John Katzenbach - The Analyst

Within minutes, he’d reached the rental car. He fumbled for the keys, dropping them once, but seizing them from the ground, gasping with tension. He threw himself behind the wheel and started the engine. Every instinct he had told him to accelerate. To escape. To run away. But he fought against these urges, trying hard to keep his wits about him.

Ricky made himself think. I cannot outrun them in this car. There are two routes back to New York City, the thruway on the western side of the Hudson and the Taconic Parkway on the eastern side. They will have a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right, and spotting me in the car. The out-of-state New Hampshire plate on the tail of the cheap rental car was a telltale sign indicating who was behind the wheel. They might have acquired a description of the vehicle and the license plate number from the rental agency in Durham. In fact, he thought this likely.

What he understood was in that moment he had to do something unexpected.

Something that defied what the three in the car would anticipate.

He thought his hands were shaking as he decided what to do. He wondered whether it was easier to gamble with his life now that he’d died once already.

He put the car in gear and slowly began to drive back in the direction of the old analyst’s house. He scrunched himself down as low in the seat as he could get, without being obvious. He forced himself to maintain the speed limit, heading north on the old country road, when the relative safety of the city was to the south.

He was closing on the driveway to the place he’d just been, when he saw the headlights of the Mercedes sweeping down toward the roadway. He could hear the crunch of the big tires against the gravel. He slowed slightly-he did not want to pass directly in the big car’s lights-giving them time to swing out onto the road, and head toward him, accelerating quickly. He had his high beams on, and as the Mercedes closed the space, he dimmed his lights, as one is supposed to, then just as they closed, blinked them on high again, like any motorist signaling with irritation at the approaching car. The effect was that both vehicles narrowly swept past each other with high beams on. Just as Ricky knew that he was blinded momentarily, so were they. He punched the accelerator as he passed, slinking rapidly around a corner. Too fast, he hoped, for someone in the other car to turn and make the license plate on the back.

He took the first side road he spotted, turning to his right, immediately switching off the car lights. He made a U-turn in the black, his way lit only by the moonlight. He reminded himself to keep his foot off the brake pedal, so that the red lights wouldn’t light in the rear. Then he waited to see if he was followed.

The road remained empty. He made himself wait five, then ten minutes. Long enough for the occupants of the Mercedes to decide on one of the two alternative routes, and rachet the big car up to a hundred miles per hour, trying to catch up with him.

Ricky put the car back in gear, and continued to drive north almost aimlessly, on side roads and streets. Heading nowhere special. After nearly an hour, he finally turned the car around and changed direction again, finally steering back to the city. It was deep into the night and few other vehicles were around. Ricky drove steadily, thinking how close his world had become, and how dark, and trying to devise a way to restore light to it.

It was deep into the predawn morning when he reached the city. New York at that hour seems to be taken over by shifting shapes, as the electricity of the late-night crowds, whether they are the beautiful or the decrepit, seeking adventure, give way to the workday throngs. The fish market and trucking beasts looking to take over the day. The transition is unsettling, made on streets slicked by moisture and neon lights. It is, Ricky thought, a dangerous time of the night. A time when inhibitions and restraints seem lessened, and the world is willing to take chances.

He had returned to his rented room, fighting the urge to throw himself onto the bed and devour sleep. Answers, he told himself. He clutched answers in the book on abnormal psychology, he just needed to read them. The question was, where?

The encyclopedia contained 779 pages of text. It was organized alphabetically. He flipped through some pages, but initially could find nothing to indicate anything. Still, poring over the book like some monk in an ancient monastery, he knew somewhere within the pages was what he needed to know.

Ricky rocked back in his seat, taking a stray pencil and tapping it against his teeth. I am in the right location, he thought. But short of examining every page, he was unsure what to do. He told himself that he needed to think like the man who’d died earlier that night. A game. A challenge. A puzzle.

They are here, Ricky thought. Inside a text on abnormal psychology.

What did he tell me? Virgil is an actress. Merlin is an attorney. Rumplestiltskin is a professional assassin. Three professions working together. As he flipped almost haphazardly through the pages, trying to think through the problem in front of him, he passed the few pages devoted to the letter V . Almost by luck, his eyes caught a mark on the initial page of the section, which started with 559. In the upper corner, written in the same pen that Dr. Lewis had used for his greeting on the title page was the fraction one and three. One-third.

That was all.

Ricky turned to the entries under M . In a similar location was another pair of numbers, but written differently. These were 1 4, written one slash four. On the opening page of the letter R , he found a third signature, two-fifths. Two dash five.

There was no doubt in Ricky’s mind that these were keys. Now he had to uncover the locks.

Ricky bent forward slightly in his seat, rocking back and forth gently, as if trying to accommodate a slight upset stomach, movements that were almost involuntary, as he concentrated on the problem in front of him. It was a conundrum of personality as complex as any he’d ever experienced in his years as an analyst. The man who had treated him to chart his own way through his own personality, who had been his guide into the profession, and who had provided the means of Ricky’s own death, had delivered a final message. Ricky felt like some ancient Chinese mathematician, working on an abacus, the black stones making clicking noises as they were shunted speedily from one side to the other, calculations made and then discarded as the equation grew.

He asked himself: What do I really know?

A portrait began to form in his imagination, starting with Virgil. Dr. Lewis said she was an actress, which made sense, for she had constantly been performing. The child of poverty, the youngest of the three, who had gone from so little to so much with such dizzying speed. How would that have affected her? Ricky demanded of himself. Lurking in her unconscious would be issues of identity, of who she truly was. Hence the decision to enter a profession that constantly called for redesigning one’s self. A chameleon, where roles dominated truths. Ricky nodded. A streak of aggressiveness, as well, and an edginess that spoke of bitterness. He thought of all the factors that went into her becoming who she was, and how eager she’d been to be the point player in the drama that had swept him to his death.

Ricky shifted in his seat. Make a guess, he told himself. An educated guess.

Narcissistic personality disorder.

He turned to the encyclopedia entry for N and then to that particular diagnosis.

His pulse quickened. He saw that Dr. Lewis had touched several letters in the midst of words with a yellow highlighter pen. Ricky grabbed a sheet of paper and wrote down the letters. Then he sat back sharply, staring at gobbledygook. It made no sense. He went back to the encyclopedia definition, and recalled the one-third key. This time he wrote down letters three spaces away from the marked ones. Again, useless.