seat. “Didn’t have to. He’s one of those men who acts like puppies when you reproach them. He simply rolls over on his back and exposes his genitals with pathetic little mewling sounds. Isn’t it remarkable how much a person will believe when they want to believe . . .”
“I will get my reputation back,” Ricky said fiercely.
Virgil grinned. “You need to be alive for that, and right now, I have my doubts.”
Ricky didn’t answer, because he, too, had his doubts. He looked up and saw the waitress approach with their dinners. She set them down and asked if there was anything else she could bring to the table. Virgil wanted a second glass of wine, but Ricky shook his head.
“That’s good,” Virgil said as the waitress departed. “Keep a clear head.”
Ricky poked for an instant at the plate of food steaming in front of him. “Why,” he asked abruptly, “are you helping this man? What’s in it for you? Why don’t you drop all this pretense and stop acting like a fool and come with me to the police. We could put a stop to this game immediately and I’d see to it that you regained some semblance of normal life. No criminal charges. I could do that.”
Virgil kept her eyes on her plate as well, using her fork to toy with the mound of pasta and slab of salmon. When she lifted her gaze to meet his, her eyes barely concealed anger. “You’ll see that I return to a normal life? Are you a magician? And, anyway, what makes you think there’s anything so wonderful about a normal life?”
He persisted, ignoring this question. “If you’re not a criminal, why are you helping one? If you’re not a sadist, why do you work for one? If you’re not a psychopath, why are you joining one? And, if you’re not a killer, why are you helping someone commit a murder?”
Virgil continued to stare at him. All the breezy eccentricity and liveliness in her manner had dissipated, replaced by a sudden frosty harshness that blew coldly across the table. “Perhaps because I’m well paid,” she said slowly. “In this day and age, many people are willing to do anything for money. Could you believe that of me?”
“Only with difficulty,” Ricky replied cautiously, although the opposite of what he said was likely the truth.
Virgil shook her head. “So you’d like to dismiss money as my motive, although I’m not sure that you should. Another motive perhaps? What other motives could there be for me? You should be expert in that arena. Doesn’t the concept ‘searching for motives’ pretty much define what you do? And isn’t the same thing an integral part of this little exercise that we’re all playing? So, c ’mon, Ricky. We’ve now had two sessions together. If it’s not money, what motivates me?”
Ricky stared hard at the young woman. “I don’t know enough about you . . . ,” he started lamely. She put down her knife and fork with a stiff deliberateness that indicated she didn’t approve of this answer.
“Do better, Ricky. For my sake. After all, in my own way, I’m here to guide you. The trouble is, Ricky, the word guide has positive connotations that may actually be incorrect. I may need to steer you in directions that you don’t want to go. But one thing is certain: Without me, you’ll get no closer to an answer, which will kill either you—or someone close to you who is in a state of complete ignorance. And dying blindly is stupid, Ricky. In its own way a worse crime. So, now, answer my question: What other motives might I have?”
“You hate me. Hate me, just as this fellow R. does, only I don’t know why.”
“Hate is an imprecise emotion, Ricky. Do you think you understand it?”
“It’s something I hear every day, in my practice . . .”
She shook her head. “No, no, no. You don’t. You hear about anger and frustration, which are minor elements of hate. You hear about abuse and cruelty, which are bigger players on that stage, but still, only teammates. But mostly, what you hear about is inconvenience. Boring and old and dull inconvenience. And this has as little to do with pure hatred as a single dark cloud has to do with a thunderstorm. That cloud has to join others and grow precipitously, before venting.”
“But you . . .”
“I don’t hate you, Ricky. Though, perhaps I could learn to. Try something else.”
He didn’t believe this for a second, but, at the same moment felt almost as if he were spinning, trying to find an answer. He breathed in sharply.
“Love, then,” Ricky said abruptly.
Virgil smiled again. “Love?”
“You perform because you’re in love with this man Rumplestiltskin.”
“That’s an intriguing idea. Especially when I told you I don’t know who he is. Never met the fellow.”
“Yes, I recall you said that. I just don’t believe it.”
“Love. Hate. Money. Are these the only motives you can come up with?”
Ricky paused. “Perhaps fear, as well.”
Virgil nodded. “Fear is good, Ricky. It can prompt all sorts of unusual behavior, can’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Your analysis of this relationship suggests that perhaps Mr. R. has some sort of threatening hold over me? Like the kidnapper who forces his victims to fork over their money in the pathetic hope that he will return their dog or their child or whoever it is that he has snatched. Do I behave like a person being asked to perform tasks against my will?”
“No,” Ricky replied.
“Well, okay then. You know, Ricky, I think you’re a man who doesn’t seize opportunities when they arise. Here, now, this is the second time I’ve sat across from you, and instead of trying to help yourself, you plead with me to help you, when you’ve done nothing to deserve my assistance. I should have predicted this, but I did have hope for you. Really, I did. Not much anymore, though . . .”
She waved her hand in the air above the table, dismissing a reply before he could come up with one. “. . . On to business. You got the reply to your questions in your paper this morning?”
Ricky paused, then answered: “Yes.”
“Good. That’s why he sent me here this evening. To double-check. Wouldn’t be fair, he thought, if you didn’t get the answers you were searching for. I was surprised, of course. Mr. R. decided to put you much closer to him. Closer than I’d have thought prudent. Pick your next questions wisely, Ricky, if you want to win. It seems to me that he’s given you a big opportunity. But as of tomorrow morning, you have only a single week left. Seven days and two remaining questions.”
“I’m aware of the time.”
“Are you? I think you don’t get it. Not yet. But, as long as we’ve been talking about motivation, Mr. R. sent along something to help you pick up the pace of your investigation.”
Virgil bent down and lifted the small leather portfolio that she’d carried beneath her arm when she’d first approached Ricky, and which she’d subsequently placed on the floor. She deliberately opened the satchel and removed a manila envelope, similar to others Ricky had seen. She handed this across the table to him. “Open it up,” she said. “It’s just filled with motivation.”
He undid the clasp and opened the envelope. Inside were a half-dozen eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs. He removed these and examined them. There were three different subjects, each in the center of two photographs. The first shots were of a young woman, perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old, wearing blue jeans and sweat-stained T-shirt, with a carpenter’s leather belt around her waist, wielding a large hammer. She appeared to be working at some construction site. The next two photographs were of another child, younger, a girl perhaps twelve years old, seated in the bow of a canoe, paddling across a lake in a wooded region. The first shot seemed slightly grainy, the second, seemingly taken from a distance with an extremely long lens, was a close
-up, near enough to show the girl’s braces as she grinned with the exertion of paddling. Then there was a third set of another teenager, a boy with longish hair and an insouciant smile, gesturing with a street vendor in what appeared to be a street in Paris.
All six pictures seemed to be taken without the knowledge of the subjects. It was clear that the photographer had snapped them off unnoticed by the three young people.
Ricky examined the pictures carefully, then looked up at Virgil. She no longer smiled.
“Recognize anyone?” she asked coldly.
He shook his head.
“You live in such splendid isolation, Ricky. It makes all this so damn simple. Look harder. Do you know who those young people are?”
“No. I do not.”
“Those are pictures of some of your distant relatives. Each one of those children is on the list of names Mr. R. sent you at the beginning of your game.”
Ricky looked again at the pictures.
“Paris, France, Habitat for Humanity, Honduras, and Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. Three kids on their summer vacations. Just like you.”
He nodded.
“Do you see how vulnerable they are? Do you think it was hard to take these photographs? Could one replace a camera with a high-powered rifle or a handgun, perhaps? How easy would it be to simply remove one of these children from the benign environment they’re enjoying? Do you think any of them has any idea how close to death they might be? Do you imagine any of them have even the vaguest notion that life might just come to a sudden, bloody, screeching halt in seven short days?”
Virgil pointed at the photographs.
“Take another long look, Ricky,” she said. She waited while he absorbed the images. Then she reached across the table to take the pictures from his hands. “I think all that we need to leave you with are the mental portaits, Ricky. Put the smiles those children wear into your head. Try to imagine the smiles they might enjoy in the future as they grow into adulthood. What sort of lives might they lead? What sort of people would they grow into? Will you rob the future from one of them—or someone like them—by obstinately clinging to your own pathetically few years remaining?”
Virgil paused, then with snakelike speed, she grabbed the photographs from his hands. “I’ll take these,” she said as she returned the photographs to her satchel. She pushed back from the table, simultaneously dropping a single hundred-dollar bill on top of her half-eaten plate of food. “You’ve stolen my appetite,” she said. “But I know your financial situation has deteriorated. So I’ll pay for dinner.”
She turned toward the waitress, hovering at a nearby table. “Do you have some chocolate cake?” she asked.
“A chocolate cheesecake,” the woman replied. Virgil nodded.
“Bring a piece for my friend, here,” she said. “His life has suddenly turned bitter and he needs some sweetness to get him through the next few days.”
Then she pivoted and walked out, leaving Ricky alone. He reached for a glass of water and noticed that his hand shook slightly, rattling the ice cubes in the glass.
He walked home in the growing city darkness, his isolation nearly complete.
The world around him seemed a rebuke filled with connections, a near-constant tease of people meeting people in the commerce of existence. He felt almost invisible walking down the streets back to his apartment. In a curious way, Ricky realized, he was almost transparent. No one who walked or drove past him, not one person, would register him on their view of the world. His face, his appearance, his very being, did not mean anything to anyone except the man stalking him. His death, on the other hand, was of critical importance to some anonymous relative. Rumplestiltskin, and by proxy Virgil and the lawyer Merlin and probably some other characters he hadn’t yet met, were the bridges between living and dying. It seemed to Ricky that he had entered into the netherworld occupied by the people who are given the worst diagnosis by a doctor or assigned a date of execution by their judge: the few who know the date of their death. He could feel a cloud of despair hovering just over his head. He was reminded of the famous cartoon character he remembered from his own youth, Al Capp’s great creation of Joe Bflspk, doomed to walk beneath a personal rain cloud dripping dampness and bolts of lightning wherever he went.
The faces of the three young people in the photographs were like ghosts to him—vaporous, filmy. He knew he had to create substance around them, so that they would be real to him. He wished he knew their names, knew also that he had to take some steps to protect them. As he fixed their faces in the near part of his memory, his pace picked up. He saw the braces in one smile, the longish hair, the sweat of selfless exertion, and as he saw each photograph, as clearly as he had when Virgil thrust them across the restaurant table, his stride lengthened, his muscles tightened, and he began to hurry. He could hear his shoes slapping against the sidewalk, almost as if the sound was coming from somewhere outside his own life, until he looked down and saw that he was nearly running. Something loosened within him, and he gave in to a sensation he didn’t recognize, but to anyone stepping aside on the sidewalk to let him pass, must have seemed like a full-blown panic.
Ricky ran, breath heaving in his chest, rasping between his lips. One block, then another, not stopping as he crossed streets, leaving a blast of taxicab horns and obscenities in his wake, not seeing, not hearing, his head filled only with images of death. He did not slow until he was within sight of the entranceway to his home. He heaved to a stop, bending over, gasping for breath, stinging moisture dripping into his eyes. He remained like that, regaining his wind, for what seemed like several minutes, blocking everything out except the heat and the pain of sudden motion, hearing nothing except his own labored breath.
When he did lift his eyes, he thought: I am not alone.
This was no different a sensation than the other moments in the past few days when he’d been overcome by the same observation. It was almost predictable, based on nothing except abrupt paranoia. He tried to control himself, not give in to the sensation, almost as if he wanted to not indulge a secret passion, a craving for a sweet or a smoke. He was unable.
He pivoted sharply, trying to spot whoever was watching him, although he knew this action was useless. His eyes raced from candidates leisurely walking down the street, to empty windows in buildings nearby. He spun about, as if he could catch some telltale motion that might tip him to the person employed to watch him, but every possibility seemed slight, elusive.
Ricky turned back and stared at his own building. He was overcome with the thought that someone had been in his apartment while he was out bantering with Virgil. He leapt forward, then stopped. With an immense summoning of willpower, he forced himself to loop tendrils of control over emotions that were ricocheting around within him, telling himself to be calm, to be centered, to keep his wits about him. He took a long, deep breath and told himself that the likelihood was strong that any moment he emerged from within his apartment, regardless of the reason, Rumplestiltskin, or one of his henchmen, was slipping in behind him. That vulnerability couldn’t be solved with a request to a locksmith, and had been proven the other day when he’d come home to a house without lights.
Ricky’s stomach was tight, like an athlete’s in the moment after a race. He thought everything that had happened to him functioned on two levels. Every message from the man was both symbolic and literal.
His home, Ricky thought, was no longer safe.
Stopped on the street outside the apartment he’d lived most of his adult life within, Ricky was almost overcome by the recognition that there might not be even one corner of his existence that the man stalking him hadn’t penetrated.
For the first time, he thought: I must find a safe spot.
Not having any idea where he might uncover this location—either internally or externally—Ricky trudged up the steps to his home.
To his astonishment, there were no obvious signs of disruption. The door wasn’t ajar. The lights functioned normal
ly. The air conditioner hummed in the background. No overwhelming sense of dread or sixth-sense perception that someone had been inside. He closed and locked the door behind him feeling a momentary surge of relief. Still, his heart continued to race, and he also felt the quiver in his hand that he’d experienced in the restaurant when Virgil had left his side. He held up his hand in front of his face, inspecting it for twitching nervousness, but it was deceptively steady. He no longer trusted this; it was almost as if he could feel within the muscles and tendons of his body that a looseness had taken place, and that at any given second, he would lose control.
Exhaustion pummeled him, reaching into every crevice of his body and pounding away. He was breathing hard, but couldn’t understand why, because the demands on his own physique were modest.
“You need a good night’s sleep,” he told himself, speaking out loud, recognizing the tones that he might use for a patient, directed at himself. “You need to rest, collect your thoughts, and make progress.” For the first time, he considered finding his prescription pad and writing out a scrip for himself, some medication to help him relax. He knew he needed to focus, and it seemed to him that this was becoming increasingly difficult. He hated pills, but thought just this once they might be necessary. A mood elevator, he thought. A sleeping agent to get him some rest. Then, perhaps, some amphetamine to help him concentrate in the morning, and over the course of his remaining week before meeting Rumplestiltskin’s deadline.
Ricky kept a rarely used Physician’s Desk Reference guide to drugs in his desk, and he steered himself in that direction, thinking that the all-night pharmacy two blocks away would deliver anything he called in. He wouldn’t even have to venture out.
Sitting in his desk chair, quickly examining the entries in the PDR, it did not take Ricky long to determine what he needed. He found his prescription pad and called the pharmacy, reading off his DEA number for the first time, it seemed to him, in years. Three different drugs.
The Analyst Page 16
