The Analyst

by John Katzenbach

  “I see, but who . . .” The secretary was momentarily flustered, put off by the clipped, authoritarian tones that Ricky employed.

  “Diogenes is the name. Please keep that in mind. I’ll be in touch in the next day or so. Please inform your employer to collect all relevant records of all transactions, especially the wire and electronic transfers, so that we won’t be wasting time at our appointment. I will not be accompanied by the SEC detectives on this initial examination, but that might become necessary in the future. It’s a matter of cooperation, you see.”

  Ricky guessed that the initials so cavalierly used as a threat would have an immediate and significant impact. No broker likes hearing about SEC investigators.

  “I think you’d better speak with—”

  He interrupted the secretary. “Certainly. When I call back in the next day or so. I have an appointment, and another series of calls to make on this matter, so I will say goodbye. Thank you.”

  And with that, he hung up, an evil sense of satisfaction creeping into his heart. He did not think that his onetime broker, a boring man intrigued only by money and making it or losing it, would recognize the name of the character who wandered the ancient world fruitlessly searching for an honest man. But Ricky did know someone who would instantly understand it.

  His next call was to the head of the New York Psychoanalytic Society.

  He had met the doctor only once or twice in the past at the sort of medical establishment gatherings that he’d tried so hard to avoid, and had thought him then to be a priggish and wildly conceited Freudian, given to speaking even to his colleagues in long silences, and vacant pauses. The man was a veteran New York psychoanalyst, and had treated many famous people with the techniques of couch and quiet, and somehow had added all those prominent treatments into an exaggerated sense of self-importance, as if having an Oscar-winning actor or Pulitzer Prize–winning author or multimillionaire financier on the couch actually made him into a better therapist or a better human being. Ricky, who had lived and practiced in so much isolation and loneliness right up to his suicide, did not think that there was the remotest chance that the man would recognize his voice, and so he did not even attempt to alter it.

  He waited until it was nine minutes before the hour. He knew that the best likelihood of the doctor picking up his own telephone was right at the break between patients.

  The phone was answered on the second ring. A flat, gruff, no-nonsense voice that dropped even a greeting from the reply: “This is Doctor Roth . . .”

  “Doctor,” Ricky said slowly, “I’m delighted to have reached you. This is Mr. Diogenes. I represent Mr. Frederick Lazarus, who is the executor for the estate of the late Doctor Frederick Starks.”

  “How may I help you?” Roth interrupted. Ricky paused, a bit of silence that would make the doctor uncomfortable, more or less the same technique the man was accustomed to using himself.

  “We are interested in knowing precisely how the complaints against the late Doctor Starks were resolved,” Ricky said with an aggressiveness that surprised himself.

  “The complaints?”

  “Yes. The complaints. As you are completely aware, shortly before his death, there were some charges made against him concerning sexual impropriety with a female patient. We are interested in learning how that investigation of those allegations was resolved.”

  “I don’t know that there was any official resolution,” Roth said briskly. “Certainly none on the part of the Psychoanalytic Society. When Doctor Starks killed himself, it rendered further inquiry pointless.”

  “Really?” Ricky said. “Did it occur to you, or anyone else in the society you head up, that perhaps his suicide was prompted by the unfairness and the falseness of those allegations, instead of his suicide being some sort of verification by self-murder?”

  Roth paused. “We, of course, considered that likelihood,” he answered.

  Sure you did, Ricky thought. Liar.

  “Would it surprise you, doctor, to learn that the young woman who made the allegations has subsequently disappeared?”

  “I beg your pardon . . .”

  “She never returned for follow-up therapy with the physician in Boston whom she made the initial charges to.”

  “That is curious . . .”

  “And that his efforts to locate her turned up the unsettling fact that her identity—who she claimed to be, doctor—was fake.”

  “A fake?”

  “And it was further learned that her charges were part of a hoax. Did you know this, doctor?”

  “But no, no, I didn’t . . . as I said, we didn’t follow up, after the suicide . . .”

  “In other words, you washed your hands of the entire matter.”

  “It was turned over to the proper authorities . . .”

  “But that suicide certainly saved you and your profession a great deal of negative and embarrassing publicity, did it not?”

  “I don’t know—well, of course, but . . .”

  “Did it occur to you that perhaps the heirs of Doctor Starks would want his reputation restored? That exoneration, even after death, might be important to them?”

  “I did not consider that.”

  “Do you know you could be considered liable for that death?”

  This statement drew a predictable, blustery response. “Not in the slightest! We didn’t—”

  Ricky interrupted. “There are more sorts of liability in this world than legal, are there not, doctor?”

  He liked this question. It went to the core of what a psychoanalyst is all about. He could envision the man on the other end of the telephone line shifting about uncomfortably in his chair. Perhaps a little sweat formed on his forehead or dripped down beneath his armpits.

  “Of course, but . . .”

  “But no one in the society really wanted to know the truth, did they? It was better if it just disappeared into the ocean with Doctor Starks, correct?”

  “I don’t think I should answer any more questions, Mr. uh . . .”

  “Of course not. Not at this moment. Perhaps at a later time. But it is curious, isn’t it, doctor?”

  “What?”

  “That truth is far stronger than death.”

  With that statement, Ricky hung up the phone.

  He lay back on the bed, staring up at the white ceiling and a bare lightbulb. He could feel some of his own sweat beneath his arms, as if he’d exerted himself in that conversation, but it wasn’t a nervous dampness, rather a wet and satisfactory righteousness. In the next room, the couple had started up again, and for a moment he listened to the unmistakable rhythms of sex, finding it amusing and not altogether unpleasurable. More than one person having a little workday amusement, he thought. After a moment, he rose and searched around until he found a small pad of paper in the bedside table desk drawer and a cheap ballpoint pen.

  On the paper, he wrote the names and numbers of the two men he had just called. Beneath those, he wrote the words: Money. Reputation. He placed check marks by these words, then wrote, the name of the third seedy hotel where he had a reservation. Beneath that, he scribbled the word: Home.

  Then he crumpled the paper up and threw it into a metal wastebasket. He doubted that the room was cleaned all that regularly and thought there was a better than even chance that whoever came searching for him there would find it. Regardless, they would undoubtedly be clever enough to check the telephone records for that room, which would turn up the numbers he had just dialed. Connecting numbers to conversations wasn’t all that difficult.

  The best game to play, he thought, is the game you don’t realize you are playing.

  Chapter Thirty

  Ricky found an army-navy surplus store on his walk across the city, where he purchased a few items that he thought he might need for the next stage of the game he had in mind. These included a small crowbar, an inexpensive bicycle lock, some surgical gloves, a miniflashlight, a roll of gray-colored duct tape, and the cheapest pair of binoculars th
at they had. As an after-thought, he also bought a modest squeeze spray container of Ben’s Bug Juice, with one hundred percent DEET, which, he thought ruefully, was about as close to poison as he’d ever considered putting on his body. It was an odd collection of items, he realized, but he wasn’t certain precisely what the task he had in mind would require, and so he obtained a variety to compensate for his uncertainty.

  Early that afternoon, he returned to his room and packed these, along with his pistol and two of his newly acquired cell phones, into a small backpack. He used the third cell phone to call the next hotel on his list, the one he had not checked into yet. There he left an urgent message for Frederick Lazarus to return the call as soon as he checked in. He gave the cell phone number to a clerk, then thrust that phone into an outside pocket of the knapsack, after carefully marking it with a pen. When he reached his rental car, he took out the phone and gruffly called the hotel a second time, leaving yet another urgent message for himself. He did this three more times as he drove out of the city, heading toward New Jersey, each time growing more strident and more insistent that Mr. Lazarus get back to him instantly, as he had important information to pass on.

  After the third message on that cell phone, he pulled into the Joyce Kilmer rest stop on the Jersey turnpike. He went into the men’s room, washed his hands, and left the telephone on the edge of the sink. He noted that several teenagers passed him on his way out, heading to the bathroom. He thought there was the likelihood that they would grab the phone and start using it pretty quickly, which was what he wanted.

  It was on the edge of evening when he arrived in West Windsor. The traffic had been crowded the entire length of the turnpike, cars lined up a length or two apart, traveling at excessive rates of speed, until everything slowed to a horn-honking, raised-voices, overheated crawl past an accident near Exit 11. Rubbernecking further limited the pace, as cars maneuvered past two ambulances, a half-dozen state police cars, and the twisted, impact-shredded shells of two compact cars. He could see a man in a white shirt and tie sitting in a half crouch by the breakdown lane, his head in his hands, obscuring his face. As Ricky crept past, the first of the ambulances took off, its siren starting up insistently, and Ricky saw a state trooper with a measuring wheel start to walk a skid mark on the highway. Another was poised by flares stuck in the black macadam surface, waving people on, wearing a solid, stern, and disapproving look, as if curiosity, that most human of emotions, was somehow out of place, or inappropriate at this moment, when, in actuality, it was merely inconvenient for him. Ricky thought that an analyst’s sort of insight, as telling about who he’d once been, was like the current glare on the trooper’s face.

  He found a diner along Route One not far from Princeton where he stopped and killed some time eating a cheeseburger and fries that were actually cooked by a person and not by machines and timers. The day was stretched long with June light, and when he emerged there was still some time before darkness settled in. He drove over to the grave site where he’d been two weeks earlier. The old caretaker was gone, which he’d counted on. He was fortunate that the entrance to the cemetery wasn’t locked or barred, so he pulled the rental car over behind the small white clapboard storage shack, and left it there, more or less concealed from the roadway and certainly appearing innocuous enough to anyone who might spot it.

  Before slinging the backpack over his shoulder, Ricky took the time to slather himself in the Ben’s Bug Juice and don the surgical gloves. These wouldn’t conceal his scent, he knew, but at least they would help keep off the deer ticks. The daylight was beginning to fade, turning the New Jersey sky a sickly gray-brown, as if the edges of the world had been burned by the heat from the afternoon. Ricky threw the backpack over his shoulder, and with a single glance down the deserted rural road, started jogging toward the kennel where he knew the information he needed was waiting. There was still plenty of warmth rising above the black macadam, and it crept into his lungs rapidly. He was breathing hard, but he knew it wasn’t from the exertion of running.

  He turned off the roadway and ducked beneath the canopy of trees, sliding past the kennel sign and the picture of the barrel-chested Rottweiler. Then he stepped off the driveway, into the shrub brush and greenery that hid the kennel from the highway, and carefully picked his way closer to the home and the pens. Still hidden by the foliage, staying back in the first dark shadows of the approaching night, Ricky removed the binoculars from the backpack and used them to survey the exterior, taking a better look at the layout than he had during his first, truncated visit there.

  His eyes went first to the pen beside the main entrance, where he spotted Brutus on his feet and pacing back and forth nervously. He smells the DEET, Ricky thought. And behind that, my scent. But he doesn’t know what to make of it yet. For the dog, it was still simply in the category of out of the ordinary. He hadn’t yet approached close enough to be considered a threat. For a moment, he envied the dog’s simpler world, defined by smells and instincts and uncluttered by the vagaries of emotions.

  Sweeping the glasses in an arc, Ricky saw a light click on inside the main house. He watched steadily for a minute or two, then saw the unmistakable wan glow of a television set fill a room near the front. The kennel office a little ways to his left remained dark, and, he guessed, locked. He made a final visual survey and saw a large rectangular spotlight near the roofline of the house. He guessed that it was motion-activated and that the field of range was directly in front of the house. Ricky replaced the glasses in his bag, and maneuvered parallel to the home, staying on the fringe of the underbrush, until he reached the edge of the property. A quick sprint would get him to the front of the kennel office, and perhaps would keep him away from triggering the exterior lights.

  Not only Brutus was aroused by his presence. Some of the other dogs in their pens were moving around, sniffing the air. A few had barked nervously once or twice. Unsettled and unsure by a scent that was new.

  Ricky knew precisely what he wanted to do, and thought that as a plan, it had virtues. Whether he could pull it off or not, he didn’t know. He was aware of one thing, which was that up to this point he’d only skirted illegality. This was a step of a different sort. Ricky was aware of another detail: For a man who liked to play games, Rumplestiltskin had no rules. At least none that were constrained by any morality that he was familiar with. Ricky knew that even if Mr. R. didn’t yet realize it, he was about to enter a little deeper into that arena.

  He took a deep breath. The old Ricky would never have imagined being in this position, he thought. The new Ricky felt a single-minded, and coldhearted purpose. He whispered to himself: “What I was, isn’t what I am. And what I am, isn’t yet what I can be.” He wondered whether he had ever been anything that he was, or anything he was about to become. A complicated question, he told himself. He smiled inwardly. A question that once upon a time you might have spent hours, days, on the couch, examining. No more. He shunted it away deep within him.

  Lifting his eyes to the sky, he saw that the day’s last light had finally slid away, and darkness was only moments from descending. It is the most unsettled time of day, he thought, and perfect for what he was about to deliver.

  With that in mind, Ricky removed the small crowbar and the bicycle lock, and placed them in his right hand, gripping them tightly. Then he returned the backpack to his back, took a deep breath, and burst from the bushes, sprinting hard for the front of the building.

  A bedlam of aroused dogs instantly creased the growing shadows. Yelps, howls, barks, and growls of all sorts and sizes pierced the air, obscuring the scrabbling sound his running shoes made against the gravel driveway. He was peripherally aware that all the animals were racing about in their small pen enclosures, twisting and turning with sudden dog excitement. A world of spastic marionettes, strings pulled by confusion.

  Within a few seconds, he’d reached the front of Brutus’s kennel. The huge dog seemed to be the only animal at the kennel with any sort of composure
and his was filled with menace. He was pacing back and forth across the cement floor, but stopped when Ricky reached the gate. For a second, Brutus eyed Ricky, his mouth open in a growl, his teeth bared. Then, with shocking speed, the dog leaped across the area, throwing all hundred-plus pounds against the chain-link fencing that kept him contained. The force of the attack nearly knocked Ricky over. Brutus fell back, now frothing with rage, then again thrust at the steel chains, his teeth clacking against the metal.

  Ricky moved quickly, rapidly threading the bicycle lock around the twin posts of the kennel door, snatching his hands back before the animal had time to seize one, then securing it, spinning the lock combination and dropping it. Brutus immediately tore at the black rubber-encased steel of the chain. “Screw you,” Ricky whispered in a mocking tough guy accent. “At least you ain’t going nowhere.” Then he rose up and jumped over to the front of the kennel office. He thought he had only a few seconds left before the owner finally responded to the growing racket and din of arousal. Ricky assumed the man would be armed, but wasn’t sure of this. Perhaps his confidence in Brutus at his side would minimize his own need for weapons.

  He thrust the crowbar into the doorjamb and snapped out the lock with a creaking, splintering noise as the wood broke. It was old, and showed some warping with age and broke easily. Ricky guessed that the kennel owner didn’t keep much of value in the office anyway, and didn’t really envision a burglar testing Brutus. The door swung open, and Ricky stepped inside. He swung the backpack around to his front, stuffed the crowbar inside and removed his pistol, quickly chambering a round.

  Inside was an opera of dog anxiety. The racket filled the air, making it hard to think, but giving Ricky an idea. Clicking on his flashlight, he raced down the musty, foul-smelling corridor where all the dogs were penned, stopping to open each cage as he ran past.

  Within seconds, Ricky was surrounded by a leaping, barking tangle of breeds. Some were terrified, some were overjoyed. Smelling, yelping, confused but all aware they were free. Some three dozen dogs, of all different shapes and sizes, unsure what was happening, but more or less determined to be a part of it nonetheless. Ricky was counting on that basic dog-think that doesn’t really understand all that much, but wants to be included in whatever is happening nevertheless. The sniffing and snuffling that flowed around and between his legs made him smile right through the nervousness of what he was doing. Surrounded by the pack of leaping, bouncing animals, Ricky returned to the kennel office. He was waving his arms, shooing the animals along, like some wildly impatient Moses at the edge of the Red Sea.