The Confessor (33 page)

He heard Corley’s voice –
Geiger . . . Do you feel disconnected from people?
– and his answer had been –
Martin, if you’ve never been plugged in, you can’t be disconnected.

Something had changed.

The
swoosh–swoosh
of the jump rope kept at a steady pace – four snaps a second. Fast enough to push her heart without going to the level where she got zoned and thoughtless. Beyond the window, there was hardly any traffic on the street. Only three of the windows of Geiger’s hotel were lit up.

Victor had called to say he was on his way back. He hadn’t found Dewey or the car. As soon as Zanni hung up she had decided, big picture, that nothing would change. They’d go a man short and play it out . . . assuming Geiger wasn’t already looking out a window thirty thousand feet up in the sky. For now, she was going to put her brother in a box, along with her dread – she had seen what Geiger could do – and the pictures in her head. If and when the job was done, if Dewey hadn’t shown up she’d look inside it – but until then she had to have a lockdown on her focus.

She switched to an alternate-foot speed-step to double up the work. Feet touching lightly, the scene out the window bouncing up and down before her, her huffing in her ears. Hard as she tried she couldn’t see Geiger as a killer. Not by nature – and not situationally. If he had compromised Dewey, why murder him? Where was the need? And then she thought of Hall and his men going after him . . . and no one came back.

She had put the Nextel cell on the window sill directly in front of her – and when it rang, she dropped the jump rope in mid-swing and stared at the phone, chest heaving, pulse knocking in her temples. She let it ring a second time, tamping down her breath, and then picked it up.

‘Geiger . . . ?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m about to get on the train to Avignon.’

‘So – we’re going to do this together?’

‘That was the plan, Soames – wasn’t it?’

The question squeezed Zanni’s gaze into a squint. ‘Yes, it was.’ She wiped the sweat away from her eyes with her free wrist. ‘When do you get there?’

‘One fifty-six.’

‘We’ll leave right away. It takes twice as long by car.’

‘I’ll call once I get the instructions from the locker.’

‘Okay.’ She was digging through her emotions to figure out why she didn’t feel relieved.

‘You didn’t think I would call, Zanni.’

‘I wasn’t sure. I saw you go out last night . . .’

‘I know.’

‘. . . so yes – I wasn’t certain if you were coming back.’

‘I saw some of the city. I’ve never been to Paris before.’

She allowed herself a thin smile. ‘Anything in particular you enjoyed?’

‘I have to get on the train. I’ll call from Avignon.’

‘Okay.’

She clicked off, headed into the bathroom and turned the shower on – and took a moment to study herself in the mirror. The violet eyes shined back at her. Sometimes when she looked at her image she could still see the tomboy – driving the tractor, outrunning all comers, beating up Dewey whenever she felt like it just because she felt like it.

She pulled off her T-shirt and shorts and got into the shower, and made the water as hot as she could handle. She was one step closer.

Victor came into his room, tossed his coat on the bed and sat down, and started massaging his knees. All the walking had kicked up the arthritis. He could see his father in his rocking chair, doing the same ritual nightly.
Le fléau de Bran
, he used to call it. The de Bran curse. One of the many things he’d passed on to his son . . .

He rose with a grunt and opened the connecting door, and heard Zanni’s shower running. Steam drifted out from the open bathroom door.

‘Zanni . . . I’m back!’

‘Go get the other car and bring it around front! Geiger just called. He’s on the train to Avignon!’

He walked back into his room. His thumbnail took up its post in the cleft of his chin, up and down, as he parsed the information. Geiger was going to play this out after all – and Victor did some rearranging of the main unknown.

Dewey.

Was Geiger involved in his disappearance? If yes, then it created more unknowns. How much might Geiger have gotten out of Dewey? Did Geiger know the true nature of things? If yes, that created still more unknowns. Is that why Geiger had called? Keep your friend close and your enemy closer?

His scuffed old traveling bag lay open on a small bench. Morocco . . . 1987 . . . at a bazaar in Tangier . . . the German banker who’d skipped with millions . . . tossed off the roof with a phony suicide note in his pocket. Victor looked round the room, picked up his vest, lay it on top of the neatly folded clothes in the bag, and closed the ties. He was always ready to leave someplace. He headed for the door with it, then paused, and put his bag down.

‘I am on my way! Two minutes! I just have to take a piss!’

The train to Avignon was a sleek, slope-nosed TGV Duplex, and Geiger had gone to the upper level and settled into an aisle seat with a view of the stairs. There were a dozen riders in the car with him. During the ride south, he’d paid little attention to the view outside, but stared at the patterns in the seatback in front of him and considered scenarios for a future that he was racing toward at a smooth two hundred miles an hour.

He stepped off the train onto the platform to be met by his own reflection in the curved glass and steel walls of the Gare d’Avignon terminal. The sun was a burning white blotch on the glass and the sky was clear. He hoped the weather held.

He doubted Dalton had anyone on the train with him, but as he neared the entry he knelt down with his bag and feigned a search of its contents, catching the reflections of those who disembarked as they went into the terminal – a young mother with a pair of cranky boys in tow, a bald old man with a tobacco-stained moustache, three glum teenaged boys going back to their school . . .

Inside, the main hall was flanked by towering walls that curved gracefully inward and met to form a cathedral-like arch of glazed glass. Strips of sunlight coming through the steel slits lay across the floor like bars of glowing paint. Geiger stopped and looked up, slowly turning in a circle, giving himself the gift of a moment to take in the striking, elegant angles – then headed down the corridor. There were plenty of people about – hustling for trains, huddled beneath the large schedule board, lined up at a café for bread and coffee – and then he sensed a body moving toward him from behind.

‘Monsieur? Pardon, monsieur . . .’

The flat, nasal voice had a French accent straight out of Rosetta Stone. Geiger turned. The man wore a checkered flannel shirt and khaki slacks that said – or meant to say – Farm Belt tourist. He had a jacket with its red ‘
CHURCH OF CHRIST BOWLERS
’ logo slung over his shoulder, a camera round his neck, and looked very unhappy.

‘Uh . . . Est-ce que vous – uh – savez où est . . . Uh . . .’ His vocabulary failed him, and with a mutter he pulled an English-to-French dictionary from his back pocket and started paging through it, licking his thumb as he did. ‘Pardon . . . Un moment . . .’

Geiger was letting it play so he could get a read. The man looked fit and hard for forty-something, and his nose had been badly broken at some time in the past. He was a definite possible.

‘Ah!’ said the man, tapping the page. ‘Bureau des
objets trouvés
!’ He looked back up hopefully. ‘Objets trouvés, monsieur?’

‘I don’t speak French.’

The man’s face split open with a toothy, jack-o’-lantern grin. ‘American! That’s great! Oh Lord, thank you!’ He reached out and gave Geiger’s arm a short, brisk shake of camaraderie. ‘Calvin Haas – Bellevue, Nebraska –
really
pleased to meet you. Praise God.’

Geiger nodded.

‘Listen . . . What I was trying to say was – do you know where the
Lost and Found
is? I left my wallet somewhere, or dropped it . . .’ He flashed a mortified grin and shrugged. ‘. . . or the pick-pockets saw the dumb tourist coming a mile away – right?’

It was the salt-in-the-wound grin and shrug that sold Geiger. The man was the real thing. A sad-sack with a big heart and small vocabulary. And no wallet.

‘I believe I saw a sign, Calvin.’ Geiger pointed down the hall. ‘That way.’

‘Yeah? Well thanks, man. Really.’ He smiled, and started away. ‘Wish me luck.’

‘Good luck, Calvin.’

Geiger was looking for a sign with the term he’d found online –
consigne à bagages
. The arrow pointed left. He felt loose-limbed, smooth, in the flow of things. Soon the speed of time would start to shift – racing faster, slowing to a crawl, stuttering to a dead stop, revving up again . . . It would be like rodeo riding – trying to stay in the saddle, react to the beast with body and mind, and not get thrown.

The lockers, six rows of three compartments painted a bright teal, were in a shadowed, recessed stretch of wall. Geiger took the red-nubbed locker key from his pocket. Locker 27 was at the end, the middle compartment. He turned to have a look around, and waited till the vicinity was relatively person-free, then put the key in and opened the locker. Inside was a letter-sized envelope and a small wooden box – the kind one would find on top of a bedroom dresser filled with earrings or rings. Geiger took out the envelope and pulled a single sheet of typewritten paper from it.

Geiger reached into the locker and took out the box. It was made of polished teak, three by two and a half inches, the lid decorated with an intricate oval mosaic of tiny nacre and sapphire diamond-shaped inlays. He ran his fingertips across the design. The craftsmanship was superb. The artisan had been a patient, passionate man – a stickler for detail, as Harry liked to say. Geiger turned the box upside down. Etched into the bottom in gold were three initials – DJS – and a date – 1815. What would DJS think – that two centuries later his beautiful creation was being admired by a kindred soul . . . and filled with some cruel, unthinkable memento?

Geiger grasped the lid between thumb and forefinger and lifted it off. The inside was lined with chartreuse felt, worn in spots – and laid out on it in a row were four circles of skin, each about the diameter and thickness of a penny. Geiger could tell they were from a human palm by the pronounced creases in the flesh. Some were parts of life-lines. Each circle had a letter etched in it, in gold, much like the bottom of the snuff box. Read left to right – U . . . S . . . U . . . S.

Geiger put the top back on and slid the box in a pocket, then took his iPad out of his bag and Googled ‘usus’. It was Latin, and there were many usages – legal term, form of matrimony, participle, and the most common – a noun, whose first definition was ‘skill, advantage, expertise’.

Expertise
.

The thing that bound them together. The skill and practice of a dark art. The echoes of suffering forever drifting in their heads. The willful tainting of the spirit. Dalton sought a final session – and who else could it be with? In a very real sense, Dalton
needed
him. It could be no one else. Geiger understood that Dalton’s madness had clarity, a creature dwelling in a house built with detail and purpose, but the angles were all askew – tilted walls and sloping floors, halls that dead-ended, doors that opened onto nothingness . . .

He tore the paper into pieces and dropped them into a refuse bin. It would be at least three hours before Soames and Victor arrived. He’d get coffee and a piece of fruit, and think for a while. Now that he had his instructions, there were a few things that would need tending to.

Matheson was seeing it all in crisp, Technicolor playback – Ezra up on the stage like a miniature man in his little suit and bow-tie, eight-year-old fingers coaxing sweetness and soul from the violin’s strings. Bach, ‘Air on a G String’ – and now, as then, Matheson’s eyes grew warm with tears and he felt a fullness and sense of grace he rarely knew . . .

. . . and Harry’s clogged snoring suddenly kicked back in and Matheson looked over at him. He was lying on his side on the mattress. The swelling in the cheek and temple seemed to be going down, but the mean, purpled splotches refused to follow suit, and Matheson wondered if some infection had taken root. In the last few days he’d thought about dying more than in the whole of his life – ways to die, how much pain might be involved, how fast or slow the process, the order of their deaths . . . and whether he’d want to be first or last.
‘After you, Alphonse.’ ‘No, you first, my dear Gaston . . .’

To gain some traction in a mind slippery with pain, he’d kept forcing himself to examine a two-part question: In the end, if Geiger arrived and Dalton agreed to set one of them free, and
only
one, who should it be? And if the moment arose when it was in anyone’s power besides Dalton to decide, who should make that choice? Matheson had tried to come at the dilemma from different starting points, but always arrived at the same conclusion.

He slowly raised his leg and, once again, studied the fetter and chain round his ankle – and the stories of wolves and coyotes gnawing off a limb to free themselves from a steel-jaw trap paid another visit. And there was the man pinned down by a boulder in a canyon who cut off half his arm . . . They made a movie about him, but Matheson couldn’t remember the name.

For years he’d thought it a high-percentage bet his death would be a private affair, carefully and anonymously planned by strangers, and undiscovered. Veritas Arcana would go dark, and there would be some slow-simmering concern, whispers and rumors, perhaps speculation in the media – but no resolution would arrive, no evidence would be found. Ezra would be the last holdout, as much out of obstinance as hopefulness, but as the days without his father’s e-mails and apologetic IMs stretched out the boy would come to accept the truth – because he’d learned too well, and much too young, that there is power that corrupts and destroys without hesitance. This was the legacy his father had left him.