The Analyst

Easily as bad as Rafael Johnson, and maybe even a little worse, because he’s the guy still walking around and Johnson’s fertilizing a plot out on Staten Island.”

“How can you be so sure he’s the guy?”

“I shouldn’t be telling you this…”

“No, I understand if you don’t want to give out details,” Ricky said.

“Well, it was a little unusual,” the policeman continued. “But I don’t suppose there’s no harm in your knowing, as long as you keep it to yourself. This guy Rogers left a calling card. Seems he wanted all of Johnson’s buddies to know who did him up so badassed, bloody, and beaten up. A little message for the boys back in the hole, I’m thinking. The old prison mentality. Anyway, after pounding on Johnson for a good while, turning his face into a mess, breaking both his legs and six of his fingers, not nice scouts, let me tell you, and right before he strung him up by the neck, this guy took the time to carve his initial right in the middle of Johnson’s chest. A big bloody goddamn R cut in the flesh. Right unpleasant that, but gets the message across no doubt.”

“The letter R?”

“You got it. Some calling card, huh?”

It was indeed, Ricky thought. And the person whom it was truly meant for just received it.

Ricky tried not to imagine Rafael Johnson’s final moments. He wondered whether the ex-con and petty thug had had any idea whatsoever who it was that was delivering his death to him. Every punch that Johnson had thrown at the unfortunate Claire Tyson twenty years earlier had been repaid, with interest. Ricky told himself not to dwell on what he’d learned, but one thing was obvious: The man who called himself Rumplestiltskin had designed his revenge with considerable thought and care. And that the umbrella of that revenge spread farther than Ricky had imagined.

For the third time, Ricky dialed the number for the New York Times advertising department, to ask his final question. He was still standing at the pay telephone in the lobby of the courthouse building, holding a finger in one ear to try to drown out the noise of people leaving the offices. The clerk at the newspaper seemed annoyed that Ricky had just managed to beat the six p.m. deadline for the ad. The clerk’s voice was curt, direct. “All right, doctor. What do you want the ad to say?”

Ricky thought, then said:

Is the man I seek, one of the three?

Orphaned young, but now no fool,

seeking those who were so cruel?

The clerk read the lines back to him, without making a single comment, as if he were immune to curiosity. He took down the billing information rapidly and just as quickly disconnected the line. Ricky could not imagine what the clerk had waiting for him at his home that was so compelling that Ricky’s question did not even elicit the smallest comment, but he was thankful for that.

He walked out to the street and started to lift his hand to flag down a cab, then thought, oddly, that he would rather ride the subway. The streets were crowded with the evening rush hour traffic, and a steady stream of people were descending into the bowels of Manhattan to ride the trains home. He joined them, finding an odd sanctuary in the press of people. The subway was jammed, and he was unable to find a seat, so he rode north hanging from a metal rail, pummeled and jostled by the rhythm of the train and the mass of humanity. It was almost luxurious to be gripped by so much anonymity.

He tried not to think that in the morning, he would have only forty-eight remaining hours. He decided that even though he’d asked the question in the paper, he would assume that he already knew the answer, which would give him two days to come up with the names of Claire Tyson’s orphaned children. He did not know whether he could manage this, but at least it was something he could focus on, a concrete bit of information that he could either acquire or not, a hard and cold fact that existed somewhere in the world of documents and courts. This was not a world he was comfortable in, as he’d amply demonstrated that afternoon. But at least it was a recognizable world, and this gave him some hope. He wracked his memory, knowing that his late wife had been friendly with a number of judges, and thinking that perhaps one of them might sign an order for him to penetrate the adoption records. He smiled, thinking that he might be able to pull that off, and that would be a maneuver that Rumplestiltskin hadn’t anticipated.

The train rocked and shook, then decelerated, causing him to tighten his grip on the metal bar. It was hard to steady himself, and he pushed up against a young man with a backpack and long hair, who ignored the sudden physical contact.

The subway stop was two blocks from Ricky’s home, and he rose up through the station, grateful to be out in the open again. He paused, breathing in the heat from the sidewalk, then set off rapidly down the street. He was not precisely confident, but filled with a sense of purpose. He decided that he would find his late wife’s old address book in the basement storage area and start that evening calling judges she had once known. One was bound to be willing to help. It was not much of a plan, he thought, but at least it was something. As he walked rapidly forward, he was unsure whether he had reached this point in the exercise in revenge because that was what Rumplestiltskin wanted, or because he’d been clever. And, in a strange way, he felt suddenly buoyed by the idea that Rumplestiltskin had taken such a terrible revenge upon Rafael Johnson, the man who’d beaten his mother. Ricky thought that there had to be a significant distinction between the modest neglect that he’d authored, which was truly born of bureaucratic deficiencies, and the physical abuse that Johnson had delivered. He allowed himself the optimistic thought that perhaps all that had happened to him, to his career, his bank accounts, his patients, all the disruption and disarray that had been created in his life might just end there, with a name and an apology of sorts, and then he could go about the task of reconstituting his life.

He did not allow himself to dwell even for a second on the true nature of revenge, because this was not something he was in the slightest familiar with. Nor did he focus on the threat to one of his relatives that still lurked in the background.

Filled instead with if not precisely positive thoughts, at least some semblance of normalcy, and the belief that he might just have a chance to play the game successfully, Ricky turned the corner to his block, only to stop abruptly in his tracks.

In front of his brownstone, there were three police cars, lights flashing, one large red city fire truck and two yellow public works vehicles. The spinning emergency lights blended with the dimming evening atmosphere.

Ricky stumbled backward, like a drunken man, or a man rebounding from a punch to the face. He could see several policemen standing about by his front steps, jawing with workers wearing hard hats and sweat-stained coveralls. A fireman or two were on the fringe of the conversation, but then, as he stepped ahead, peeled away from the group milling about, and swung themselves up into the fire truck. With a deep engine roar mingled with a siren’s harsh blare, the fire truck headed off down the street.

Ricky hurried forward, only subliminally aware that the men in front of him were lacking urgency. When he arrived in front of his home, he was almost out of breath. One of the policemen turned and faced him.

“Hey, slow down, fella,” the officer said.

“This is my home,” Ricky replied anxiously. “What happened?”

“You live here?” the cop asked, although he’d already been given the answer to this question.

“Yes,” Ricky repeated. “What’s going on?”

The cop didn’t reply directly. “Oh, man. You better go talk to the suit over there,” he said.

Ricky looked toward another group of men. He saw one of his neighbors, a man from two stories above him, a stockbroker who headed the building’s loosely confederated association, arguing and gesturing with a city Department of Public Works man, wearing a yellow hard hat. Two other men stood nearby. Ricky recognized one of them as the building supervisor, and another as the man in charge of building maintenance.

The DPW man was speaking loudly and as Ricky approached the group he overheard the man say, “I don’t give a shit what you say about inconveniencing people. I’m the guy who decides occupancy