The Inquisitor: A Novel (11 page)

“Can I ask you one more thing?”

Geiger waited, his fingers coming alive at his sides.

“What happened, Geiger?”

“What happened?”

“To you. Something’s happened.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Geiger said.

Harry shook his head. “Yeah, well … neither do I.”

And that’s that, thought Harry. No more questions, because Geiger had no answers. There had been a massive sea change inside this room, and now Harry was in the drink, head barely bobbing above the waves, no sign of land, no sense of which way to swim, no assurance that someone wouldn’t blow his head off as soon as he crawled onto the shore, if he was lucky enough to reach one. The only thing he was sure of was that if he ever did set foot on land again there’d be no more attachés full of cash waiting for him. The aftershock of that thought—that there might be a certain righting of cosmic scales at work, that some renascent sense had spurred Geiger into an act of spontaneous grace—made him smile, sadly, as one might when cleaning out a cluttered desk drawer and finding an old photograph of someone dear and long departed.

“You’re smiling, Harry. Why?”

“Not important.”

“Then go get the car.”

“Okay.”

Harry allowed himself a final glance at Hall’s attaché case and walked out.

Geiger watched him step into the elevator and descend. Interacting with Harry had tightened him back up. The acts of listening and responding had been a truss wrapping around him, closing cracks and giving him a footing in time again.

Hall’s limbs moved in small, lazy shifts with the gradual onset of consciousness. Geiger walked into the session room and went over to the boy.

“Ezra?”

The boy turned stiffly, as if the spell in the chair had tightened his joints and made even casual movement an effort.

“We’ll be leaving soon and going someplace safe.” The boy nodded slowly. “I’ll leave the tape on until we’re there.” There was no nod this time, just a brief whimper.

Geiger walked to a wall, pressed back flat against it, and closed his eyes. He felt like someone who’d been driving a road with no end. As if observing the driver from a great distance, he thought: You’ve been behind the wheel so long that the hum of it in your hands has numbed your senses. Your head droops, you’re nodding out, and suddenly you jolt awake and hit the brakes. You pull over onto the shoulder. You look out the windshield, in the rearview mirror, out the side windows, and you discover that you’re in a perfect blind spot, one where trees and humpbacked hills and bends in the road ahead of you and behind you are a veil to every perspective. You’re not exactly sure when you nodded off, or for how long, but now you have no idea where you are.

You could be anywhere.

9

When Geiger got Harry’s call announcing his arrival in the alley, he checked on Richard Hall; he was semiconscious but his pulse was steady. Geiger wheeled the boy into the elevator and pulled the gate closed. Through the steel latticework, he saw the violin case lying on the session room floor. He came back out, picked up the case, returned to the elevator, and went down to the basement and alley door. He’d had the door installed in case a clandestine departure was ever necessary—lockless and knobless on the outside, the door was solid steel with internal hinges, manual slide bolts, and an interior handle.

Before leaving the building, he told the boy what to expect: he’d be getting into the backseat of a car, lying down, and going for a ride that would last about half an hour. When getting in and out of the car, he was not to try to run away—there would be no punishment for an attempt, but it would be a waste of time, and time was important now.

Geiger slid the bolts back and opened the door. A Taurus four-door sat in the unlit alley with the motor running. Standing beside it, Harry’s silhouette glistened slightly with a coat of drizzle.

“Can I say something?” Harry said.

“What is it?”

“We could drop him off at a police station. He’s never seen us. We just keep the tape on, pull up at the station, point him toward the door, and leave.”

“Bad idea, Harry. No cops.”

“I’m just trying to help out here.”

“This has got nothing to do with you.”

Harry felt heat rise beneath his skin. “No? How the hell do you figure that?”

“Harry, no more talking now. Go home.”

“I’m not coming with you?”

“No. Leave the van in case Hall has eyes out here, and stay off Ludlow Street.”

“What if Hall tries to get in touch with me?”

“I expect he will. I don’t think Mr. Hall is the type to just call it a day. The safest thing to do is go home and stay there—until we see how this plays out. And if Mr. Hall tries to contact you through the website, don’t answer.”

Geiger went back inside. Harry had the disconcerting sensation that his position in the physical world was going off kilter. Either the landscape was receding from him or he was growing smaller, shrinking.

Geiger came out leading the blinded boy by the hand. His ankle ties had been removed. Geiger opened the Taurus’s back door and tossed the violin case on the floor.

“Bend down, Ezra, and lie down in there.”

Manacled arms outstretched, the boy did exactly as he was told, without hesitation or a sound. Geiger closed the car door and then the door to the building. He came around past Harry and slid into the driver’s seat. He sat up straight and his hands settled gently on the wheel, precisely at nine and three o’clock. To Harry, there was something vaguely childlike about Geiger’s posture. It wasn’t the first time he’d had that thought.

“You’re okay driving?”

Geiger’s eyes scanned the dashboard displays and nodded. He turned around to look at the boy, who was curled up on his side. “We’re going now, Ezra.”

A soft, guttural cluck of understanding came from the boy.

Geiger faced forward. “Don’t call me,” he said to Harry. “I’ll call you.”

No you won’t, thought Harry. He stepped back and watched the car move slowly down the alley.

*   *   *

Geiger drove north on Tenth Avenue. He passed two patrol cars doing slow right-lane cruises, but the traffic was light, mostly taxis. He kept his speed under thirty-five miles an hour and was making about eight blocks between red lights. He’d gotten a license five years ago, and each April since then he had rented a car and taken it out on the West Side Highway for an hour’s practice, navigating the same route every time. From the rental place on Fifty-seventh Street, he would drive two blocks west to the highway’s entrance ramp, drive north to the Ninety-sixth Street exit, circle under the highway, get back on the highway going south, and get off at Fifty-sixth Street. Round and round he drove, five circuits in all. Now, on this night that had broken free of its mooring, he was actually driving somewhere, with someone, for the first time.

His distance vision was normal but his short-range focus was still interrupted by small, sporadic blips, so even though the drizzle had become a steady rain, he changed the wipers’ setting from high to intermittent after a dozen blocks because their continual sweep exacerbated the anomaly. Raindrops bled down the windshield, stained with the colors of traffic lights. He went blocks at a time without seeing a soul.

As the light turned yellow at Sixtieth Street, Geiger slowed to a stop and turned around. The boy lay facing the seatback, shoulders rising and falling faintly.

“Be there soon,” Geiger said.

The boy’s head moved slightly on the seat in a horizontal nod, and Geiger turned back to the wheel. He could feel his pulse echoing through his veins—not faster, but with a weighty beat instead of its usual ping. He knew that he needed to be away from the movement and sound of the world. He needed the darkness and the music to usher him back to a starting place. His life was all balance, calibration, detail. He needed to reset his internal scale.

When the light turned green he hit the gas and then saw the wet blur of a bicyclist speeding into the intersection. Geiger swerved right but heard the car’s front bumper clip the back wheel of the bicycle, followed by the tinny scraping of metal skidding across asphalt. He pounded the brakes, sending the boy thudding to the floor in back.

The rider had come to a stop against a parked car, pinned beneath his mangled ten-speed. He wasn’t moving. Geiger turned around to check on the boy: he was wedged down sideways against the backs of the front seats, grunting through the tape across his mouth.

Geiger reached down and pulled him up onto the backseat. “You okay?”

A loud
crack
swiveled Geiger’s head to the driver’s window. Outside, the bicyclist stood with a tire pump held high beside his head in a tight fist. In the misty light of the streetlamps, it was impossible to tell whether the dark patches on his glowering face were blood or grime.

“Get out of the car, motherfucker!” the rider yelled through the window.

He was tall and chiseled, ropy muscles stretching out of his T-shirt and spandex riding shorts. Both upper arms were emblazoned with tattoos of barbed helixes. After trying the door handle and discovering that it was locked, he hammered the window again with the pump. A nickel-sized spider’s web bloomed in the glass.

“Get the fuck out here!”

Geiger’s ears were ringing. The inside of his skull felt crowded, as if his brain had grown too big for its casing. His eyes danced forward, taking in the views of the windshield and rearview mirror at the same time. Headlights in the rain cruised toward him.

“Are you coming out of that car or am I coming
in
?”

Geiger turned back to the bicyclist, and there, just outside the window, was a man in overalls. His wide, flat forehead shone with sweat; in his hand he held something thin and shiny. For half a heartbeat, his father stood before him. Then he was gone.

The tire pump came down on the window again, and the glass burst into a thousand tiny diamonds. The rider reached in and grabbed hold of Geiger’s jumpsuit.

“Get out here, asshole!”

Geiger’s right hand shot out the window frame, anchored itself in the bicyclist’s hair, and pulled him halfway into the front seat. Growling in anger, the man tried to bring his arms through the opening to wage some form of attack, but the fingertips of Geiger’s left hand dug into the soft cavity above the man’s clavicle. The growls turned to screams.

Geiger pulled the man nose to nose. His fingers relaxed and the screaming stopped.

“Go—away—now,” Geiger said.

The man stared at him wide-eyed, breathless, raindrops beaded on his face.

“Do you understand?” Geiger asked.

The man nodded. Geiger let go and the rider wriggled his way out the window, stumbling back onto the street, hands going up to his neck.

Geiger’s foot found the gas pedal and he drove off, keeping the point of the speedometer’s arrow exactly between 30 and 40.

*   *   *

Geiger’s block was quiet. Nothing moved except for rainwater in the gutters. There were few residential units on the street, and the uniform shop and bodega didn’t open until six, the auto body shop and storage warehouse an hour later. Geiger’s building was between a bath and shower supply outlet and an empty storefront. Constructed of tawny bricks, it was twenty feet wide, thirty feet deep, and two stories high. Its windows were boarded up and had been for a long time.

Years ago, the place had belonged to a Serb with whom Geiger had worked in renovation. When jobs were scarce, the Serb would offer Chinese food to friends and coworkers in exchange for their help in gutting the place, and before Geiger went into his current line of work he’d spent a dozen nights ripping out rotted walls and flooring. Five years later, he had gone back. Boards covered the windows, and the dumpster in the alley was filled with drywall so moldy that it obviously hadn’t been emptied in months. But the Serb still lived there; he invited Geiger in and told him that he’d run out of money and the dream had died. That same afternoon, Geiger and the Serb worked out a deal, and two days later Geiger paid him in cash. He had had two-thirds of the price in hand and borrowed the rest from Carmine on friendly terms.

Geiger had done all the work on the place himself. He insulated the second floor and closed it off, upgraded the plumbing and wiring, and fenced in the small backyard. Before putting up drywall, he built a floor-to-ceiling layer of cinder blocks across all the walls and then fit every fourth block with a mixture of nitroglycerine and RDX in shaped charges that would detonate inward. He painted the walls with a soft gray he found at Sherwin-Williams called Tradewind.

Then he began creating the floor.

He had carried the design around in his head for years. Three or four days a week he made the rounds of reno sites in Brooklyn and Harlem—brownstones, small buildings, factories—searching for and buying discarded antique flooring. Sometimes he might come back with a six-foot plank of chestnut, other times a few eight-inch squares of hemlock. Employees at lumber and reclamation companies in the boroughs came to expect his biweekly visits as he sought out the more esoteric kinds of wood he needed.

Whatever the type of wood, whatever its shape or state, the process was always the same. Geiger would saw, shave, and whittle—as much by instinct as finite measure—to create the shape of the piece he saw in his head. Three lengthy sanding sessions with increasingly fine paper would take the wood down to its original, natural surface. Then, after treating all sides of the piece with a homemade concoction of beeswax and china wood oil, he would set it into the whole. One after another, the scraps became part of a huge, six-hundred-square-foot jigsaw puzzle.

He started from the outer borders and worked inward. He used more than seven hundred pieces, some as long as five feet and as wide as four inches, some no bigger than a bottle cap. The wood was teak, Brazilian tigerwood, oak, mahogany, ash, hemlock, elm, chestnut, heart pine. It took Geiger seven months to complete the fantastic mosaic, a creation a visitor would have marveled at had any seen it. In fact, the boy would be the first ever to set foot inside the place.