1
Racing through the night and drizzle, he was more a dark phantom than the living – black pullover and sweatpants, black Ghost GTX running shoes, black hair dyed brown and chopped to a one-inch cut, his beard nearly reaching his sharp cheekbones. To the few who knew him, he would be nearly unrecognizable. Thirty violins sang Mahler’s passion and whipped themselves into a frenzy in his head. The streets’ wet sheen made them look liquefied, bottomless. You might take a step and plummet, and never stop . . .
. . . He remembered the madness beneath the river, the desperate, clutching bodies. He remembered finding Ezra’s skinny arms, pulling the boy free of the scrum and shoving him to the surface. He remembered hands closing round his throat – and the waterlogged ooof! as his fist smashed into some boney part of Hall, feeling it break and cave.
He’d come out of the river, dragged himself up the bank and crawled toward a squat, dark outline in the mist. It was an old storage hut for the railroad, with a door hanging on one rusty hinge. Inside, he’d torn the pockets out of his sweatpants and stuffed them in the bullet hole in his chest and exit wound in his back, just below the scapula. He thought it likely he’d lose consciousness and didn’t want to bleed out in his sleep.
The magnitude of pain was new, its presence unbordered, so he’d kept his mind drenched with Chopin – Fantasie Impromptu, Prelude in E Minor – trying to finesse the pain, negotiate instead of wage all-out war on fronts too wide to control. He slept most of the first two days, and when he went outside on the third night, he found a sleepy town a mile away, vegetable scraps in the garbage behind a diner, and an orphaned wind-breaker and bottle of water on a dugout bench at a ballfield. On day five he left at dawn, and it took four hours to walk the two miles to the highway on his mutilated leg. He only stuck his thumb out for trucks, and the first that stopped took him all the way to the city . . .
Brooklyn was a mongrel jumble of edifice, ethnicity and class. Every turn seemed to transport him to someplace unconnected and alien. A shadowed stretch of warehouses and saggy-fenced lots became a well-lit block of townhouses with flat-screens and stuffed bookshelves behind windows, which morphed into a pocket of shabby check-cashing storefronts and grimy bodegas pouring reggaeton into the street, then around a corner came brick and chrome hipster restaurants and bars with neon ‘Brooklyn Lager’ signs.
He’d considered leaving, starting over. He’d gone to Richmond, Brattleboro, Boston, and stayed a few days – but they never took hold. New York was his planet, its singular gravity kept him tethered. Another place would not hold him in orbit. He could float into black space and drift like a broken satellite. And – he had a task to finish here.
It had taken months before he had healed sufficiently to run again. There was new pain, a prickly burn in the left quad under the fresh scars of Dalton’s cuts. Coupled with the old issues in his hips and ankles, equilibrium was at times elusive – but the music, as always, helped the alchemist in him transform pain into pure sensation . . . and power.
As the light turned green and he jogged into the deserted intersection, the strings reached their peak, and in his mind’s eye strands of sound circled each other in a mating dance, then rushed into an embrace, fusing into a multicolored ribbon. The music was ripe. He tasted spearmint, strawberry – and heard the urgent snarl of the horn one second before the black, speeding mass entered his peripheral landscape, wrenching him around to a head-on view of the Dodge Dakota as it ignored the red light and barreled toward him. The streetlamps shone on the windshield, illuminating the three faces behind it – the widening eyes and stretching lips – then the driver jerked as he hammered the horn again and stomped the brake, and the vehicle flinched on the wet asphalt and went into a skid.
The tires’ screech overpowered the strings, and he fought the drift of inner tumult. He’d been here before – caught unaware when the world snuck up on him, slowing the nature of things to an exquisite crawl. Perpetual motion broken into minute segments, falling dominos, connected but separate and distinct. Sounds spread like mercury on tilted glass, then lingered beyond their usual half-life. He put his hands out in front of him.
In the final moment, a thought surfaced that he found unexpected:
He wondered if someone had ever discovered his father’s body on the mountain, trapped under the truck’s tire, the knife deep in his heart. Geiger could feel the leather hilt in his child’s hand as he’d pushed it in. More likely, wolves had devoured the flesh. Mountain lions and foxes had played with the bones, scattering them, the sun had dried the blood-soaked ground, and the wind had scraped the darkened dirt free and swept it away. All that was left of the man was what Geiger carried with him, inside and out – the demented rituals, the elegant circuitry of scars, the kinship of pain, the final declaration from pale, bleeding lips: The world knows nothing of you. That is my gift to you, son. You are no one.
The truck was upon him. In the front seat, the young woman between the two men covered her face with her hands. The tortured cry of tires died as the gleaming silver grill met Geiger’s upheld palms – and stopped. Had there been witnesses, they might’ve thought he was some superhero able to stop speeding vehicles with his bare hands.
The door swung open and the driver hopped out. He looked a few hard years past twenty, had a beer bottle in hand, and wore a sweatshirt that read ‘STAR SPANGLED BANGER!’ in red, white and blue letters. He ran a hand across his buzz-cut, then spread his arms like a rainmaker about to pray to the sky.
‘What the fuck, man? What the fuck’re you doing, huh?’
Geiger straightened up. ‘You drove through a red light,’ he said.
Something about Geiger’s smooth, uninflected tone put a grin on the man.
‘Red light? This is fucking Brooklyn, man.’
‘You should be more careful. It was a stupid thing to do.’
The man’s smile held its ground. He glanced at the others. ‘He says I’m stupid.’
The other man in the truck laughed, and threw an empty beer can through the open door at his friend. ‘He’s right, you dumb asshole!’
The driver turned back to Geiger, and held up his bottle. ‘You made me spill my beer, man. It was almost full – my last one. Bummer.’
Since his return Geiger had kept face-to-face events to a minimum, but the man’s chatter was firing his sensors, probing beneath the surface of words and tone for intent. Somewhere a fire engine was keening for a new tragedy. He took out his earbuds.
‘You should get back in the truck now.’
‘C’mon, Dougie,’ said the woman. ‘Let’s go.’
‘In a sec.’ The driver was staring more intently now. ‘You’re not from around here – are you, man? We, uh – we drive around and, y’know, keep an eye on things in the nabe . . . and I don’t think I seen you before.’ He cocked his head like a Doberman getting a whiff of hamburger. ‘Hey . . . Are you a moozle? Cuz – you sorta look like one.’
Geiger felt the pulse in his temples ticking like a clock. ‘I don’t know what a moozle is.’
‘Sure ya do. Y’know . . . moozle. Towel-head. Mosque rat.’ The man shrugged. ‘A moozle.’ He looked back at the other two. ‘Looks kinda like one, don’t he?’
‘I guess,’ said the man in the passenger seat. ‘Sorta.’
‘I’m not a Muslim,’ said Geiger, ‘so you can go now.’
‘In a sec.’ The man started across the asphalt in a chummy shuffle. Geiger’s fingers started tapping against his thighs. The breath in his nostrils turned hot. The driver stopped inches from him and held up the bottle. ‘Have a drink, yeah? Just so there’s no hard feelings. I mean moozles can’t drink – but you’re not a moozle, so you can.’
‘I don’t drink.’
‘C’mon . . . not even a swig of Bud?’ His grin had a lazy droop to it, like his heart wasn’t really in it. His buddy stuck his head out of the passenger window.
‘Are we cool here, Dougie – or what?’ he asked.
Geiger
felt the memory of the hundreds of fates held in his hands – the sweat of fear on skin, muscles tensing in alarm, wills succumbing to his touch. His inheritance, his expertise – the creation of pain . . . the construction of suffering . . . the extraction of truth . . .
‘Douglas,’ Geiger said, ‘get in the truck and leave.’
The last pretense of amity abandoned the man’s face. ‘Well how ’bout you get on your fucking camel . . .’ He planted his forefinger in Geiger’s chest. ‘. . . and—’
Movement was so fast it precluded the man from making another sound. Geiger grabbed the collar and pulled him in, while his other hand latched onto a wrist and spun him around as he twisted the arm up behind the man. The bottle shattered at their feet.
Geiger’s right arm locked round the neck and they stood pressed together, chest to back. Every time the man tried to move, Geiger hitched the arm higher – and the man stopped.
The young woman jumped out to the street. She wore a powder-blue version of the driver’s sweatshirt. ‘Dougie!’
The driver started to speak, but Geiger’s forearm tightened round the throat and silenced him, and then he spoke very softly into the man’s ear.
‘Don’t talk. Don’t move. Relax.’ There was a light touch to the words, an almost paternal promise in them. Don’t worry. There’s nothing to be afraid of.
The man riding shotgun got out, nervously grinding a fist into his other palm.
‘Let him go!’ said the woman. She reached into the front seat, and then straightened back up with an aluminum bat in hand. The green paint was scuffed in places. ‘Right now, motherfucker!’
The man in Geiger’s grasp chuckled coarsely. ‘Meet my girlfriend, Abdul.’
Geiger was studying her – the straightness of her spine, how her fingers moved in a repetitive motion around the bat’s neck. She knew the feel of it. She’d used it before.
The woman shot a look at her friend. ‘Let’s do this, Jamie.’ He nodded, and the two started forward. Five strides, at the most.
Geiger leaned to the driver’s ear. ‘Douglas . . . we have a change of plans.’
‘Gonna let me go – huh, asshole?’
Geiger shifted his forearm, fingers curling stiffly, and dug into the front of the man’s neck above the clavicle. The man’s brain received an instant message from the brachial plexus – of a sudden, massive shock to the nervous system – and he blacked out and went rag-doll limp. Geiger’s forearm kept him from falling. The others stopped with a synchronized flinch, as if they’d run into an invisible force-field.
‘Jesus Christ . . .’ slipped out of the other man.
The girlfriend raised the bat. ‘Motherfucker! What’d you do to him?!’
‘Douglas is unconscious.’ He felt the smooth march of blood, saw the darkest part of him watching it all. The Inquisitor nodded at him. There are numerous applications of pain. ‘You both need to get back in the truck.’ There is pressure, blunt force, application of intense heat and cold, manipulation of joints . . . ‘Do what I tell you.’
The woman put the bat on her shoulder. Confusion and awe tugged at an eyebrow.
‘Who the fuck are you?’
Geiger parsed her timbre and cadence and found as much fear as fury, which was a good thing.
‘Put the bat down, get in the truck – and close the doors. When I’ve gone, give Douglas a few slaps on the cheeks and move his head side to side. He’ll wake up.’
The second man was shaking his head like a bystander at the scene of an accident.
‘Did you two hear what I said?’ Geiger’s voice was that of a patient teacher in a rowdy classroom, and it made his students look at him with something akin to dread.
‘Motherfucker,’ snarled the woman, and dropped the bat. The second man gratefully took it as a cue, and they walked to the truck, got in and slammed the doors.
Geiger dragged the body to the corner farthest from the truck, watching them watch him. He lowered the driver to the sidewalk and propped him against a lamppost. He could smell oily smoke starting to crowd the air. A second fire engine’s siren called out to the first, like a beast seeking a mate. Something was burning down close by.
Geiger put his earbuds back in place and resumed his run. He took a different route each time – and had another half-hour before he got there. Dylan’s sandpaper rasp was in his ears. ‘Something is happening here and you don’t know what it is – do you, Mr. Jones?’
2
In this jam-packed, crazy-quilt, rackety part of the city, the crack! jolting Harry Boddicker out of his doze could have been any number of things – a car backfire, a shout, a gunshot – but his mind thought the sound was a salvo of fireworks . . . because the dream he’d been trapped in, as was often the case, was about July Fourth. He’d fallen asleep in the folding chair on the fire escape outside his fourth-floor walkup on Henry Street in Chinatown – the perch where he now observed life on Planet Earth. He could have been a gargoyle on a ledge peering down at the shifting, joyful madness.
He’d had two reasons for making Chinatown his new home. The density of people on the streets gave him hope that on the rare times he went out his odds for anonymity would be bettered – and his favorite dim sum restaurant was a block away. Still, the world had become much too small a place – so small his hideaway life seemed little more than a futile postponement of the inevitable. They would find him. They might change in personage – Hall, Mitch and Ray were dead – but they would all be very good at their job, and someday he’d get a tap on the shoulder or a sap on the skull because, as Geiger had said – they never stop. And a day after Geiger had spoken those words he was dead.
Harry’s sadness had a sharp, fine edge. For nine months, it had been honed by the loss of Geiger, his partner and only friend, and Lily, his sister. It was a shard lodged within him, cutting him with every movement – even as subtle as a breath. And sleep offered no respite. Awake, he had mastered the skill of squelching the images when they sprang up – but he was helpless in dreams to escape the replays of that July Fourth night . . .
. . . The livid sky punctured by pyrotechnics . . . Geiger standing at the dock’s end, battered, bloodied, watching the rowboat drift into the Hudson River with Hall and Ezra . . . then Lily rising from the depths, grabbing the boat’s gunwale, capsizing it . . . everyone disappearing beneath the surface . . . and Geiger diving in as Harry hobbled down the dock, helpless, useless – watching the union of fate and chaos . . . the river foaming with turmoil – then one gasping soul rising up and swimming to shore. The boy. Ezra. With the gym bag of torture videos clutched in his hand . . .
Without Geiger to stabilize Harry’s orbit, without the work and reason to put on his stickler-for-detail hat – time was thoughtless. It made him vulnerable to pricks of memory, and his exiled past had sensed its chance, mustered its army, and overthrown the present. Now he spent much of his life in the company of ghosts, a melancholy congregation – those who had left by choice, and those who’d had no say in the matter. They looked to him. They asked unanswerable questions.
The buzzer rang inside and Harry leaned over the railing and looked down. The delivery man was on the stoop. He rose with a grunt and stepped through the window, into the living room, went to the door and pressed the intercom.
‘That you, Cheng?’
‘Yes, Mr. Jones, sir.’
He hit the buzzer. He’d come to the conclusion that mayhem was cheap – the gods had overstocked inventory and tossed it down as often as possible. He lived on the cash in his Citibank safe deposit box, addicted to Pepcids, fighting a return to his pre-Geiger drinking form – and hadn’t been back to his apartment in Brooklyn Heights, his cherished sanctum, since the Independence Day massacre. It wasn’t a stretch to think there was a file with Harry’s name and address in the database of some ice-for-blood honcho in the CIA or NSA or some other lethal three-letter cadre. He could see the lush trees lining his old street, rolling out their thick shadows – and imagined someone
standing cloaked within them, staring at his second-floor windows, waiting for his return.
He craved the company of others. Early on he’d considered getting a job, putting himself in the crosshairs of the public eye, just to pass some time with people – but then he’d imagined the job interview, sitting across from someone perusing his résumé.
‘You have a BA from CCNY, 1989 – superior skills in computer programming – reporter for the New York Times from 1991 till 1997, worked in Obituaries from ’97 until 2001. Very impressive, Mr. Jones. Have you been employed since then?’ And Harry could answer – ‘Well, yes. I was a partner in a very successful entrepreneurial venture. IR.’
‘“IR”? I’m not familiar with that field.’
‘Information Retrieval. Our start-up capital was provided by Carmine Delanotte, a Mafia don – and I was the business manager for the greatest torturer in the world. So . . . do I get the job?’
Harry scratched at his beard – he’d grown it for camouflage, but hated its itch – and looked glumly around the room: the buckled walls, the east-west crack in the ceiling, the meagerly stuffed corduroy chair, the folding card table with his MacBook, the dented Sears mini-fridge and stained two-burner oven of unknown origin.
‘Long fucking way from Brooklyn Heights, Harry.’
Having conversations with himself was another new habit. He missed talking to someone, because being heard was being known. Most of all, he missed Geiger – their diner breakfasts two or three times a week, their mutual, obsessive dedication to detail, the man’s unworldly calm, his unknowableness right until the end – a man whose genius was acquiring truth through torture but who gave his life to save a child he barely knew.
Eleven years.
What they had done was always with him now. The list of those who had suffered was long. That most had stepped out of a catalogue of the seven sins, and that Geiger had never shed blood – those facts were only a weak salve for Harry’s shame. Still – had anyone asked, he wouldn’t have denied he keenly missed the ritual of the work. Being the gatekeeper with those who sought Geiger’s gifts . . . using his own singular skills to create the dossiers of potential clients and targets – navigating the internet’s dark alleys in search of pieces of a life, then stitching them together so Geiger had a detailed picture of who he would be dealing with before accepting a job . . . negotiating what price truth was trading at on a given day with the client . . . creating transcripts from the interrogation sessions’ DVDs, looking away as often as possible as he typed . . . and collecting his 25 percent, tax free . . .
The Confessor Page 2