The Confessor (15 page)

He heard the elevator’s
ding
before he felt it stop – and looked up. ‘RC’ was lit. ‘SS’ – basement level – was still dark. The door slid open and a silver-haired woman in an evening gown stared back at him. Victor had a partial view of the night clerk at the counter behind her, across the lobby, bent over his textbook, chin in his palm.

The woman glanced down at the laundry cart. ‘Going up, dear?’ she asked.

‘Going down. I shall send it back up,’ he said, and smiled – until the door closed.

The woman turned to the clerk. ‘You clean the rooms here at this hour? My . . . I hope you pay the poor things overtime.’

The clerk looked up wearily – and watched the ‘SS’ symbol light up above the elevator. His brow became a field of furrows . . .

In the alley, Dewey leaned against the van’s hood. The engine was running and he liked the feel of the vibration against his lower back. It hadn’t been the same since the IED on the road out of Kandahar. They had told him he’d need two weeks in a brace, but after three days in traction he’d started worrying that the worse-offs thought he was a weak dick – and he was going stir-crazy anyway – so he said he wanted to go back out.

The hotel’s side door was a metal roll-up. He’d sprayed it with WD-40, so when it started to rise the noise was minimal. Victor came out pushing the cart.

‘Let’s move.’

Dewey nodded, but he was looking at something inside the basement. ‘Victor . . .’

‘Hey! Attendez!’ demanded a voice – and Victor whirled around and drove his fist into the night clerk’s throat – two hard, rapid, left-handed jabs. The clerk made a single harsh, cloying sound – like a cat trying to spit out a hairball – but didn’t even have time to raise his hands before he hit the ground like a bag of bones.

Dewey stared at the body. The hair was up on the back of his neck. It had looked so cool. Like a movie.

‘Move, Dewey,’ Victor said, as he leaned down and grabbed the clerk’s arms and started dragging him back inside.

Dewey wheeled the cart to the back of the van and opened the doors. Harry lay inside, motionless – silver duct tape across his eyes and mouth and securing his ankles and wrists together. Dewey pushed the bed sheets aside and grabbed Matheson, who was taped in the same fashion, lifted him out and shoved him in beside Harry. He closed up and got in the driver’s seat. He was replaying the short scene of crisp, cool violence. Victor pivoting, the left springing out – wap! wap! – the guy going down . . . Perfection.

Victor came back out, eyeing the van with a frown. He came round and slid into the passenger’s side.

‘You should have backed it in,’ he said.

‘Huh?’

‘The van. You back it
in
when time is not an issue – so you don’t have to back it
out
when it may be. Stupid mistake. Drive.’

Dewey had the wince of a scolded pupil. ‘You’re right. Sorry.’ He put it in gear and backed down the alley with a pro’s skill, smoothly shifted on the street and headed uphill for Rue de Rennes. ‘Just so you know, man . . . I could’ve backed out of there with my eyes closed doing ninety if I’d had to.’

‘I understand, Dewey – but you realize that’s not the point.’

‘Yeah. I do.’ Dewey stopped at the red light. Victor took out his gold lighter, and rubbed away a smudge. Lausanne . . . 1994 . . . a tobacco store on the Grand Pont . . . the South African arms dealer . . . snatched from a parking lot and delivered to the NIA. He lit a cigarette, lowered his window and stared out. In one of the hundreds of nearby apartments ‘Hey Jude’ was being played very loudly.

Dewey watched Victor flex the fingers of his lethal hand a few times. ‘He saw the van,’ said Dewey. ‘Won’t he call the police when he wakes up?’

Victor took in a long pull of smoke. ‘He is not going to wake up.’

There was a sudden ping in Dewey’s brain – like a sonar pulse suddenly detecting something massive, unseen but very near. Dead people hadn’t been mentioned as part of this job. He’d had four gigs. No one had died.

‘Green,’ said Victor.

Dewey hit the gas and turned left, south. The air held the promise of rain, but was holding back, waiting.

‘Question,’ Dewey said.

Victor sighed, and turned to him. ‘Ask.’

‘Why the Adam’s apple? Not so easy a target. Why not hammer him in the face?’

‘Because you’re more likely to break your hand doing that.’

Dewey nodded. ‘Got it.’ He settled back, letting the feel of the car rule his movements. The biggest issue he’d had in the job was chilling on the machine. He liked speed, torque,
using
the vehicle – but in this line of work, it turned out that driving was 90 percent lay-back.

Victor made him nervous. He’d known guys back in the unit who were good at killing – who didn’t blink at it – but Victor was so . . .
smooth
.

‘Dewey . . .’

‘Yeah?’

‘How did you get into this business?’

Dewey thought he heard a touch of something in Victor’s voice – like someone trying to sound polite asking a garbage man how he became a philosophy professor.

‘You know . . . I knew somebody who knew somebody. Like that.’ He cruised past a car and got back into the right lane. ‘Listen, man . . . I don’t want to piss you off with my questions. I’m not gonna do this as long as you – I’m only in till I’m flush enough to get out – and I’m just trying to pick your brain is all. In the Army, you figure out once you’re in the shit that learning from the timers is how to stay in one piece – so that’s why the questions. You want me to stop – just say when.’

Victor turned round and flicked on the overhead light to check on the cargo. The bodies were still. He killed the light, faced front, and his thumb went to his cleft.

‘Les loups ne lisent pas,’ he said.

‘What’s that mean?’

‘
Wolves don’t read
.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘It’s a saying, Dewey. My father worked for the mob in Marseilles. He’d say it to me.’

‘Okay – but I still don’t get it.’

‘Your thoughts are always about the prey . . . and those around it. You act on instinct, and as you move on –
if
you move on – experience. You cannot be
taught
the important things. The only manual is what you have
done
.’ He tapped his forehead with a finger. ‘In here.’ His hand went back into his lap. ‘
Les loups ne lisent pas
.’

‘Wolves don’t read. I got it.’

Dewey let a Fiat cut him off without a response and made a right. Victor held the cigarette up before his eyes and studied the tip’s pulsing glow, as if all one needed to know was locked inside the fire.

‘And something else to understand,’ Victor said.

‘Okay . . .’

‘Do you remember I told you I had no
partners . . .
?’

‘Yeah.’

‘This is to say . . . in this job,
trust
makes things very – how do you say? – complicating?’

‘Complicated.’

‘Complicated. So you just hope for loyalty. That is all one can ask. In the rest of life, disloyalty is a common sin. In the job – it is . . . unacceptable to me.’

‘Kind of weird, isn’t it? To split it up like that?’

Victor sucked in a hit of smoke. His lips had a slight grin when he took the cigarette away.

‘If a friend betrays me, maybe I am sad. If
you
betray me, maybe I am dead.’

Dewey gave him a quick glance. He was wondering if Victor actually
had
any friends. He turned into a vast square, Place Denfert Rochereau, a roundabout where six streets converged – on every corner, a massive, ornate six or seven-floor building like V-shaped stone layer-cakes. In the center of the square stood a large statue of a lion, regal in its repose, its black copper gleaming with a coat of rain. Victor pointed his cigarette at it.

‘The Lion of Belfort. Beautiful, no?’

‘Lions are cool.’

‘Bartholdi. The same sculptor who made your Statue of Liberty. You have seen it?’

‘Just pictures. Never been to New York. Long way from Oklahoma. I never crossed the state line till I joined up.’ He turned off onto Avenue Rene Coty, going south. ‘Okay if I ask how your old man ended up?’

‘At sixty-one he retired to a small house with a garden in Provence . . . and died twenty years later with a bottle of wine in his lap.’

Victor flicked his butt out the window and watched the burst of sparks tumble down the street like a troop of golden pixies, each with its own precious moment of birth, each dying at its own singular time.

The drive took six hours.

In the sweep of the headlights, the bend in the gravel road ended and revealed the silhouette of the farmhouse, one hundred yards away. Cold, white light shone in two of the windows and bled out onto the ground. Dewey was not one for drama – but it was his first time here at night, and in the dark the place looked mean.

Victor pointed. ‘Go around and back it up to the door.’

Dewey slowed, and as they went past the front door it opened – and a figure stood in the doorway, made black and featureless by the interior light behind him.

‘Keep driving,’ said Victor.

‘Got it,’ said Dewey, and kept going.

Harry was clear-headed – one of the reasons surgeons liked propofol was because you came out of it fast, with hardly any fuzz or hangover. He knew he was strapped to a chair. He had watched dozens of Joneses twist and turn and suffer in one – and the full-circle, payback irony of it all was priceless. The gods had outdone themselves. Congratulations were in order all around.

He was wearing a smock and hood with holes for his eyes and mouth, which was taped shut. And he had no idea who the guy holding a large, angry hornet between two fingers was – but you didn’t need to be a shrink to see he was crazy.

Dalton bent down to him, ‘Huge, isn’t it? My travels on Google tell me it’s probably a Vespa mandarinia – the Asian giant hornet. The most venomous there is – they say a swarm attack can kill a man in minutes . . . anaphylactic shock – but I’ll be damned how they got here.’ He held up the index finger of his free hand. ‘Watch,’ he said, and moved it beneath the hornet and gave its abdomen a poke. The beast jabbed its stinger into the finger. Dalton showed no reaction.

Harry tried to tune the guy out so he could think. He didn’t know where he was, but he could see a field of wild lavender beyond a window of the room, which was old, wide-plank wood. It didn’t feel like Paris. He was clueless – but somebody had gone to a lot of trouble. This was pro from start to finish.

‘They can just keep on stinging, over and over.’ Dalton prodded the insect’s belly with his fingertip and the hornet stung him again. ‘See?’ He pulled the bottom edge of Harry’s hood a few inches away from the neck. ‘This is just to loosen you up a bit. Get rid of some of that adrenaline.’ He released the hornet under the hood. ‘They aren’t particularly aggressive unless provoked. Still, it’s best you try not to move.’

Harry felt the creature on him. The nasty buzz stopped and the thing began to crawl upward, and Harry’s hands fisted up as he tried to keep his facial muscles from twitching. He closed his eyes as the hornet crawled over them. When he opened them, he saw the man’s pale, smooth finger reach toward him and prod the hornet – and it was as if lightning struck him in the cheek. It brought tears to his eyes.

‘There are questions I have to ask you.’

Harry’s involuntary wince tightened his facial muscles – and the hornet took umbrage . . . and stung him again. His body went into a full electric-chair twitch, and a groan struggled to come out of his taped lips.

‘I said try not to move,’ said Dalton, and his palm swung up and smacked Harry on the temple, crushing the hornet. He took out his antique scalpel. ‘I’ll be using this as my primary tool.’ He put the instrument in Harry’s palm. ‘Go ahead. Hold it. It has a pleasing feel. Perfect balance.’

Harry’s face was on fire. He wished he could cry more . . . to douse the flames.

Dalton leaned down to him. ‘It’s remarkable how fate plays a hand. You see – you and I . . . We have a –
common bond
, of sorts.’ He grabbed the top of the hood and pulled it off. ‘It’s quite possible you already know who I am – but let me introduce myself. My name is Dalton.’

The name cut through Harry’s anguish like a scythe. Dalton the torturer, the man who cut off people’s lips with a rotary knife, IR’s ying to Geiger’s yang. Now he knew why he was in this chair – and for more reasons than he could count, he was okay with it.

‘I must tell you, Harry . . . your presence is unexpected – you weren’t part of the plan – but here you are, and you’re the best present under the Christmas tree.’

Dalton’s forefinger began to slowly tap at his upper lip’s cleft, like a metronome for thinking. It was a simple, habitual gesture – but something about its methodical, wind-up-toy action gave Harry the cold creeps.

For Dalton, acquiring Harry as an added element was serendipity at its most thrilling. It created an extra dimension to the scenario without having to change the mechanics in any way, and would amplify Dalton’s gravitational pull without any effort on his part. He would become the sun and Geiger the moon. Right now, he was conjuring Geiger’s face at the moment when he would first have a sense of the beautiful, secret structure that had been built around him. No one would appreciate it more than Geiger, but even the Inquisitor wouldn’t see what waited for him at the center of the game. Tap . . . tap . . . tap.
Come to Papa
.

Harry realized the utter bizarreness of things was actually buffering his fear. The monster bug out of a 1950s sci-fi film . . . the madman and his pet scalpel . . . There was a deep-sleep nightmarish feel to it all. But, Harry knew too much. He’d watched all those DVDs of Geiger’s sessions, dutifully transcribing – and he knew that pain had a way of making things very real. It was a fast-acting agent – and he knew it was on the way. He made as loud a mushy mutter as he could.