The Confessor

Home > Other > The Confessor > Page 23
The Confessor Page 23

by Mark Allen Smith


  ‘Yes. It is.’ Geiger felt the growing heat of his cigarette between his fingers as it burned down close to his flesh. He flicked it into the flat darkness of the yard, took out his pack and jiggled another loose.

  ‘Give me one,’ said Christine.

  He handed her one. His lighter flicked, she leaned in, and when her eyes looked up at him for a moment, Geiger saw the flame encased in both of them. It seemed as if it had always been there.

  He lit himself up and took a few steps onto the grass, out of the light. Christine drew on the cigarette. She’d never liked the taste, but the sensation was pleasing. Geiger was a lean blur in the black with a tiny, glowing orange dot. A sudden breeze set the bells ringing.

  ‘Harry ran the business side,’ he said. ‘Research, transcribing, book-keeping, the website . . .’

  ‘Website . . . ?’ She watched the hot tip rise like a firefly and suddenly glow brighter. ‘Jesus, Geiger . . . A website?!’ There was a grating mix in her outburst – pure astonishment, outrage, and acknowledgement of the absurd all tumbling out together. ‘How in God’s name does . . . ? I mean – is there a school where you learn this? Torture 101?’

  Geiger stepped back into the light. ‘Actually, there are training programs. Governments have them . . . the military. But it was instinctual with me. I have a lot of experience with pain.’

  Christine looked at the cigarette between her fingers as if she had no idea how it got there . . . and tossed it away.

  ‘Is that what you were doing with the dead man?’

  ‘Yes. To get information about Harry and Ezra’s father.’

  ‘And . . . ?’

  ‘I know where they are now.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘It’s best you don’t know that.’ Geiger slowly rose up on the balls of his feet, stretching the calves and Achilles. Then down, then up again. ‘I understand some of what you’re thinking, Christine.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes. I do. That’s why I stopped . . . last July – until now.’ He took a long pull on his cigarette. ‘You are repulsed by torture – and ashamed that you’re glad I was able to find out where Harry is by those means.’

  She felt revealed, naked.

  ‘You’re the first person I’ve talked to about any of this, Christine.’

  ‘You didn’t regale people with it at dinner parties, huh?’

  She heard the mordant underside of her tone – and wondered why she wanted to hurt him. She watched him drop his cigarette to the grass and grind it out with the bare heel of his foot. Then he looked back up at her. The sarcasm had made no impression. Not in his placid expression, or his stony eyes.

  ‘I don’t go to dinner parties,’ he said, and came toward her, and then past her into the house.

  Geiger sat at the dining table, shirtless. His shoulder was swollen, but not discolored, which meant there hadn’t been any internal tears. He was studying the place – the dining room, living room. He felt a sense of stasis around him. Everything seemed firmly set in its place – furniture, the paintings on the walls, vases, curios – as if nothing had been moved, or switched, or replaced for a long time. And there were no photographs of anyone – no evidence of connections, no proof of the past. It was as if consciously or unknowingly her purpose had been to create a space in which time had no role, a haven where change was irrelevant.

  Christine came in from the kitchen with her arms full – three Ace bandages and two large zip-lock plastic bags filled with ice cubes. She dumped everything on the table.

  ‘Where should they go?’

  He tapped the top of his collarbone at the joint. ‘Balance one across here first. Wrap a bandage around a few times, under the armpit, and then around the chest once.’

  Christine positioned an ice bag and Geiger slowly raised his arm twenty degrees to allow the bandage through. There was a looseness in the joint that concerned him more than the pain, but the cold was a balm. Christine began wrapping, over the bag and under the armpit, round and round.

  ‘Too tight?’

  ‘No.’

  He needed to lock down a schedule. It was almost 2 a.m. He’d need a small meal, a shower, and two hours’ sleep before he left.

  ‘Around the chest now?’

  ‘Yes. Twice.’

  Christine watched things in him tense and ripple as he leaned forward from the waist, away from the chair’s back. His sleek, lean body reminded her of a perfect machine, except for the star-shaped scar in his pectoral.

  ‘Is that a bullet wound?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It’s a long story. Last July.’

  She started going around his chest and back with the bandage. ‘You keep mentioning July . . .’

  ‘Harry . . . his sister . . . Ezra . . . his father . . . myself. We found ourselves in the middle of something. People died.’

  Her hand brushed against his bare skin. It was cool and tight, and she felt hard muscle beneath it.

  ‘Some men kidnapped Ezra . . . in order to get to his father. His father had some very sensitive, classified videos the government wanted to stay hidden. I took Ezra from them – to get him back to his mother. The man who has Harry and Ezra’s father now – Dalton – he was involved.’

  Geiger let his eyes fall shut. He hadn’t had time yet to focus on what to do about Soames. If he tried to contact her, to alert her to Victor’s duplicity . . . It didn’t feel like something he could tell her on the phone – and person to person could create a multitude of entanglements. If he chose not to tell her and go on alone – she’d be a certain casualty, a sacrificial lamb whether she got to Dalton’s or not. He suspected Victor preferred a blade to a bullet.

  ‘Are you all right . . . ?’ she asked.

  The sudden smell of lavender, riding in on a breeze. The question came again. She was very close.

  ‘. . . Are you all right?’

  So close the softness of her voice was like a feather tickling his ear.

  ‘Yes, Ma. I’m all right. What should I do?’

  ‘You can’t do anything, sweetness,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing to do.’

  He had the heart of a boy, and it beat against his ribs like a captive animal flailing at the bars of its cage.

  ‘Are you all right?’ A warm hand came to rest on his forearm. ‘Geiger . . . Are you all right?’

  He opened his eyes. Christine was watching him with a tilted look.

  ‘I asked three times if you were all right. You didn’t hear me.’

  ‘I heard you. But I thought you were someone else.’

  Geiger looked like a weary sailor who’d navigated through a thick fog back out into familiar waters, and Christine decided that he was the strangest and saddest person she had ever met.

  ‘Where does the other ice pack go?’

  Geiger tapped the outer arm below the shoulder joint. ‘Here.’ He took an ice bag and held it against his deltoid, and Christine picked up another bandage and began.

  ‘I have a question,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?

  ‘What does soleil couchant mean?’

  Christine slowed in her movements. ‘It means sunset.’

  ‘Why did you name the café Soleil Couchant?’

  She did two more circuits with the bandage and tucked the end in.

  ‘Watching the sunset was something my daughter and I loved to do together. It was her favorite thing.’ The hour and angst was catching up to her, tugging at her to slow down. ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked.

  Geiger nodded. His eyes followed her as she went into the kitchen. He tried to summon an image of her and Harry and their little daughter – sitting in a room, walking in a park, sharing a meal . . . a unit, content to be as they were, together – and he had no difficulty seeing Harry wearing a comfortable, easy grin like a favorite, old sweater. When Christine opened the refrigerator, she bent down and the silver door blocked his view of her – and he saw his own, blurred reflection
in the burnished steel instead, the melted features drained of color and expression. The irony was not lost on him.

  25

  Dalton gave the back room a final looking-over. It was like staring through a magic window back into the past. He closed the door, and with thumb and forefinger put the key in the old lock and turned it. Mid-action, he had to alter his grip before he could turn it far enough to get the click of the chambers. Some hand movements were still difficult to perform successfully without adjustments.

  He took out the key and moved down the hall toward the kitchen. The old planks muttered beneath his shoes. Sometimes he heard the words they were saying . . . but not tonight.

  There was a glass of red wine he had poured earlier waiting on the counter – a rich Margaux from Bordeaux that Victor had brought as a gift the first time they had met. He picked it up and continued through a darkened doorway to the study, flicked on the light and sat down at his computer. The monitor’s screensaver was a single silver word in a large, ornate, three-dimensional font – floating, turning, tilting randomly. GEIGER.

  He tapped the space bar and the screensaver flew away, revealing a page of his memoirs. He took a sip of wine as he read his latest entry.

  CHAPTER 27

  Sometimes I have felt like a reporter delving into the past of a stranger, but I have told it all – every interrogation, from the first – 1986, in Nicaragua – to this week, in Tulette. I shall make a final decision on the status of Harry Boddicker and David Matheson very soon. It is an odd realization – that holding the power over their fates feels almost trivial in the larger scope of things. But I have not lost my sense of the pragmatic, and will make my choice based on what might serve my own needs best.

  Dalton looked to a window. The deep silence had made a pact with the blackness, weaving itself into it, allies now, creating a fibrous, impenetrable wall of night. It shut out the pinpricks of starlight and the cries of hunter and prey. He began typing.

  Because the future is undefined, I will e-mail the manuscript to Lars soon. It is strange, and perhaps thrilling to think this could be the last chapter of the book – that Geiger will arrive tomorrow, or the next day, and I may never write another word. But that is not to say that this memoir would remain unfinished, because what is a memoir but the story of one’s life . . . until it ends. If this is the last chapter, then there is nothing left to tell – and I am complete.

  He closed the document, leaned back in his chair, and the screensaver – GEIGER – returned to the dark monitor. Dalton reached for his glass – as the floating, silver word came to rest in the center of the screen and morphed into Geiger’s placid, unblinking face. It was as if they were looking at each other through a tinted window.

  ‘Ah . . . Bonsoir, mon ami.’ Dalton took up his glass. ‘Tchin-tchin,’ he toasted, tilted the wine to his parted lips and drank slowly. ‘Getting close, aren’t you?’ He put the glass down softly. ‘But not as close as you think.’

  Dalton’s forefinger rose and began to tap his lip.

  ‘What I realized, back on that day, when you were in the chair and I was cutting you up . . . is that you don’t know who you are. You’re like a blind man with incredibly attuned senses – but the fact still remains . . . You can’t see.’

  Geiger stared back at him, unmoved by the diagnosis.

  ‘You think you can see – but you can’t.’ Dalton leaned to the monitor. ‘And that is why I am here. To help you. You think this is about saving lives – Matheson, Harry – all for Ezra, in a sense. But you can’t see. This isn’t about anyone else’s life but yours – and mine. I’m in your head, Geiger. In that beautiful brain of yours. And I am going to give you sight.’ He raised the wine again. ‘And then all shall be revealed.’

  Dalton drained the glass, then held it out before him, turning the bowl in his fingertips, left and right, so the light wrapped round its equator like a thin, gleaming ribbon. His fingers tensed slightly, slowly, the pressure increasing in minute degrees – and the glass shattered in his hand.

  ‘Voilà,’ he said.

  Christine rinsed a plump Belle de Pontoise apple under the kitchen faucet, then sliced it into quarters and put it on a plate beside spears of raw asparagus and stalks of broccoli. Geiger had told her he only ate raw food.

  She didn’t have to look around to know the long-lost troll was near. She could hear the sniffles and sobbing, the taunting dare to come join in the remorse. The size and power of all she’d been dragged into was beginning to hit home, and she needed to keep doing things. Geiger was in the bathroom washing the dirt and dust off. She’d put his dirty clothes in the washer. The events of the past few days, and the last twelve hours – they’d been picking the locks of her vault, and she felt her sad, precious treasures and horrors were about to come tumbling out.

  She turned. Geiger was coming down the hall, cleaned up, wearing a pair of gym shorts. The swelling in his shoulder had diminished, but her eyes immediately went to the three horizontal marks on his left quad. She felt the urge to ask – but stopped herself.

  Geiger sat down at the table. Christine brought the plate and a fork and put it down before him.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to cook any of this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She sat down across from him. ‘Do you want salt?’

  ‘I don’t use it.’ He picked up an asparagus spear with his long fingers and took a bite. It made a loud crunch. ‘Thank you, Christine – for your help.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  They stared at each other. Christine felt a trace of a tug – the aftermath of a shared calamity between victims . . . witnesses . . . accomplices. She tried to imagine him smiling – but the image wouldn’t come to her.

  ‘If you know where they are now, why not bring the police in?’

  ‘Because I would lose whatever control I might have. Police don’t necessarily make good choices in these situations. If they tried to negotiate . . . or stormed the house, Dalton might decide to kill them both . . . if he had time. It’s impossible to know. But the deal was to make a trade – them for me – and if I show up as planned, he might let them go. Or if I arrive secretly and get the upper hand, I might be able to save them . . . if they aren’t dead already.’

  ‘But you don’t know what you’re going to do . . .’

  ‘No. The only way to know is to get there.’

  The simplicity of it all made it scarier for her to contemplate. The only concrete element was death – that people would die. It was a very strange thing to be certain about. She reached out and took a piece of apple from the plate, and nibbled off a small chunk. The tartness gave her a tiny rush.

  ‘What did Harry tell you about us?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  The word was an unexpected crisp jab – and Christine wondered why it hit her as sharply as it did.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘No. He never mentioned you until the day he was leaving to come here.’ Geiger took a bite of broccoli. Snap. ‘And he said you had a daughter. He used the past tense – so I made the assumption she is dead . . .’

  Somehow, his unadorned tone cast the statement in italics. I made the assumption she is dead.

  ‘. . . and that her death destroyed the marriage.’

  Christine felt a flinch deep down. It was another lock being picked, another chamber clicking into the open position.

  ‘Tell me something, Geiger. Do you ever stop to think about how you might say something before you say it?’

  He swallowed. ‘Was I mistaken about anything?’

  She slowly put the apple down on the table. ‘No,’ she said. The way his eyes took her in – she felt like a book in his hands. More and more, she was understanding why he was so good at what he did.

  ‘You were the one who left,’ he stated.

  She kept her gaze with his. ‘Yes.’ She didn’t want to look away.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I couldn’t look at him with
out seeing her . . . and I couldn’t be with him without feeling her not being there. So I left.’

  ‘Have you missed him?’

  ‘Very much – but I became adept at putting that feeling away.’ Her smile had a small, bitter crimp to it. ‘Like fixing up a guest room for it all. Someplace I can open the door and have a quick look at sometimes if I’m blue enough.’ She let out a long breath, as if she’d been holding it for some time.

  Geiger pushed his chair back and stood up. ‘I need some water.’

  He started toward the kitchen – and that was when Christine saw the back of his legs, and the perfect latticework of slender scars from his thighs all the way down to his ankles. Their degree of precision, and what that signified, made them all the more horrific to discover. She watched him find a glass in a cupboard above the sink, fill it up and drink it all, then refill the glass and come back to his seat.

  ‘Who did that to you?’

  ‘My legs?’ The fingers of his right hand began to rise and fall on the tabletop in a rhythmic ritual. The images were never far from the moment . . .

  Lying face down, naked, on the bench before the hearth, staring at the cabin’s floor – an astonishing work of art, a recreation of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, the thousands of inlays a testament to his father’s virtuosity and obsession.

  ‘My father did it.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Years. Since I was five or six, I think. I’m not certain.’

  His father stood over him in faded denim overalls, holding the pearl-handled straight razor.

  ‘What do we know, son?’ he said.

  ‘Life makes us ache for things we think we need.’

  ‘And . . . ?’

  ‘And the pain makes us weak.’

  ‘Why did he do it, Geiger? Do you know why?’

  ‘To teach me about pain. To make me strong.’

  ‘So what must we do, son?’

  ‘Embrace the pain, a little each day, and grow strong.’

  ‘But why? Did something happen . . . to make him start?’

 

‹ Prev