The Analyst

by John Katzenbach

  An appropriate game for a psychoanalyst to invent.

  Again he sucked at the thin air of the study. Rumplestiltskin may have been the agent of revenge and the instigator, as well, Ricky thought. But the design of the game came from the man dead before him. Of that he was certain.

  Which meant that when he spoke of knowledge, he was likely telling the truth. Or at least some perverted, twisted version of the same.

  It took Ricky a second or two to realize that he still clutched the envelope that his onetime mentor had handed him. It was difficult for him to strip his eyes away from the body of the old man. It was as if the suicide was hypnotic. But he finally did, tearing open the flap and pulling a single sheet of paper from the envelope. He read rapidly:

  Ricky: The wages of evil are death. Think of this last moment as a tax I have paid on all I have done wrong. The information you seek is in front of you, but can you find it? Is not that what we do? Probe the mystery that is obvious? Find the clues that stare at us directly and shout out to us?

  I wonder if you have enough time and are clever enough to see what you need to see. I doubt it. I think it is far more likely that you will die tonight in more or less the same fashion that I have. Only your death is likely to be far more painful, because your guilt is far less than my own.

  The letter wasn’t signed.

  Ricky sucked in a new and seemingly unique panic with every breath.

  He lifted his eyes and began to search around the office. A wall clock clicked quietly with each passing second, the sound suddenly penetrating Ricky’s consciousness. He tried to do the travel math: When did the old man call and tell Merlin and Virgil and perhaps Rumplestiltskin that Ricky was on his way? From the city to the country home was two hours. Maybe a little less. Did he have seconds? Minutes? A quarter hour? He knew he had to get away, to distance himself from the death sitting in the seat before him, if only to gather his thoughts and try to determine what move he had left, if any. It was like being in a chess game with a grand master, he thought suddenly, moving pieces around a board haphazardly, all the time knowing that the opponent can see two, three, four, or more moves ahead.

  His throat was dry and he felt flushed.

  Right in front, he thought.

  Sliding gingerly around the desk, trying to avoid even brushing up against the dead analyst’s body, he started to reach for the top drawer, then stopped. What am I leaving behind, he thought? Hair fibers? Fingerprints? DNA? Have I even committed a crime?

  Then he thought: There are two kinds of crimes. The first brings out the police and prosecutors and the weight of the state demanding justice. The second strikes at the hearts of individuals. Sometimes the two blend together, he knew. But so much of what had happened was predominantly the second, and it was the judge, jury, and executioner who were heading his way that truly concerned him.

  There was no way around these questions. He told himself to have confidence in the single fact that the man whose prints and other substances were being left in the dead man’s room was dead, too, and that might afford him some protection, if only from the police who would likely be there at some point that night. He put his hand on the drawer and pulled it open.

  It was empty.

  He moved swiftly to all the other drawers. They, too, were barren. Dr. Lewis had clearly taken the time to clean out anything that had been accumulated there. Ricky ran his fingers under the desk surface, thinking perhaps something was concealed there. He bent down and searched, but saw nothing. Then he turned his attention to the dead man. Breathing in sharply, he let his fingers travel inside the man’s pockets. They, too, were clear. Nothing on the body. Nothing in the desk. It was as if the old analyst had taken pains to wipe his world clean. Ricky nodded in agreement. A psychoanalyst, better than anyone, he thought, knows what speaks about who one is. And it follows that seeking to wipe that identity slate clear, he would know better than most how to eradicate the telltale signs of personality.

  Again, Ricky swept his eyes over the office. He wondered whether there was a safe. He spotted the clock, and that gave him an idea. Dr. Lewis had spoken about time. Perhaps, Ricky thought, that was the clue. He jumped to the wall and searched behind the clock.

  Nothing.

  He wanted to bellow in rage. It’s here, he insisted.

  Ricky took another deep breath. Perhaps it isn’t, he thought, and all the old man wanted me to do was to be here when his murderous adopted offspring arrive. Was that the game? Perhaps he wanted this to be the end, tonight. Ricky seized his own weapon and spun back toward the door.

  Then he shook his head. No, that would be a simple lie, and Dr. Lewis’s lies were far more complex. There is something here.

  Ricky turned to the bookcase. Rows of medical and psychiatric texts, collected writings of Freud and Jung, some modern studies and clinical trials in book form. Books on depression. Books on anxiety. Books on dreams. Dozens of books, filled with only a modest portion of the accumulated knowledge of man’s emotions. Including the book that housed Ricky’s bullet. He looked at the title, riding the spine: The Encyclopedia of Abnormal Psychology, only the ology of the last word had been shredded by his shot.

  He stopped, staring forward.

  Why did a psychoanalyst need a text on abnormal psychology? Their profession dealt almost exclusively with the modestly displaced emotions. Not the truly dark and twisted ones. Of all the books lined up on the shelves, it was the only one slightly out of place, but this was a distinction only another analyst would notice.

  The man had laughed. He’d turned and saw the place the bullet landed and laughed and said it was appropriate.

  Ricky jumped to the bookcase and grasped the text from the shelf. It was heavy and thick, bound in black with vibrant gold writing on the jacket. He opened the book to the title page.

  Written in thick red with a Flair pen right across the title were the words: Good choice, Ricky. Now can you find the right entries?

  He looked up and heard the clock ticking. He did not think he had time to answer that question at that moment.

  He took a step away from the bookcase, almost starting to run, and then stopped. He turned back and carefully took another text from a different shelf and placed it into the open space of the book he had removed, covering the textbook’s absence.

  Ricky took another quick look around, but saw nothing that spoke loudly to him. He took a final glance at the old analyst’s body, which seemed to have grayed in the few moments that death had been there with him. He thought he should say or feel something, but no longer was sure what that could be, so instead, Ricky ran.

  The deep onyx of night blanketed him as he slid from Dr. Lewis’s country home. Within a few strides he was away from the front door, the light that seeped from the study, swallowed by the summer darkness. Standing in the black shadows, Ricky was able to look back quickly. The benign sounds of the rural area played the usual midnight music, no discordant tones to indicate that violent death was a part of the landscape. For a second he stopped and tried to assess how every piece of himself had been systematically erased over the past year. Identity is a quilt of experience, but it seemed to Ricky that so little existed of what he’d come to believe was himself. What he had left was his childhood. His adult life was in tatters. But both halves of his existence were cut away from him, with no apparent access. He thought this understanding left him part dizzy, part nauseous.

  He turned and continued to flee.

  Settling into a comfortable jog, footsteps mingling with the night sounds, Ricky headed back toward his car. He carried the abnormal psychology encyclopedia in one hand, his weapon in the other. He had traveled only half the distance, when he heard the unmistakable sound of a vehicle moving fast on a country road, heading in his direction. He looked up and saw the glow of headlights sweeping around a distant corner, mingling with the deep throaty sound of a large engine accelerating.

  He did not hesitate. He knew immediately who was heading in that d
irection in such a hurry. Ricky pitched himself to the earth and scrambled behind a stand of trees. He ducked down, but lifted his head as a large, black Mercedes roared past. The tires sharpened the noise at the next corner.

  When he raised himself up, he was already sprinting. This was flight in earnest, muscles complaining, lungs red-hot with exertion, moving as fast as he could through the night. Getting away was the only importance, the only concern. With an ear cocked behind him, listening for the telltale sound of the huge car, he raced forward. He told himself to find distance. They will not stay long at the country house, he said to himself, urging his feet forward. A few moments only to measure the death in the study and to search for signs that he was still there. Or close by. They will know that only moments elapsed between the self-murder and their arrival, and they will want to close the gap.

  Within minutes, he’d reached the rental car. He fumbled for the keys, dropping them once, but seizing them from the ground, gasping with tension. He threw himself behind the wheel and started the engine. Every instinct he had told him to accelerate. To escape. To run away. But he fought against these urges, trying hard to keep his wits about him.

  Ricky made himself think. I cannot outrun them in this car. There are two routes back to New York City, the thruway on the western side of the Hudson and the Taconic Parkway on the eastern side. They will have a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right, and spotting me in the car. The out-of-state New Hampshire plate on the tail of the cheap rental car was a telltale sign indicating who was behind the wheel. They might have acquired a description of the vehicle and the license plate number from the rental agency in Durham. In fact, he thought this likely.

  What he understood was in that moment he had to do something unexpected.

  Something that defied what the three in the car would anticipate.

  He thought his hands were shaking as he decided what to do. He wondered whether it was easier to gamble with his life now that he’d died once already.

  He put the car in gear and slowly began to drive back in the direction of the old analyst’s house. He scrunched himself down as low in the seat as he could get, without being obvious. He forced himself to maintain the speed limit, heading north on the old country road, when the relative safety of the city was to the south.

  He was closing on the driveway to the place he’d just been, when he saw the headlights of the Mercedes sweeping down toward the roadway. He could hear the crunch of the big tires against the gravel. He slowed slightly—he did not want to pass directly in the big car’s lights—giving them time to swing out onto the road, and head toward him, accelerating quickly. He had his high beams on, and as the Mercedes closed the space, he dimmed his lights, as one is supposed to, then just as they closed, blinked them on high again, like any motorist signaling with irritation at the approaching car. The effect was that both vehicles narrowly swept past each other with high beams on. Just as Ricky knew that he was blinded momentarily, so were they. He punched the accelerator as he passed, slinking rapidly around a corner. Too fast, he hoped, for someone in the other car to turn and make the license plate on the back.

  He took the first side road he spotted, turning to his right, immediately switching off the car lights. He made a U-turn in the black, his way lit only by the moonlight. He reminded himself to keep his foot off the brake pedal, so that the red lights wouldn’t light in the rear. Then he waited to see if he was followed.

  The road remained empty. He made himself wait five, then ten minutes. Long enough for the occupants of the Mercedes to decide on one of the two alternative routes, and rachet the big car up to a hundred miles per hour, trying to catch up with him.

  Ricky put the car back in gear, and continued to drive north almost aimlessly, on side roads and streets. Heading nowhere special. After nearly an hour, he finally turned the car around and changed direction again, finally steering back to the city. It was deep into the night and few other vehicles were around. Ricky drove steadily, thinking how close his world had become, and how dark, and trying to devise a way to restore light to it.

  It was deep into the predawn morning when he reached the city. New York at that hour seems to be taken over by shifting shapes, as the electricity of the late-night crowds, whether they are the beautiful or the decrepit, seeking adventure, give way to the workday throngs. The fish market and trucking beasts looking to take over the day. The transition is unsettling, made on streets slicked by moisture and neon lights. It is, Ricky thought, a dangerous time of the night. A time when inhibitions and restraints seem lessened, and the world is willing to take chances.

  He had returned to his rented room, fighting the urge to throw himself onto the bed and devour sleep. Answers, he told himself. He clutched answers in the book on abnormal psychology, he just needed to read them. The question was, where?

  The encyclopedia contained 779 pages of text. It was organized alphabetically. He flipped through some pages, but initially could find nothing to indicate anything. Still, poring over the book like some monk in an ancient monastery, he knew somewhere within the pages was what he needed to know.

  Ricky rocked back in his seat, taking a stray pencil and tapping it against his teeth. I am in the right location, he thought. But short of examining every page, he was unsure what to do. He told himself that he needed to think like the man who’d died earlier that night. A game. A challenge. A puzzle.

  They are here, Ricky thought. Inside a text on abnormal psychology.

  What did he tell me? Virgil is an actress. Merlin is an attorney. Rumplestiltskin is a professional assassin. Three professions working together. As he flipped almost haphazardly through the pages, trying to think through the problem in front of him, he passed the few pages devoted to the letter V. Almost by luck, his eyes caught a mark on the initial page of the section, which started with 559. In the upper corner, written in the same pen that Dr. Lewis had used for his greeting on the title page was the fraction one and three. One-third.

  That was all.

  Ricky turned to the entries under M. In a similar location was another pair of numbers, but written differently. These were 1Ž4, written one slash four. On the opening page of the letter R, he found a third signature, two-fifths. Two dash five.

  There was no doubt in Ricky’s mind that these were keys. Now he had to uncover the locks.

  Ricky bent forward slightly in his seat, rocking back and forth gently, as if trying to accommodate a slight upset stomach, movements that were almost involuntary, as he concentrated on the problem in front of him. It was a conundrum of personality as complex as any he’d ever experienced in his years as an analyst. The man who had treated him to chart his own way through his own personality, who had been his guide into the profession, and who had provided the means of Ricky’s own death, had delivered a final message. Ricky felt like some ancient Chinese mathematician, working on an abacus, the black stones making clicking noises as they were shunted speedily from one side to the other, calculations made and then discarded as the equation grew.

  He asked himself: What do I really know?

  A portrait began to form in his imagination, starting with Virgil. Dr. Lewis said she was an actress, which made sense, for she had constantly been performing. The child of poverty, the youngest of the three, who had gone from so little to so much with such dizzying speed. How would that have affected her? Ricky demanded of himself. Lurking in her unconscious would be issues of identity, of who she truly was. Hence the decision to enter a profession that constantly called for redesigning one’s self. A chameleon, where roles dominated truths. Ricky nodded. A streak of aggressiveness, as well, and an edginess that spoke of bitterness. He thought of all the factors that went into her becoming who she was, and how eager she’d been to be the point player in the drama that had swept him to his death.

  Ricky shifted in his seat. Make a guess, he told himself. An educated guess.

  Narcissistic personality disorder.

  He turned to the encyclop
edia entry for N and then to that particular diagnosis.

  His pulse quickened. He saw that Dr. Lewis had touched several letters in the midst of words with a yellow highlighter pen. Ricky grabbed a sheet of paper and wrote down the letters. Then he sat back sharply, staring at gobbledygook. It made no sense. He went back to the encyclopedia definition, and recalled the one-third key. This time he wrote down letters three spaces away from the marked ones. Again, useless.

  He considered the dilemma again. On this occasion, he looked at letters that were three words away. But before writing these down, he thought to himself one over three, so he went instead to letters three lines below.

  By doing this, the first three dots produced a word: the.

  He continued rapidly, producing a second word: jones.

  There were six more dots. Using the same scheme, they translated to: agency.

  Ricky stood and walked to the bedside table, where, beneath the telephone there was a New York City telephone book. He looked up the section for theatrical talent, and found in the midst of a number of listings, a small advertisement and telephone exchange for “The Jones Agency—A theatrical and talent agency catering to the up-and-coming stars of tomorrow . . .”

  One down. Now, Merlin the attorney.

  He pictured the man in his mind’s eye: hair carefully combed; suits without wrinkles, tailored to the nuances of his body. Even his casual dress had been formal. Ricky considered the man’s hands. The fingernails had been manicured. A middle child, who wanted everything to be in order, who couldn’t tolerate the messiness of the disruptive life he’d come from. He must have hated his past, adored the safety of his adopted father, even as the old analyst had systematically twisted him. He was the arranger, the enabler, the man who had dealt with threats and money and savaged Ricky’s life with ease.