The Analyst

by John Katzenbach

  He could see none.

  Instead, he seized the long zipper on the top of the bag, hesitated, taking a deep breath and opened it slowly. He pulled back the opening and stared inside.

  In the center of the bag there was a large cantaloupe. Head-sized and round.

  Ricky burst into laughter. Relief filled him, unchecked, bursting out in guffaws and giggles. Sweat and nervousness dissipated. The world around him that had been spinning out of control stopped, and seemed to return to focus.

  He zipped the bag back up and rose. The train was empty, as was the platform outside, except for a couple of porters and a pair of blue-jacketed conductors.

  Throwing the bag over his shoulder, Ricky proceeded down the platform. He started to think about his next move. He was sure that Rumplestiltskin would confirm the location and the situation where his mother had been in treatment with Ricky. He allowed himself the fervent hope that the clinic might actually have kept records of patients dating back two decades. The name that had proven so elusive for his memory might be on a list up at the hospital.

  Ricky marched forward, his shoes clicking on the platform, echoing in the darkness around him. The core of Pennsylvania Station was ahead, and he moved steadily and swiftly toward the glow of the station lights. As he marched with military determination toward the brightly lit crowds of people, his eye picked out one of the redcaps, sitting on a hand truck, engrossed in the Daily News while he waited for the next train’s arrival. In that single second, the man opened the paper so that Ricky could see the screaming headline on the front page, written in the unmistakable block letters that seemed to cry for attention. He read: transit cop in hit-run coma.

  And below that, the subhead: seek missing hubby in marital mayhem.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Ricky sat on a hard wooden bench in the middle of Pennsylvania Station with copies of both the News and the Post on his lap, oblivious to the flow of people surrounding him, hunched over like a single tree in a field bending to the force of a strong wind. Every word he read seemed to accelerate, slipping and skidding across his imagination like a car out of control, wheels locked and screeching impotently, unable to halt the careening, heading inevitably toward a crash.

  Both stories had fundamentally the same details: Joanne Riggins, a thirty-four-year-old detective with the New York Transit Authority Police, had been the victim of a hit-and-run driver the night before, struck less than a half block from her home as she crossed the street. The detective remained on life support systems in a coma at Brooklyn Medical Center after emergency surgery. Prognosis questionable. Witnesses told both papers that a fire-engine red Pontiac Firebird had been seen fleeing the site of the accident. This was a vehicle similar to one owned by the detective’s estranged husband. Although the vehicle was still missing, the ex-husband was being questioned by police. The Post reported that he was claiming his highly distinctive car had been stolen the night before the hit-and-run accident. The News uncovered that the man had had a restraining order taken out against him by Detective Riggins during the divorce proceedings, a second restraining order taken out by another, unnamed female police officer, who was said to have rushed to Detective Riggins’s side in the seconds after the young woman was crushed by the speeding car. The paper also reported that the ex-husband had publicly threatened his wife during the final year of their marriage.

  It was a tabloid dream story, filled with tawdry intimations of an unusual sexual triangle, a stormy infidelity, and out-of-control passions that eventually resulted in violence.

  Ricky also knew that it was fundamentally untrue.

  Not, of course, the majority of the story; only one small aspect: The driver of the car wasn’t the man the police were interviewing, although he was a wondrously obvious and convenient suspect. Ricky knew that it would take them a significant amount of time to come to believe the ex-husband’s protests of innocence and even longer to examine whatever alibi he claimed to have. Ricky thought the man was probably guilty of every thought and desire leading up to the act itself, and he guessed that the man who’d arranged this particular accident knew that, as well.

  Ricky crushed and crumpled the News in anger, twisting the pages and then tossing them aside, scattering the sheets on the wooden bench, almost as if he’d wrung the neck of a small animal. He considered telephoning the detectives working the case. He considered calling Riggins’s boss at the Transit Police. He tried to imagine one of Riggins’s coworkers listening to his tale. He shook his head in growing despair. There was absolutely no chance whatsoever, he thought, that anyone would hear what he had to say. Not one word.

  He lifted his head slowly, once again nearly overcome with the sense that he was being watched. Inspected. That his responses were being measured like the subject of some bizarre clinical study. The sensation made his skin grow cold and clammy. Goose bumps formed on his arms. He looked around the huge, cavernous station. In the course of a few seconds, dozens, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of people swept past him. But Ricky felt utterly alone.

  He rose and, like a wounded man, started to make his way out of the station, heading toward the cabstand. There was a homeless man by the station entrance begging for loose change, which surprised Ricky; most of the disadvantaged were shooed away from prominent locations by the police. He stopped and dropped whatever loose change he had in the man’s empty Styrofoam coffee cup.

  “Here,” Ricky said. “I don’t need it.”

  “Thank you, sir, thank you,” the man said. “Bless you.”

  Ricky stared at the man for a moment, taking note of the sores on his hands, the lesions, partially hidden by a scraggly beard, that marked his face. Dirt, grime, and tatters. Ravaged by the streets and mental illness. The man could have been anywhere between forty and sixty years old.

  “Are you okay?” Ricky asked.

  “Yes, sir, yes, sir. Thank you. God bless you, generous sir. God bless you. Spare change?” The homeless man’s head pivoted toward another person exiting the station. “Any spare change?” He kept up the refrain, almost singsong with his voice, now ignoring Ricky, who continued to stand in front of him.

  “Where are you from?” Ricky suddenly asked.

  The homeless man stared at him, filled with a sudden distrust.

  “Here,” he said carefully, indicating his spot on the sidewalk. “There,” he continued, gesturing toward the street. “Everywhere.” He concluded by sweeping his arms in a circle around his head.

  “Where’s home?” Ricky asked.

  The man pointed at his forehead. This made sense to Ricky.

  “Well, then,” Ricky said, “have a nice day.”

  “Yes sir, yes sir, God bless you, sir,” the man continued melodically. “Spare change?”

  Ricky stepped away, abruptly trying to decide whether he had cost the homeless man his life, merely by speaking with him. He walked toward the taxi stand, wondering if every person that he came in contact with would be targeted like the detective had, like Dr. Lewis might have been. Like Zimmerman. One injured, one missing, one dead. He realized: If I had a friend, I couldn’t call him. If I had a lover, I couldn’t go to her. If I had a lawyer, I couldn’t make an appointment. If I had a toothache, I couldn’t even go and get my cavity filled without putting the dentist in jeopardy. Whoever I touch is vulnerable.

  Ricky stopped on the sidewalk and stared at his hands. Poison, he thought.

  I’ve become poison.

  Shaken by the thought, Ricky walked past the row of waiting cabs. He continued across town, heading up Park Avenue, the noises and flow of the city, incessant movement and sound, dropping away from him, so that he marched in what seemed to him to be complete silence, oblivious to the world around him, his own world narrowing, it seemed, with every stride he took. It was nearly sixty blocks to his apartment, and he walked them all, barely aware that he even took a breath of air on the trip.

  Ricky locked himself into his apartment and slumped down into the armcha
ir in his office. That was where he spent the remainder of that day and the entirety of the night, afraid to go out, afraid to stay still, afraid to remember, afraid to leave his mind blank, afraid to stay awake, afraid to sleep.

  He must have nodded off sometime toward morning, because when he awakened the day was already blistering outside his windows. His neck was stiff and every joint in his body creaked with the irritation of spending the night in a chair. He rose gingerly and went to the bathroom, where he brushed his teeth and splashed water on his face, pausing to stare at himself in the mirror and to remark internally that tension seemed to have made inroads in every line and angle he presented to the world. He thought that not since his wife’s final days had he appeared so close to despair, which, he admitted ruefully to himself, was about as emotionally close to death as one could get.

  The x-ed out calendar on his desk was now more than two-thirds filled.

  He tried Dr. Lewis’s number in Rhinebeck again, only to get the same recording. He tried directory assistance for the same region, thinking perhaps there was a new listing, but came up with a blank. He thought of dialing the hospital or the morgue, to try to determine what was truth and what was fiction, but then stopped himself. He wasn’t certain that he really wanted that answer.

  The only thing he latched onto was one remark that Dr. Lewis had made during their conversation. Everything Rumplestiltskin was doing seemingly was to draw Ricky closer to him.

  But to what purpose, other than death, Ricky could not guess.

  The Times was outside his door, and he picked it up and saw his question at the bottom of the front page, next to an ad seeking men for impotency studies. The corridor outside his apartment was silent and empty. The hallway was dim, dusty. The single elevator creaked past. The other doors, all painted a uniform black with a gold number embossed in the center, remained closed. He guessed that many of the other tenants were on vacations.

  Ricky quickly flipped through the pages of the newspaper, half hoping that the reply would be somewhere within, because, after all, Merlin had overheard the question and presumably had passed it on to his boss. But Ricky could find no evidence that Rumplestiltskin had toyed with his paper. This didn’t surprise him. He did not think it likely that the man would employ the same technique twice, because that would make him more vulnerable, perhaps more recognizable.

  The idea that he would have to wait twenty-four hours for an answer was impossible. Ricky knew that he had to make progress even without assistance. The only avenue that he thought viable was to try to find the records of the people who came to the clinic where he worked so briefly twenty years earlier. This, he believed, was a long shot, but at least would give him the sensation he was doing something other than waiting for the deadline to expire. He dressed quickly and headed to the front door of his apartment. But once standing there, his hand on the doorknob, ready to exit, he stopped. He felt a sudden wave of anxiety sweep over him, heart rate pitching high, temples starting to throb. It was as if an immense heat had dripped into the core of his body, and he saw that his hand quivered as he reached for the door. A part of him screamed internally, a massive warning, insisting that he not go out, that he was unsafe outside the doors to his apartment. And for just an instant, he heeded this, stepping back.

  Ricky breathed in deeply, trying to control his runaway panic.

  He recognized what was happening to him. He’d treated many patients with similar anxiety attacks. Xanax, Prozac, mood elevators of all sorts were available, and despite his reluctance to prescribe, he had been forced to do this on more than one occasion.

  He bit down on his lip, understanding that it is one thing to treat, another to experience. He took another step back from the door, staring at the thick wood, imagining that just beyond, perhaps in the hallway, certainly on the street outside, that all sorts of terrors awaited him. Demons waiting on the sidewalk, like an angry mob. A black wind seemed to envelop him and he thought to himself that if he stepped outside, he would surely die.

  It seemed in that immediate moment that every muscle in his body was crying to him to retreat, to hole up in his office, to hide.

  Clinically, he understood the nature of his panic.

  The reality, however, was far harder.

  He fought the urge to step back, feeling his muscles gather, taut, complaining, like the first second that one has to lift something very heavy from the earth, when there is this instant measurement of strength versus weight versus necessity, all coming together in an equation that results either in rising up and carrying forward, or dropping back and leaving behind. This was one of those moments for Ricky and it took virtually every iota of power he had left within him to overcome the sensation of complete and utter fear.

  Like a paratrooper jumping into unknown, enemy darkness, Ricky managed to force himself to open the door and step outside. It was almost painful to take a step forward.

  By the time he reached the street, he was already stained with sweat, dizzy with the exertion. He must have been wild-eyed, pale and disheveled, because a young man passing by spun about and stared at him for a second, before picking up his own pace and hurrying ahead. Ricky launched himself down the sidewalk, lurching almost drunkenly toward the corner where he could more easily hail a cab working on one of the avenues.

  He reached the corner, paused to wipe some of the moisture from his face, and then stepped to the curb, his hand raised. In that second, a yellow taxi miraculously pulled directly in front of him, to disgorge a passenger. Ricky reached for the door, to hold it open for whoever was inside, and in that time-honored city way, to claim the cab for himself.

  It was Virgil who stepped out.

  “Thanks, Ricky,” the woman said almost carelessly. She adjusted dark sunglasses on her face, grinning at the consternation he must have worn on his. “I left the paper for you to read,” she added.

  Without another word, she spun away, walking quickly down the street. Within seconds, she had turned a corner and disappeared.

  “Come on, buddy, you want a ride?” the driver abruptly demanded. Ricky was caught holding the door, standing on the curb. He looked inside and saw a copy of that day’s Times folded on the seat, and without thinking further, threw himself in. “Where to?” the man asked.

  Ricky started to reply, then stopped. “The woman who just got out,” he said, “where’d you pick her up?”

  “She was a weird one,” the driver replied. “You know her?”

  “Yes. Sort of.”

  “Well, she flags me down about two blocks away, tells me to pull over just up the street there, wait with the meter running all the time while she’s sitting back there, doing nothing ’cept staring out the window and keeping a cell phone pinned to her ear, but not talkin’ to nobody, just listening. All of a sudden, she says ‘Pull over there!’ and points to where you was. She sticks a twenty through the glass and says, ‘That man’s your next fare. Got it?’ I says, ‘Whatever you say, lady,’ and does like she says. So now you’re here. She was some looker, that lady. So where to?”

  Ricky paused, then asked, “Didn’t she give you a destination?”

  The driver smiled. “She sure did. Damn. But she tells me I’m supposed to ask you anyways, see if you can guess.”

  Ricky nodded. “Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. The outpatient clinic at 152nd Street and West End.”

  “Bingo!” the driver said, pushing down the meter flag and accelerating into the midmorning traffic.

  Ricky reached for the newspaper resting on the cab’s backseat. As he did so, a question occurred to him, and he leaned forward toward the plastic barrier between driver and passenger. “Hey,” he said, “that woman, did she say what to do if I gave you a different address? Like, someplace other than the hospital?”

  The driver grinned. “What is this, some sort of game?”

  “You could say that,” Ricky answered. “But no game you would want to play.”

  “I wouldn’t mind playing a game
or two with that one, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yes you would,” Ricky said. “You might think you wouldn’t, but trust me, you would.”

  The man nodded. “I hear ya,” he said. “ Some women, look like that one, more trouble than they’re worth. Not worth the price of admission, you could say . . .”

  “That’s exactly right,” Ricky said.

  “Anyways, I was supposed to take you to the hospital whatever you said. She tells me that you’d figure it out when we got there. Woman handed me a fifty to take you on the ride.”

  “She’s well financed,” Ricky said, leaning back. He was breathing hard, and sweat still clouded the corners of his eyes and stained his shirt. He leaned back in the cab and reached for the newspaper.

  He found what he was looking for on page A-13, written in the same red pen in large block letters across a lingerie ad from Lord & Taylor’s department store, so that the words creased across the model’s slender figure and obscured the bikini underwear she was displaying.

  Ricky narrows the track,

  Getting closer, heading back.

  Ambition, change, clouded your head,

  So you ignored all the woman said.

  Left her adrift, in a sea of strife,

  So abandoned it cost her life.

  Now the child, who saw the mistake,

  Seeks revenge for his mother’s sake.

  Who once was poor, but now is rich,

  Can fill his wishes, without a twitch.

  You may find her in the records of all the sick,

  But is it enough to do the trick?

  Because, poor Ricky, at the end of the day,

  There’s only seventy-two hours left to play.

  The simple rhyme, like before, seemed mocking, cynical in its childlike pattern. He thought it a bit like the exquisite torture of the kindergarten playground, with singsong taunts and insults. There was nothing childish about the results that Rumplestiltskin had in mind, however. Ricky tore out the single page from the Times and folded it up and slid it into his pants pocket. The remainder of the paper he thrust to the floor of the taxi. The driver was cursing mildly under his breath at traffic, carrying on a steady conversation with each and every truck, car, or the occasional bicyclist or pedestrian that crossed his path and obstructed his route. The interesting thing about the driver’s conversations was that no one else could hear them. He didn’t roll down the window and shout obscenities, nor did he lay on his horn, as some cabdrivers do, like some nervous reaction to the traffic web surrounding them. Instead, this man merely spoke, giving directions, challenges, maneuvering words as he steered his cab, so that in an odd way, the driver must have felt connected, or at least, as if he interacted with all that came onto his horizon. Or his crosshairs, depending, Ricky thought, how one saw it. It was an unusual thing, Ricky thought, to go through each day of life having dozens of conversations that couldn’t be heard. Then he wondered if anyone was any different.