Analyst

by John Katzenbach

  “No problem-o. I can take that information,” this new clerk said. Ricky was mildly amused that the person in classified at the Voice seemed significantly less stuffy than their counterparts at the Times, which, when he considered it, was more or less as expected. “What sort of heading do you want on the message?”

  “Heading?” Ricky asked.

  “Ah,” said the clerk. “A first-timer. You know, the abbreviations like WM for white male, SM for sadomasochism . . .”

  “I see what you mean,” Ricky replied. He thought a moment, then said, “The top should read: WM, 50s, seeks Mr. Right for special fun and games . . .”

  The clerk repeated this to Ricky. “Okay,” he said, “something else?”

  “Oh, yes, indeed,” Ricky said. He then read off the poem to the clerk, making the man repeat the message twice, to be certain that he had it correctly. When he’d finished reading, the clerk paused.

  “Well,” he said, “that’s different. Way different. This will probably bring them all out of the woodwork. The curious, at least. And maybe a few of the crazies. Now, do you want to pay for a box reply? We give you a box number, and you can access the replies by phone. The way it works, while you’re paying for the box, only you can get the answers.”

  “Please,” Ricky said. He heard the clerk clicking on a computer keyboard. “All right,” he said. “You’re box number 1313. Hope you’re not superstitious.”

  “Not in the slightest,” Ricky said. He wrote down the number for accessing the answers on his napkin and hung up the phone.

  For a moment, he considered calling the number that he had for Virgil. But he resisted this temptation. He had a few more things to arrange first.

  In The Art of War, Sun-Tzu discusses the importance of the general choosing his battleground. Occupying a position of mystery, seizing a location of superiority. Taking the high ground. Being able to conceal one’s strength. Creating advantages out of topographical familiarity. Ricky thought these lessons applied to him, as well. The poem in the Village Voice was like a shot across the bows of his adversary, an opening salvo designed to get his attention.

  Ricky realized it would not take long for someone to arrive in Durham searching for him. The license plate number noticed by the dog kennel owner fairly guaranteed that. He didn’t think it would be particularly difficult to discover that the plate belonged to Rent-A-Wreck, and soon enough, someone would show up, asking for the name of the man who’d rented that car. The issue he faced, he thought, was complex, but wrapped up in the single question: where did he want to fight the next battle? He had to choose his arena.

  He returned the rental car, stopped briefly at his room, and then went directly in to his night job at the crisis hot line distracted by these questions, thinking that he did not know how much time he had purchased for himself with the ads in the Times and the Voice, but a little. The Times would run the following morning, the Voice at the end of the week. There was a reasonable likelihood that Rumplestiltskin would not act until he’d seen both. All the man knew, so far, was that an overweight and physically scarred private investigator had arrived at a dog kennel in New Jersey asking disjointed questions about the couple that records showed had adopted him and his siblings years earlier. A man hunting a lie. Ricky did not delude himself that Rumplestiltskin wouldn’t see the links, find other signs of Ricky’s existence rapidly. Frederick Lazarus, priest, would show up in inquiries in Florida. Frederick Lazarus, private investigator, arrived in New Jersey. The advantage Ricky had, he thought, was that there would be no clear-cut link between Frederick Lazarus and either Dr. Frederick Starks or Richard Lively. One was presumed dead. The other still clung to anonymity. As he took his seat at a desk in the darkened office, behind a multiline telephone, he was glad that the semester was wrapping up at the university. He expected callers with the usual stressed out, final exams despair, which he was comfortable dealing with. He did not think that anyone would kill themselves over a chemistry final, although he had heard of sillier things. And, in the deep of night, he found that he was able to concentrate clearly.

  He asked himself: What do I want to achieve?

  Did he want to kill the man who had driven him to fake his own death? Who threatened his distant family and destroyed everything that had made him who he was? Ricky thought that in some of the mystery novels and thrillers that he’d devoured over the past months, the answer would have been a simple yes. Someone caused him great harm, so he should turn the tables on that someone. Kill him. An eye for an eye, the essence of all revenges.

  Ricky pursed his lips and told himself: There are many ways to kill someone. Indeed, he’d experienced one. There had to be others, ranging from the assassin’s bullet to the ravages of a disease.

  Finding the right murder was critical. And, to do that, he needed to know his adversary. Not merely know who he was, but what he was.

  And he had to emerge from this death with his own life intact. He wasn’t some sort of kamikaze pilot, drinking a ritual cup of sake, then going to his own death with nary a care in the world. Ricky wanted to survive.

  Ricky held no illusion that he would ever be able to return to Dr. Frederick Starks. No comfortable practice listening to the whinings of the rich and discomfited on a daily basis, for an easy forty-eight weeks of the year. That was gone, and he knew it.

  He looked around himself, at the small office where the crisis hot line was located. It was in a room off the main corridor of the student health services building. It was a narrow spot, not particularly comfortable, with a single desk, three telephones, and a few posters celebrating the schedules of the football, lacrosse, and soccer teams, with pictures of athletes. There was also a large campus map and a typed list of emergency services and security numbers. In slightly larger print, there was a protocol to be followed in the case where the person manning the suicide prevention line became convinced that someone had actually attempted to kill themselves. The protocol explained the steps to take, to call police, and have the 911 operator run a line check, which would trace a call back to a location. This was to be used only in the direst of emergencies, when a life was at stake, and rescue services needed to be dispatched. Ricky had never availed himself of this capacity. In the weeks he’d worked the graveyard shift, he’d always been able to talk, if not common sense, at least delay, into even the most frantic of callers. He had wondered whether any of the young people he’d helped would have been astonished to know that the calm voice speaking reason to them belonged to a janitor in the chemistry department.

  Ricky told himself: This is worth protecting.

  A conclusion, he recognized, brought him to a decision. He would have to lead Rumplestiltskin away from Durham. If he was to survive the upcoming confrontation, Richard Lively needed to be safe and remain anonymous.

  He whispered to himself: “Back to New York.”

  As he was reaching this realization, the phone on the desktop rang. He punched the proper line and picked up the receiver.

  “Crisis,” he said. “How can I help you?”

  There was a momentary pause, and then he heard a muffled sob. This was followed by a string of disconnected words, that separately meant little, but taken together, said much. “I can’t, I just can’t, it’s all too much, I don’t want, oh, I just don’t know . . .”

  A young woman, Ricky thought. He heard no slurring beyond the sobs of emotion, so he didn’t think there were any drugs or alcohol involved in the call. Just middle-of-the-night loneliness and low-rent despair. “Can you slow down,” he said gently, “and try to fill me in on what is going on? You don’t have to give me the big picture. Just right now, right this moment. Where are you?”

  A pause, then a response: “In my dormitory room.”

  “Okay,” Ricky said, gently, starting to probe. “Are you alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “No roommate? Friends?”

  “No. All alone.”

  “Is that the way you are all the time? Or d
oes it just feel that way?”

  This question seemed to cause the young woman to think hard. “Well, my boyfriend and I broke up and my classes are all terrible and when I get home, my folks are going to kill me because I’ve dropped off the honors list. In fact, I might not pass my comp lit course and it all seems to have come to a head and . . .”

  “And so something made you call this line, right?”

  “I wanted to talk. I didn’t want to do something to myself . . .”

  “That makes eminently good sense. It sounds like this hasn’t been the best of semesters.”

  The young woman laughed, a little bitterly. “You could say that.”

  “But there are other semesters to come, right?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “And the boyfriend, why did he say he left you?”

  “He said he didn’t like being tied down right now . . .”

  “And this reply made you, what? Depressed?”

  “Yes. It was like a slap in the face. I felt like he’d just been using me, you know, for sex, and then with summer coming, well, he figured I wasn’t worth it anymore. It was just like I was some sort of candy bar. Taste me and throw me away . . .”

  “That’s well put,” Ricky said. “An insult, then. A blow to your sense of who you are.”

  Again the young woman paused. “I guess, but I hadn’t really seen it that way.”

  “So,” Ricky continued, still speaking in a solid, soft voice, “really instead of being depressed and thinking that there’s something wrong with you, you should be angry with the son of a bitch, because clearly the problem is with him. And the problem is selfishness, right?”

  He could hear the young woman nodding in agreement. This was the most typical of telephone calls, he thought. She called in a state of boyfriend- and school-related despair, but really wasn’t anywhere close to that state, when examined a little more closely.

  “I think that’s a fair statement,” she said. “The bastard.”

  “So, maybe you’re better off without him. It’s not like there aren’t other fish in that sea,” Ricky said.

  “I thought I loved him,” the young woman said.

  “And so it hurts a bit, doesn’t it? But the hurt isn’t because you actually have had your heart broken. It’s more because you feel that you engaged in a lie. And now you’ve had your sense of trust staggered.”

  “You make sense,” she said. Ricky could sense the tears drying up on the other end of the line. After a minute, she added, “You must get a lot of calls like this one. It all seemed so important and so awful a minute or two ago. I was crying and sobbing and now . . .”

  “There’s still the grades. What will happen when you get home?”

  “They’ll be pissed. My dad will say, ‘I’m not spending my hard-earned dollars on a bunch of C’s . . .’ ”

  The young lady did a passable harrumph and deepened her voice, capturing her father pretty effectively. Ricky laughed, and she joined him.

  “He’ll get over it,” he said. “Just be honest. Tell him about your stresses, and about the boyfriend, and that you’ll try to do better. He’ll come around.”

  “You’re right.”

  “So,” Ricky said, “here’s the prescription for this evening. Get a good night’s sleep. Put the books away. Get up in the morning and go buy yourself one of those really sweet frothy coffees, one with all the calories in it. Take the coffee outside to one of the quads, sit on a bench, sip the drink slowly and admire the weather. And, if you happen to see the boy in question, well, ignore him. And if he wants to talk, walk away. Find a new bench. Think a little bit about what the summer holds. There’s always some hope that things will get better. You just have to find it.”

  “All right,” she said. “Thanks for talking with me.”

  “If you’re still feeling stressed, like to the point where you don’t think you can handle things, then you should make an appointment with a counselor at health services. They’ll help you through problems.”

  “You know a lot about depression,” she said.

  “Oh, yes,” Ricky replied, “I do. Usually it is transitory. Sometimes it isn’t. The first is an ordinary condition of life. The second is a true and terrible disease. You sound like you’ve just got the first.”

  “I feel better,” she said. “Maybe I’ll get a sweet roll with that cup of coffee. Calories be damned.”

  “That’s the attitude,” Ricky said. He was about to hang up, but stopped. “Hey,” he said, “help me out with something . . .”

  The young woman sounded a bit surprised, but replied, “Huh? What? You need help?”

  “This is the crisis hot line,” Ricky said, allowing humor to seep into his voice. “What makes you think that the folks on this end don’t have their own crises?”

  The young woman paused, as if digesting the obviousness of this statement. “Okay,” she said, “how can I help?”

  “When you were little,” Ricky said, “what games did you play?”

  “Games? Like board games, you know, Chutes and Ladders, Candyland . . .”

  “No. Outdoor, playground-type games.”

  “Like Ring Around the Rosie or Freeze Tag?”

  “Yes. But what if you wanted to play a game with other kids, a game where one person has to hunt the other, while at the same time being hunted, what would that be?”

  “Not exactly hide-and-seek, right? Sounds a little bit nastier.”

  “Yes. Exactly.”

  The young woman hesitated, then started thinking more or less out loud, “Well, there was Red Rover, Red Rover, but that had more of a physical challenge. There were scavenger hunts, but that was a pursuit of objects. Tag and Mother May I and Simon Says . . .”

  “No. I’m looking for something a little more challenging . . .”

  “The best I can think of is Foxes and Hounds,” she said abruptly. “That was the hardest to win.”

  “How did you play it?” Ricky asked.

  “In the summer, out in the countryside. There were two teams, Foxes and Hounds, obviously. The foxes took off, fifteen-minute head start. They carried paper bags filled with ripped-up newspaper. Every ten yards, they had to put a handful down. The hounds followed the trail. The key thing was to leave false trails, double back, put the hounds into the swamp, whatever. The foxes won if they made it back to the starting point after a designated time, like two or three hours later. The hounds won if they caught up with the foxes. If they spotted the foxes across a field, they could act like dogs, and take off after them. And the foxes had to hide. So, sometimes the foxes made certain that they knew where the hounds were, you know, spying on them . . .”

  “That’s the game I’m looking for,” Ricky said quietly. “Which side usually won?”

  “That was the beauty of it,” the young woman said. “It depended on the ingenuity of the foxes and the determination of the hounds. So either side could win at any given time.”

  “Thank you,” Ricky said. His mind was churning with ideas.

  “Good luck,” the young woman said, as she hung up the phone.

  Ricky thought that was precisely what he was going to need: some good luck.

  He began making arrangements the following morning. He paid his rent for the following month, but told his landladies that he was likely to be out of town on some family business. He had put a plant in his room, and he made certain they agreed to water it regularly. It was, he thought, the simplest way of playing on the psychology of the women; no man who wants his plant watered was likely to run out on them. He spoke to his supervisor at the janitorial staff at the university, and received permission to take some accumulated overtime and sick days. His boss was equally understanding, and aided by the end of the semester slowdown, willing to cut him loose without jeopardizing his job.

  At the local bank where Frederick Lazarus had his account, Ricky made a wire transfer to an account he opened electronically at a Manhattan bank.

  He also made
a series of hotel reservations around the city, for successive days. These were at less than desirable hotels, the sorts of places that didn’t show up on anyone’s tourist guide to New York City. He guaranteed each reservation with Frederick Lazarus’s credit cards, except for the last hotel he selected. The final two of the hotels he’d selected were located on West 22nd Street, more or less directly across from each other. At one, he simply reserved a two-night stay for Frederick Lazarus. The other had the advantage of offering efficiency apartments by the week. He reserved a two-week block. But for this second hotel, he used Richard Lively’s Visa card.

  He closed Frederick Lazarus’s Mailboxes Etc. mail drop, leaving a forwarding address of the second-to-last hotel.

  The final thing he did was pack his weapon and extra ammunition and several changes of clothing into a bag, and return to Rent-A-Wreck. As before, he rented a modest, dated car. But on this occasion, he was careful to leave more of a trail.

  “That has unlimited mileage, right?” he asked the clerk. “Because I need to drive to New York City, and I don’t want to get stuck with some ten cent per mile charge . . .”

  The clerk was a college-aged kid, obviously starting up a summer job, and already, with only a few days in the office, bored out of his head. “Right. Unlimited mileage. As far as we’re concerned, you can drive to California and back.”

  “No, business in Manhattan,” Ricky repeated deliberately. “I’m going to put my business address in the city down on the rental agreement.” Ricky wrote the name and telephone number of the first of the hotels where he’d made a reservation for Frederick Lazarus.

  The clerk eyed Ricky’s jeans and sport shirt. “Sure. Business. Whatever.”

  “And if I have to extend my stay . . .”

  “There’s a number on the rental agreement. Just call. We’ll charge your credit card for extra, but we need to have a record, otherwise after forty-eight hours, we call the cops and report the car stolen.”

  “Don’t want that.”