The Confessor

by Mark Allen Smith

  ‘Would you like a taste?’

  Geiger didn’t see it coming – because it was not something he’d ever looked for . . .

  Zanni leaned to him, and took his face in her hands, and kissed him.

  Her mouth was warm and wet – and sweet – and set off a ripple of cool waves across his shoulders that cascaded down his back like an electric waterfall.

  The kiss was a slow, easy dance. Simple steps. Curiosity, restraint. And Zanni wasn’t in a hurry. She let her mouth linger against his. He felt the breath from her nostrils on his face – tasted the chocolate . . .

  She ended it with a nip of his bottom lip.

  ‘Did you like it?’ She felt no need to specify what ‘it’ was.

  Geiger swallowed. ‘Too sweet,’ he said.

  Even in the middle of this train wreck – cars going off the tracks front and back, bodies piling up – Zanni felt her smile coming. She slid across the center console and straddled him, her knees at his waist, and pulled the seatback’s lever so it went down until Geiger was almost prone. She studied him as she unzipped her jacket and took it off, then pulled her thin sweater off over her head.

  Something about the way her arms moved and her body stretched reminded Geiger of the cat. And the two had something else in common. They both made it very clear what they wanted, and when.

  ‘FYI,’ she said, ‘I like you better without the beard.’

  She leaned down toward him – and he grabbed her shoulders and held her there.

  ‘The timing is questionable, Zanni.’

  ‘The timing? Geiger . . . There’s a real chance that in a few hours I might die – and if so, I’d like to have the two things I enjoy most in life before I do.’ She pulled his jacket’s zipper down. ‘And I’ve already had the chocolate.’

  Zanni came for him. This time the kiss was hard, an accompaniment to other urgent gestures, fingers working at buttons, hands searching for things, bodies turning, making adjustments in the cramped space . . .

  ‘Careful,’ he said. ‘I have a knife taped to my chest.’

  She stopped, and raised herself so she could have a better look at him. ‘If that’s your way of talking dirty, Geiger – it’s working.’ She yanked his shirt up, exposing the weapon, and tore it off, tape and all, in one pull. He winced.

  ‘Hurt?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’

  Geiger pulled her back down to him. The scent of lavender filled his head. His hands were tangled in her hair. There was a sudden heat in his chest, an incandescent bloom, as if his heart had become a sun. He was as close to painless and thoughtless as he had ever been – and that state felt more pure than any he had known . . .

  And when her first, throaty gasp came, almost a growl, it was the most honest sound he’d heard her make since they’d met.

  31

  She snored.

  The sound barely met the definition’s requisites – it was a fuzzy flow and ebb, a fluttering of wings, and had he been asleep it would not have awakened him. He felt her warm stream of breath brush his cheek with each rustling.

  Zanni lay half atop him, one leg and arm resting across him, her head next to his on the seatback. She’d been asleep for twenty minutes, and he’d been able to reach his jacket and hers without waking her and drape them across her slim nakedness, from the waist down to her socks.

  He’d used the time to try and envision the finale. Beginning – middle – end.

  He and Dalton had been in the business of using torture to gain information, and by its nature the process was impersonal – certainly in the way Dalton went about it – but whatever Dalton had planned, there was an aspect of it that transcended physical pain. He wanted more than suffering.

  Vengeance was a key element, but there was something else floating around it, portentous but so sheer Geiger couldn’t see it. You stand on a city street corner, surrounded by aromas . . . The exhaust from a passing bus – a piquant dish drifting from a window – hot tar spread in a pothole – and there’s another scent mixed in with them all. You can smell it, almost taste it on your tongue. You tilt up your nose, turn in a slow circle. It’s right there with you. It’s knowable. But you can’t give it a name.

  He heard Zanni’s breath shift into waking mode, and she sat up. She looked at her watch, then at Geiger.

  ‘I fell asleep.’

  ‘For about twenty minutes.’

  The exchange was the first words either of them had spoken since she had put him inside her. It had been a long, rolling rush of sounds between silence – some of them comments, appraisals, some questions, some answers – but not one word.

  Geiger saw the almost imperceptible movement of her bottom lip – just the faintest pulling away from the top. It was a tell he’d seen a thousand times on the faces of a Jones. She had been about to say something else – and had stopped to play it out in her head, and then decided to leave it unspoken.

  She grabbed her panties and slacks from the floor and opened the door. ‘Have to pee.’ She got out, and went a few paces before she stopped and crouched down.

  Geiger stepped out and walked east, ten yards or so, until he could see a good-sized chunk of sky through the trees – and then found the faint, smudged dividing line between the inky blue and the heavy black of the adjacent hills. The sun had at least another hour of climbing to do before there’d be a hint of it on the horizon.

  He was rerunning Dalton’s video in his mind, trying to get a glimpse of the game within it. He would not factor Zanni in. If her presence ended up affecting things, he would deal with it at that point, but not now. He had one piece to play with, a single chip to get the men out alive: that what Dalton wanted, only Geiger could provide – and Dalton could not take it from him. Geiger had to give it to him.

  There was a knock on his door.

  ‘Ez . . .’ His mother’s voice sounded thin, and tired. ‘You’re still up, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Ezra was sitting on the sill of his open window, his feet on the fire escape, the cat on his shoulder, staring at the windows of the brownstone on the other side of the communal garden. His door opened and she stepped inside.

  ‘It’s very late,’ she said.

  ‘I know. But I’m not going to school again tomorrow – right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So it doesn’t really matter when I go to bed.’

  His mother walked to his bed and sat down. She could hear the cat’s motor running.

  ‘Jesus . . . What a purr. That’s the funniest cat.’

  ‘He likes shoulders. It’s his favorite place. Geiger used to walk around with him on his shoulder.’

  ‘Why do you call him Tony?’

  ‘Cuz of the scar – his eye. Scarface – Pacino – Tony Montana – Tony.’

  She knew that slow delivery – the hollow center to it. It jabbed at her heart.

  ‘Gotcha. I like it.’ She ran her hand across the bedspread. It was thinning in spots. She made a note to get a new one. ‘Ez . . . Look at me a sec.’

  He turned round to her.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Ez. For all of this, for everything – and that I can’t just be brilliant and make it all better. I love you so much – and I’m just so sorry.’

  ‘I know, Mom. I really do. I love you too.’

  She leaned toward him, and he leaned toward her – just close enough for her to put a kiss on his forehead.

  ‘Don’t stay up too late.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  She got up and left the room, closing the door. He turned back to the night. His hand rose to the cat’s scar and went to work with a hard scratch. The animal’s hum rose a few decibels – from contented to blissful.

  ‘I should do it, right? I have to – right?’

  He grabbed his iPad from the bed, hopped to the fire escape, put the cat down and slowly, quietly closed the window.

  Geiger walked back to the car. Zanni was dressed. One of the bags was on the
car’s hood. She smacked a new magazine in the Beretta, then took a sight out of the bag and slid it onto the gun’s frame rail. She tapped a button and a neon green laser came to life. She raised the weapon and slowly moved the thin beam across the dark trees.

  ‘I assume you won’t take this – right?’

  ‘The only reason for me to have a gun is if we both go in shooting.’

  ‘But remember, Geiger . . . Dalton may not know it, but he’s down two men.’

  ‘All he needs is one man with a gun on Harry and Matheson – we go in firing – maybe they die.’

  ‘I could try and call in some help. We’d have to wait . . .’

  ‘Two guns, five guns. It doesn’t matter. Our numbers wouldn’t change what I just said.’

  Zanni nodded. ‘You’re right.’ She punched the laser sight off and put the gun into her jacket pocket.

  A dinging jingle sounded, and they both turned. It was coming from the backseat of the car. It sounded again.

  ‘That’s an iPad. FaceTime,’ she said. ‘Someone’s calling you.’

  Geiger opened the back door, reached inside and took his iPad from his bag. The screen said that Ezra was calling.

  ‘Ezra . . .’ said Zanni. ‘Matheson’s son?’

  ‘Yes.’ Geiger stared at the ‘accept’ and ‘decline’ options. Green and red, like stop and go lights.

  ‘He knows you’re in France?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And looking for his father?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He glanced at her. She looked somewhat surprised and clearly displeased with the information – and she looked like she had more questions to ask, but just stared back at him. The iPad rang again. And again.

  ‘Well . . . ?’ she said.

  Geiger tapped ‘accept’ and Ezra’s weary face filled the screen. Zanni took a step back out of camera range.

  ‘Hi,’ Ezra said. ‘It’s me. I—’

  ‘You shouldn’t be calling me, Ezra. This isn’t good.’ He could feel Zanni’s eyes on him.

  The boy winced. ‘I’m sorry. I – I had something I had to tell you.’

  There was no space left in Geiger for more information, no time for any more interactions. He was full up.

  ‘What is it, Ezra?’

  ‘I – I screwed up.’

  ‘How did you screw up?’

  Ezra’s wince grew an inch wider. ‘. . . Mom read your letter.’

  Zanni lifted a brow at the statement.

  ‘Ezra . . . I told you no one was to read the letter.’

  ‘I know – but she came in my room, and I was upset – and she could tell something was wrong. I mean – she just knew . . .’ His lips scrunched up like a pair of pipe-cleaners. ‘So I showed it to her.’

  Zanni watched muscles harden in Geiger’s face. It was the closest thing to a show of emotion she’d seen him display.

  ‘Go on, Ezra.’ It was more cold instruction than conversation.

  ‘She, uh, took me down to the FBI office and showed them the letter. She was really pissed – y’know – that somebody might be screwing with Dad again. She wanted answers – from them, or the CIA, anybody – or she’d make a lot of noise . . .’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The guy said he didn’t know anything. He said he’d look into it and call her back.’ He shook his head dolefully. ‘Geiger . . . I told her from the start they wouldn’t say they knew even if they did. But now – if it’s the same guys that are after Dad and Harry again . . . Well – now they know you’re coming after them.’ His sigh pulled his shoulders up around his ears like a collar. ‘Sorry I messed up – but that’s what I wanted to tell you – y’know – so you’d . . . know ahead of time.’

  He blew out a breath and his shoulders fell down. He was done. He looked spent.

  Zanni’s eyes went right to left, left–right, right–left – from the rueful face on screen . . . to Geiger’s granite stare . . . and then she saw it soften.

  ‘Ezra . . . Don’t worry about me. This time they’re the good guys.’

  ‘For real?’

  ‘For real. Now I have to go.’

  ‘. . . Okay.’

  They took a last look at each other. Somewhere on a Manhattan street, a car horn blared. To Geiger, it sounded like it came from a million miles away.

  ‘Geiger . . . Whatever happens, you’re not gonna come back – are you?’

  ‘No.’

  Ezra nodded. The bright green eyes filled with tears. ‘Bye.’

  Geiger nodded, and then tapped ‘end’ and the screen went black. He turned to Zanni. In his work, he had become closely acquainted with almost every expression a face could convey – but he couldn’t find the story or feeling in Zanni’s expression. There were too many angles – like a Picasso face, hard edges and soft, slanted planes.

  ‘You wrote him a letter – that you were doing this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Doesn’t seem like a smart thing to do. Why would you do that, Geiger?’

  ‘Because if Matheson and Harry don’t make it back, I didn’t want him to think he’d been abandoned.’

  He put the iPad back in his bag. It was time to put everything away except the next few hours in the farmhouse.

  Zanni let his answer settle – another piece of Geiger that didn’t fit into any kind of big picture – and she was not going to try and understand it now.

  ‘Okay. What’re you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to knock on the front door. I’ll wait until the hint of first light. You’ll be able to see a bit more – outside and inside. You wait till I’m inside for a while. Maybe some lights get turned on. Maybe you can get some sense of the layout – or how many he has in there with him. Then you find a way in.’

  She zipped up the bag. ‘Right.’

  ‘Zanni?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Victor was supposed to take out Dalton . . .’

  She turned to him. ‘Are you worried about me, Geiger?’ She opened the car door and tossed the bag inside. ‘Would you worry about me if I was a man?’

  ‘I’m not worried about you, Zanni.’

  ‘Good. You just put your Inquisitor’s hat back on and I’ll handle my end.’ She looked to the sky. ‘I’d say we’ve got about an hour before dawn. Time to move up.’ She leaned into the car again, picked up something from the floor – and held it before him. His knife. ‘Still want this?’

  He nodded. It was a disconcerting moment. He’d forgotten all about it.

  They moved through the narrow rows of the dead vineyard in a low crouch, Geiger in the lead, the crooked, stubbed branches grabbing at their pants and sleeves. One hundred feet from the house, he stopped. Zanni came up beside him. The single illuminated window tossed a pale splash of light on the front yard.

  ‘I’m going around the back while it’s still dark,’ she said.

  They turned to each other. The remarkable violet of her eyes looked richer in the night. When she blinked it was like the flicker of neon lights. It wasn’t a color someone would associate with a human. It was animalistic – stripes in the wings of a bird of prey, or iridescent scales on an exotic snake, or the feathers of a peacock. It would be almost impossible to forget.

  ‘I’ll wait for the sun,’ he said.

  Zanni nodded. ‘See you inside,’ she said, and moved off to the left, staying low. In a few seconds her silhouette went from black to invisible, like a magic trick the night kept up its sleeve.

  Geiger lay back on the ground. The stars’ shimmering created an illusion of movement – shiny ornaments hung on the sky, twisting slightly in a celestial breeze . . .

  . . . He saw Dalton standing over him, the overhead lights of Geiger’s session room spreading tiny stars along the torturer’s glasses. The sparkling display was an odd partner to his solemn look. He leaned down to Geiger, strapped into the barber’s chair.

  ‘I’m not going to bother with any head games – not that head games are my strong suit, and not
that they’d work on you in any case. No, I’m going straight to the pain. That’s my humble expertise – that’s what I do . . .’

  . . . But Geiger knew neither of them were the same now.

  He sensed the change in himself, but as a child becomes aware that this day he is different than the days that came before. The hows and whys play catchup. They will reveal themselves, but not yet. All Geiger truly grasped was that he was not the same – fuller, denser from the resurrection of the past and this endless baptism of being in the world.

  So who would be the Geiger that sat down with Dalton to honor this dark contract?

  Zanni walked to the back of the house and sat down against it. She took three slow breaths, put two fingertips to a wrist and looked at her watch for twenty seconds, then did the multiplication. Seventy-two. Her resting pulse was sixty. Not bad, considering.

  They were coming around the last turn now – and she felt like she had a final kick in her. She would not take even a quick look back yet. She would finish strong. She would deal with what she’d left in her wake later.

  Bowe was at his desk, eyes on his laptop reading a report on BBC Online News about a street protest in Riyadh. He always worked late. He usually got more done from 9 p.m. to midnight than he did the twelve hours before.

  He picked up his Starbucks and swiveled round in his chair to stare out the window at the Washington Monument. He knew it was corny, and he kept it to himself, but after all these years the sight of it, lit up at night, still gave him a rush.

  His assistant walked into the office. ‘Sir . . .’

  Bowe came back around to the room. ‘What’re you still doing here, Marie? It’s late. Go home.’

  ‘Just dealing with the new mail system, sir.’ She came to the desk and put a manila folder down before him.

  ‘This came in from New York on the code line a little while ago,’ she said, and stepped back, lacing her hands together at the waist of her navy-blue skirt suit.

  Bowe opened the folder. There were two pieces of letter-size paper inside. He slid one toward him and began to read – and his left brow began to rise, reached its zenith, and remained frozen in place.

  ‘Is Mac still here?’ he said without looking up.