Analyst

by John Katzenbach

  The woman hesitated, as if reluctant to say, then continued, “The Visa card number you gave me, uh, it came back canceled. Are you certain you gave me the proper number sequence?”

  Ricky blushed, alone in the room. “Canceled? That’s impossible,” he said indignantly.

  “Well, maybe I got the number wrong . . .”

  He reached for his wallet and pulled out the card, reading off the sequence of numbers again, but slowly.

  The woman paused. “No, that’s the number I submitted for approval. It came back that the card had been recently canceled.”

  “I don’t understand,” Ricky said with mounting frustration. “I didn’t cancel anything. And I pay off the entire balance every month . . .”

  “The card companies make more mistakes than you’d think,” the woman said, apologetically. “Have you got another card? Or maybe you’d just prefer me to send you a bill and you can pay by check?”

  Ricky started to remove another card from his wallet, then abruptly stopped. He swallowed hard. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” he said slowly, suddenly working hard to keep himself under control. “I will have to contact the credit card company. In the meantime, please just send me the bill as you suggest.”

  The woman mumbled an agreement, double-checking his address, then adding, “It happens all the time. Did you lose your wallet? Sometimes thieves get numbers from old statements that are tossed away. Or you buy something and the clerk sells the number to a crook. There are zillions of ways cards get screwed up, doctor. But you better call the issuing company and get it straightened out. You don’t want to end up fighting over charges you don’t make. Anyway, they’ll probably just overnight you a new card.”

  “I’m sure,” Ricky said. He hung up the phone.

  Slowly he extracted each of the credit cards from his wallet. They’re all useless, he told himself. They have all been canceled. He didn’t know how, but he knew by whom.

  Still, he started the tedious process of calling to discover what he already knew to be true. The telephone customer service clerks at each credit card company were friendly but not very helpful. When he tried to explain that he hadn’t actually canceled his cards, he was informed that he indeed had. That’s what their computers showed, and whatever the computer showed, had to be right. He asked each company exactly how the card had been canceled, and each time he was told that the request had been made electronically, through the bank’s Web sites. Simple transactions of that sort, the clerks dutifully pointed out, could be accomplished with a few simple swipes at a keyboard. This was, they said, a service that the bank offered, to make financial life easier for their clients, although Ricky, in his current state, might have debated that. All offered to open new accounts for him.

  He told each company he would get back to them. Then he took some scissors he kept in his top drawer and cut each of the useless pieces of plastic in half. It was not lost on Ricky that this act was precisely what some patients had been forced to do, when they allowed themselves to get overextended with their credit and into debt.

  Ricky did not know how far into his finances Rumplestiltskin had managed to penetrate. Nor did he know how. Debt is a concept close to the game the man had created, Ricky thought. He believes I owe him a payment, and not one that can be paid by check or credit card.

  A visit in the morning to the local branch of his bank was in order, Ricky thought. He also placed a telephone call to the man who handled his modest investment portfolio, leaving a message with a secretary, asking that the broker call him back promptly. Then he sat back for a moment, trying to imagine how Rumplestiltskin had entered this part of his life.

  Ricky was a computer idiot. His knowledge of the Internet and AOL, Yahoo, and eBay, Web sites, chat rooms, and cyberspace was limited to a vague familiarity with the words, but not the reality. His patients often spoke of life connected to the keyboard, and in that way he’d gained some appreciation of what a computer could do, but more of what a computer did to them. He had never seen any need to learn any of this himself. His own writing was scrawled in pen in notebooks. If he had to compose a letter, he used an antique electric typewriter that was more than twenty years old and kept in a closet. He owned a computer, in a way. His wife had purchased one in the first year of her disease, then upgraded it a year before her death. He had been aware that she had used the machine to electronically visit cancer support groups and to speak with other cancer victims in that curiously detached world of the Internet. He had not joined her in these sorties, thinking that he was respecting her privacy by not intruding, when another might have suggested that he was simply not showing enough interest. Shortly after she’d died, he’d taken the machine from the desk in the corner of their bedroom that she’d occupied when she was able to gather the energy to get out of bed, and packed it away in a box and stuck it in the basement storage rooms of his building. He had meant to throw it out or give it to some school or library, and had just never gotten around to it. It occurred to him that he might need it, now.

  Because, he suspected, Rumplestiltskin knew how to use one.

  Ricky rose from his seat, deciding in that instant to recover his dead wife’s computer from the basement. In the top right-hand desk drawer, he kept a key to a padlock, which he grabbed.

  He made certain to lock his front door behind him, then took the elevator down to the basement. It had been months since he’d been in the building’s storage area and he wrinkled his nose at the musty, stale-smelling air in the space. It had a fetid, sickly quality to it, aged and filthy, charred by the daily cycle of heat. Just stepping out of the elevator gave him the asthmatic’s sensation of tightening in his chest. He wondered why building management never cleaned the area. There was a light switch on the wall, which he flicked, throwing a little brightness into the basement from a single uncovered overhead hundred-watt bulb. Whenever he moved, he carried shadows with him, streaking grotesquely through the dark and damp. Each of the building’s six apartments had a storage area, delineated by chicken wire nailed to cheap balsa wood frames, with the apartment number stenciled on the outside. It was a place of broken chairs and boxes of old papers, unused and rusty bicycles, skis and steamer trunks, and unneeded suitcases. Dust and cobwebs covered most everything, and most everything was in the category of something slightly too valuable to throw out, but not important enough to keep around every day. Things collected from time to time that just slipped into the category of better keep this because someday we might need it, but just barely.

  Ricky hunched over slightly, although there was plenty of headroom. It was more the closed atmosphere that made him bend. He approached his own cubicle with the padlock key in hand.

  But the lock was already open. It hung from the handle of the door like a forgotten Christmas tree ornament.

  He looked closer and saw that it had been sliced open with bolt cutters.

  Ricky stepped back a single stride, shocked, as if a rat had suddenly run in front of him.

  His first instinct was to turn and run, his second to move forward. This is what he did, walking slowly to the chicken wire door and pulling it open. What he saw immediately was that exactly what he came down to the basement searching for, the box containing his wife’s computer, was missing. He moved deeper inside the storage area. The overhead light was partially blocked by his own body, so that only swordlike streaks of illumination carved through the area. He glanced about and saw that another box was absent. This was a large plastic file container that kept copies of his completed tax returns.

  The rest of his near-trash seemed to be intact, for what it was worth.

  Almost staggered by an overwhelming sense of defeat, Ricky turned and headed back to the elevator. It was not until he rose out of the basement, back into the midday light, clearer air, and away from the grime and dust of memories stored below that he allowed himself to think about the impact that the missing computer and tax returns might have.

  What was stolen? he
asked himself.

  He shuddered suddenly. He answered his own question: Perhaps everything.

  The missing tax returns made his stomach churn with an evil, acid sensation. No wonder the attorney Merlin knew so much about his assets. He probably knew everything about Ricky’s modest finances. A tax return is like a road map, from Social Security number to charitable donations. It displays all the well-traveled routes of one’s existence, without the history. Like a map, it shows someone how to get from here to there in another person’s life, where the turnpikes flow and where the back roads begin. All it lacks is color and description.

  The missing computer frightened Ricky just as much. He had no idea what remained on the hard drive, but he knew it was something. He tried to recall the hours that his wife had spent on the machine before the disease robbed her even of the strength to type. How much of her pain, memories, insights, and electronic travels were there, he had no idea. He knew only that skilled computer technicians could recover all sorts of past journeys from computer memory chips. He assumed that Rumplestiltskin had the necessary ability to extract from the machine whatever was there that he decided he wanted.

  Ricky slumped into his apartment. The sense of violation he felt was like being sliced with a heated razor blade. He looked about him, and understood that everything he thought was so safe and private about his life was vulnerable.

  Nothing was secret.

  If he were still a child, Ricky realized, he would have burst into tears at that very moment.

  His dreams that night were filled with dark and violent images, of being cut by knives. In one dream, he saw himself trying to maneuver through a poorly lit room, knowing all the time that if he stumbled and fell he would fall through the blackness into some oblivion, but as he traversed the dreamscape, he was uncoordinated and clumsy, grasping at vaporous walls with drunken fingers, his journey seemingly helpless. He awakened into the pitch-darkness of his bedroom filled with that momentary panic as one staggers from unconscious to conscious, sweat staining his nightshirt, his breathing shallow and his throat hoarse, as if he’d been crying out for several hours in sustained despair. For a moment he was still unsure whether he’d left the nightmare behind, and it was not until he clicked on the bedside lamp and was able to look around the familiar space of his own room that his heart began to return to a normal pace. Ricky dropped his head back onto his pillow, desperate for rest, knowing none was readily available. He had no difficulty interpreting his dreams. They were as evil as his waking life was becoming.

  The ad ran in the Times that morning on the front page, at the bottom, as specified by Rumplestiltskin. He read it over several times, then thought that at the least, it would give his tormentor something to think about. Ricky did not know how long it would take for the man to reply, but he expected some sort of answer rapidly, perhaps in the following morning’s paper. In the interim, he decided it would be best if he kept working on the puzzle.

  He felt a momentary, illusory surge of success, with the ad running, as if encouraged that he had taken a step forward, and gained a temporary sense of determination. The overwhelming despair from the previous day’s discovery of the missing computer and stolen tax returns was, if not exactly forgotten, at least put aside. The ad gave Ricky the sensation that this day, at least, he wasn’t being a victim. He found himself focused, able to concentrate, his memory more acute and accurate. The day fled rapidly, as quickly as an ordinary day with patients would have, as Ricky plumbed his recollections and traveled steadily through his own interior landscape.

  By the end of the morning, he’d created two separate working lists. Still confining himself to the ten-year period that started in 1975 and went to 1985, on the first list he identified some seventy-three people that he had seen in treatment. The courses of treatment had ranged from a high of seven years for one deeply troubled man, to a three-month burst for a woman experiencing marital difficulties. On average, most of his patients were in the three- to five-year range. A few less. The majority of his patients were traditional Freudian-based analyses, four to five times per week, utilizing the couch and all the various techniques of the profession. A few were not; they were face-to-face encounters, more simple talk sessions, where he had behaved less as an analyst and more as an ordinary therapist, complete with opinions, pronouncements, and advice, which are, for the most part, the things an analyst strives hardest to avoid. He realized that by the mid-1980s he had weaned most of this sort of patient out of his practice, and begun to confine himself solely to the in-depth experience of psychoanalysis.

  There were also, he knew, a number of patients, perhaps two dozen over that ten-year period, who had started treatments and then interrupted them. The reasons for discontinuing therapies were complex: Some hadn’t the money or the necessary health insurance to cover his fees; others had been forced to relocate, because of job or school demands. A few had simply decided angrily that they weren’t being helped enough, or rapidly enough, or were too angry with the world and what it promised to deliver to them to continue. These people were rare, but existed.

  They comprised his second list. This was a far more difficult list to come up with.

  It was, he realized swiftly, on first appearance, the far more dangerous list. They were the people who might have transformed their rage into an obsession with Ricky, and then passed that obsession on.

  He placed both lists on the desk in front of him, and thought he should start the process of tracking down the names. Once he had Rumplestiltskin’s reply, he thought, he could eliminate a number of people from each, then forge ahead.

  All morning he had been expecting the telephone to ring, with a reply from his account executive. He was a little surprised not to have heard from the man, because in the past he’d always handled Ricky’s money with a boring diligence and dependability. He dialed the number again, once again reaching the secretary.

  She seemed flustered when she heard his voice. “Oh, Doctor Starks, Mr. Williams was about to call you back. There’s been some confusion over your account,” she said.

  Ricky’s stomach clenched. “Confusion?” he asked. “How can money be confused? People can be confused. Dogs can be confused. Money cannot.”

  “I’m going to connect you with Mr. Williams,” the secretary replied. There was a momentary silence, and then the not exactly familiar, but not unrecognizable voice of his account executive came on the line. Ricky’s investments were all conservative, boring, mutual funds and bonds. Nothing hip-hop or aggressively modern, just modest and steady growth. Nor were they particularly substantial. Of all the professions in the medical world, psychoanalysts were among the most limited in what they could charge and the number of patients they could see. They were not like the radiologist who had three patients booked into different examining rooms for the same time slot, nor the anesthesiologist who went from assembly-line surgery to surgery. Analysts didn’t often become rich and Ricky was no exception to this rule. He owned his place on the Cape and his apartment and that was it. No Mercedes. No Piper twin engine. No forty-two-foot yawl named the Icutknees harbored on Long Island Sound. Just some prudent investments designed to provide him enough money for retirement, if he ever decided to cut back on his patient load. Ricky spoke with his broker perhaps once or twice a year, that was it. He’d always assumed he was one of the genuinely smaller fishes in the executive’s pond.

  “Doctor Starks?” The executive came on the line brusque and speaking swiftly. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, but we’re trying to figure out a problem here . . .”

  Ricky’s stomach seemed empty, tight. “What sort of problem?”

  “Well,” the executive said, “did you open up a personal trading account with one of the new online brokers? Because . . .”

  “No, I haven’t. In fact, I hardly know what you’re talking about.”

  “Well, that’s the confusing part. It appears that there’s been significant day-trading in your account.”


  “What’s day-trading?” Ricky asked.

  “It’s trading stocks rapidly, trying to stay ahead of market fluctuations.”

  “Okay. I understand that. But I don’t do this.”

  “Does someone else have access to your accounts? Perhaps your wife . . .”

  “My wife passed away three years ago,” Ricky said coldly.

  “Of course,” the broker answered quickly. “I remember. I apologize. But someone else, perhaps. Do you have children?”

  “No. We did not have children. Where is my money?” Ricky spoke sharply, demanding.

  “Well, we’re searching. This may turn out to be a police matter, Doctor Starks. In fact, that’s what I’m beginning to think. That is, if someone managed to illegally access your account . . .”

  “Where is the money?” Ricky demanded a second time.

  The broker hesitated. “I can’t say precisely. We have our internal auditors going over the account now. All I can say is that there has been significant activity . . .”

  “What do you mean activity? The money has just been sitting there . . .”

  “Well, not exactly. There are literally dozens maybe even hundreds of trades, transfers, sales, investments . . .”

  “Where is it now?”

  The broker continued, “A truly extraordinary trail of extremely complicated and aggressive financial transactions . . .”

  “You’re not answering my question,” Ricky said, exasperation filling his voice. “My funds. My retirement account, my cash reserves . . .”

  “We’re searching. I’ve put my best people on it. I will have our head of security contact you as soon as they make some headway. I can’t believe with all the activity that no one here spotted something wrong . . .”

  “But all my money . . .”

  “Right now,” the executive said slowly, “there is no money. At least, none that we can find.”

  “That’s not possible.”