Lawrence Block - Hit Man

“What do you think?”

“I think it’s guilt. My profit derives from the misfortunes of others, from the grief I bring to others. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“On the surface, yes. When we go deeper, perhaps we will begin to discover other connections. With your having chosen this job in the first place, perhaps, and with some aspects of your childhood.” He interlaced his fingers and sat back in his chair. “Everything is of a piece, you know. Nothing exists alone and nothing is accidental. Even your name.”

“My name?”

“Peter Stone. Think about it, why don’t you, between now and our next session.”

“Think about my name?”

“About your name and how it suits you. And”-a reflexive glance at his wristwatch-“I’m afraid our hour is up.”

Jerrold Breen’s office was on Central Park West at Ninety-fourth Street. Keller walked to Columbus Avenue, rode a bus five blocks, crossed the street, and hailed a taxi. He had the driver go through Central Park, and by the time he got out of the cab at Fiftieth Street he was reasonably certain he hadn’t been followed. He bought coffee in a deli and stood on the sidewalk, keeping an eye open while he drank it. Then he walked to the building where he lived, on First Avenue between Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth. It was a prewar high-rise, with an Art Deco lobby and an attended elevator. “Ah, Mr. Keller,” the attendant said. “A beautiful day, yes?”

“Beautiful,” Keller agreed.

Keller had a one-bedroom apartment on the nineteenth floor. He could look out his window and see the UN building, the East River, the borough of Queens. On the first Sunday in November he could watch the runners streaming across the Queensboro Bridge, just a couple of miles past the midpoint of the New York marathon.

It was a spectacle Keller tried not to miss. He would sit at his window for hours while thousands of them passed through his field of vision, first the world-class runners, then the middle-of-the-pack plodders, and finally the slowest of the slow, some walking, some hobbling. They started in Staten Island and finished in Central Park, and all he saw was a few hundred yards of their ordeal as they made their way over the bridge into Manhattan. Sooner or later the sight always moved him to tears, although he could not have said why.

Maybe it was something to talk about with Breen.

It was a woman who had led him to the therapist’s couch, an aerobics instructor named Donna. Keller had met her at the gym. They’d had a couple of dates, and had been to bed a couple of times, enough to establish their sexual incompatibility. Keller still went to the same gym two or three times a week to raise and lower heavy metal objects, and when he ran into her they were friendly.

One time, just back from a trip somewhere, he must have rattled on about what a nice town it was. “Keller,” she said, “if there was ever a born New Yorker, you’re it. You know that, don’t you?”

“I suppose so.”

“But you’ve always got this fantasy, living the good life in Elephant, Montana. Every place you go, you dream up a whole life to go with it.”

“Is that bad?”

“Who’s saying it’s bad? But I bet you could have fun with it in therapy.”

“You think I need to be in therapy?”

“I think you’d get a lot out of therapy,” she said. “Look, you come here, right? You climb the Stair Monster, you use the Nautilus.”

“Mostly free weights.”

“Whatever. You don’t do this because you’re a physical wreck.”

“I do it to stay in shape.”

“And because it makes you feel good.”

“So?”

“So I see you as all closed in and trying to reach out,” she said. “Going all over the country and getting real estate agents to show you houses you’re not going to buy.”

“That was only a couple of times. And what’s so bad about it, anyway? It passes the time.”

“You do these things and don’t know why,” she said. “You know what therapy is? It’s an adventure, it’s a voyage of discovery. And it’s like going to the gym. It’s… look, forget it. The whole thing’s pointless anyway unless you’re interested.”

“Maybe I’m interested,” he said.

Donna, not surprisingly, was in therapy herself. But her therapist was a woman, and they agreed he’d be more comfortable working with a man. Her ex-husband had been very fond of his therapist, a West Side psychologist named Breen. Donna had never met the man herself, and she wasn’t on the best of terms with her ex, but-

“That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll call him myself.”

He’d called Breen, using Donna’s ex-husband’s name as a reference. “But I doubt that he even knows me by name,” he said. “We got to talking a while back at a party and I haven’t seen him since. But something he said struck a chord with me, and, well, I thought I ought to explore it.”

“Intuition is a powerful teacher,” Breen said.

Keller made an appointment, giving his name as Peter Stone. In his first session he talked some about his work for a large and unnamed conglomerate. “They’re a little old-fashioned when it comes to psychotherapy,” he told Breen. “So I’m not going to give you an address or telephone number, and I’ll pay for each session in cash.”

“Your life is filled with secrets,” Breen said.

“I’m afraid it is. My work demands it.”

“This is a place where you can be honest and open. The idea is to uncover those secrets you’ve been keeping from yourself. Here you are protected by the sanctity of the confessional, but it’s not my task to grant you absolution. Ultimately, you absolve yourself.”

“Well,” Keller said.

“Meanwhile, you have secrets to keep. I can respect that. I won’t need your address or telephone number unless I’m forced to cancel an appointment. I suggest you call in to confirm your sessions an hour or two ahead of time, or you can take the chance of an occasional wasted trip. If you have to cancel an appointment, be sure to give me twenty-four hours’ notice. Or I’ll have to charge for the missed session.”

“That’s fair,” Keller said.

He went twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays, at two in the afternoon. It was hard to tell what they were accomplishing. Sometimes Keller relaxed completely on the sofa, talking freely and honestly about his childhood. Other times he experienced the fifty-minute session as a balancing act; he was tugged in two directions at once, yearning to tell everything, compelled to keep it all a secret.

No one knew he was doing this. Once when he ran into Donna she asked if he’d ever given the shrink a call, and he’d shrugged sheepishly and said he hadn’t. “I thought about it,” he said, “but then somebody told me about this masseuse, she does a combination of Swedish and shiatsu, and I’ve got to tell you, I think it does me more good than somebody poking and probing at the inside of my head.”

“Oh, Keller,” she’d said, not without affection. “Don’t ever change.”

It was on a Monday that he recounted the dream about the mice. Wednesday morning his phone rang, and it was Dot. “He wants to see you,” she said.

“Be right out,” he said.

He put on a tie and jacket and caught a cab to Grand Central and a train to White Plains. There he caught another cab and told the driver to head out Washington Boulevard and let him off at the corner of Norwalk. After the cab drove off he walked up Norwalk to Taunton Place and turned left. The second house on the right was a big old Victorian with a wrap-around porch. He rang the bell and Dot let him in.

“The upstairs den,” she said. “He’s expecting you.”

He went upstairs, and forty minutes later he came down again. A young man named Louis drove him back to the station, and on the way they chatted about a recent boxing match they’d both seen on ESPN. “What I wish,” Louis said, “I wish they had like a mute button on the remote, except what it would do is it would mute the announcers but you’d still hear the crowd noise and the punches landing. What you wouldn’t have is the constant yammer-yammer-yammer in your ear.” Keller wondered if they could do that. “I don’t see why not,” Louis said. “They can do everything else. If you can put a man on the moon, you ought to be able to shut up Al Bernstein.”