The Confessor (32 page)

‘I have a question,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Is it there all the time?’

The question settled down in her, like a lapdog, waiting for a response. She didn’t need to ask for clarification. She knew what he meant.

‘Yes, it’s always there.’

‘What do you do with it?’ he said.

‘I keep it at arm’s length. Close enough that I can see it out of the corner of my eye . . . but far enough away that it can’t sneak up on me.’ She turned to him. ‘But you don’t do that. You do something else.’

He turned to her. They were close enough that he could see a few tiny specks of hazel in the blue irises.

‘I . . . embrace it,’ he said. ‘I let it fill me up.’

‘And then there’s no room for anything else.’

She suddenly became acutely aware of her body – how it rested in the mattress, the blouse’s silk on her skin, the insistence in her pulse . . .

She wanted something from him – wanted to let go of herself and
take
something from him. Flesh, touch, breath, motion . . .

‘I need to leave soon, Christine. I’m behind schedule.’

She sat up and ran her hands back through her hair. ‘Yes,’ she said, and straightened her blouse. ‘I’ll make coffee.’

‘Black.’

‘Sugar?’

‘No.’

Geiger watched her go. She left like someone who was late for an appointment. His right side, where she had lain against him, was still warm. He would ice his shoulder once more before he left. There was no reason to go back to the hotel room.

‘Are you hungry?’ she called.

‘No.’

He scrubbed the steam off the mirror with his palm – he had lingered in the hot shower so the beard would be soft and pliant.

Five a.m., 3 July – the last time he had shaved. Almost nine months to the day – when he firmly held the reins of his life, deaf to echoes of a past, numb to sins of the present . . . when the walls between the inside and outside were staunch, uncompromised . . . and there was no Ezra, no betrayals, no revelations . . . no vengeful quests, no dead-eyed body in a shuttered store . . . no stirrings, no father and mother staking claim to their place amid tumbling memories . . . no pristine sense of intolerable wrongs awaiting redress . . .

Carmine’s words came back around to him.

‘
. . . Life owns your ass – from day one, cradle to grave. You don’t get it. You think you can choose whether you’re in or not . . . but you can’t . . .
’

He raised the razor he’d found in the medicine cabinet – the plastic disposable kind in a box of ten – to his soapy cheek, and started working the blade, half-inch downstrokes, slowly uncovering his face. There was no longer need for camouflage of any kind.

Outside the dining-room window the sky’s coy shimmer was a hint the rain had moved on and would not be coming back. Christine put Geiger’s coffee before him in a blue ceramic bowl – and he stared at it until Christine sat down with hers, cradled it in her palms and brought it to her lips.

‘Two hands,’ she said. ‘When in France . . .’

He copied her technique and sipped. She watched his newly revealed face for a sign of pleasure or satisfaction, but his features gave no evidence of either.

‘Feels good – without the beard?’

‘Cleaner. Lighter.’

Christine lowered her bowl. ‘Can I ask you a question?’

‘Yes.’

‘Beneath the surface, on the inside . . . Do you feel different things – at different times?’

Geiger blew softly on the coffee, curling the steam. ‘Christine . . . I have nothing to tell you about myself.’ He took another sip. ‘I’ll tell you something Harry once said. I overheard him speaking with a client. The man asked what I was like – and Harry told him it would be a waste of time describing me. He said – “Geiger’s like a mirror. What you would see isn’t what I see . . . or anyone else would see.”’

Christine put her hands on the table before her, entwining her fingers as one might as a preface to prayer.

‘Is that how
you
see yourself?’

‘That’s the point, Christine,’ he said. ‘I don’t see myself.’ He took a long drink of his coffee and put the bowl down. ‘May I see your knives?’

‘My knives?’

‘For cooking.’

Christine’s lips parted.
For cooking.
The near-weightlessness of the words had the force of a slap across the face.

‘They’re on the counter, next to the stove.’

Geiger stood up and went into the kitchen.

She turned her bowl slowly in her fingertips. The pictures she was seeing were terrible. She had held them off until now – but with things coming to an end, she could no longer keep them at bay. A fast-running stream of images – violent, bloody, vicious – different versions of suffering and brutality in some farmhouse in a tiny town.

Geiger returned and put a knife on the table – a short-bladed carver with a beechwood handle. The sight of it made Christine’s spine straighten.

‘Jesus . . . Is that what you are going to . . . to
use
?’

Geiger gave her only a second’s glance – and took out a roll of duct tape from his bag and sat back down.

‘I’m concentrating on what needs to be done, Christine. It’s one way Harry and I are alike. “Stickler for detail” is how he puts it.’

He began to wrap the handle – each revolution of tape precise, the application thicker and raised at both ends of the handle so the hand would settle easily and securely into the center. She watched his long, elegant fingers at work, calmly customizing the everyday for the most extreme of purposes.

‘Geiger . . . ?’

His hands came to rest, and he raised his gaze to her, and waited.

‘Have you ever killed someone?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but not the way you mean.’

‘Then how do you know you can – if you have to?’

She caught a moment’s shift in Geiger’s face. She couldn’t tell where it came from – the lips, jawline, the eyes.

‘You’ve come here to
save
lives, so how do you—?

‘Christine . . . This has been an intense experience for you – but it would be a mistake to feel you know me . . . at all.’

‘Or – perhaps you aren’t as unknowable as you think.’

‘. . . Perhaps.’

Geiger stood up and went to his bag.

‘What are you doing?’

He returned to the table with his iPad and began to type. ‘Harry kept everything in a secure data storage facility. Financial records, dossiers, session transcripts and videos.’ He finished typing, turned the tablet around and slid it over to her side. ‘Click on a file labeled “S.D.V.D.”’

The display showed a listing of ‘S.D.V.D.’ files – dozens and dozens of them, each with a pair of letters and a date.

‘Which one? There are so many . . .’

‘One hundred and twenty-one, not including Ezra. It doesn’t matter which one you choose.’

She scanned the entries. They started in 1999 – ‘S.D.V.D./JM/6-29-1999.’ The quantity alone was chilling to behold.
One hundred and twenty-one people.

‘Why do you want me to do this?’

Geiger picked up his coffee and took a long sip. ‘You asked me how I saw myself. I’m trying to let you see who I am.’ He put the bowl down. ‘They called me the Inquisitor.’

Christine looked up at him. ‘These are videos – of you?’

‘Yes.’

There was a hot infusion into her blood, a swift jet of anger her heart pumped into her veins. The world was too full of pain. Bursting at its seams with it. She had borne witness to it long enough on her own. She did not need his help.

‘That’s a miserable goddamn thing to do, Geiger.’ She pushed the iPad back to him. ‘I’m not going to look at these – and you can go to hell.’ She grabbed her bowl and marched into the kitchen.

Geiger’s gaze went down to the screen.

‘WS/3-17-1999’.

WS . . . Warren Sloan
.
He asked God why he had forsaken him.

‘PK/7-9-2002’.

PK . . . Paul Knowles
.
He fainted at the sight of the straight-edge razor.

One hundred and twenty-one moments when truth was dug up and dragged into the light, kicking and screaming in all its muddy, battered glory – and each at an indescribable cost. What atonement, how many tests and proofs, what
sine qua non
would lift him high enough to clear the reefs and make it to open water?

‘NB/10-20-2005’.

NB . . . Nico Bartelli
.
He kept repeating, ‘Do you know who the fuck I am?!’

‘EG/11-4-2009’.

EG . . . Edie Garson. She said she would fuck him anyway he liked if he didn’t hit her in the face.

He wondered if he could remember every name . . .

Christine’s voice sounded tempered and careful. ‘Do you want more coffee?’

‘Yes,’ he said, and picked up the knife and resumed his task.

He was outside on the patio smoking a cigarette. From her seat at the table, Christine could see his reflection in the glass of the patio door. Geiger’s leaving would transport her to a limbo of doubt and hope. She might spend the rest of her life wondering if they were all dead – turning at every jingle of the bell atop the café’s door to see if it was Harry walking in.

Geiger came back inside. ‘Time to go.’

‘Are you sure you don’t want me to drive you to the metro?’

‘Yes,’ said Geiger, and picked up his jacket. He put it on, being measured and methodical with his shoulder.

She stood up from the table. ‘Does it hurt?’

‘Yes, but it’s not a hindrance.’

He picked up his bag. She wondered if there was a gun inside. She suspected not, but was surprised to realize she was hoping there was.

‘What happens now?’ she said.

‘I take the train to Avignon. There are instructions for me at the station there.’

Christine started shaking her head back and forth, but her eyes never left him.

‘You going into all of this – having no idea what could happen . . . It’s
insane
. Can you see that?’

He zipped up his coat. ‘I see a beginning, middle, and end, Christine.’ He headed for the door – and she followed after him.

‘And what does
that
mean?’ She heard the edge to her question.

‘It’s how I see things – beginning, middle, end – and I focus on where I am in the process.’ At the door, he turned round to her. ‘It’s not insane, Christine. Thinking that you ever really know what’s ahead of you is an exercise in folly – so I don’t focus on the end till I get very close to it.’

. . . He remembered his mother reading to him – seated in her lap, his skinny, bony back nestled into her chest, her arms extended out and around him, holding the book before them, the scent of lavender and sense of peace inseparable from one another – and when she turned a page, her head tilting down so her lips could kiss the rim of his ear lightly . . .

‘You looked like you had a very faint smile just now,’ Christine said.

‘Did I?’

‘For a moment – yes.’

Geiger nodded. ‘I’ll have to take your word for it.’

She stepped in close to him – and her hand rose and rested on his smooth cheek. She was taking a long careful look at his face. It wasn’t often that you knew, in the moment, with complete certainty, that it would be the last time you ever saw someone – and after today, when she thought of him she didn’t want memory to smudge his features . . . or feelings to alter them. She wanted to remember him as he really was.

Geiger’s hand slowly came up to hers, and gently closed around it. The warmth of her skin was nearly narcotic.

‘I have to go now.’

Their hands descended together, entwined for a moment – and then she took a step back. He opened the door. The crisp morning air slid past him like a cat coming in from the cold.

‘Be safe, Geiger.’

‘Goodbye, Christine.’

She didn’t take her next breath until he’d gone and the door had shut with a soft click. She felt chilled from the cold, and the weariness, and the fear in her veins. She walked into the living room and picked up her sweater from the couch. As she put it on she stared at the old photograph she’d put in a frame last night and placed on the coffee table. It was of two people, taken from behind them at dusk – silhouettes of an adult and a very small child sitting side by side in a park, watching the sun go down behind dark hills across a river. It had always been Harry’s favorite shot of the two of them.

When he’d left Christine’s, he’d walked past the nearest metro station and continued on – wanting movement and the air’s chill.

. . . He remembered that the baby had died in his arms, a last fuzzy sigh signaling the end to its brief hours, and he had wondered if it knew it had lived at all. He remembered that his father had buried mother and child together, wrapped in the same sheet . . . and no words were spoken at the grave . . .

Something was heating up places inside him, bending them, like a blacksmith urging the hardest, coldest of things into new shapes. His mother. Gentle and bloodied and within him and lost.

. . . He remembered the pungent smell of gasoline and smoke when his father burned all her clothes in the fifty-gallon drum behind the cabin. He remembered his father’s decree – that neither mother nor sibling be mentioned again . . . that to speak or think of the weak was to invite weakness into their lives – and he remembered that his father had started building the special closet for him to sleep in the very next day. He wasn’t certain when the ritual of the razor had begun – but it had been soon . . .

He spent the rest of the walk to Gare de Lyon station trying to decide about Soames. It was like trying to hammer a nail into a blob of mercury. Making the call to her would mean keeping Victor close – but it could also limit his maneuverability down the line. If he didn’t make the call and went on alone, then soon enough Victor would have no reason to keep her alive . . . and an image barged into his mind – Victor stepping up behind an unsuspecting Soames, grabbing her by the hair, his arm swinging round and sinking a knife into her chest – and it slowed his steps to a dead halt. This wasn’t about fine-edged thought and strategy. It was thicker, messier – from the heart, not the head.