Harry set Lily on her feet, turned away from her, and vomited. He had watched DVDs of Geiger’s sessions with the keen, assiduous eye of an analyst, but this was his handiwork. He ran his tongue across his three false front teeth and remembered parts of him coming asunder, the searing clarity of pain and breakage, the stirring knowledge that death was an even-odds bet. He straightened up.
Ray had the towel pressed against his mouth, and his eyes held Harry like a prey in crosshairs. He mumbled something indecipherable, but the promise of vengeance was crystal clear. Harry took Lily’s hand in his.
“Come on, Lily. We gotta go.”
“We gotta get outta this place,” she sang, “if it’s the last thing we ever do.”
Harry started leading her toward the door, walking backward with the gun still held waist-high in his hand.
“Good-bye,” he said.
Hall nodded. “Tell Geiger I’ll see him around.”
* * *
Hall ached from his waist to the top of his head. He’d never had a problem dealing with the physical aspect of pain, but it made him feel stupid, because in his job, pain meant you’d screwed up. You always had the “just in case” mind-set. You always assumed that a wrench was perched somewhere, waiting to fall into the gears. But the last twenty-four hours had rolled out a brutal trifecta: Matheson shakes them, Geiger decides to play moral relativist, a computer geek turns into Rambo. Hall took a last drag of his Camel, stubbed it out on the coffee table, and went over to Ray.
“Give me your cell.”
Ray spat out a large dollop of blood and pulled a cell phone from his pocket. Hall dialed.
“Be ready, Mitch. Boddicker is coming out—with his sister.”
“Sister?” a voice said. “What happened in there?”
“Boddicker and Ray got into it, but later on that. I’ve got to get Ray’s face stitched up.”
“That bad? Jesus, Richie. We’re turning into the three fucking blind mice.”
“Stay close, Mitch—but not too,” Hall said. “And don’t get cute. You know he’s our best bet to get to Geiger, right?”
“Wanna know what I think? I think maybe somebody who keeps making wrong choices should stop sounding all the time as if he knows what the fuck he’s doing.”
Hall had wanted to punch the guy in the face for years, but he kept his sigh silent and hung up. Since the beginning of this clusterfuck, he’d been assuming that if things got much worse the three of them would end up at each other’s throats, but he couldn’t let it happen yet. He had another call to make, and for this one, he sat down in Harry’s chair and took a deep breath, letting it out in a measured release. He dialed and the call was picked up on the first ring.
“Yes?”
“It’s Hall. We have a problem, sir.”
“‘Problem’ is one of my least favorite words. What is ‘our’ problem?”
“We lost the kid—before we were able to get any information. Geiger has him.”
“Has him?”
“Took him, sir.”
“Then find Geiger.”
“Yes, sir. That’s the plan. But we don’t know where Geiger is … yet.”
“Hall…”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m beginning to wonder if I should start being concerned. Yesterday you said you had Matheson lined up. Now this.”
“I understand, sir, but there’s no need to—”
“Find Geiger.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And keep me up to date. I don’t like hearing about ‘problems’ after the fact. If you foresee more complications, I want to know about them before they happen.”
“Yes, sir.”
The call ended. Hall could hear the sky starting to crack, and unless he turned this job around, it would surely fall. Ray, with a loud groan, staggered to his feet and grabbed the wall with one hand to keep from falling down.
“Muhjerfushinn—”
“Ray, shut the fuck up!”
11
The boy did not sleep for long. His slumber was full of twitches and mumbled noises, and then some dream demon chased him into consciousness. Geiger sat down beside him with the alcohol and a washcloth. He put a glass of water on the floor.
“I’m going to take the tape off. Tell me if it hurts too much.”
Ezra nodded, and Geiger began slowly peeling off an end of the tape around one eye, dabbing at the newly exposed skin every quarter of an inch. The boy flinched a few times but made no sound. Once Geiger got past the first eye—the left—the rest of the tape lifted more easily. The boy’s eyes were a striking shade of luminous green, the color of sea glass. There was lingering fear in them, and confusion, leaving no room for trust.
Geiger went to work on the strip across Ezra’s mouth while the boy stared at him warily. Geiger carefully pulled the tape free. Ezra’s cheeks and temples had two horizontal red streaks of chemical irritation. He ran his tongue across his lips a few times.
“Thirsty,” he croaked.
Geiger handed him the glass, and the boy drank it all down. They studied each other, like strangers sharing space at the start of a long trip.
“Are you gonna hurt me?” said Ezra.
His voice had a medium pitch, and Geiger heard a sporadic preteen squeak at its edges. But there also was an unexpected husky bottom to it; Geiger found the boy’s voice strangely soothing, like a cello at the heart of a string quartet.
“No,” said Geiger.
Ezra dragged a hand across his clammy forehead. “Really hot in here. Can you turn on the AC?”
“There’s no air-conditioning.”
“No AC? Then can you turn on a fan?”
“I don’t have a fan.”
“Don’t you get hot in here?”
“Yes.”
The boy tried to read Geiger’s face, looking for a hint of humor in the sharp features and stony, ash-colored eyes. He had good antennae for sarcasm. That was always his parents’ tone of choice, and they’d used it for banter, scolding, small talk, out-for-blood fighting. But Geiger seemed utterly straightforward.
“Well, can I take a shower?”
“Yes.”
Ezra raised a hand, gently touched his cheek, and winced. To Geiger, the gesture, the physical presence of another person here, seemed to have a magical effect, altering the place’s shape and shrinking its size. The boy’s palms came to rest beside his thighs, flat on the leather cushion, as if he needed the extra support to keep from toppling over sideways. His head rested back against the sofa, and his eyelids descended.
“Why do you do it?” he asked.
“Do what?”
“Your job.” He opened his eyes again. “That’s what you do, right? Hurt people?”
Geiger took the empty glass from Ezra and stood up. Then he realized he’d had no particular place in mind to go to. He turned back to the boy.
“Ezra, do you know that this is all about your father? That they wanted to find out if you know where he is?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you know where your father is?”
The boy cocked his head and shifted his skinny body. “How do I know you’re not one of them? Maybe you’re just pretending to be nice, so I’ll tell you stuff.”
The back door was on the north wall, in the kitchen. Geiger went to it and used a keypad to unlock it.
“Where you going?” asked the boy.
“Out back, for a smoke.”
Geiger walked out off the porch, into the yard. From beyond the fence the smell of engine oil reached him as he lit his cigarette and drew the smoke deep inside him. For the length of the breath, he saw the image of his father’s face above him, looking down, pearl-colored smoke snaking out of his nostrils. Until the predawn ride in the rental car, it was the only picture of his father Geiger had carried in his mental scrapbook. He knew now there would be more to come. The pages would fill up, independent of his desires or conscious powers.
“Can I come out?”
The boy was in the doorway. Geiger exhaled and his father’s face faded away.
“No,” he said. “Stay there.”
The world outside would keep oozing in through the cracks, and the past would usurp the present, gradually taking hold. Geiger could feel his pulse pounding at his insides, a mounting internal timpani, blood and organs like hammer and anvil. He started to stroll around the yard in his singular gait, fingers in a jig at his sides.
“Hey,” said Ezra. “Can I ask your name?”
“Geiger.”
“Like the counter?”
“Yes. Like the counter. Stop talking now. I need to think about some things.”
Geiger took one more suck on his cigarette, then let it fall and watched the butt’s last plume of smoke drift southward. He wanted to light another one.
* * *
Harry pressed the pay phone’s receiver tight to his ear so he could hear above the noise of the laundromat. His other hand held Lily’s; she seemed to have discovered a central beat in the jumble of the washers’ and dryers’ competing clatter and was swaying slightly to it. He could still feel the aftershocks rippling up from his hand and through his arm from when his Beretta had smashed into Ray’s face and something had given way.
“It’s me,” Harry said after the voice mail’s beep. “We have to talk. Really, really important. About Hall and Matheson and the kid and the whole fucking thing. I’m in a laundromat on Flatbush. Hall showed up at my place—I don’t know how—with another guy, trying to find out where you are and how to get the kid back. These guys are heavy lifters. Hall has battery acid in his veins. I’m on a pay phone because Hall may have tagged my cell, so don’t call my cell. It’s turned off. I’ll call again. Or you call me—please!”
As he hung up, he noticed that a few of the patrons had paused in their separating and folding to stare at the guy yelling into the phone. He hadn’t realized he’d been shouting. He led Lily over to a line of chairs against a wall and sat down. His damaged, aching knee felt like a water balloon.
“Sit down, Lily,” he said. He gave her a little tug, but she remained standing, shifting back and forth from one foot to the other, in thrall with the motorized cacophony. Leaving the brownstone, he had dragged her three blocks before he’d been able to flag a cab. When the driver had asked where they wanted to go, Harry hadn’t answered for nearly ten seconds. In a city of infinite destinations, he was struck mute by the realization that he had nowhere to go. Finally, he told the driver he needed a pay phone, and they cruised Flatbush Avenue silently until the harsh fluorescents of the laundromat caught the driver’s eye.
Watching the machines tumble and whirl, Harry took stock. The de Kooning scenario had dipped to zero plausibility. David Matheson had something, or knew something, and Hall desperately wanted it or him. Hall was obviously a wired guy, and he seemed to have access to the most sophisticated kinds of techno-tracing. Kidnapping and violence were not an issue. The man had carte blanche in an à la carte world. But Harry couldn’t figure out how they had found his home. He’d made himself untraceable, unfindable. How had Hall ended up sitting in his living room, waiting for him to come out of the shower? He scrubbed the inside of his mouth with his tongue. He’d crunched two Pepcids to kill the lingering taste of vomit, but it hadn’t worked.
Lily let go of her brother’s hand and began slowly tracing a line on her right cheek with the tip of her middle finger, from cheekbone to jawline, up and down, like a rhythmic accompaniment as she started to sing.
“Hello, darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again…”
“You’re awfully talkative lately, Lil. What made you start singing that song? The bright bulbs?”
He slumped back and closed his eyes. Lily wandered off toward a little boy, three or four years old, who sat cross-legged on the floor at his mother’s feet as she folded bedsheets emblazoned with a web-throwing Spider-Man flying amid large-font “Wham!”s and “Kapow!”s.
Harry floated through the sheer walls of memory to his University Heights apartment in the 1990s, after his sister’s inner gears had started slipping and he’d taken her in and set her up in his bedroom. He would be half asleep on the living room sofa in the loneliest hours of the night, and Lily would shuffle in and hover over him and whisper, “Harry?” It was less an inquiry than an invitation to share the fantastic adventures conjured by her devolving mind. Then the visitations stopped, and sometimes at night Harry would peek into the bedroom and find her sitting on the window seat, talking to the city beyond the glass. She’d found a new listener no one else could see.
Harry opened his eyes and was on his feet in an instant. Lily was kneeling down before the young boy, who looked up at her from the pile of plastic superheroes in his lap.
“Hi,” the boy said.
“Wonderful,” said Lily.
She stared at him like Copernicus discovering the true place of Earth in the cosmos. Harry came for her just as she reached out and took the boy’s hand in hers. The mother glanced down as Harry arrived.
“Hey!” she barked.
“It’s okay,” Harry said. “She just—”
“Aparta las manos! No touch!” she said.
Harry grabbed Lily by the arm and pulled her up to him. Her hand remained outstretched as the boy’s slipped from it.
“Sorry,” he said. “She’s a little … odd.”
“Qué?”
“Excéntrico. Muy excéntrico.”
The woman cocked her head, and as she studied Harry’s expression her scowl relaxed into a sad, condoling smile.
He led Lily back to the chairs. He lowered his head into his hands, but it set off a hot, painful throb from Ray’s blow, and he straightened up.
“What am I going to do with you, sis?”
“Wonderful,” she said, her shining eyes staring at the little boy, who had picked up his action figures and resumed the eternal battle between good and evil.
* * *
As Geiger paced in the yard, Ezra watched the odd but precise movements of the man’s body. Most of the work seemed to be going on in the hips and ankles. The motion looked almost natural but wasn’t; he was clearly making adjustments for some sort of injury or disease. Ezra wondered if he had been in a terrible accident—maybe a smashup in a car, or something that happened in a war.
“Geiger, I’m real hungry.”
“I’ll make you something to eat.”
Geiger came across the yard and they both went into the kitchen. A black walnut counter lined two walls. There was a coffeemaker and a bean grinder, a sink and a Viking two-burner cooktop. Beneath it was a mahogany-paneled compact refrigerator. Atop one counter were a wood-block knife holder with two blades, a wooden utensils cart with two spoons, knives, and forks, and two large stainless steel bowls, one of them filled with fruit and vegetables. On a wall rack hung a cast-iron skillet and a stainless steel pot. In a corner was a combination washer-dryer. Everything gleamed beneath four hanging pendant lights. The room was handsome and minimal—there was nothing extra.
Geiger turned on the water, put some broccoli and asparagus on the counter, and took a knife from its slot.
“Weird,” said the boy.
“What?”
“You don’t have any cupboards or drawers.”
The only occasion when Geiger had ever spent time in a child’s presence was an afternoon years ago when he’d gone to La Bella to give Carmine his monthly loan payment and had been asked to stay for lunch with Carmine and his nephew. As always, the offer had been a smiling command presented in the form of an invitation. Geiger had sat silently while Carmine regaled him and the squirrelly boy, who had been about Ezra’s age, with stories about his stints in the navy and the teamsters. Then Carmine had leaned toward him and said:
“When you walked in the door, my nephew said something. Tell Geiger what you said, Michael.”
The boy had pointed his nose down at his pasta primavera. “I don’t remember,” he said
. His glance at Carmine was dark with a sullen question: Why are you making me do this?
Carmine’s smile was benign, but then it always was. “Michael, tell Geiger what you said.”
“I said…” the boy mumbled, and looked at Geiger. “I said you looked weird.”
“Be specific, Michael,” Carmine prompted.
The boy looked resigned to his fate. “I said, ‘Look at that guy. I betcha he’s a freak job or a retard.’”
“Good,” said Carmine, and mussed the boy’s hair. He sat back, a sage preparing to dispense wisdom. “Now, there’s a reason I made you do that, Michael—it’s so you won’t forget lessons to be learned here. Lesson number one: Never insult someone you don’t know to somebody else, because the person you’re talking to might respect that person or care for him, like I do Geiger—in which case you’ve insulted both men. You see?”
The nephew nodded, his lips working nervously.
“And lesson two: Talk like that and you might end up becoming a spoiled little punk who gets his goddamn face slapped. Now go home.”
But with Ezra, there was an aura of gentleness, the kind of affect sometimes interpreted as sadness. Geiger also noticed that a stillness ruled the boy’s body. Apart from actions intended and necessary, he hardly moved at all—there were no impatient gestures or childish fidgets.
With a soft meow announcing a homecoming, the cat came through the flap on the pet slot at the bottom of the back door. He stopped for a five-second, one-eyed appraisal of the visitor.
Ezra crouched down. “Hey…” He held out a hand. “Boy, that’s a bad-looking cat. He yours?”
“He lives here. He goes where he wants, but he always comes back.”
“That’s a song, y’know.”
“No, I don’t.”
“‘The cat came back, he just couldn’t stay away.’ You don’t know that?”
The animal sprang effortlessly onto the counter and started nuzzling his battered head into Geiger’s forearm.
“What’s his name?”
The Inquisitor: A Novel Page 11