The Confessor (37 page)

‘Ezra . . . I can’t just leave this to a man I’ve never met – not if it’s about your father’s safety. And Harry’s too. There are people who know how to deal with this.’

‘Yes, they do – but that’s the point, Mom. We don’t know if they’re gonna be the good guys or the bad guys. We could end up helping guys like Hall find them . . .’ He tried to scrunch around a few degrees, but couldn’t. ‘And the good guys wanna put Dad in prison anyway.’ He knew it was a lame comment, but he was running out of ways to try and dissuade her.

‘I can’t
not
do anything,’ she said. ‘And if it’s a choice between your father going to prison or dying, then I’ll take that chance.’

‘Well, since when do you care what happens to Dad?’

His mother flinched. It wasn’t so much the force of the blow as the tender spot it hit.

‘That is a really shitty thing to say, Ez – and you know it.’

He hadn’t meant to hurt her. He wasn’t really even mad at her. But he knew he was right and it was making him crazy. He felt like a war vet trying to explain the nature of battle to one who’d never served. He’d been in the midst of it. He’d seen men die, he’d learned the cold rules of treachery.

He couldn’t quite relinquish his scowl, but it wrinkled with contrition. ‘You’re right, Mom. I’m sorry I said that.’

She cocked her head, and then gave him a soft smile.

‘Ez . . . I’ve never made believe I understand what you went through – not for one second. You thought you were going to die . . . and he saved your life – and I don’t know what that feels like either.’ She pulled her hand up out of the crunch and ruffled his hair. ‘Just so you know I think about it.’

‘I know you do, Mom.’

‘So let’s do this and see what they have to say.’

Ezra sighed, and shook his head. ‘I love you, Mom – but you don’t get it. What they
say
doesn’t count.’

The laser rangefinder in the binoculars read ‘257 FT/44 DEG’ – focused on the only window of the south end of the farmhouse, three feet wide and four feet high. Inside, all that was visible was a small wooden table with a vase full of lavender against a wall of time-yellowed mortar.

Zanni lowered her binoculars. The three of them were standing atop the hill between two trees.

‘The south window could be any kind of room,’ Zanni said. ‘I can’t tell.’

Victor continued peering through his binoculars. ‘Front door looks like old wood. Casement windows.’ At this stage, it was the Inquisitor’s ear that listened to each statement Victor made – and he could hear the echo of polished guile like a single, barely skewed note in a symphony of a hundred players. And he wondered how Victor would have fared in a session – and decided it would have been a long, exhausting event.

The house was old, made of pine, a single level. There was a twenty-foot-wide apron of grass around the front and sides. A few yards from the back of the house was a small shed, a square garden and then a field of heather – and stretching out to the north, south, and east the forsaken vineyards, their four-foot-high rows of dead, twisted plants like markers in a graveyard. Once the trio came out of the trees, that would be their only cover – and they would have to crouch or crawl to make use of it.

‘Most likely,’ said Geiger, ‘there are five or six rooms, three weight-bearing interior walls. A house this old, the inside walls are probably mortar with thin wood slats eighteen to twenty-four inches apart. They might not stand up to a good pounding at the right spots.’

He lowered the binoculars and turned to see both Victor and Zanni staring at him with matching, cockeyed expressions.

‘I know how to build things,’ he said, and handed the binoculars back to Victor.

Zanni put her pair around her neck and pointed. ‘I’m going a little west to see if there’s a better view of the back.’

The two men watched her walk away. Victor took out his Gitanes.

‘She doesn’t allow me a smoke near her,’ he said, and offered the pack to Geiger. Geiger slid one out, Victor took one, flicked his lighter and lit them up. Geiger watched Zanni’s graceful form disappear within the trees.

‘You’ve been at this a long time, Victor.’

Victor’s smile was like that of a mourner speaking fondly of the deceased. ‘I sometimes think
too
long – but then they come to me with another job.’ He shrugged. ‘We do what we know, yes?’

Geiger took a deep drag on his smoke. ‘Have you ever met Dalton? Made a delivery to a job he was working?’

‘No. But one hears of him over the years . . . as I had of you. The Inquisitor, yes? Zanni has told me what he did to you – and what you did to him. It strikes me, Geiger – it is a most courageous thing you are doing. How many men of ten would make this choice, I could not say.’

‘Choice is not a word I would use, Victor.’

‘No?’ Victor studied Geiger openly, his interest clearly sincere. ‘I would not have thought the Inquisitor would act out of sentiment.’

‘I’m retired.’

Geiger took another pull on his cigarette. Each time he raised his hand to his lips, he felt the very slightest pull of the two six-inch-long strips of duct tape he had fixed horizontally across his chest to hold Christine’s knife in place, in the dent of the sternum between his pectorals. He’d put on a sweater when getting dressed this morning to help hide the customized handle.

Victor dropped his cigarette butt and started mashing it into the pine needles. ‘May I ask . . . ? Why did you crush Dalton’s fingers?’

‘I decided that he should retire too.’

Victor looked back up at him. Any hint of antipathy or irony was not to be found there. Nor in his voice.

‘Well,’ Victor said, ‘it would seem he is – how do you say? – back in business.’

The surrounding quiet bordered on silence. There was a small congregation of thin, flowing clouds in the sky. The sun looked pale and tired, nearing the end of its shift, and above it, to the west, was the moon’s ghost. It would be a bright, huge golf ball in the night sky.

She could see the back of the house clearly from here. Three windows with their curtains drawn, two others that were boarded up, a back door, and an overhang with a small, grey Peugeot parked beneath it. The little shed was corrugated steel.

Zanni lowered the glasses and leaned against a tree. Her mind was like the inside of a hive – a thousand thoughts buzzing, coming and going.

Dewey was dead.

Cause of death – Geiger.

She was waiting to be hit with something primal – but felt only a light, fuzzy melancholy settling around her. It was true they had shared very little for a long time – that things other than love connected them – need on Dewey’s part, and an odd sense of obligation on hers that she’d never taken time to understand. But he was still her brother. Shouldn’t there be something more? Had she become so skilled at censoring her feelings that she couldn’t feel them at all? A cold wave of grief? A pang of outrage?

And what of retribution?

What had Geiger done to him – before killing him? The question brought back flickering pictures of the Inquisitor at his dark trade – and she clamped her eyes shut, wiping them away. All that would have to wait. She knew where her focus had to land.

When her cell had rung in the hotel room and she’d heard Geiger’s voice on the line, she’d felt that cool rush of reacquired control, of misplaced pieces settling back into their proper spots. But Geiger had worked some sort of alchemy – turning the hard, precise angles of the scenario pliant and unpredictable. Now there was a decision she would have to make quickly, almost on the run – because time had become an unstable element, about to reach critical mass.

As had Victor.

They had moved deeper into the woods, in the cover of the pines, as they came back down the hill.

‘The two windows in back that are boarded up . . . Strong possible that’s where he has them,’ said Zanni. She checked their progress on the iPad’s blue grid and stopped. ‘Closest point is here.’

She turned and walked in the direction of the house, went into a crouch for the last ten yards and then lay down on her stomach near the edge of the trees. The men joined her, one on each side. Geiger felt the ground press the knife’s taped handle into his chest.

The sun was on the horizon, and dusk was soaking up the light from the sky like a sponge. It would be dark in half an hour, and the moon was already growing light-bulb bright.

Zanni and Victor raised their binoculars to their eyes.

‘Geiger,’ she said. ‘What about a kill-shot if we have one?’

‘I don’t like it.’

Zanni brought her glasses down. ‘Go on.’

‘Dalton didn’t snatch Matheson and Harry on his own. He has at least one, maybe two or more people working for him.’ He leaned forward and looked past Zanni to Victor. ‘Doesn’t that sound right to you, Victor?’

Victor lowered his binoculars. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Absolument.’

‘And where are they?’ said Geiger. ‘Almost certainly – inside. Right?’

Victor nodded. ‘I would think – yes. It only makes sense.’

‘Zanni . . . Taking down Dalton from out here could mean the next thing that happens is someone inside kills Matheson and Harry. Victor . . . Isn’t that what you would do?’

‘Perhaps, yes. That could also make sense.’

‘If they’d seen your face, that would be reason to kill them . . .’

‘Yes.’

The two men could have been discussing their preferred stitches for knitting a scarf.

Geiger’s gaze settled back on Zanni. ‘That isn’t why I came here. You know that.’

Zanni watched the stone-gray eyes. There was no hint there that he’d just put a brazen play on Victor – literally an in-your-face performance, pushing buttons, toying with minds. Having a discussion with Victor –
about Victor
. It made her wonder how long it had taken Geiger to make Dewey give up his secrets.

‘All right,’ she said.

Geiger sat up. ‘We move in separately from three different entries. As you said, Zanni . . . It will give us the most coverage and discovery in the shortest time. But . . .’ His fingers came to life on his knees, playing a slow beat. ‘If either of you finds Dalton – you are not to kill him.’

He turned his head.
Click
. Then he took Zanni’s binoculars from her, lay back down, and trained the glasses on the house.

Harry was making a list. The Top Ten Best Days of his life, in no particular chronological order. The first five had been easy.

. . . Losing his virginity at eighteen with his girlfriend, Abby, at her parents’ apartment while watching
Raiders of the Lost Ark
on HBO. His performance had been light years from stellar, but he felt terrific that he’d finally gotten it out of the way.

. . . Watching Sophie come into the world at Lenox Hill Hospital after Christine had twisted and growled ‘Merde!’ through twenty-three hours of labor. Around hour thirteen he’d started begging her to agree to a C-section, or at least an epidural, but she’d refused – and, between extraordinarily inventive curses, had informed the kind and fretful obstetrician that she would pull out his liver with her bare hands if he listened to Harry.

. . . His finding out, four months into his first post-college job – as a researcher at the
Times
– that his elders had given him the nickname ‘Shovel’ in honor of his remarkable talent for digging up information. He could never have guessed how that skill would serve him in the future.

. . . The night early on in the courtship, when he and Christine were sitting in his small, cluttered living room at Seventy-eighth Street reading different sections of the newspaper. He had looked up to discover her staring at him. ‘What?’ he’d said. ‘I had a hard time at work today,’ she’d answered. ‘Why?’ he’d asked. ‘I missed you, Harry. All day long. Tu m’as manqué.’

. . . The night in Central Park when Geiger had come out of the rain and saved his life – and made him realize, as pitch-black, fucking miserable and self-destructive as he was, that he really didn’t want to die.

‘Harry . . .’ said Matheson.

Harry opened his eyes. Matheson was on his feet, turning and stretching and bending as best he could, trying to loosen up his stiff, aching body.

‘Yeah? What is it?’

‘Nothing. The position you were lying in, I couldn’t tell if you were breathing. I just wanted to see if you were alive.’

‘I was making a list. The ten best days of my life.’

Matheson leaned back against the wall. It looked as if he’d have fallen down if he hadn’t.

‘And the reason you’re making this list . . . ?’

‘Feels good. Makes you think about all this great stuff. Gets you back there . . . you remember things – how something felt, how somebody looked . . .’

‘Are you getting ready to die, Harry?’

‘Yeah, guess I am.’ Any amount of talking made him want to swallow, so he did, knowing it would hurt like hell – and he was right. ‘Christ, David . . . I feel really fucking stupid, and pissed off – and I don’t want to die feeling like that – so I’m doing my Top Ten Greatest Hits. Why not go out with that stuff – right?’

‘Makes perfect sense to me.’

Harry’s hand rose and gingerly tapped at his face. ‘My face feels like a loofah. Is that what it looks like?’

‘How long were you married, Harry?’

‘Seven years. You?’

‘Eight.’

‘How many were really good?’

Matheson shrugged. ‘Maybe four. You?’

Harry sighed – and slowly, a shadow of a smile came to his lips. ‘All of them,’ he said.

The door opened and Dalton stepped inside.

‘Good evening.’ He sniffed the air, his nose wrinkling. ‘Getting ripe in here, isn’t it? Not to worry. This may be your last night here – so I’ve come to ask what you’d like for your last dinner. There are beef tomatoes, squash, leftovers of that delicious ham, and some veal.’

Harry pushed himself up into a sit. ‘That mean you’re letting us go?’

‘Or . . .’ said Matheson, ‘. . . not?’

‘Don’t worry, boys. You’ll be leaving here.’

Harry gave a sick little smile at the answer. ‘Is Geiger here?’