The Confessor

by Mark Allen Smith

  Victor turned round and flicked on the overhead light to check on the cargo. The bodies were still. He killed the light, faced front, and his thumb went to his cleft.

  ‘Les loups ne lisent pas,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘Wolves don’t read.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘It’s a saying, Dewey. My father worked for the mob in Marseilles. He’d say it to me.’

  ‘Okay – but I still don’t get it.’

  ‘Your thoughts are always about the prey . . . and those around it. You act on instinct, and as you move on – if you move on – experience. You cannot be taught the important things. The only manual is what you have done.’ He tapped his forehead with a finger. ‘In here.’ His hand went back into his lap. ‘Les loups ne lisent pas.’

  ‘Wolves don’t read. I got it.’

  Dewey let a Fiat cut him off without a response and made a right. Victor held the cigarette up before his eyes and studied the tip’s pulsing glow, as if all one needed to know was locked inside the fire.

  ‘And something else to understand,’ Victor said.

  ‘Okay . . .’

  ‘Do you remember I told you I had no partners . . . ?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘This is to say . . . in this job, trust makes things very – how do you say? – complicating?’

  ‘Complicated.’

  ‘Complicated. So you just hope for loyalty. That is all one can ask. In the rest of life, disloyalty is a common sin. In the job – it is . . . unacceptable to me.’

  ‘Kind of weird, isn’t it? To split it up like that?’

  Victor sucked in a hit of smoke. His lips had a slight grin when he took the cigarette away.

  ‘If a friend betrays me, maybe I am sad. If you betray me, maybe I am dead.’

  Dewey gave him a quick glance. He was wondering if Victor actually had any friends. He turned into a vast square, Place Denfert Rochereau, a roundabout where six streets converged – on every corner, a massive, ornate six or seven-floor building like V-shaped stone layer-cakes. In the center of the square stood a large statue of a lion, regal in its repose, its black copper gleaming with a coat of rain. Victor pointed his cigarette at it.

  ‘The Lion of Belfort. Beautiful, no?’

  ‘Lions are cool.’

  ‘Bartholdi. The same sculptor who made your Statue of Liberty. You have seen it?’

  ‘Just pictures. Never been to New York. Long way from Oklahoma. I never crossed the state line till I joined up.’ He turned off onto Avenue Rene Coty, going south. ‘Okay if I ask how your old man ended up?’

  ‘At sixty-one he retired to a small house with a garden in Provence . . . and died twenty years later with a bottle of wine in his lap.’

  Victor flicked his butt out the window and watched the burst of sparks tumble down the street like a troop of golden pixies, each with its own precious moment of birth, each dying at its own singular time.

  The drive took six hours.

  In the sweep of the headlights, the bend in the gravel road ended and revealed the silhouette of the farmhouse, one hundred yards away. Cold, white light shone in two of the windows and bled out onto the ground. Dewey was not one for drama – but it was his first time here at night, and in the dark the place looked mean.

  Victor pointed. ‘Go around and back it up to the door.’

  Dewey slowed, and as they went past the front door it opened – and a figure stood in the doorway, made black and featureless by the interior light behind him.

  ‘Keep driving,’ said Victor.

  ‘Got it,’ said Dewey, and kept going.

  Harry was clear-headed – one of the reasons surgeons liked propofol was because you came out of it fast, with hardly any fuzz or hangover. He knew he was strapped to a chair. He had watched dozens of Joneses twist and turn and suffer in one – and the full-circle, payback irony of it all was priceless. The gods had outdone themselves. Congratulations were in order all around.

  He was wearing a smock and hood with holes for his eyes and mouth, which was taped shut. And he had no idea who the guy holding a large, angry hornet between two fingers was – but you didn’t need to be a shrink to see he was crazy.

  Dalton bent down to him, ‘Huge, isn’t it? My travels on Google tell me it’s probably a Vespa mandarinia – the Asian giant hornet. The most venomous there is – they say a swarm attack can kill a man in minutes . . . anaphylactic shock – but I’ll be damned how they got here.’ He held up the index finger of his free hand. ‘Watch,’ he said, and moved it beneath the hornet and gave its abdomen a poke. The beast jabbed its stinger into the finger. Dalton showed no reaction.

  Harry tried to tune the guy out so he could think. He didn’t know where he was, but he could see a field of wild lavender beyond a window of the room, which was old, wide-plank wood. It didn’t feel like Paris. He was clueless – but somebody had gone to a lot of trouble. This was pro from start to finish.

  ‘They can just keep on stinging, over and over.’ Dalton prodded the insect’s belly with his fingertip and the hornet stung him again. ‘See?’ He pulled the bottom edge of Harry’s hood a few inches away from the neck. ‘This is just to loosen you up a bit. Get rid of some of that adrenaline.’ He released the hornet under the hood. ‘They aren’t particularly aggressive unless provoked. Still, it’s best you try not to move.’

  Harry felt the creature on him. The nasty buzz stopped and the thing began to crawl upward, and Harry’s hands fisted up as he tried to keep his facial muscles from twitching. He closed his eyes as the hornet crawled over them. When he opened them, he saw the man’s pale, smooth finger reach toward him and prod the hornet – and it was as if lightning struck him in the cheek. It brought tears to his eyes.

  ‘There are questions I have to ask you.’

  Harry’s involuntary wince tightened his facial muscles – and the hornet took umbrage . . . and stung him again. His body went into a full electric-chair twitch, and a groan struggled to come out of his taped lips.

  ‘I said try not to move,’ said Dalton, and his palm swung up and smacked Harry on the temple, crushing the hornet. He took out his antique scalpel. ‘I’ll be using this as my primary tool.’ He put the instrument in Harry’s palm. ‘Go ahead. Hold it. It has a pleasing feel. Perfect balance.’

  Harry’s face was on fire. He wished he could cry more . . . to douse the flames.

  Dalton leaned down to him. ‘It’s remarkable how fate plays a hand. You see – you and I . . . We have a – common bond, of sorts.’ He grabbed the top of the hood and pulled it off. ‘It’s quite possible you already know who I am – but let me introduce myself. My name is Dalton.’

  The name cut through Harry’s anguish like a scythe. Dalton the torturer, the man who cut off people’s lips with a rotary knife, IR’s ying to Geiger’s yang. Now he knew why he was in this chair – and for more reasons than he could count, he was okay with it.

  ‘I must tell you, Harry . . . your presence is unexpected – you weren’t part of the plan – but here you are, and you’re the best present under the Christmas tree.’

  Dalton’s forefinger began to slowly tap at his upper lip’s cleft, like a metronome for thinking. It was a simple, habitual gesture – but something about its methodical, wind-up-toy action gave Harry the cold creeps.

  For Dalton, acquiring Harry as an added element was serendipity at its most thrilling. It created an extra dimension to the scenario without having to change the mechanics in any way, and would amplify Dalton’s gravitational pull without any effort on his part. He would become the sun and Geiger the moon. Right now, he was conjuring Geiger’s face at the moment when he would first have a sense of the beautiful, secret structure that had been built around him. No one would appreciate it more than Geiger, but even the Inquisitor wouldn’t see what waited for him at the center of the game. Tap . . . tap . . . tap. Come to Papa.

  Harry realized the utter bizarreness of things was actual
ly buffering his fear. The monster bug out of a 1950s sci-fi film . . . the madman and his pet scalpel . . . There was a deep-sleep nightmarish feel to it all. But, Harry knew too much. He’d watched all those DVDs of Geiger’s sessions, dutifully transcribing – and he knew that pain had a way of making things very real. It was a fast-acting agent – and he knew it was on the way. He made as loud a mushy mutter as he could.

  Dalton cocked his head. ‘Hmm?’

  Harry did it again, and Dalton pulled the tape from his lips. Harry opened his mouth as wide as it went, loosening the jaw joints. His face had a constant little-drummer-boy throb of heat.

  ‘Something on your mind, Harry?’

  ‘Yeah. Bourbon – big glass – no ice – and then let’s get this party rockin’.’

  Dalton looked like he had fallen in love for the first time in his life. ‘You’re sure about that?’

  Harry nodded. And then – though he knew it would hurt like hell – he smiled, ear to ear.

  Part Two

  13

  ZZ Top slashed through some hardass blues – and Geiger’s right fist slammed into the tough, blue leather, hammering the downbeat – then his left followed. He’d started working on a heavy bag in the fall, before he’d been able to run again. He’d thought it could be a way to keep his body loose and pump his blood without threatening the scars on his quads. He had the back door open and the music inside pumped high.

  Years ago, Harry had told him something Carmine had said. After one of the many times Carmine had sat in the viewing room, watching Geiger in a session through the one-way mirror, he had remarked to Harry:

  ‘Our boy’s a thing of beauty, isn’t he? It’s like watching a chess match in a boxing ring. Kasparov and Ali rolled into one.’

  Never having seen a boxing match, Geiger had gone online, found videos of Muhammad Ali, and studied them – the calm predator’s prowl, the choice and change of position, the cool appropriation of the ring. And he’d studied the lesser opponents – the shift and dip of a gaze, the reactive calibrations, attempts to mask fear of pain. As always, Geiger had taken what was relevant and brought it to the work – and last fall, when he’d seen the blue Everlast bag at a flea market, he’d brought it home and hung it from a hook on the concrete wall that surrounded his twenty-by-fifteen-foot backyard. He’d put down sod in October, and now his place before the bag was a circle of dirt surrounded by green.

  It was in the fifties outside but he was naked except for gym shorts and gleamed in the pale sun like a stripped-down, steel machine. His movement was a precise accompaniment to the steady bass and snare and, behind closed eyes, in an endless blackness, the music bloomed in gold and red novas with each punch. His duffel was packed. He had more cash in a money belt than he’d ever spend. There was nothing that was not finished. The music stopped and Geiger came to rest, drenched, pulse thumping from toes to temples. He walked back inside.

  Zanni was sitting at his desk, the cat in her lap. Her presence immediately turned his heart-rate down like a ratchet. The swiftness of it caused a slight tinging in his ear.

  ‘Sweet cat,’ she said. ‘I knocked. You don’t lock your door.’

  ‘No, I don’t. Not since I left IR.’

  Her eyes calmly took in his near-nakedness. Zero body fat, tight flesh over hard muscle, and with the workout stoking his heart, the gorged veins were like cords beneath his skin. His body reminded her of drawings in an anatomy textbook, except for the scars. They were as Dalton described, though the star cicatrix in his chest was a surprise, and looked recent. When he went to the shower and took a towel off a hook she had a glimpse of the exit wound. Thirty-eight caliber, or close. Is that what all the blood on the river dock was about? She tried to see it – Hall firing from fifteen, twenty feet away . . . Geiger going down in a massive spray . . . major bleeding out the back . . . How did he even get up?

  Geiger started wiping himself down. ‘This is sooner than I thought,’ he said.

  ‘But not what you think. There’s something you need to see, Geiger.’ She held up a jewel case. ‘It came to us this morning in an e-mail – but it’s for you.’

  ‘Other than you people, only one person knows I’m alive – and he wouldn’t be sending you an e-mail.’

  ‘Like I said – you need to see this. May I?’

  She wiggled the jewel case and the dying light spilling through the skylight cast it in gold – like some relic Geiger sensed had the power to bend north into south and the promise of solitude into tumult. To watch it would be an act of abnegation, and it would be irreversible. He was certain of that. He could feel his inner compass tilt.

  He nodded. ‘Go ahead,’ he said.

  Zanni took out the disk and slipped it in the laptop. She got up and Geiger came and took her place. The black of the screen lightened and ‘CLASSIFIED – DEEP RED’ appeared in bright crimson font – and something in the air touched him. A scent. Proustian. Cool fingertips on a fevered brow.

  ‘What am I smelling?’ he said.

  ‘Lavender,’ said Zanni.

  Another’s voice sang to him. ‘You are the sunshine of my life . . .’

  Geiger resisted the pull, the urge to drift. He turned round to Zanni. ‘What did you say?’

  She cocked her head at his expression. ‘Lavender water. You smell me.’

  ‘Hello,’ said someone else – the effect as cold as the spirit’s voice was warm. Zanni pointed at the laptop – and Geiger turned back to it. Dalton, in close-up, stared at him.

  ‘I learned recently that Geiger is living in Brooklyn, New York, and that you have made contact with him. In all honesty, I always assumed he was alive – I saw it in a vision – but still, I was thrilled to have it confirmed.’

  ‘He’s way out there now,’ said Zanni.

  Geiger’s mind was autumnal – carpeted with crisp, dead leaves, thoughts meandering through them, kicking them about, revealing what lay beneath, warm, moist . . .

  ‘So,’ said Dalton, ‘I request that you get this video to Geiger immediately.’ The camera began a slow pull-out. ‘Geiger . . . I’m speaking now with the assumption that you are watching.’ He held up his hands. ‘I’m a new man, Geiger, inside and out – and I owe it all to you. I am in your debt . . . and I wish to repay you – so here is what I propose. Come see me. We have much to talk about. Come to Paris.’

  Geiger stared at the face. Dalton had lost a good deal of weight. The frame continued to widen. Dalton was sitting in a chair, dressed in a checkered flannel shirt and khaki slacks, flanked on both sides by a slumped, hooded figure in a blue hospital smock, strapped to a heavy wooden chair.

  Dalton grinned. The Cheshire Cat in a child’s nightmare. He reached out to his sides and patted the forearms of the two figures.

  ‘David Matheson – and Harry Boddicker. They are both sedated.’ He reached in his shirt pocket and took out the antique scalpel. ‘Horatio Kern, eighteen sixty-seven. Beautiful, yes?’

  He leaned to the figure on his right and took the left hand in his. The pinky and fourth finger were wrapped in gauze, and looked shorter than normal. With three precise cuts, Dalton severed a third of the forefinger at the top knuckle. The body showed no response.

  Zanni made a sound like air bleeding from a radiator. ‘Jesus . . .’

  ‘I have a confession, Geiger. The plan was to lure Matheson. He was the only possible connection to you that I had, and a questionable one at that – but beggars can’t be choosers. Not that I thought the two of you were in touch – but he is the father of your dear Ezra, and I hoped that you might be communicating with the boy – and perhaps the father knew that, and had learned of your whereabouts from his son. Harry was pure chance – or fate, if you believe in that sort of thing.’

  Dalton placed the digit in the body’s lap. ‘When you arrive, go to the Hotel Maroq in the sixth arrondissement. There will be instructions for you at the desk, under the name “Dalton”.’ He grinned. He seemed to like that detail. ‘When you make your way to me
, you will have the choice of taking their place – or not.’ He leaned forward – and Geiger flashed on the same image he had on July Fourth. The bulbish, balding head . . . distorted eyes behind the glasses . . . the pointed chin. A praying mantis.

  ‘One more thing: For those of you in Deep Red . . . Some words of caution. This has nothing to do with you. Stay out of it. This morning I videotaped a session with Matheson. I played Dalton, the ruthless torturer who is working for you. He played the US citizen undergoing government-sanctioned extreme interrog.’ He took his glasses off and began cleaning them with his shirt-tail. ‘Have a look.’

  The shot cut to Matheson, strapped to a chair under unseen bright lights – head drooped, bare-chested, shiny with sweat.

  ‘Matheson . . .’ It was Dalton’s voice, off-camera, close by.

  Matheson looked up a bit, hair hanging down in his reddened face.

  ‘Is your name David Matheson?’

  Matheson’s head rose and fell in a sad little nod. ‘Yes.’ His voice had a scratchy, tired hiss, like an old L P.

  ‘Do you run the organization called Veritas Arcana?’

  Matheson’s head bobbed again slowly. A hand came into view and gave him a crisp short slap, jolting his eyes open wider.

  ‘Answer, please.’

  ‘Yes. I run Veritas Arcana.’

  ‘Mr. Matheson . . . You have illegally acquired and released to the public classified property of the US government – videotapes, documents, e-mails . . . Among them were the videotapes of the C.I.A.-sanctioned torture of Egyptian Deputy Minister Nari Kaneesh – correct?”

  Matheson let out a slow sigh, and nodded.

  “Mr. Matheson . . . You are going to tell us the names of the people who provided you with them. That is why you are here.’

  The tip of Matheson’s tongue came out and ran across his lips. ‘Thirsty,’ he rasped.