"The Analyst" - читать интересную книгу автора (Katzenbach John)

Chapter Six

Ricky Starks slammed the door to his apartment shut behind him, the noise resounding in his ears, and echoing away through the dimly lit empty building corridor. He frantically twisted the locks that he so infrequently used, double-bolting the entranceway. He pulled on the door handle, to make certain that these functioned properly. Then, still uncertain that the locks alone were sufficient, he grabbed a chair and wedged it up under the doorknob as an old-fashioned secondary barrier. It took some mental energy on his part to prevent himself from piling bureau, boxes, bookshelves-anything he could immediately lay his hands on-up against the door to barricade himself inside. Sweat stung at his eyes, and even though the air conditioner hummed along busily out of sight in the office window, he still felt flashes of sudden heat like so many lightning bolts crease his body. A soldier, a policeman, a pilot, a mountaineer-anyone versed in the various businesses of danger-would have easily recognized these for what they were: strikes of fear. But Ricky had spent so many years living away from any of those edges, that he was unfamiliar with the most obvious of signs.

He stepped away from the door, turning to survey his apartment. A single, dim overhead light above the doorway that barely overcame the night threw odd weak shadows into the corners of the waiting room. He could hear the air conditioner and beyond that, muffled street noises, but other than that, nothing but an oppressive silence.

The door to his office was open, yawning darkly. He was abruptly overcome by the sensation that when he’d left the sanctuary of his home earlier that evening in the minutes after Virgil’s visit, he’d closed that door behind him, as was his usual habit. A rough-edged sense of apprehension scoured about within him, filling him with doubts. He stared at the open door, trying desperately to recall his precise steps in leaving.

He could picture himself donning his tie and jacket, pausing to double-knot his right shoelace, patting his hip to make certain that he carried his wallet, dropping the apartment key into his front pocket, then jangling it to reassure himself that it was secure. He saw himself stepping across the apartment, exiting the front door, waiting for the elevator to descend from the third floor, finding himself out on the street where the air above the sidewalk was still hot. All this was abundantly clear. It was, he thought, a departure no different from thousands of others over thousands of days. It was the return that resulted in everything seeming skewed or slightly misshapen, like staring at one’s image in a circus fun-house mirror, distorted no matter which way one pivoted and turned. Inwardly he screamed at himself: Did you close that interior door?

He bit his lip in frustration, trying to recall the sensation of the knob in his hand, the noise of the wood shutting behind his back. The memory eluded him and he felt frozen in his position, stymied by his inability to recollect a single, simple, everyday act. And then he asked himself an even worse question, although he didn’t realize it quite yet: Why can’t you remember?

He took a deep breath and reassured himself: You must have left it open. By mistake.

Still he didn’t move. He felt suddenly sapped of strength. Almost as if he’d been through a fight, or, at least, what he suspected he’d feel if he’d fought someone, because he realized abruptly that he never had. At least, not as an adult, and he discounted the occasional wrestlings of adolescent boys which seemed impossibly distant in his past.

The darkness seemed to mock him. He strained his hearing, trying to penetrate into the darkened room.

No one is there, he told himself.

But, as if to underscore the lie, he said out loud: “Hello?”

The sound of the single word spoken in the small space had a tightening effect upon Ricky. He was overcome by a sense of being ridiculous. A child, he told himself, is frightened of shadows, not an adult. Especially one who has spent the entirety of their adult life dealing with secrets and hidden terrors, as he had.

He stepped forward, trying to regain his composure. He was home, he told himself. He was safe.

Still, he reached out quickly for the light switch on the wall, as he hesitated in the gray-black space of the doorway, groping about with his hand until he found the toggle switch, which he flicked instantly.

Nothing happened. The blackness of the room remained intact.

Ricky gasped hard, inhaling some of the darkness. He flicked the switch repeatedly, as if refusing to believe that there was no light in the room. He cursed out loud: “Damn it to hell…” but did not step inside. Instead, he allowed time for his eyes to adjust to the dark, all the time listening carefully, trying to pick out some telltale noise that might let him know that he wasn’t alone. He reassured himself: When you’ve had as unsettling an experience as he’d had that evening, the mind naturally played all sorts of little tricks. Still, he waited a few more seconds, so that his vision had some purchase on the dark room, and he swept his eyes back and forth a few times. Then he stepped across the small space, angling for his desk and the lamp that occupied one corner. He felt not unlike a blind man, keeping his hands out in front of him, trying to feel his way across an area where there was nothing to feel. He bumped solidly into his desk, misjudging the distance slightly, banging his knee, which prompted a torrent of obscenities from his mouth. Several shits and damns and a single fuck, all of which were out of character for Ricky, who before the events of the past day, had rarely uttered an obscenity.

He sidled alongside the desk, finally finding the lamp with his hand, and locating its switch. With a relieved sigh, he clicked this, expecting light.

It, too, failed to function.

Ricky gripped the side of the desk, steadying himself. He told himself there must be some kind of power outage, caused by the heat and the citywide demand for electricity, but behind his desk he could see through the window that streetlights were burning brightly and the air conditioner continued to hum merrily along. Then he told himself that it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that two different lightbulbs might have burned out simultaneously. Unusual, but possible.

Keeping one hand on the desk edge, he turned in the direction of the third lamp that he kept in his office. It was a standing light, a black, cast-iron design that his wife had purchased a number of years earlier to take up to the summer place in Wellfleet, but which he’d appropriated for the corner of his office, behind his chair, at the head of the couch. He used it for reading, and on rainy, dark days, to clear some of the city November gloom from the room, so that patients wouldn’t be totally distracted by the weather. The lamp was perhaps fifteen feet away from where he was poised at the desk, but it was a distance that in that moment seemed much farther. He pictured his office, knowing that it was merely a few paces away and that nothing stood between him and his chair, and once there, the lamp would be easily found. He wished, in that moment, that more light from the street filtered through the windows, but what little existed seemed to stop right at the glass, as if impotent and unable to penetrate into the small room. Four strides across, he told himself. Don’t bump your knee on the chair.

He stepped forward carefully, feeling the emptiness in front of him with his outstretched arms. He bent slightly at the waist, reaching for the reassuring feel of his old leather chair. It seemed to take him longer to cross the space than he would have guessed, but the chair was where it always was, and he found the arm, the back, and he lurched into the seat with a grateful welcoming squeak of leather. His hands located the small table where he kept his daybook and clock, then reached behind it for the lamp. The knob was up just beneath the bulb, and with a little twisting and fumbling, he found it. Without hesitation, he turned it with a decisive click.

The darkness remained intact.

He twisted the knob back and forth a dozen times, filling the room with clicks.

Nothing.

Ricky sat frozen in his seat, trying to arrive at some obvious and benign explanation for why none of the lights in his office functioned. This eluded him.

Breathing in deeply, he listened to the nighttime, trying to sort through the ancillary sounds of the city. His nerve ends were on edge, his hearing sharpened, every other sense gathered in an effort to determine whether he was truly alone. A part of him wanted to bolt for the front door, to escape to the corridor, and then to find someone to accompany him back into the apartment. He fought against this desire, recognizing it for the panic that it implied. He tried to force himself to remain calm.

He could hear nothing, but this did not reassure him that no one was with him in the apartment. He tried to imagine where someone might hide, which closet, which corner, beneath which table. Then he tried to concentrate on those locations, as if from the seat behind his analyst’s couch, he could see into those hidden regions. But this effort, too, was unsuccessful, or, at least, he realized, unsatisfactory. He tried to remember where he might have kept a flashlight or candlesticks, guessing that if he had any, they would be in the kitchen on a shelf, probably right next to the spare lightbulbs. He stayed seated for another minute, reluctant to leave his familiar seat, managing to force himself upward only by recognizing that pursuing some sort of light was the only reasonable response.

He stepped gingerly into the center of the room, keeping his hands out in front of him again, mimicking a blind man. He was halfway across the room when the telephone on the desk rang.

The sound seared through him.

He stumbled as he pivoted toward the noise, reaching out for the sound. His hand knocked into a jar of pens and pencils he kept on his desktop, scattering them. He seized the telephone just before the sixth ring, which would have triggered his answering machine. “Hello? Hello?”

There was no response.

“Hello? Is someone there?”

The phone went dead abruptly.

Ricky held the receiver in his hand in the darkness, cursing silently to himself, then not so silently, “Goddamn it to hell!” he said loudly. “Goddamn it, Goddamn it, Goddamn it…”

He hung up the receiver, and placed both hands on the desk surface, as if exhausted and needing to catch his breath again. He cursed again, though more softly.

The phone rang again.

He lurched back in surprise, then reached out and fumbling slightly, banging the receiver against the desktop, he grabbed the receiver and thrust it to his ear. “This isn’t funny,” he said.

“Doctor Ricky,” cooed Virgil’s deep, yet kittenish voice. “No one has ever suggested this was a joke. In fact, Mr. R. is fairly humorless, or so I’m told.”

Ricky bit back on the every angry word that leapt forward to the brink of his lips. Instead, he let some silence speak for him.

After a few seconds, Virgil laughed. The sound was awful over the phone line.

“You’re still in the dark, aren’t you, Ricky?”

“Yes,” he said. “You’ve been here, haven’t you. You or someone like you broke in here while I was out and…”

“Ricky,” Virgil suddenly cooed, almost seductively, “you’re. When you’re in the dark about something, especially something simple, what do you do?”

He didn’t reply. She laughed again.

“Come on, Ricky. And you think yourself to be a master of symbolism and interpreting all sorts of mysteries? How do you shed light where there is only darkness? Why, that’s your job, isn’t it?”

She didn’t allow him a response.

“Follow the simplest trail for an answer.”

“What?” he asked.

“Ricky, I can see you’re going to need my help considerably over the next few days if you intend to make an honest effort to save your own life. Or do you prefer to sit in the dark right up to the arrival of the day that you have to kill yourself?”

He felt confused.

“I don’t get it,” he said.

“You will in a moment or two,” she said firmly. Then she hung up, leaving him holding impotently on to the telephone. He took several seconds before he returned it to its cradle. The nighttime in the room seemed to envelop him, blanketing him with despair. He reviewed Virgil’s words, which seemed to him to be obtuse, cryptic, and unfathomable. He wanted to scream out that he had no idea what she meant, frustrated by both the darkness that surrounded him and the sense that his private space had been disrupted and violated. Ricky ground his teeth in anger, gripping the edge of the desk, grunting with rage. He wanted to pick something up and break it.

“A simple trail,” he almost shouted out. “There aren’t any simple trails in life!”

The sound of his own words disappearing into the blackened room had the immediate effect of quieting him. He seethed, on the verge of fury.

“Simple, simple…,” he said under his breath.

And then he had an idea. He was surprised that it managed to slide past his growing anger. “It can’t be…” he said, as he reached out with his left hand for his desk lamp. He felt the base and found the electrical cord emerging from the side. Holding this between his fingers, he traced the wire downward to where he knew it was plugged into an extension cord that ran against the wall to the outlet. He lowered himself to his knees on the floor and within a few seconds found the plug. It had been pulled from the extension. It took another few seconds of groping around for him to find the end of the extension, but he managed. He slid the plug into the receptacle and the room around him suddenly burst with light. He rose from the floor and turned to the lamp behind the couch and immediately saw that it had been unplugged, as well. He lifted his eyes to the overhead light and guessed that the bulb behind the sconce had merely been loosened.

On his desk, the telephone rang for the third time.

He picked it up, demanding “How did you get in here?”

“Don’t you think Mr. R. can afford a capable locksmith?” Virgil said coyly. “Or a professional burglar? Someone expert with the antique and outmoded dead-bolt locks you have on your front door, Ricky. Haven’t you ever considered something more modern? Electrical locking systems with lasers and infrared motion detectors? Handprint technology, or maybe even those eyeball retina recognition systems they use at government installations. You know that sort of thing is available to the general public through slightly shady and disreputable connections. Haven’t you ever had the urge to be slightly more modern in your personal security?”

“I’ve never needed that foolishness,” Ricky harrumphed pompously.

“Never had a break-in? Never been robbed? Not in all these years in Manhattan?”

“No.”

“Well,” Virgil said smugly, “I guess no one ever thought you had something worth stealing. But that’s not the case now, is it, doctor? My employer certainly does, and he seems more than willing to take all sorts of chances.”

Ricky did not reply. He looked up abruptly, staring out the office window.

“You can see me,” he said excitedly. “You’re looking at me right now, aren’t you? How else would you know that I managed to get the lights on?”

Virgil burst into a laugh. “Good for you, Ricky. You’re making some progress when finally able to state the obvious.”

“Where are you?” Ricky asked.

Virgil paused, before replying: “Close by. I’m at your shoulder, Ricky. I’m in your shadow. What good would it be to have a guide to Hell who wasn’t there when you needed her?”

He didn’t have an answer.

“Well,” Virgil continued, her voice returning to the lilting tones that Ricky was beginning to find irritating, “let me give you a little hint, doctor. Mr. R. is a sporting type. With all the planning that has gone into this modest exercise in revenge, do you think he would be unwilling to play his game with rules that you couldn’t perceive? What did you learn tonight, Ricky?”

“I learned that you and your employer are sick, disgusting people,” Ricky burst out. “And I want nothing to do with you.”

Virgil’s laugh over the telephone line was cold and flat.

“Is that what you learned? And how did you reach that particular conclusion? Now, I’m not denying it, mind you. But I’d be interested to know under what psychoanalytic or medical theory you arrived at that diagnosis when it seems to my untrained mind that you don’t know us at all. Why, you and I, we’ve had only one session. And you still have no clue as to who Rumplestiltskin is, do you? But you’re willing to jump to all sorts of conclusions. Why, Ricky, I think jumping to conclusions is dangerous for you, given the precariousness of your position. I think you should try to keep an open mind.”

“Zimmerman…,” he started with his own version of a mingling of cold and fury. “What happened to Zimmerman? You were there. Did you push him off the platform? Did you give him a little shove, or maybe just a jostle, so that he lost his balance? Do you think you can get away with murder?”

Virgil hesitated, then answered bluntly, “Yes, Ricky, I do. I think people in this day and age get away with all sorts of crimes, up to and including murder. Happens all the time. But in the case of your unfortunate patient-or should I say ex-patient?-the evidence is far stronger that he jumped. Are you absolutely sure he didn’t? No secret that he was deeply troubled. What makes you think he didn’t do himself in, using a fabulously inexpensive and efficient technique not all that uncommon in New York? A method you might soon be forced to consider yourself. Not all that terrible a way to go when you really think about it. A momentary feeling of fear and doubt, a decision, a single brave step off the platform, some screeching noise, a flash of light, and then blessed oblivion.”

“Zimmerman wouldn’t kill himself. He showed none of the classic conditions. You or someone like you pushed him in front of that subway train.”

“I admire your certainty, Ricky. It must be a happy life to be so sure about everything.”

“I’m going to go back to the police.”

“Well, you’re certainly welcome to give them another try if you think it will do you some good. Did you find them particularly helpful? Were they especially eager to listen to your analytic interpretation of events that you didn’t actually witness?”

This question quieted Ricky. He waited before he said, “All right. So, what’s next?”

“There’s a present for you. Over on your couch. See it?”

Ricky looked up swiftly and saw that there was a medium-sized blond manila envelope resting where his patients usually placed their heads. “I see it,” he replied.

“Okay,” Virgil said. “I’ll wait for you to open it up.” Before he could place the telephone down on the desktop, he heard her humming a tune that he vaguely recognized, but was unable to immediately place. Had Ricky been more of a television watcher, he might have immediately determined that Virgil was using the familiar music from the quiz show Jeopardy. Instead, he rose, crossed the room swiftly, and seized the envelope. It was thin, and he tore it open rapidly, removing a single sheet of paper.

It was a solitary page from a calendar. A large red X had been drawn through that day’s date, the first of the month of August. Thirteen days that followed were left blank. The fifteenth day was circled in red. The remaining days of the month had been blacked out.

Ricky’s mouth went dry. He looked in the envelope, but there was nothing else.

He moved slowly back to the desk and lifted the receiver.

“All right,” he said. “This isn’t hard to understand.”

Virgil’s voice remained even flowing and almost sweet. “A reminder, Ricky. That’s all. Something to help you get yourself started. Ricky, Ricky, I asked already: What have you learned?”

The question infuriated him and he was about to burst with outrage. But he bit back the fury gathering within him and, keeping tight rein over his emotions, replied instead, “I’ve learned that there don’t seem to be any boundaries.”

“Good, Ricky, good. That’s progress. What else?”

“I’ve learned not to underestimate what is happening.”

“Excellent, Ricky. More?”

“No. That’s it to this point.”

Virgil started to tsk-tsk like some caricature of a grade-school teacher. “Not true, Ricky. What you have learned, Ricky, is that everything in this game, including the likely outcome, is being played on a field uniquely designed to accommodate you. I think that my employer has been exceptionally generous, considering his alternatives. You’ve been given a chance, granted a slight one, to save someone else’s life and to save your own by answering a simple question: Who is he? And, because he doesn’t want to be unfair, he’s given you an alternative solution, less attractive for you, of course, but one that will give your sorry existence some meaning in your final days. Not many people get that sort of opportunity, Ricky. To go to their grave knowing that their sacrifice saved another from some unknown, but absolutely genuine horror. Why, this borders on sainthood, Ricky, and it’s being handed to you without the delightful three miracles that the Catholic Church usually requires, although I believe they’ll waive one or two on occasion for worthy candidates. How does one go about waiving a miracle, when that’s the standard for acceptance in the club? Ah, well, an intriguing question we can debate at length some other moment. Right now, Ricky, you should go back to the clues you have been given, and get started. Time is wasting and there’s not much of it left. Have you ever performed an analysis on deadline, Ricky? Because that is what this is all about. I’ll be in touch. Remember, Virgil is never far away.”

She took a deep breath, then added: “Got all that, Ricky?”

He remained silent, and she said it again, harsher.

“Got all that, Ricky?”

“Yes,” he said. But of course he knew that he didn’t as he hung up the phone.