The Confessor (8 page)

‘My accountant told me . . .’ Carmine had said, and taken a sip of his beloved espresso and smacked his lips. He would often start a comment and pause – to reposition a fork, pull his sleeves a half-inch from his suit jacket, comb fingertips through his silver hair. Geiger knew it was part of his situational manipulation. He’d watched others react to the pauses – seen them lean forward, unaware of doing so – as if Carmine’s suspension of the moment increased his gravitational pull. To Carmine life meant control, and tipping a conversation or negotiation even half a degree would eventually pay dividends. Geiger had incorporated the technique into his own work since the man had set him up in IR.

‘. . . He told me I’m paying a hundred and twenty-seven thousand in taxes this year. That’s what it costs to look like an honest success.’ Carmine drained his demitasse. ‘You’re making real money now. You saving any?’

‘I don’t spend very much. It goes in the safety deposit box, like you said.’

Carmine wagged a finger. ‘Not
all
of it. You need to have a little coffin money.’

‘What is coffin money?’

Carmine had smiled, then reached over and patted Geiger’s cheek. ‘You always tell me you don’t know where you came from – but I do.
Mars
.’

That is why Geiger had been in Brooklyn – because buried in Prospect Park, in dense woods between two elms marked with notches, was a tool box with sixty thousand dollars and an extra key to the safe deposit box. At 3 a.m. he’d dug it up, taken forty grand and the key – and stood beneath the indifferent gaze of a million stars and thought of Carmine Delanotte, revisiting the pain in his benefactor’s voice as he had delivered Geiger to Hall and Dalton –
You think I’m happy about this? I’m not, Geiger. You’re my boy, but I do business with these people
– knowing chance was blind and without fidelity, but convinced certain parts of a life never died unless you killed them, and filled with a sense belying reason that there was a time and place when that theory would be tested.

After moving in, Geiger had brought in a mini-fridge, food preparation table and a mattress. Then he had started purchasing woodworking tools. The first thing he built was his desk, then the five-foot-square closet in the west corner of the space. He bought an Aeron ergonomic chair, a MacBook Pro, and an LG Spyder cell phone – and the first call he made was to Harry, but the recording said the service had been cancelled.

At their reunion, Geiger had been struck by Harry’s intensity, his unrestrained joy – by the time he arrived home that night, Harry’s cell number and e-mail address were waiting on his laptop. Geiger was a student of feelings – a gauger, an analyzer. This quality had helped make him the master of his craft – the ability to
feel
others’ emotions while living in estrangement from his own. Bonds, intimacies – they were for scrutiny and evaluation, not experience. But standing in the eye of Harry’s emotional storm, the incongruity of their relationship – that Geiger’s presence in Harry’s life, and his absence, were so meaningful – had not been lost on him. He had left his mark on someone outside the session room without intent. Jogging home that night he’d summoned a vision of Ezra, and wondered what part of himself might be alive inside the boy.

He slid two fingertips down the side of the cutout in the wood, measuring its slope with an instrument as sensitive as any tool. He picked up the half-moon piece he’d carved out of quilted maple – six inches from tip to tip. The ripple effect in the grain gave it a stunning brightness and three-dimensional quality. It had been one of his best finds – the unscathed back panels of an armoire damaged in a fire. He’d get a dozen more inlays from it. His peregrinations to the reno shops throughout the boroughs were one of the holdovers from the old life – rummaging in the racks and yards for discarded, unwanted treasure. Something warped, damaged, all but useless. His eye never missed them.

Geiger turned to his finished works. Against the walls were two desks, three tables and an armoire – all dark woods, mahogany, black walnut, Indian rosewood. Each had dozens of lighter inlays – elm, red oak, aspen – big as a grapefruit, small as a dime. He was creating a universe. Each piece was a part of the night sky – stars, planets, constellations, nebulae, moons of different phases, all set in deep darkness – the sky he had watched endlessly as a child invisible and unknown to the world.

He stroked the inlay’s sides and rubbed his fingertips together, determining how much of his beeswax and chinawood oil blend remained. Before oiling, each piece underwent three sanding sessions to return the surface to its natural state – trance-like procedures. In all the years of watching his father work, the man had never made pronouncements about rules. This was, simply, the way to do things.

He heard himself talking to Harry last night –
Don’t worry, Harry. It’s not IR. I’m done with it. Completely.
He had come to that decision nine months ago, while Dalton worked on him, but he had never voiced the words aloud.
I’m done with it. Completely.
The statement had a cleansing feel to it, like some caustic agent sweeping away the last, clinging remnants of a toxic sludge within him. He would never go back to it.

He fit the piece into the cutout and pressed down until two inches remained, then took a chamois and laid it over the inlay. He picked up the mallet as the cat strolled over, rubbing against him.

‘Not now, Tony.’

The cat had adapted. Geiger had put a pet-door in a window and the animal had taken up its nightly journeys, returning around 5 a.m., as always. It peered up at him with its one eye and started scratching at Geiger’s calf. Geiger picked it up and draped it on his shoulder. He gave the scar where the right eye used to be a few scratches and the animal settled on its perch, its purr an engine in Geiger’s ear.

He had begun calling the cat ‘Tony’ after they moved in here. It had been Ezra’s suggestion – one of a million things Geiger kept from their twenty-four hours together. The boy had immediately taken to the cat.

‘What’s his name?’ he had asked.

‘Cat.’

‘That’s what you call him? “Cat?” You should give him a real name,’ the boy had said. ‘Hey, you could call him Tony – after Tony Montana.’

The name had meant nothing to Geiger. ‘Who?’ he had asked.

‘Tony Montana – you know? Al Pacino in
Scarface.
’ Geiger had stared back blankly. ‘Get it?
Scarface
– the movie?’

‘I don’t go to the movies.’

‘Well, you ought to name him
something
. “Cat” is kinda dumb.’

And these days, every time Geiger spoke to the cat, the boy was with them.

Geiger raised the mallet and struck the chamois with just enough force to push the piece downward – once, twice – then removed the cloth and ran his hand over the wood.

A smooth fit. Flush. Perfect.

Harry was heading east on 125th Street, buffeted by the boom boxes’ output, watching deals go down with the sidewalk vendors – fake Rolexes, sunglasses, something to smoke – past a soul-drenched sax player and three silent, suited men offering their pamphlets. He was experiencing sporadic moments of something that bordered on giddiness. He was out in the world again, on the street,
going
somewhere.

Geiger’s resurrection had been a kind of rebirth for Harry. That night, he’d returned to Chinatown, grabbed his laptop and a few disks, and left without closing the door. In the cab back to Brooklyn, he’d caught sight of himself in the rearview mirror with a grin so wide he looked like a lunatic stranger. When he got home, he’d taken a long shower and shaved off the unwanted beard. Then he’d gotten into his own bed, made a note to buy a new dracaena, and fell into lush, dreamless sleep.

He turned left at Second Avenue and headed north. The street level of the three-story building housed a West African clothing store. It was Harry’s first time here – the work he’d done until now had been from his Chinatown hideout. The building’s side door was in a narrow alley – pocked, gray steel with three locks, two steps down. Harry pushed the button on the intercom panel. Above it was a small, recessed lens.

‘Coming,’ said a voice.

There were motion-sensitive lights and two round, metal reflectors mounted on the opposite wall to afford a view of both ends of the alley from inside the building. He grinned at the irony, because obsessed as Matheson was about detection and invasion, in this town his setup was business as usual. From Harlem to Soho, you could have a dozen locks, mirrors and security cameras and no passer-by would give it a second’s thought – and that made it perfect for Veritas Arcana. In a world where every day less could be hidden and more was revealed, the paranoiac was the sanest man in the room. He heard the locks being turned, and the door creaked opened on cranky hinges.

David Matheson looked like hell. It had been two months since Harry had seen him – when Matheson had come to him for some software installations. Raccoon eyes stared from a pale, unshaven face, his tall, muscular frame in rumpled Dockers and a tan hoodie whose sleeves were dappled with coffee stains. He pushed his long, dark hair back from his forehead and took a drag of his cigarette.

‘Hi,’ he said.

Harry stepped into the dark entry. It smelled of smoke and popcorn and stale, imprisoned air. Matheson closed the door, turned the locks, and went down a short hall toward a spill of light. Harry followed.

The world had taken a heavy hammer to Matheson. His reckless passion for truth and disclosure had put his son in grave danger, unknowingly delivered the boy to violence, and in the end, been the blade that severed all but minimal contact between them. His online release of the torture videos had elevated Veritas Arcana, in the eyes of some, from a second-tier whistle-blower to an entity worthy of eradication. Now he was the
enemy.

Harry turned the corner. The small, windowless room was part of a converted basement, bald concrete melting into shadows – trapped, hovering smoke lending it a Stygian mood. Jammed against a wall were a cot, mini-fridge, two dinged-up file cabinets with a microwave and lamp on top, and five plastic bins filled with tossed clothes. On the opposite wall were a laundry sink whose porcelain had once been white and a network of sweaty pipes that snaked from floor to ceiling. Matheson turned to Harry.

‘Welcome to my living room-kitchen-bedroom-dining room.
Mi casa es su casa
.’ There was a wrinkle to his smile that Harry had always liked – a meld of loathing for his between-a-rock-and-a-hard-place existence and a dark appreciation of it.

‘Not real big on the feng shui thing are you, David?’

Matheson took a pull on his butt and flicked it into the sink. ‘On the contrary. It took me months to work out the proper . . .
flow
.’

Harry waved the smoke away as he stepped inside. ‘Jesus . . . You’re gonna die from your own second-hand smoke. Can that happen?’

There were Xeroxes of Veritas Arcana web pages taped on the walls: ‘US assault rifles found in Taliban hideout in Kandahar’ . . . ‘Classified US Department of Defense memos discuss secret bid-rigging in Iraq’ . . . ‘Secret CIA torture of Egyptian cabinet minister’.

Harry strolled, leaning in, reading them. ‘The Veritas Arcana Hall of Fame?’

Matheson went to a door and pushed it open. ‘Let’s get to work. And close the door. Keeps the smoke out.’

Harry followed him inside. This room was twice as large as the first, smoke-free, and ten degrees colder. A row of four web servers went down its middle, and six laptops sat in a row atop a twelve-foot aluminum table. There were three wall-mounted monitors with CNN, MSNBC and FOX on and the sound muted. Matheson sat down at a laptop.

Harry took a seat beside him and got the disk out of his coat.

‘Thank you for this, Harry. I know you didn’t want to go back to Brooklyn.’

‘I’m glad you asked. It was good for me.’

‘No bad guys waiting for you?’

‘Right. No bad guys.’

Harry tapped the space bar and the desktop came on – a picture of Ezra, green eyes locked on the neck of the violin wedged under his chin. It wasn’t a recent image.

‘You speak to him lately?’ asked his father.

‘Uh-huh.’

Matheson let out a clipped, bitter chuckle. ‘So you know I haven’t.’

The emotional geometry of the three of them made Harry antsy. ‘He’s okay. Not great. Still pissed at you. Still in therapy. A lot of guilt about Geiger.’ Harry’s pulse did a short jig.
I wasn’t meant to be part of his life, Harry – and I shouldn’t be.
Geiger was wrong – but it wasn’t Harry’s secret to tell.

‘Christ, I miss him.’ Matheson sighed, but there was no trace of self-pity.

‘Well . . . I think he misses you too. He just also hates your guts.’

Matheson nodded wearily. ‘As he should. Right?’

Last 3 July, with the secret CIA torture videos finally in his possession, he had told his son to lock the apartment door behind him and then gone uptown, to this room, to prepare the disks for online access. He was pumped to the max. He knew the bad guys were close – but it would only take a few hours, and Ezra was safe at home . . .

‘David,’ Harry said, ‘you do good work. Important work.’ He slid the disk in the drive. ‘You made a decision because of the work. You didn’t think Ezra’d get snatched. Maybe you didn’t think long enough. I don’t know.’ The screen filled with a spyglass logo and
VIDEO VERIFY
in a chrome font. ‘Did you fuck up? Yes – and now you’re paying for it. That’s what usually happens, David. We fuck up and then we pay for it. Maybe when Ezra gets older he’ll see a bigger picture.’

Matheson’s wistful smile returned. ‘How’d you get so wise, Harry?’

‘By fucking up – a lot. Where’s the e-mail?’

‘V–A–3 inbox, labeled X – X – X.’

Harry clicked on the e-mail’s icon, clicked and it came up on-screen. There were six lines of text: