The Inquisitor: A Novel

by Smith, Mark Allen

  Geiger put his cup down. This was the time. His temples drummed.

  “I need your help with something.”

  “Business-related?”

  “I need a gun.”

  The blue eyes flashed. “For what?”

  Geiger didn’t want to tell him the whole story. His focus was starting to fuzz again on the edges. “It’s just a precaution.”

  “Have you ever fired a gun before?”

  “No.”

  Carmine noticed a tiny piece of lint on the front of his tailor-made shirt and flicked it off.

  “Eddie!”

  One of the bodyguards came inside and stood motionless, hands clasped at his belt buckle.

  “Geiger needs a piece. Not too big. He’s never used one before. Let’s keep the recoil down.”

  The guard nodded. As he turned and walked out the door, he left a trail of images in Geiger’s vision.

  Geiger reached for his coffee and knocked the cup over. The spill started running off the table’s edge, onto the carpet, and he watched each drop fall in slow motion.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Carmine. He sighed and flexed his fingers again.

  Groggy as Geiger was, he caught the pang of rue in his benefactor’s voice. He wondered what had been put in his coffee.

  Carmine stood up and ran a hand through his silver mane. “I don’t get you, Geiger. I’m a very smart man, but I don’t get you.”

  Carmine knelt down directly in front of him, reached out, and patted his cheek affectionately. “I have to ask you something while you can still answer me. Can you understand me?”

  This was another new sensation for Geiger—a drug-induced slide out of consciousness. He felt a spread of prickly heat from the neck up, but he didn’t care. “Right,” Geiger said.

  Carmine reached out again, but this time he gave Geiger a firm slap across the face.

  “Why did you do it? What the hell could you possibly have been thinking?”

  “Right,” Geiger said.

  “You think I’m happy about this? I’m not, Geiger. You’re my boy.”

  Geiger’s head started to loll. “Right,” he said again.

  “I wish there was a choice here, but I do business with these people. Remember when you told me the feds bugged my house? That was my fucking invitation to them. You gave it to me. You’re the one who hooked me up with them! We talked. We made a deal. I help them out once in a while, give them a name, do them a favor—and they leave me alone. Jesus, Geiger. It wasn’t Colicos who sent Hall to you. It was me.”

  “Right.”

  “You know who you’ve been fucking with? These guys are contractors—and I don’t mean the kind who do renovation. They’re government contractors. Understand? They’re the guys who do the stuff nobody’s ever supposed to find out about, and they don’t play by the rules, because they don’t have to. They’re all ex-commandos and mercenaries, fucking cowboys! And most of them are crazy, because if you do this stuff long enough, that’s what it does to you—it makes you crazy. Bottom line, they do anything to get the job done, because they know they’re gonna get disappeared if they don’t. These guys don’t retire with a pension and health benefits. Capiche?”

  Carmine tugged at his jacket sleeves, as if he’d suddenly decided they were too short.

  “They called this morning and very politely said that if you should happen to come by … So now do us both a favor. Just tell them what they want to know. I know he’s just a kid—but be smart.”

  “Right.”

  Carmine grabbed Geiger’s face in his hands. “And I’m gonna tell you something else, Geiger—about life. All your ‘outside versus inside’ stuff? It’s bullshit! Life owns your ass—from day one, cradle to grave. You don’t get it, Geiger. You think you can choose whether you’re in or not, but you can’t. If you come out of this alive, you remember that.”

  “Right…”

  Just before Geiger blacked out he had a thought, and even in his deeply muddled state, the irony did not escape him. He had never felt so good in his whole life.

  PART THREE

  18

  “Geiger. Wake up.”

  The voice was behind him. He could feel the restraints at his wrists, ankles, and chest. He was lashed tightly to something. He opened his eyes and quickly went down a checklist of his senses. Sight, sound, touch—they all seemed to be in working order. No fog, no fuzz, no delay.

  He was in his own place—the Ludlow Street session room—strapped into the barber’s chair, wearing only his white jockeys. The air-conditioning was off. It was hot. He was already sweating.

  “I’m awake,” he said.

  A man stepped in front of him. Very thin and well over six feet tall, he was dressed in loose beige khakis and a gray sweatshirt. He wore round glasses, and his lightbulb-shaped head had only a few tufts of sparse, graying hair. To Geiger, he looked like a praying mantis. He held a pair of disposable white latex gloves.

  “My name is Dalton,” the man said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, though who would’ve thought it would happen like this?” His voice had the tranquil, measured tone of a high school teacher who knows every teenage trick in the book. He pulled one of the gloves on. The snap bounced around the room. “I like the lightly powdered,” he said. “What do you wear?”

  “I don’t. I don’t like the way they feel.”

  “You don’t worry about infection? Aids, Hep C…”

  “There’s hardly ever any bleeding with me.”

  Dalton put the other glove on. Snap. Geiger looked to the one-way mirror. Who else was here? Hall, certainly. Carmine? Probably not, but he heard the echo of his words: I do business with these people. You know who you’ve been fucking with? They’re government contractors.

  Dalton followed Geiger’s eyes. “You have a wonderful place here, Geiger. You’ve got a real eye for the little things, the special touches. And the viewing room—beautiful.” Dalton walked behind Geiger, out of his sight, then came back around pushing the wheeled cart. “I brought some of my own things and picked out a few of yours, too.”

  On the cart’s top shelf were a handheld butane torch, a box cutter with the grip wrapped in duct tape, an awl with a wooden handle, an aluminum baseball bat whose upper portion was encased in a four-inch layer of blue rubber foam, and Geiger’s antique straight razor. The bottom shelf of the cart was stocked with half a dozen white hand towels, a roll of gauze, a roll of adhesive tape, and a neatly folded khaki windbreaker.

  “It must be very strange, being on the other end of this,” Dalton said.

  Geiger looked at Dalton’s loose, oversized clothes; he couldn’t get a sense for whether the man’s body was in good shape. His face was sallow and free of wrinkles. He looked to be about fifty.

  “How long have I been out?”

  “About forty-five minutes.” Dalton took off his glasses and began polishing the lenses. “Now, first things first. I’m out of the loop on this. All I’ve been told is that they want to know where the boy is. So … where is the boy?”

  Geiger remembered that he’d written Matheson’s cell number on his left hand. The hand was extended just past the end of the chair’s arm, palm facing the floor.

  “That Jones in Iraq,” said Geiger. “Did you really cut off his lips?”

  Dalton’s smile reminded Geiger of a dog baring its teeth just before it growls.

  “Sorry,” Dalton said. “I never kiss and tell. But let me ask you something.” He put his glasses back on. “Do you know what they call you?”

  “Who are ‘they’?” Geiger asked.

  “Some of our mutual … friends.”

  “No,” said Geiger. “I don’t know what they call me.”

  “They call you the Inquisitor. What do you think—you like it?”

  Geiger was monitoring his pulse. It was slow. He considered the moniker: The Inquisitor. The royalty of torture. The CIA loved their code names.

  Dalton looked slightly disappointed at Geiger�
��s apparent lack of interest. “Well, I like it. Very elegant.”

  Geiger remained silent, waiting Dalton out.

  “They’re in a real hurry about this, Geiger,” Dalton said, pulling the sleeves of his sweatshirt up to his elbows. “So 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.”

  Dalton turned to the cart, and Geiger slowly rotated his palm so he could see it. The skin had a moist sheen. He stared at the number: 917 555 0617. He recited it silently, committing it to memory.

  The door to the viewing room swung open and Hall barged out. Dalton turned at the disturbance.

  “His hand!” Hall yelled. “He’s got something on his palm!”

  Geiger clenched his hand into a fist, rubbing his fingertips against his palm, working at the skin, until Dalton grabbed the hand with both of his and pried the fingers open. Hall arrived as the palm was revealed—a smudged but still legible 917 5 was followed by a smear of blue ink.

  “It’s a phone number,” said Dalton.

  “I can see that,” growled Hall. He glowered at Geiger. “Don’t make this hard. You’re smarter than this.”

  Geiger nodded. “How is your head, Mr. Hall?”

  Hall ignored him. As he headed back to the viewing room, he spoke over his shoulder to Dalton: “Get to work on him—now!”

  The door slammed. Dalton reached toward the cart and picked up the awl and the butane torch. The awl’s steel needle was four inches long and a sixteenth of an inch thick, and the wooden grip was darkened from the sweat of countless uses. The torch fit perfectly in his hand.

  “As I was saying. Expertise…”

  His thumb pressed the torch’s ignition button, and a thin, two-inch-long blue flame shot out of the nozzle.

  “It’s always seemed to me the most egalitarian of assets,” Dalton said. “Anyone can have an expertise. You don’t have to be smart, or rich, or clever. You don’t need a degree. There’s no privilege involved, no genetic lottery. You can be a ditchdigger and have an expertise. A shoe salesman, a dishwasher, a garbageman…”

  He brought the needle of the awl into the flame and kept it there.

  “I’ve always felt that you can tell a lot about a person if they have a genuine expertise. If they do, you know for certain, without knowing anything else about them, that they are dedicated. They have applied themselves, they have a passion for something that has driven them to a point well beyond where most people would ever go. That says a lot about a person, don’t you think?”

  The awl’s needle glowed red. Dalton turned off the torch and put it on the cart. Geiger stared at the incandescent needle; it looked like the nucleus of a hearth’s fire compressed into a single, lucent filament. He felt the past being awakened by it.

  Dalton studied the needle’s tip, then brought it close to Geiger’s left cheek with an unwavering hand. He grabbed Geiger’s hair with his other hand to immobilize the head.

  Geiger didn’t move. “You don’t have to do that,” he said.

  “Where is the boy?”

  Geiger shut his eyes. A single piano note cascaded down into a full chord, and luminous puffs of clouds bloomed, laced with streaks of bright, falsetto-fueled lightning. They say everything can be replaced. They say every distance is not near.

  Very slowly, Dalton pushed the hot needle into Geiger’s cheek until Geiger felt the tip break through the inner side and poke at the edge of his tongue. Dalton wiggled the probe.

  So I remember every face of every man who put me here.

  “Geiger, where is the boy?”

  As Dalton had intended, the torture delivered a dual sensation: the searing burn of the hot steel and the sharp pain of the piercing of flesh. Geiger’s brain had a moment to form a critique. Heating the needle was, ironically, counterproductive, since it produced something of a desensitizing effect on the skin, diminishing the intensity of the invasion.

  Dalton adjusted the awl’s angle slightly downward and jabbed it in farther, into the soft, connective tissue beneath the tongue.

  “Where is the boy?”

  Any day now, any day now … The high, sweet voice weaved toward the hot blast of pain and, like a viper, wrapped itself around it and strangled it.… I shall be released.

  Dalton shoved the awl in deeper. Its point came up against something solid. Bone. The pain was molten. Geiger was inside the sun.

  “Geiger … where is the boy?”

  Geiger opened his mouth and spat blood. Dalton shook his head and pulled the awl out. The heat had created a circular pink flush on the cheek, and a crimson bubble of blood began to grow in its center. Dalton picked up one of the hand towels and began wiping off the instrument with short, measured strokes.

  “I’m curious,” he said. “Professionally speaking, on a scale of one to ten, how much did that hurt?”

  Geiger’s eyes opened, and when they swiveled to Dalton light flashed on their wet surfaces. “How much did what hurt?” he said.

  Dalton looked up from his cleaning ritual. He had heard the stories for years: about the boy wonder who’d brought a new style to the trade, about the wizard who at one point even had the CIA singing hosannas, about the master who could draw out the truth without drawing blood. But the man in the chair was not what Dalton had expected. He was too … But Dalton couldn’t complete the thought, couldn’t quite put his finger on the qualities that set the real man apart from the legend.

  Dalton put the awl down and picked up the bat.

  “Now, this takes me back,” he said, and took two short checked swings. “You like baseball?”

  “I never played.”

  Dalton swung and hit Geiger flush on the left pectoral. Dalton’s grunt was almost as loud as Geiger’s, whose lips twisted and seemed to pull the rest of his face inward, like an eddy sucking in debris. The physical agony ballooned inside his chest, and the army of angels’ voices in his head sent a volley of high-arcing arrows raining down on the pain. I see my light come shining—piercing it, puncturing it, deflating it—from the west down to the east.

  “Tell me where the boy is, Geiger.”

  When no answer came Dalton swung again, hitting the top of the sternum at the nexus of the clavicle. The force of the blow caused the trachea behind it to seize up, and the result was a combined feeling of choking and asphyxiating. Geiger’s ears filled with a high-pitched whine that drowned out the music inside him; he struggled reflexively against his bindings, his chest heaving.

  Dalton grabbed him by the jaw and rammed his head back against the headrest. The thrust actually helped Geiger gulp some air.

  “Listen to me,” Dalton said, leaning in very close. His breath smelled of peppermint. “I like my work, but I’m not enjoying this. It’s weird, you being who you are. So I’m going to tell you something. Call it a professional courtesy. This job is in effect a norell—hear me? No release likely. You may as well be at a black site. They’ll have me turn you into a Cobb salad before they tell me to stop. So don’t do this—stop being whoever you think you’re being, because that’s not who you are. And because if you don’t, you will probably die in this chair.”

  Dalton straightened up and rubbed the back of his neck. “Now, was there any part of that you didn’t understand?”

  Geiger was finally able to swallow.

  “What’s a Cobb salad?” he asked.

  Dalton brought the bat down hard, smashing it across both quadriceps.

  * * *

  The loud clap of the blow and the wild twisting of Geiger’s torso made Hall, watching through the one-way mirror, grimace.

  “‘What’s a Cobb salad?’” he repeated. “That’s very funny.” He turned to Ray, who was sitting on the couch with a glass of ice pressed to his face. “Considering his situation, that is a great line.”

  “Tell Dalton to start cutting him,” said Ray. “He’ll talk.
And make sure he tells us where Harry is, too.”

  Hall poured himself some Clynelish.

  “Hey, me too,” said Ray.

  “No alcohol.”

  “I’m feeling better, you know.”

  Dalton had found some lidocaine in Geiger’s medicine cabinet and given Ray a shot in his lower face. The pain had lessened, and Ray’s vitality was increasing.

  “Ray, Harry didn’t give Geiger up. So what makes you think Geiger will give Harry up?” He raised the glass to his lips, then stopped and put the Scotch back down. “Listen to me, Raymond. The job is Matheson. That’s it. After that, I don’t ever want to see Geiger or Harry again. Ever. We clear?”

  “After this is done, my time’s my own,” Ray said.

  Hall could see Ray’s brain squirming inside his skull like a mutt in a cage. That would be all they’d need—to find Matheson, escape from this mess clean, and then have Ray go after Boddicker and leave a bloody, mile-wide trail. He was beginning to wish Harry had shot the sonofabitch in the head.

  Hall turned back to the viewing window. Dalton was focused on the cart, eyeing his options. Geiger—red welts spreading on his chest, bleeding from his cheek—sat in the chair with his head bowed. The two men looked like deep thinkers considering a serious point of debate. Geiger was breathing through his mouth, cheeks puffing slightly with each long exhalation. Then he looked up, staring directly at the glass as if he could see right through it.

  “What’s your story?” said Hall, as if Geiger could hear him, too. “You in the market for a little redemption? That what this is? Sorry, man—ain’t gonna happen. You’re going to hell, just like the rest of us.”

  Hall’s cell phone rang, and he answered.

  “You in position?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” said Mitch, “I’m here. Right downstairs, across the street.”

  “Stay put.”

  * * *

  Dalton turned to Geiger, hands behind his back, head bobbing in a slow, satisfied nod, as if he had figured out some especially difficult riddle. Mr. Chips in a chamber of horrors.

  “What do you do with it?” Dalton asked.