Authors: Mark Allen Smith
The Confessor
Before writing his first novel, Mark Allen Smith spent ten years as a television investigative news producer and documentary producer-director, and over twenty years as a screenwriter. He lives in New York City with his partner and three children.
A
LSO BY
M
ARK
A
LLEN
S
MITH
The Inquisitor
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2014
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Mark Allen Smith 2014
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
The right of Mark Allen Smith to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-85720-773-9
EBOOK ISBN: 978-0-85720-774-6
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
To Dodie, Cari Esta, and Liz.
The Hardass Trio.
Faith and love, from Day One.
A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Well . . . I did my part, for better or worse. Now, I’d like to give sincere thanks to those who did theirs in helping this manuscript become a book;
Ian Chapman, Chief Executive and Publisher, Simon & Schuster UK – for his unwavering faith and belief in my novel
Emma Lowth & Maxine Hitchcock, Simon & Schuster UK – for their keen editors’ eyes and imagination
Steffan Luebbe & Marco Schneiders, Bastei Lubbe, and Joy Terekiev, Mondadori – for their constancy, spirit and generous support
Liz Robinson & Dodie Gold – almost thirty years my partners, protectors, and loving friends
Tony Cartano – for his French translations
and
Nat Sobel & Judith Weber, Sobel Weber Associates Inc. – for being, quite simply, the best, most steadfast and caring agents a writer could dream of having . . . anywhere, anytime, anyhow
and
Cathy Nonas – my reader, my editor, my scribbler, my wife, my love.
He could see his indistinct reflection in the laptop’s screen – a diaphanous face imprisoned behind the dense thicket of words. Playing with the light’s angle, tilting his head forward and back a few degrees, infused the specter with depth and dimension. He enjoyed it – making his image wax and wane, bringing himself to the cusp of the living, then sending himself back to the edge of the netherworld.
His right hand rose up, and he began to tap the philtrum in the center of his upper lip with the tip of the forefinger as he read what he had written so far today.
We’re not like other professionals. During a downtime, you can’t go to a batting cage to keep your swing sharp or read law journals to stay up to speed. You lose the feel of some things. Most important of all, you lose the feel of another’s fear.
A clogged, rheumy sound came from behind him. He had always thought fear made humans sound more animalistic – that there were similarities between the tight-throated yelp of a helpless, scared human and the cry of a wounded dog or a bear caught in the steel teeth of a trap. He didn’t turn around. He decided to wait a little longer.
How strange, he thought. In the moment, everything that was measurable, quantifiable, seemed more or less the same – the event, his role, the necessary skills and implements – as if a day had passed instead of ten months of surgeries and rehabilitation. Yet sitting here in this nexus of time, this rebooting – if it had been possible to take an x-ray of himself that revealed his
emotional
terrain, and he could have put it alongside one taken before the events of last July Fourth’s, he was certain they would bear little resemblance. Hills would now be mountains, gullies rivers, crevices canyons. Earth, Planet X.
He rose, walked to an old, scarred oak table – for his re-entry into the life he’d wanted something organic, fashioned by man but created by nature – and gazed down at the terrible array laid out on it. The three o’clock sun was strong for early spring, pouring through the room’s skylight and coating the instruments with a coppery, liquescent shine.
After the two reconstructive operations, the doctors had told him further procedures would not serve any purpose, the damage was too extensive – but when they’d presented the alternative, he had felt the moment’s promise of perfection stir within its black irony. He would be remade, and remake his internal self as well – he would stretch his limits, transfigure his tolerances. Money was not an issue. He’d saved more than he’d ever spend. When he was done there would be no pain too great to bear.
He had it documented, with two cameras to ensure coverage, and while he healed had spent hundred of hours watching the video, studying each cut, each severance. In the post-op months, he had allowed himself only two 50mcg fentanyl patches daily, and experienced sensory events of such wrenching intensity that his understanding of physical suffering underwent a radical realignment that matched the feats of his surgeons.
He picked up the 1867 Horatio Kern one-piece scalpel from the table. He’d tried the commercial plastic brands with disposable blades but their lightness was problematic, so he had one of the men shop for something more substantial. The Kern’s ebony handle gave it heft and a more satisfying grip. He’d begun practicing on rabbits, and once he’d mastered basic skills had pigs brought in from a nearby farm. His surgeons had said the animal’s subcutaneous fat and dermal thickness were relatively similar to that of human flesh. It was the closest he would get to the real thing.
A familiar, coarse droning made him look up. A very large hornet, two inches long, had wriggled its way into the room through the hole in the window screen, and now lighted on the slice of white peach he kept on the sill as a lure.
He put the scalpel down and went to the window. He could see the large gray, scabrous nest, bigger than a medicine ball, fixed to the underside of the eave outside, beside the lean-to where the dusty car was parked. The insects’ visits had become a useful element in his regimen. While the hornet probed the peach, he reached down, gently grasped its gossamer wings between the tips of his thumb and forefinger, and raised the struggling, madly buzzing creature. This particular action had, over time, helped hone his fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination. As a rule, he would then hold the plump, striped abdomen between two fingertips and slowly squeeze until it burst. That had helped his sense of applied pressure, a facility that had been difficult to reacquire. He had been practicing on grapes when the first hornet had made its way in, and had discovered that animate flesh, sensitive and reactive to his touch, was a distinct improvement on fruit – so he’d started putting a slice of peach on the sill. For months now, the maid would find a pile of wizened carcasses on the floor when she came in.
He watched the beast twitch. Its energy was unflagging. The thick grunt came again. It was time. Time to begin anew. He turned and walked across the room. The subject was in a high-backed chair, draped with a loose-fitting, blue surgical smock that rendered the body shapeless. A makeshift hood of the same material covered the head, with holes cut for the eyes and mouth, which was covered with strips of black tape. Plastic lock-ties secured the body to the chair at the neck, wrists, waist and ankles.
He bent down to the face, and frowned. There was not enough fear in the gaze. He held the noisy, struggling beast up. ‘Huge, isn’t it?’
The lids of the eyes inside the hood pulled back and the pupils flared.
‘My travels on Google tell me it’s probably a Vespa mandarinia – the Asian giant hornet. The most venomous there is – they say a swarm attack can kill a man in minutes . . . anaphylactic shock – but I’ll be damned how they got here.’
He held up the index finger of his free hand. ‘Watch,’ he said, then moved it beneath the hornet’s twisting abdomen and gave the underside a poke. The end of the abdomen immediately curled down and inward, as the quarter-inch stinger slid out and jabbed into the finger. He showed no reaction – not a flinch, or a wince.
The right brow of his audience rose in confusion.
‘The most interesting difference between the wasp family and bees is . . . bees can only sting once. Their stingers are barbed and get lodged in the flesh and torn off, and the bee dies. But hornets have barbless stingers. They can just keep on stinging, over and over.’ He prodded the insect’s belly with his fingertip and the hornet stung him again. ‘See?’ He pulled the bottom edge of the hood a few inches away from the neck. ‘This is just to loosen you up a bit. Get rid of some of that adrenaline.’ He watched the Adam’s apple bob up and down with a tight swallow, then he released the hornet under the hood. ‘They aren’t particularly aggressive unless provoked, but it’s best you try not to move.’
The nasty buzz suddenly stopped. Because of the hornet’s size, he could clearly see it moving beneath the fabric as it crawled up the cheek. The eyes in the hood stared straight ahead, unblinking, but unfocused – like the look of someone trying to recall a person’s name, or the date of some upcoming appointment. Then, the lids slowly closed and quivered, as the hornet crawled over the left eye and headed upward.
Beyond a window, the wild lavender was in bloom, a waving purple sea. Sudden movement there made the man look up from his captive, and he saw dozens of serpents with brilliant, iridescent scales begin leaping up from the brush in suspended, elegant arcs, one devouring another, opaline fangs glistening red. He watched until one, bloody, victorious creature remained, and it turned to him with a curious gaze.