The Confessor (3 page)

‘You should get back in the truck now.’

‘C’mon, Dougie,’ said the woman. ‘Let’s go.’

‘In a sec.’ The driver was staring more intently now. ‘You’re not from around here – are you, man? We, uh – we drive around and, y’know, keep an eye on things in the nabe . . . and I don’t think I seen you before.’ He cocked his head like a Doberman getting a whiff of hamburger. ‘Hey . . . Are you a moozle? Cuz – you sorta look like one.’

Geiger felt the pulse in his temples ticking like a clock. ‘I don’t know what a moozle is.’

‘Sure ya do. Y’know . . .
moozle
. Towel-head. Mosque rat.’ The man shrugged. ‘A moozle.’ He looked back at the other two. ‘Looks kinda like one, don’t he?’

‘I guess,’ said the man in the passenger seat. ‘Sorta.’

‘I’m not a Muslim,’ said Geiger, ‘so you can go now.’

‘In a sec.’ The man started across the asphalt in a chummy shuffle. Geiger’s fingers started tapping against his thighs. The breath in his nostrils turned hot. The driver stopped inches from him and held up the bottle. ‘Have a drink, yeah? Just so there’s no hard feelings. I mean
moozles
can’t drink – but you’re not a moozle, so you can.’

‘I don’t drink.’

‘C’mon . . . not even a swig of Bud?’ His grin had a lazy droop to it, like his heart wasn’t really in it. His buddy stuck his head out of the passenger window.

‘Are we cool here, Dougie – or what?’ he asked.

Geiger felt the memory of the hundreds of fates held in his hands – the sweat of fear on skin, muscles tensing in alarm, wills succumbing to his touch. His inheritance, his expertise – the creation of pain . . . the construction of suffering . . . the extraction of truth . . .

‘Douglas,’ Geiger said, ‘get in the truck and leave.’

The last pretense of amity abandoned the man’s face. ‘Well how ’bout
you
get on your fucking camel . . .’ He planted his forefinger in Geiger’s chest. ‘. . . and—’

Movement was so fast it precluded the man from making another sound. Geiger grabbed the collar and pulled him in, while his other hand latched onto a wrist and spun him around as he twisted the arm up behind the man. The bottle shattered at their feet.

Geiger’s right arm locked round the neck and they stood pressed together, chest to back. Every time the man tried to move, Geiger hitched the arm higher – and the man stopped.

The young woman jumped out to the street. She wore a powder-blue version of the driver’s sweatshirt. ‘Dougie!’

The driver started to speak, but Geiger’s forearm tightened round the throat and silenced him, and then he spoke very softly into the man’s ear.

‘Don’t talk. Don’t move. Relax.’ There was a light touch to the words, an almost paternal promise in them.
Don’t worry. There’s nothing to be afraid of.

The man riding shotgun got out, nervously grinding a fist into his other palm.

‘Let him go!’ said the woman. She reached into the front seat, and then straightened back up with an aluminum bat in hand. The green paint was scuffed in places. ‘Right now, motherfucker!’

The man in Geiger’s grasp chuckled coarsely. ‘Meet my girlfriend, Abdul.’

Geiger was studying her – the straightness of her spine, how her fingers moved in a repetitive motion around the bat’s neck. She knew the feel of it. She’d used it before.

The woman shot a look at her friend. ‘Let’s do this, Jamie.’ He nodded, and the two started forward. Five strides, at the most.

Geiger leaned to the driver’s ear. ‘Douglas . . . we have a change of plans.’

‘Gonna let me go – huh, asshole?’

Geiger shifted his forearm, fingers curling stiffly, and dug into the front of the man’s neck above the clavicle. The man’s brain received an instant message from the brachial plexus – of a sudden, massive shock to the nervous system – and he blacked out and went rag-doll limp. Geiger’s forearm kept him from falling. The others stopped with a synchronized flinch, as if they’d run into an invisible force-field.

‘Jesus Christ . . .’ slipped out of the other man.

The girlfriend raised the bat. ‘Motherfucker! What’d you do to him?!’

‘Douglas is unconscious.’ He felt the smooth march of blood, saw the darkest part of him watching it all. The Inquisitor nodded at him.
There are numerous applications of pain.
‘You both need to get back in the truck.’
There is pressure, blunt force, application of intense heat and cold, manipulation of joints . . .
‘Do what I tell you.’

The woman put the bat on her shoulder. Confusion and awe tugged at an eyebrow.

‘Who the fuck
are
you?’

Geiger parsed her timbre and cadence and found as much fear as fury, which was a good thing.

‘Put the bat down, get in the truck – and close the doors. When I’ve gone, give Douglas a few slaps on the cheeks and move his head side to side. He’ll wake up.’

The second man was shaking his head like a bystander at the scene of an accident.

‘Did you two hear what I said?’ Geiger’s voice was that of a patient teacher in a rowdy classroom, and it made his students look at him with something akin to dread.

‘Motherfucker,’ snarled the woman, and dropped the bat. The second man gratefully took it as a cue, and they walked to the truck, got in and slammed the doors.

Geiger dragged the body to the corner farthest from the truck, watching them watch him. He lowered the driver to the sidewalk and propped him against a lamppost. He could smell oily smoke starting to crowd the air. A second fire engine’s siren called out to the first, like a beast seeking a mate. Something was burning down close by.

Geiger put his earbuds back in place and resumed his run. He took a different route each time – and had another half-hour before he got there. Dylan’s sandpaper rasp was in his ears.
‘Something is happening here and you don’t know what it is – do you, Mr. Jones?’

In this jam-packed, crazy-quilt, rackety part of the city, the
crack!
jolting Harry Boddicker out of his doze could have been any number of things – a car backfire, a shout, a gunshot – but his mind thought the sound was a salvo of fireworks . . . because the dream he’d been trapped in, as was often the case, was about July Fourth. He’d fallen asleep in the folding chair on the fire escape outside his fourth-floor walkup on Henry Street in Chinatown – the perch where he now observed life on Planet Earth. He could have been a gargoyle on a ledge peering down at the shifting, joyful madness.

He’d had two reasons for making Chinatown his new home. The density of people on the streets gave him hope that on the rare times he went out his odds for anonymity would be bettered – and his favorite dim sum restaurant was a block away. Still, the world had become much too small a place – so small his hideaway life seemed little more than a futile postponement of the inevitable. They would find him.
They
might change in personage – Hall, Mitch and Ray were dead – but they would all be very good at their job, and someday he’d get a tap on the shoulder or a sap on the skull because, as Geiger had said –
they never stop
. And a day after Geiger had spoken those words he was dead.

Harry’s sadness had a sharp, fine edge. For nine months, it had been honed by the loss of Geiger, his partner and only friend, and Lily, his sister. It was a shard lodged within him, cutting him with every movement – even as subtle as a breath. And sleep offered no respite. Awake, he had mastered the skill of squelching the images when they sprang up – but he was helpless in dreams to escape the replays of that July Fourth night . . .

. . . The livid sky punctured by pyrotechnics . . . Geiger standing at the dock’s end, battered, bloodied, watching the rowboat drift into the Hudson River with Hall and Ezra . . . then Lily rising from the depths, grabbing the boat’s gunwale, capsizing it . . . everyone disappearing beneath the surface . . . and Geiger diving in as Harry hobbled down the dock, helpless, useless – watching the union of fate and chaos . . . the river foaming with turmoil – then one gasping soul rising up and swimming to shore. The boy. Ezra. With the gym bag of torture videos clutched in his hand . . .

Without Geiger to stabilize Harry’s orbit, without the work and reason to put on his stickler-for-detail hat – time was thoughtless. It made him vulnerable to pricks of memory, and his exiled past had sensed its chance, mustered its army, and overthrown the present. Now he spent much of his life in the company of ghosts, a melancholy congregation – those who had left by choice, and those who’d had no say in the matter. They looked to him. They asked unanswerable questions.

The buzzer rang inside and Harry leaned over the railing and looked down. The delivery man was on the stoop. He rose with a grunt and stepped through the window, into the living room, went to the door and pressed the intercom.

‘That you, Cheng?’

‘Yes, Mr. Jones, sir.’

He hit the buzzer. He’d come to the conclusion that mayhem was cheap – the gods had overstocked inventory and tossed it down as often as possible. He lived on the cash in his Citibank safe deposit box, addicted to Pepcids, fighting a return to his pre-Geiger drinking form – and hadn’t been back to his apartment in Brooklyn Heights, his cherished sanctum, since the Independence Day massacre. It wasn’t a stretch to think there was a file with Harry’s name and address in the database of some ice-for-blood honcho in the CIA or NSA or some other lethal three-letter cadre. He could see the lush trees lining his old street, rolling out their thick shadows – and imagined someone standing cloaked within them, staring at his second-floor windows, waiting for his return.

He craved the company of others. Early on he’d considered getting a job, putting himself in the crosshairs of the public eye, just to pass some time with people – but then he’d imagined the job interview, sitting across from someone perusing his résumé.

‘You have a BA from CCNY, 1989 – superior skills in computer programming – reporter for the
New York Times
from 1991 till 1997, worked in Obituaries from ’97 until 2001. Very impressive, Mr. Jones. Have you been employed since then?’ And Harry could answer – ‘Well, yes. I was a partner in a very successful entrepreneurial venture. IR.’

‘“IR”? I’m not familiar with that field.’

‘
Information Retrieval
. Our start-up capital was provided by Carmine Delanotte, a Mafia don – and I was the business manager for the greatest torturer in the world. So . . . do I get the job?’

Harry scratched at his beard – he’d grown it for camouflage, but hated its itch – and looked glumly around the room: the buckled walls, the east-west crack in the ceiling, the meagerly stuffed corduroy chair, the folding card table with his MacBook, the dented Sears mini-fridge and stained two-burner oven of unknown origin.

‘Long fucking way from Brooklyn Heights, Harry.’

Having conversations with himself was another new habit. He missed talking to someone, because being heard was being known. Most of all, he missed Geiger – their diner breakfasts two or three times a week, their mutual, obsessive dedication to detail, the man’s unworldly calm, his unknowableness right until the end – a man whose genius was acquiring truth through torture but who gave his life to save a child he barely knew.

Eleven years.

What they had done was always with him now. The list of those who had suffered was long. That most had stepped out of a catalogue of the seven sins, and that Geiger had never shed blood – those facts were only a weak salve for Harry’s shame. Still – had anyone asked, he wouldn’t have denied he keenly missed the ritual of the work. Being the gatekeeper with those who sought Geiger’s gifts . . . using his own singular skills to create the dossiers of potential clients and targets – navigating the internet’s dark alleys in search of pieces of a life, then stitching them together so Geiger had a detailed picture of who he would be dealing with before accepting a job . . . negotiating what price truth was trading at on a given day with the client . . . creating transcripts from the interrogation sessions’ DVDs, looking away as often as possible as he typed . . . and collecting his 25 percent, tax free . . .

There was a knock. Harry turned the three locks and opened up, leaving the extra-long chain he’d put on attached. The extra two inches of links allowed a large-enough gap for a bag of dim sum to fit through. He stayed behind the door out of sight.

‘Cheng?’

‘It me, Mr. Jones, sir.’ A brown paper bag came through the opening. ‘Usual, Mr. Jones, sir.’

Harry took the bag, fished a five and a ten out of his pocket and held them out below the chain, and a hand took it.

‘Thank much, Mr. Jones, sir.’

‘You’re welcome. So, uh – how’s business, Cheng?’

‘Deliver all time, Mr. Jones. All time. Never stop. Business good.’

‘That’s good. Good to hear.’ Harry sighed. ‘How’s Mr. Han doing?’

‘He fine.’

‘Is the restaurant gonna do that—’

‘Must go now, Mr. Jones. Busy. Very very busy. Bye.’

Harry heard footsteps go slowly down the steps, and smiled. Cheng wasn’t in a hurry. He just didn’t want to stand in the hall talking to the weird guy who never took the latch off. He flipped the locks, sat at the table and took the Styrofoam box and plastic fork out of the bag. The nightly ritual – closing his eyes, opening the lid, taking in the aroma of his cha siu baau. He was not beyond certain pleasures, few though they might be.

An icon of a washing machine began to glow on his laptop. ‘
Clean. Dry?’
appeared beneath it. He tapped it and stared at the delicate profile of Ezra Matheson, sitting in his bedroom. Harry could see the boy’s violin lying on the bed behind him.

‘Hey, kid,’ he said.

Ezra’s face softened with feeling. ‘Hi, Harry.’

A brake pressed down on Harry’s pulse, slowing it, giving each beat a richer thud. Each time they spoke, it struck Harry how the nine months had changed the boy. It was more than the unstoppable bloom of youth. The hollow curve of his cheeks looked ill-matched to his widening face. The dark under his eyes stole some of the luster from their bright emerald. Harry was loath to accept it. Ezra looked
haunted
.