The Inquisitor: A Novel

by Smith, Mark Allen

  On the June day in 1999 when Harry had walked out of the Times Building to find Geiger waiting for him on the sidewalk with a business proposition, Harry had no idea what he’d be getting into, and no way to make a decision based on a financial forecast. In the end, he made a life-altering choice based on his instinctive response to Geiger’s matter-of-fact presentation. “I am going into a new line of work,” Geiger had said. “Illegal. I need a partner. You’ll get twenty-five percent of the profits.” As Geiger described his vocation, Harry wondered: What was the going rate for torture? How do you build a clientele? The research part would be a snap, his forte, but the human carting might prove challenging. Forget, for a moment, the moral and legal aspects. Could he do it? Was that in him? He let the exhilaration in his chest provide the answer.

  Harry pulled the van up to the gate of the lot next to the Ludlow Street session house and checked his watch. Hall was due with Matheson in fifteen minutes. He got out, unlocked the heavy-gauge gate, and pushed it open. As he was about to turn back to the van, he felt the presence of someone coming up behind him. He froze, and silently cursed his carelessness—why had he left the Louisville Slugger on the van’s floor? Slowly he turned.

  A ragged redwood of a black man stood before him, wearing a tattered New York Knicks sweatshirt and pants of a blotched, now indistinguishable color. His clothes hung on thick, broad bones, and Harry saw the glare of mean hunger in his bottomless eyes. Harry’s mind measured the steps to the van’s door. Seven, maybe eight. A tricky maneuver to pull out the bat and swing for the fences. Trickier if the guy was agile—Harry never could hit a curveball. But if it came to it, he’d die trying. Nobody was ever going to beat on him again.

  A hand the size of an oven mitt came out from behind the man’s back. The upturned palm was desiccated and deeply furrowed.

  “Gimme somethin’, man,” the guy said, his voice sepulchral. “Five bucks.”

  Harry realized he wasn’t breathing; he inhaled. “Shouldn’t sneak up on people, man,” he said. “Not cool.”

  “I’ll send you a fucking letter next time. Now goddamn gimme somethin’.” His pupils flared with molten emotion. “C’mon, motherfucker!”

  “Motherfucker?” Harry said. “Hey—do I owe you something?”

  The man’s great paws grabbed the lapels of Harry’s sport jacket and pulled him in close. Harry’s nostrils bristled at the thick, sour smell of unwashed flesh.

  “Fuck you very much,” the man said.

  An airy giggle came from somewhere very near, and then a small, shiny-eyed face peeked out from behind the man’s tree-trunk legs. The girl wore a soiled orange jumpsuit and sneakers with the toes wrapped in frayed duct tape, and the gap between her front teeth blinked at Harry when she grinned. She couldn’t have been more than five. If Harry believed in God, he would have sworn she was an angel.

  The girl looked up at him. “Yeah,” she said. “Fuck you very, very much.”

  “Don’t you be cursing, Laneesha,” the man said, but his eyes stayed on Harry, who was losing a battle to suppress a grin.

  “What’s Laneesha mean?” Harry asked.

  “Fuck if I know, man.”

  “Pretty name.”

  “You like it? Gimme five bucks, you can have it.”

  “Okay,” Harry said.

  The man squinted at the answer, and let go of Harry. “Yeah?” he said.

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  Harry went into his pocket and took out a money clip. He thumbed through the folded bills and frowned.

  “No fives. Have to take a twenty.”

  He pulled one free and held it out. The man snatched it with a thumb and forefinger, stuck it deep down in a pocket, and took a moment to reappraise his benefactor.

  “Thanks.”

  “Welcome.”

  “You’re a weird guy,” the man said. “Cool, but weird.”

  “Doubtful about the cool part.” Harry looked down at the little girl. “You and I have the same name,” he said.

  Her brow crinkled with three undulating lines of confusion. “Your name’s not Laneesha!” she said.

  “It is now,” said Harry, grinning. “I just bought it.”

  She reached up and let her tiny hand disappear inside the giant’s. Turning, they walked down the street. It had started to drizzle, and the streetlights threw shadows everywhere, an irregular crisscross pattern like a huge net laid down across the wet concrete.

  Harry hopped back inside the van, drove into the lot, and pulled up to the wall of the session house. He parked beside the gray canvas-sided awning that extended eight feet from the building, blocking the view of the side entrance door from the windows of adjacent buildings and passersby.

  Drops of rain on the windshield were momentarily set aglow by a passing wash of light. Harry turned and watched a dark green van pull up to the open gate and stop, softly idling. He got out, stepped into the flood of the headlights, and motioned the vehicle forward like an airport gate man coaxing in a jet. Then he directed the van to pull under the canvas awning. The engine died, the door opened, and a man stepped out with an attaché case and strolled toward Harry, headlights trimming the edges of his stocky silhouette with a backlit aura.

  “Harry?” the man said.

  “Right. Mr. Hall?”

  “Yes.”

  As he neared, Hall’s silhouette morphed into detail. His gray suit looked off the rack. His features were middle-American bland—the face of someone sitting in a Wichita diner or an office cubicle in Des Moines. You wouldn’t notice him in a crowd, but face to face Harry could see his busy eyes, always moving. Hall was one of those people who could look straight at you and see everything around you at the same time, his gaze shifting tiny degrees, scanning and rescanning the area like motion detectors getting signals from an internal command center.

  He held out a ringless hand and Harry shook it. Harry’s fingers felt like they were caught in a vise.

  “We set?” Hall asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Let’s do this.”

  They headed for the van. Hall clearly had no interest in small talk, and that was fine by Harry. He could never ignore the absurdity of talking about the Mets or the traffic as a lead-in to torture. The worst ones were those who wanted to talk about Geiger, and what he did, and how he did it. Harry spent a lot of time building a wall around his special knowledge so he could consider himself a businessman. But the inquiries about Geiger were taps on his shoulder, whispers in his ear that made him look inward, and at those times his psychic Sheetrock couldn’t hide the Medusa’s head he’d grown over the last decade.

  He unlocked and opened the building’s reinforced side door, revealing a wide, well-lit hallway. The center of the hallway’s floor was embedded with four rows of two-inch steel cargo rollers. Hall pulled out the van’s sliding ramp from beneath the back doors and laid the end down onto the rollers. He grabbed the handle of the trunk inside the van and pulled it down the ramp. When the trunk slid onto the rollers, he and Harry gave it a nudge, and then walked it down to an open freight elevator at the corridor’s end.

  “Nice setup,” said Hall.

  “Yup,” said Harry.

  They shoved the trunk into the elevator and stepped inside. Harry pulled the accordion gate closed, worked the hand gear, and they slowly ascended with a jangle and rattle.

  “Haven’t been in one of these in a long time,” Hall said.

  Harry glanced down at the silver container between them. It was the same kind he used—a six-foot, seam-welded Zarges made of anodized aluminum. Harry had listed the brand in his prep e-mail.

  “Have any problem finding a trunk?”

  “No, not at all,” Hall said. He opened the attaché case and showed Harry the contents. “Thirty-five thousand. Hundreds and fifties, as requested.”

  Harry shifted the lever and eased the lift to a stop at the second floor. The room was bigger than the space in the Bronx—thirty feet square and twelve feet hi
gh, with speaker grids set into the glossy black walls and ceiling every ten feet. When Harry pushed the gate open the brassy clatter skittered off the surfaces like a handful of coins.

  In the center of the room sat a motorized wheelchair, its black leather and chrome gleaming in the piercing overhead lights. Leather straps hung from the back, arms, and footrests. Otherwise the room was empty.

  Hall glanced at Harry. “A wheelchair?”

  Harry nodded.

  “Is he here?”

  “He’s here,” Harry said.

  They dragged the trunk out of the elevator, and a tiny worm of thought wriggled to life beneath a rock in Harry’s brain. Something was not quite right. He was about to turn the rock over and have a look when Geiger stepped into the room.

  “Geiger?” Hall asked, extending a hand.

  Geiger came to them, giving a single nod, hands remaining at his sides. He was dressed in a black denim jumpsuit and high-top sneakers. Hall put the attaché case down.

  “Geiger,” he said, “there’s been a slight change of plans.”

  Harry was perhaps the only person on earth who understood that the imperceptible shift in the muscles of Geiger’s face might be a frown.

  “What kind of change?” Geiger asked.

  “Matheson slipped us. He got away.”

  Now Harry turned over that rock in his mind and winced. When they’d carried the trunk into the room, it had felt light. Too light.

  “Then who is in the trunk?” Geiger said.

  “Someone I’m pretty certain knows where Matheson is.” Hall flicked the trunk’s latches open. “His son.”

  Hall started to lift the lid, but Geiger’s fingers came to rest on it, stopping its progress after a few inches.

  “How old?” Geiger said.

  “Twelve.”

  Geiger pushed the lid back down until it closed. The action was relaxed but firm.

  “I don’t work with children, Mr. Hall.”

  “You don’t?”

  Geiger’s fingertips did short drum rolls on his thighs. Hall’s hand went inside his jacket pocket, came out with a thick manila envelope, and dropped it on top of the trunk.

  “Would another five grand persuade you to make an exception?”

  “You should have let Harry know about the situation. He would have told you the policy. No exceptions.”

  “You’re right, of course,” Hall said with a series of choppy nods, “but it never occurred to me that someone in your business would have any … exceptions.” He glanced at Harry, who was staring mournfully at the attaché case as if it were a casket. The hundreds and fifties inside it were dead to him now.

  “Listen, Geiger,” Hall said. “Seeing as how we’re here, let’s talk about this for a minute. The kid has been staying with his father for a few weeks, and we’re close to certain he knows where Matheson is, or where he’s headed. Now, my referral gave me two names for the job—yours and a Mr. Dalton. We came to you because we understand your methods are more understated, whereas Dalton has a reputation for getting carried away. I don’t want to see the boy hurt, Geiger, but I have to find out what he knows. We’re really fighting the clock now. So my point is this: if you don’t do the job, we’ll go to Dalton. So why not take the payday?” His hands rose out to his sides, palms up, as if he’d just finished a pitch at a sales convention. “And that includes the extra five thousand.”

  Harry watched Geiger go into what he had privately coined “dead mode”—a state that visited Geiger when he seemed to be considering something. Eyes unblinking, chest unmoving, he stood completely still for several seconds. Then a single blink seemed to bring him back to life.

  “Let’s get the kid in the chair,” Geiger said.

  Hall’s eyebrows curled into question marks, and he turned to look at Harry as if Geiger had spoken in an unknown dialect and Harry was the official translator. Harry stared back silently. He’d never delivered an underage Jones, never even considered the possibility. It had been a long time since Geiger had surprised him.

  “All right, then,” Hall said. “Great.”

  He reached to the trunk and pulled the lid up. Harry bent down and caught the manila envelope as it slid toward the floor.

  Geiger looked in the trunk. Matheson’s son was on his side, wrists and ankles cinched together with thin plastic self-locking ties. Three strips of silver duct tape circled his head, one across his eyes and two across his mouth. His long, wavy blond hair was sodden, stuck to his forehead and cheeks like seaweed on a beach. He was dressed in a blue T-shirt, silver gym shorts, and red-and-black Nike Air LeBrons. The skin of his slender arms and legs was tanned, and his head rested on a violin case. He looked asleep, or in a coma.

  “His name?” Geiger asked.

  “Ezra.”

  “Did you give him anything?”

  “No. But he was a handful.”

  Geiger knelt beside the trunk. Harry thought there was almost something of the supplicant in the action.

  “Ezra…” Geiger said softly, like a parent waking a child from a nap. The blinded, muted body showed no reaction to its name. “Ezra, time to get up.”

  Geiger started to straighten up, and as he did he grabbed the handle at one end of the trunk and suddenly yanked it up, standing it on its end. The boy and the violin case came tumbling out onto the floor. Harry took two involuntary steps backward, staring at the moaning body.

  Geiger took hold of the plastic cable tie at the boy’s ankles and began dragging him across the floor. The boy twisted furiously, like a marlin on a gaff, and muffled whimpers escaped from beneath the duct tape. At the wheelchair, Geiger grabbed the boy under the armpits and hoisted him roughly onto the seat. Then he began securing the chair’s straps around the boy’s ankles, arms, and chest.

  Hall watched the proceedings with a hint of admiration at his lips.

  “Ezra,” Geiger said as he worked, “you’re going for a ride now. You won’t struggle—you’ll stay completely still in this wheelchair. In a little while I’m going to ask you questions about your father, and you are going to tell me everything I need to know.” The strapping was finished. Geiger clicked his neck. Left, right. “I’m telling you the truth, Ezra, and you’re going to tell me the truth. That’s why we’re here. Any answer that is less than truthful—I’ll hurt you. It doesn’t matter that you’re a child. In this room, you become ageless. That’s how it works. Nod if you understand.”

  A fluidal sound, something between a sob and a gurgle, came from the boy’s gullet, and his head bobbed. It made Harry reflexively clear his throat.

  “Good,” Geiger said. He flicked a switch on the wheelchair, and as it started across the black tiles he went to a wall and pushed a button. The low, moaning sound of a foghorn started up, rising and fading from the speakers in a random sequence. As it approached a corner, the wheelchair took a smooth left turn and settled into its route, circumnavigating the room, passing within inches of the walls. The noise presented itself to the boy as a dopplering fade, or a growing presence, or sudden sidelong blasts that made him quake in his bonds.

  As Hall and Harry watched the spectacle, Geiger walked over to them.

  “Harry…” Geiger said, almost a whisper. Harry picked up the attaché case, stepped back into the elevator, quietly drew the gate closed, and descended out of sight. Geiger pointed toward a door beside a square mirror in a wall, and Hall followed him through. They turned to the one-way mirror and observed the wheelchair’s circular ritual.

  “Disorientation?” Hall said.

  “Yes. The chair is on a timer,” Geiger said. “Five minutes, then I’ll begin. Something to drink?”

  Hall looked to the chrome bar. “Wine. Red.”

  Geiger walked to the bar and began pouring some pinot noir.

  “Does your client know you took the son?” he said.

  “My client wants his painting back. How I get it is up to me.”

  Geiger handed him the glass. The lights made the vermilion
liquid flash. Hall took a long sip and let the wine linger in his mouth before he swallowed. He nodded with satisfaction.

  “Do you know anything about him, Mr. Hall—besides what was in your report?”

  “No. He lives most of the year with his mother. I’ve got his cell phone—two calls in the last twenty-four hours, one with a New Hampshire area code, and one with a Manhattan area code we figure is Matheson. We found the violin in his room in Matheson’s apartment. I thought maybe it might be of use to you.”

  “Anything else in his room?”

  “I didn’t notice. Does it matter?”

  “Everything matters, Mr. Hall.”

  * * *

  Harry sat in the van’s driver’s seat. He had started counting the money, but he stopped as a gloominess crept in with the sticky evening air. When Geiger had spilled the kid out of the trunk it had been a pure what’s-wrong-with-this-picture moment. Even if he could rig his ethical arithmetic yet another time, it was a trickier task squaring Geiger’s reversal with everything he’d done in the past. Harry had become a moon in a steady orbit around Geiger, dependent on and secure in the man’s gravitational force, so experiencing a shift in Geiger’s axis of rules brought with it something vertiginous. Seeing Geiger do the unexpected was like watching the Statue of Liberty wink at him.

  Harry sighed, and then went back to counting the money.

  * * *

  The wheelchair and its blind passenger continued tracing a circle, and the foghorn’s sad warning came out of the walls. Hall checked the time again.

  “Just a little longer,” Geiger said. “A layman might think minors are easy to break, but it’s not necessarily true. In a context of intense fear, a child is apt to go inward and shut down—or to lie, say anything, and say it convincingly.” He poured a glass of water. “Mr. Hall, if you’re that concerned about time, telling me what this is really about will make my job easier—and quicker. It’s up to you.”

  Hall watched him drink the glass down. “What do you mean?”