The Inquisitor: A Novel

by Smith, Mark Allen

  “Maybe it was about completion,” Geiger said.

  “Interesting.”

  “Is it?”

  “I think so,” Corley replied. “You might have said ‘destruction,’ which could be considered the opposite of completion.”

  “Good point, Martin.”

  Before Geiger, no patient had ever addressed Corley by his first name, in thirty years of sessions. The first time, it had sent ripples skipping across the calm surface between them, leaving the psychiatrist unsettled and shifting in his chair. It had stirred something in him, the unforced familiarity in the gesture so contradictory to Geiger’s basic inscrutability. Corley had never said anything about it, and ultimately he’d embraced it as part of their unusual dynamic.

  “Everything’s a process,” Geiger said. “Beginning, middle, end. That’s what works best for me. You know that. Completion.”

  Geiger’s gaze drifted to the ceiling. Years ago there had been water damage. His eye was always drawn to the subtle change in texture caused by the repair. He knew, step by step, exactly how they’d gone about the work, because he’d done the same kind of job hundreds of times himself.

  “Why do you think we’re talking about the spider?” said Corley.

  Geiger bent his right knee and pulled the leg slowly up to his chest. Corley waited for the familiar, soft pop in the sacral joint.

  “The spider had finished its web,” Geiger said. “So why did I torch it? I’m not sure. Because it’s in my territory?”

  “And only you decide when something’s finished in your domain?”

  “King of all I see?” A soft sound slipped out of him. It could have been a sigh. “That’s a line from something, isn’t it?”

  “Richard the Third?” said Corley. “Yertle the Turtle?”

  “What?”

  “The children’s book.”

  Corley waited, scraping fingertips down one bearded cheek and then the other. But Geiger’s silence was like the sound of a door slamming shut.

  “Do you remember any children’s books?” Corley asked. “Or songs? Does anything come to mind? Maybe toys, or—”

  “No. Nothing comes to mind.”

  Over time, Corley had come to think of Geiger as a lost and beleaguered boy who had somehow remained undaunted. Because Geiger’s dreams were virtually the sole context in which Corley could work, he knew almost nothing about the man and could only guess at what lay beyond the borders of their sessions. Even so, Geiger’s story about the spider and conversations like this one convinced him that the child in Geiger was buried beneath so much traumatic rubble that it was more ghost than real. Sometimes Corley felt like a medium at a séance trying to contact the dead.

  Corley glanced at his watch. It was the last gift his wife had given him. Engraved on the back was Where does the time go? Love, Sara.

  “We’re almost out of time,” he said, “so let me put something out there for you to think about—about the spider.” He straightened the pad on his knee and wrote, Empathic? “Maybe setting fire to the web wasn’t about completion or dominion.” He noticed the dance of Geiger’s fingers becoming more intense. “Maybe you didn’t want the spider to kill the moth.”

  Geiger’s fingers came to rest, and he sat up. Corley watched the overdeveloped trapezius muscles shift beneath his shirt. Geiger’s shirts were always long-sleeved, brushed black cotton, and closed at the neck.

  Geiger stood up and swiveled his head left and right. Corley heard dual clicks.

  “Food for thought,” Geiger said. Then: “Tell me something, Martin.”

  Corley had expected the request. It had become part of the process, part of Geiger’s exit ritual. It was usually Tell me something … and a question would follow, or By the way … and a seemingly insignificant bit of news would be proffered. Corley knew that these last exchanges helped Geiger manufacture a closing to a process that was, by its nature, open-ended, and so gave him, depending on the tenor of the session, a parting sense of control.

  “Do you go up to your house often?” Geiger asked.

  “No,” Corley said.

  “Why not?”

  Corley put his pad down on the desk. “We have to stop now.”

  * * *

  For Geiger, the morning walk to and from Corley’s office was always a sensory feast. Central Park West was a kaleidoscopic vista: taxis feinting in traffic like yellow-skinned middleweights; sluggish, ungainly buses chugging and wheezing; dogs and their walkers sniffing and eyeing each other; joggers stretching voluptuous hamstrings at red lights as they waited to enter the park; olive-skinned men trudging through the gutters, pulling their hot dog and souvlaki carts behind them like broken penitents. It was all pure stimuli for Geiger, an assault of colors, shapes, sounds, movement. Not the subtlest hue or tone or gesture went unnoticed or unheard, but no secondary, more sophisticated responses occurred. He took everything in and yet held nothing. He was both a vacuum and a bottomless pit.

  He had lived in New York for fifteen years, and his arrival in the city marked the beginning of the only life he could remember. On September 6, 1996, Geiger was born an almost full-grown man of indeterminate age when a Greyhound driver shook him by the shoulder as he slept in a seat in the last row of a bus that had just pulled into New York’s Port Authority Terminal, on Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue. The boy/man guessed that he was in his late teens, but otherwise he was as much a stranger to himself as the people he passed on the sidewalks of the city. He was a scarred, aching body with an unencumbered mind, a human machine without a memory card. He ran solely on instinct.

  The next day, while walking the streets of Harlem, he stopped to watch a member of a renovation crew sawing a new window frame for a run-down brownstone. A moment later, he walked through the doorless entry and asked for a job. It was a pure, thoughtless act, and when the crew chief asked if he knew carpentry he said Yes and didn’t know why.

  He had worked “reno” for four years—never staying with one company for long, taking nonunion late shifts, mainly in Harlem and Brooklyn and SoHo, secretly sleeping in the basements of the buildings where he worked, saving his money. All the companies paid off-the-books cash—no ID numbers, no FICA, no paper trails. At first he’d used the name Gray, then Black. One day, passing a Barnes & Noble bookstore, he spotted a book about the artwork of H. R. Giger. The byzantine images appealed to him, as did the name with its twin g’s. For visual symmetry, he added an e and so became Geiger.

  One night, after finishing a shift in a brownstone in Williamsburg, he’d been sleeping in a crawl space in the building’s basement. Awakened at three A.M. by footsteps coming down the stairs, he lay there watching flashlight beams dance between two-by-fours, listening to two men discuss their task as they went about it—installing wiring behind fresh drywall for a bug that would attempt to record incriminating conversations regarding a certain Carmine Delanotte.

  “I heard Delanotte owns a dozen of these,” one of the men said.

  “My brother-in-law’s in real estate,” said the other. “Says everything around here will be worth a fortune once they push the spics and the blacks out. Buy low, fix ’em up, sell high.”

  “This wire’s a waste of time, you know? Delanotte’s too smart.”

  “Maybe. But I heard they’re close to turning one of his lieutenants around.”

  “Yeah, well. They try and turn a lot of ’em, but most don’t talk. They throw everything they’ve got at these guys—mindfucks, blackmail, even the occasional beatdown. The fucking guys don’t talk.”

  “Must be one very strange job.”

  “What?”

  “Trying to make guys talk. Cracking hard cases. You can’t just beat the shit out of ’em, right? You got to be smoother than that, you know?”

  “There are guys who know how to do it, though. Interrogators, specialists—they know how to make people open up.”

  As the two men—FBI techs, presumably—continued talking, Geiger lay in the darkness and felt
the birth of something. It was a weightless, free-floating thing, but it was potent enough to muster his instincts toward a direction and a course of action. He’d felt this bloom and pull once before; standing outside the dilapidated Harlem brownstone, an urge had risen up in him as if from a molecular level. He felt it this time, too, a kind of genetic calling, a sense as powerful and thoughtless as an avalanche destroying everything in its path.

  3

  Harry Boddicker stared up at the brightly lit, tensile webs of the Brooklyn Bridge, and then at a helicopter as it glided over the East River, humming in the indigo summer sky like a giant firefly.

  He glanced back at the dark blue van parked beneath the FDR Drive. The Jones was in the back, gagged, tied, and taped up inside a metal trunk. He was one of Carmine’s bagmen. Fifteen minutes ago, when three of Carmine’s men had made the delivery, they had informed Harry that when they’d picked up the guy—they’d snatched him while he was screwing his girlfriend in her apartment—they’d had to put the hammer down hard. They’d given him two black eyes and maybe a broken nose and a couple of busted ribs.

  Now Harry had to call Geiger. The last time they’d gotten a damaged Jones—a business manager from Providence—Geiger had gone on about necessary states, compromised origins, and diminished potential, his satin voice never rising or falling, and then called the job off. Because Carmine would be getting his usual discount, this gig was worth only twelve grand, but the thought of losing his share, three thousand dollars, went straight from Harry’s brain to his stomach and pumped a bitter bubble of gas up his esophagus. They hadn’t had a job in five days. He popped two more Pepcid Completes. Whatever they’d added to the chalky mix to make the old stuff “new and improved” didn’t seem to matter to his gut. It still roiled and grumbled as always.

  He walked a little farther away from the van and jabbed at his cell phone. Geiger would pick up after the third ring. Not one or two, not four. Always three.

  “What is it, Harry?” Geiger answered.

  “About tonight. There’s an issue. Damaged goods.”

  “Details, Harry.”

  Harry sighed. “One eye’s swollen shut. Nose might be broken. Ribs.”

  After a brief pause, Geiger said, “Change of location, Harry. Take him to the Bronx instead.”

  “Right,” Harry said, his eyes closing with relief. Geiger was willing to take the job.

  “And use propofol instead of Brevital. Two cc’s.”

  “Right. Propofol. Two cc’s.”

  * * *

  When Harry called, Geiger was in his backyard doing one-armed push-ups: fifty with the left arm, fifty with the right, then forty, then thirty, the breeze drying the sweat on his naked body. The yard was a twenty-by-fifteen-foot green oasis in the midst of a dense urban sprawl of geometric concrete, brick, and asphalt. The patch of grass, backed by an oak bench and a modest Norway maple, was surrounded on three sides by a tall wooden fence that Geiger had built with over one hundred ten-foot vertical slats. The fence’s longest side, opposite the back of the house, ran east–west, and Geiger had cut the top of each slat to a specific length and then shaved or carved each board so that when viewed from the back stoop the entire span was a perfect, to-scale replica of the jagged skyline of the buildings looming directly behind it.

  Earlier, Geiger had studied the Jones’s file and built a scenario in his head. John “Jackie Cats” Massimo—one of Carmine’s men and a hard case by any measure—was forty-two, heavyset but muscular, and comfortable with physical violence. In his younger days he’d been knifed in the chest and had taken a shotgun blast in the thigh. And he was a cat lover: he had six of them. But now Massimo was already in physical pain and might have impaired vision, so Geiger would have to rework everything—the session room, tactics, methodology. He didn’t even think of canceling the job, however, because he wouldn’t do that to Carmine.

  Carmine had given Geiger his first job in IR, eleven years ago. The day after Geiger overheard the conversation between the FBI techs, he had gone to an Internet café and found a photo of Carmine Vincent Delanotte, reputed mob boss, as well as the address of his restaurant, La Bella Ristorante, in Little Italy. Geiger read several articles about Carmine and learned that he was something of a visionary. In the early 1980s, he had started buying run-down brownstones throughout the boroughs for practically nothing. Apparently he had grasped all the possibilities—the houses provided him with a legitimate front, laundering venues, and kickback contracts—and fifteen years later a flood of cash had started coming his way. One of the articles quoted a source at the FBI who claimed that lately Carmine had been making more money in real estate than in loan-sharking and gambling combined.

  That evening, Geiger had walked into Carmine’s restaurant and handed the maître d’ a sealed envelope.

  “Give this letter to Mr. Delanotte,” Geiger said.

  Perhaps Geiger’s manner had an immediate impact, or perhaps the maître d’ often delivered envelopes to the owner; in any case, he took the letter without a word and walked away. Geiger picked out Carmine at a table in a corner with three other men. The gleam of his blue eyes and his silver-streaked hair flashed with every tilt of his head, as if he had an alternating current running through him.

  The maître d’ leaned down to his boss, whispered in his ear, and held out the letter. Carmine looked at the offering, then turned his gaze toward Geiger. The cool stare measured him, and Geiger saw a flat look of nonrecognition give rise to a glint of curiosity in the man’s wide, cerulean eyes. Carmine opened the envelope with a flourish of his polished thumbnail, took out the single sheet of paper, and read it. He folded the paper methodically, tore it in half, and then tore the letter a second and third time. He dropped the bits of paper into a porcelain cup on the table, lit a match, and set them on fire.

  His lips moved and the words put bodies in motion. The maître d’ stepped away, and Carmine’s three colleagues rose and stood behind him against a blood-red brocade wall. Carmine looked again at Geiger and raised two thick fingers; flicking them, he gave Geiger an imperial command to approach.

  When Geiger was three feet away, Carmine pointed at him. Geiger halted. Carmine leaned to the burning paper and blew out the flames. Smoke rose in languid puffs from the cup, and Carmine waved some of it toward his face and took in a deep, sensuous breath. Then he looked up at Geiger.

  “I’m not allowed to smoke anymore,” he said in a voice that rumbled with the echo of thousands of deeply drawn cigarettes. He shrugged ruefully and sat back. “Guys…” he said. The three sentinels strolled to the bar.

  “Sit down,” said Carmine. Geiger slid into a chair and Carmine poured himself two inches of Chivas. He put the bottle down in front of Geiger.

  “I don’t drink,” said Geiger.

  Carmine raised his glass and took a small sip. “Three years and I still can’t get used to Chivas without a Lucky.” He put his glass down. “What do you make on the late shift? What do I pay you?”

  “One hundred and fifty dollars a night.”

  “Cash, off the books. So it’s really more like two hundred and twenty a day.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s more than enough to rent a room, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re sleeping in one of my houses. That’s not allowed, Mr. Geiger.”

  “I know.”

  “Then why do you do it?”

  “I save a lot of money that way.”

  The corners of Carmine’s wide lips tilted up. “Are you fucking with me, Geiger?”

  “No.”

  “You do know who I am, right?”

  “Yes, Mr. Delanotte. I’ve read about you.”

  Carmine’s lips finished their arc into a fully fashioned smile. “Okay,” he said. “First thing: you don’t sleep in my houses anymore. Second thing: I appreciate the heads-up about the feds. I’ll deal with it.” He slipped a hand inside his suit jacket and took out a taupe leather billfold. “Five hu
ndred sound fair?”

  “I don’t want your money,” Geiger said.

  “No? You’re so flush from sleeping free in my houses that you don’t need it?”

  “I have a question.”

  “Ask me.”

  “About your ‘lieutenants.’ How will you find out which one is going to betray you?”

  Carmine scowled. “Could be any one of five or six. I know a guy. He’ll find out.”

  “I could do it,” Geiger said.

  “What is it you could do?” asked Carmine.

  “Find out what you need to know.”

  “And how would you do that, Geiger?”

  “I’ll ask your lieutenants questions, and they’ll tell me the truth.”

  “So—when you’re not doing reno, you’re in the truth business?”

  “Information retrieval.”

  Carmine’s head tilted, like a dog’s hearing a distant whistle. He was evaluating the tone of voice; Geiger had spoken the two words without the slightest hint of irony or sarcasm.

  “Information retrieval,” Carmine said. “Got it. All right—so what am I thinking right now?”

  “I’m not a mind reader, Mr. Delanotte.” Geiger turned his head to the right; there was a barely audible click. “But you are probably wondering if I might be psychotic—or retarded.”

  Carmine’s grin lurked just beneath the surface, like a shark in shallow water. “I guess I can’t really ask for a résumé, can I? You’ve got experience in … information retrieval, is it? The truth business?”

  “I can tell when someone is lying. I can tell a lot about someone just by looking at them.” Geiger turned his head to the left. Another click. “You’re left-handed,” he said.

  “That’s right. How’d you know that?”

  “Your eyebrows.”

  “My eyebrows, huh? You gonna read my palm and tell my fortune next?”

  “I don’t know how to do that. But you see better out of your right eye than your left—and you had two, maybe three fingers on your left hand dislocated a long time ago. They still hurt. Probably arthritic.”