John Katzenbach - The Analyst

Dr. Lewis paled slightly.

“You knew, didn’t you?” Ricky continued, “that you were as much the psychopath as he was? You wanted a killer, and so you found one, because that was what you always wanted to be: a killer.”

The old man scowled. “You always were astute, Ricky. Think of what you could have made with your life had you been a bit more ambitious. A little more subtle.”

“Put the weapon down, doctor. You’re not going to shoot me,” Ricky said.

Dr. Lewis kept the revolver trained on Ricky’s face, but nodded. “I do not really have to, do I?” he said. “The man who killed you once will do it again. And this time he will not accept an obituary in the paper. I think he will actually need to see your death. Do you not?”

“Not if I have anything to say about it. And perhaps, once I find this great array of clues as to who he is that you say are here, perhaps I’ll just disappear again. I succeeded once, and I suspect I can evaporate a second time. Perhaps Rumplestiltskin will simply have to settle for what he achieved the first time we played. Doctor Starks is dead and gone. He won that round. But I will go on and become whatever I want. I can win by running. I win by hiding. By staying alive and anonymous. Isn’t that an oddity, doctor? We, who worked so hard to help ourselves and our patients confront the demons that pursue and torment them, can actually preserve ourselves by fleeing. We helped patients become something, but I can become nothing, and thus win. An irony, don’t you think?”

Dr. Lewis nodded his head.

“I anticipated your response,” he said slowly. “I imagined that you would see the answer that you have just provided me.”

“So,” Ricky said, “I repeat: Put your weapon down, and I will take my leave. Assuming the information I need is in this envelope.”

“In a way, it is,” the old man said. He was whispering, with a nasty smile. “But I have just a final question or two for you, Ricky… if you do not mind.”

Ricky nodded.

“I have told you of the man’s past. And told you far more than you yet understand. And what did I tell you of his relationship with me?”

“You spoke of a kind of odd loyalty and love. A psychopath’s love.”

“One killer’s love for another. Most intriguing, do you not think?”

“Fascinating,” Ricky said briskly. “And were I still a psychoanalyst, I would likely be intrigued and eager to investigate. But I am not. No longer.”

“Ah, but I think you are wrong.” Dr. Lewis shrugged his shoulders. “I think one cannot walk away from being a physician of the heart quite as easily as you seem to think it can be done.” The old man shook his head in a negative. He still had not relaxed his grip on the revolver, nor had it wavered from Ricky’s face. “I think our time is up for the evening, Ricky. One last session. The fifty-minute hour. Perhaps now your own analysis is nearly complete. But the real question I have for you to take away from this is this, Ricky: If he was so devoted to seeing you kill yourself after you failed his mother, what will he want to happen to you when he believes you have killed me?”

“What do you mean?” Ricky asked.

But the old physician didn’t reply. Instead, in a single sweeping gesture, he lifted the revolver up to his temple, grinned maniacally, and then fired a single shot.

Ricky half shouted, half screamed, in surprise and shock. His voice seemed to blend with the echo of the revolver’s report.

He rocked back hard in the chair, almost as if the bullet that exploded into the old psychoanalyst’s head had actually been diverted and struck him in the chest. By the time the reverberation from the gunshot had faded into the night air, Ricky was on his feet, standing at the edge of the desk, staring down at the man who once he’d trusted so implicitly. Dr. Lewis had slammed backward, twisted slightly by the force of death delivered to his temple. His eyes had remained open, and now they stared out with macabre intensity. A scarlet mist of blood and brain matter had painted the bookcase, and deep, maroon blood was seeping from the gaping wound down across the physician’s face and chin, staining his shirt. The revolver that had delivered the fatal shot slipped from his fingers to the floor, its weight muffled by the fine Persian carpet beneath their feet. Ricky gasped out loud, as the old man’s body twitched once with muscles coming into tune with death.

He breathed in harshly. It wasn’t, he realized, the first time he’d seen death. When he’d been an intern, doing rotations in internal medicine and the emergency room, more than one person had died in his presence. But that was always surrounded by equipment, and teams of people trying to save life and fight off dying. Even when his wife had finally succumbed to cancer, that had still been part of a process that he was familiar with, and provided a context, even if awful, for what took place.

This was different. It was savage. It was murder, specialized. He felt his own hands shake with an old man’s palsy. He fought hard against the overwhelming instinct to panic and run.

Ricky tried to organize his thoughts. The room was silent, and he could hear his own labored breathing, like a man at the top of a high mountain, sucking in cold air without significant relief. It seemed that every sinew inside of him had tightened, knotted, and that only fleeing would loosen the tension. He gripped the edge of the desk, trying to steady himself.

“What have you done to me, old man?” he said out loud. His voice seemed out of place, like a cough in the midst of a solemn church service.

Then he realized the answer to his own question: He’s tried to kill me. One bullet that can kill two people, because the old physician’s death was likely to be taken hard by three people on this earth who had no restrictions on how they would respond. And they would blame Ricky, regardless of what evidence of suicide stared them in the face.

Only it was even more complicated than that. Dr. Lewis wanted to do more than simply murder him. He’d had the gun leveled at Ricky’s face, and he could easily have pulled the trigger, even knowing that Ricky might return fire before dying. What the old man wanted was to endow all the people playing out the murderous game with a moral depravity that equaled his own. That was far more important than simply killing Ricky and himself. Ricky tried to breathe past the thoughts which flooded him. All along, he thought, this hasn’t only been about death. It’s been about the process. It’s been about how death was reached.

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.