Hit Man - Lawrence Block [28]
Keller browsed, hoping they would decide to clear out. At one point he was standing in front of a whole wall of videocassettes and it turned into a wall of caged puppies. It was momentary, and he couldn’t tell if it was a genuine hallucination or just some sort of mental flashback. Whatever it was, he didn’t like it.
One customer left, but the other two lingered, and then someone new came in off the street. And in half an hour the Indian kid was due back, and who knew if he would take his full hour, anyway?
He approached the counter, trying to look a little more nervous than he felt. Shifty eyes, furtive glances. Pitching his voice low, he said, “Talk to you in private?”
“About what?”
Eyes down, shoulders drawn in, he said, “Something special.”
“If it’s got to do with little kids,” the man said, “no disrespect intended, but I don’t know nothing about it, I don’t want to know nothing about it, and I wouldn’t even know where to steer you.”
“Nothing like that,” Keller said.
They went into a room in back. The jowly man closed the door, and as he was turning around Keller hit him with the edge of his hand at the juncture of neck and shoulder. The man’s knees buckled, and in an instant Keller had a loop of wire around his neck. In another minute he was out the door, and within the hour he was on the northbound Metroliner.
When he got home he realized he still had the magazines in his bag. That was sloppy, he should have discarded them the previous night, but he’d simply forgotten them altogether and never even unsealed the package.
Nor could he find a reason to unseal it now. He carried it down the hall, dropped it unopened into the incinerator. Back in his apartment, he fixed himself a weak scotch and water and watched a documentary on the Discovery Channel. The vanishing rain forest, one more goddam thing to worry about.
“Oedipus,” Jerrold Breen said, holding his hands in front of his chest, his fingertips pressed together. “I presume you know the story. Unwittingly, he killed his father and married his mother.”
“Two pitfalls I’ve thus far managed to avoid.”
“Indeed,” Breen said. “But have you? When you fly off somewhere in your official capacity as corporate expediter, when you shoot trouble, as it were, what exactly are you doing? You fire people, you cashier entire divisions, close plants, rearrange human lives. Is that a fair description?”
“I suppose so.”
“There’s an implied violence. Firing a man, terminating his career, is the symbolic equivalent of killing him. And he’s a stranger, and I shouldn’t doubt that the more important of these men are more often than not older than you, isn’t that so?”
“What’s the point?”
“When you do what you do, it’s as if you are seeking out and killing your unknown father.”
“I don’t know,” Keller said. “Isn’t that a little far-fetched?”
“And your relationships with women,” Breen went on, “have a strong Oedipal component. Your mother was a vague and unfocused woman, incompletely present in her own life, incapable of connection with others. Your own relationships with women are likewise blurred and out of focus. Your problems with impotence—”
“Once!”
“—are a natural consequence of this confusion. Your mother herself is dead now, isn’t that so?”
“Yes.”
“And your father is not to be found, and almost certainly deceased. What’s called for, Peter, is an act specifically designed to reverse this entire pattern on a symbolic level.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“It’s a subtle point,” Breen admitted. He crossed his legs, propped an elbow on a knee, extended his thumb and rested his bony chin on it. Keller thought, not for the first time, that Breen must have been a stork in a prior life. “If there were a male figure in your life,” Breen went on, “preferably at least a few years your senior, someone playing a faintly paternal role vis-à-vis yourself, someone to whom you turn for advice and direction.”
Keller thought of the man in White Plains.
“Instead of killing this man,” Breen said, “symbolically, I need hardly say—I am speaking symbolically throughout