The Inquisitor: A Novel (16 page)

“I’ll get you some things,” Geiger said. “Give me your dirty clothes. I’ll put them in the washer.”

“Thank you.”

One of Ezra’s hands came out with his soiled things. Geiger took them to the kitchen and started a wash cycle, then went to his dresser. As he stood there, an image and echo of something rushed up from deep inside him. He was in darkness, a door was opening, and a silhouette spoke in a gruff voice:

“Did you piss yourself, boy?”

“No, Pa. I held it in.”

“Good.”

Geiger grabbed some underpants, a pair of shorts, and a T-shirt from the drawers and headed back to the bathroom.

12

The more Harry thought about Hall, the more his anxiety tilted toward paranoia, so when he hailed a taxi outside the laundromat and got Lily in the back with him, he told the cabbie to go into Manhattan and drop them at Seventy-sixth and Columbus, because the closest thing to a safe haven he could think of was the diner. He’d considered a hotel but decided against it. He didn’t have a lot of cash on him—he’d cursed himself for forgetting to grab more before he left the apartment—and without an ATM card he’d have to nurse along what he was carrying in his wallet. Besides, front desk clerks tended to notice people when they checked in, especially if one side of your face was swollen and purple and the only luggage you had was a crazy person. But nobody noticed anyone in diners. You went in, sat down, and ate. Maybe you read the paper, or had a conversation if somebody was with you, but people watching wasn’t big on the menu.

The taxi smelled of sweat and pine scent, and country music pumped out of the radio. They were halfway across the Manhattan Bridge. The cabbie’s baseball cap was tilted back on his head, and he slapped the steering wheel in time with the snare drum’s crisp beats, making sport of the bridge’s crowded, narrow lanes.

Lily sat beside Harry. She had lost weight since he’d bought her the sky-blue blouse, and it made her look even more like a child. He realized he’d have to keep a close eye on her until he could get her back to the home. She might get hungry, for one thing. And drugs—he had no idea what meds she was on, if any. He took her hand in his.

“You always held my hand, remember?” He asked the question with no expectation of getting an answer. “Even when we were grown up, if we were walking to dinner or the movies, you’d take my hand. Remember that?” He gave her hand a squeeze, but she stared straight ahead, fingers unresponsive to his. Still, he felt a little lighter for the memory of an old, precious bond when they were impossibly different people.

The throb in Harry’s head had become a dull, flat thud. He leaned to the plastic partition. “Hey, man. Think you could kill the radio for a while?”

“You don’t like country music?” said the cabbie. His voice had an oiled, good ol’ boy slide that surprised Harry.

“I just need a little quiet time. Got a headache.”

“Can do, buddy.”

The cabbie punched at the radio and the sound cut off, and as Harry leaned back Lily jolted to life, her tiny hands grabbing the lapels of his sport coat, fists tugging him back and forth with surprising force, like a child seized by a tantrum. She was mewling loudly, a tortured sound that made the driver’s head whip around.

Harry gripped her at the wrists. “Lily! What? What is it?”

“Don’t do that!” she howled. “Don’t do that!”

“Lily—stop!”

“No—no—noooo!”

The sound was almost more than Harry could bear, a siren of madness and loss. “Sweet Jesus,” said the cabbie. “What’s she want, man?”

And then Harry understood. “Turn the radio back on!”

The cabbie jabbed at the dashboard, the bright guitar streams returned, and Lily’s yowling slowed to a stop like a windup toy running down.

“Well, all right!” whooped the cabbie. “That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout!” He chuckled and gave the horn four quick taps as he headed down the off-ramp.

Harry gently pulled at Lily’s wrists. Her clenched fists came away from his lapels and something fell into Harry’s lap. It was a button-sized black disk, an inch across, a quarter-inch thick. He picked it up. It was made of some kind of plastic, shiny and smooth on one side and sticky on the other. Harry repositioned Lily against the seat and then settled back, rolling the tracer between thumb and forefinger like a lucky coin.

“Son of a bitch,” he whispered to himself.

A scene flashed in front of him like a three-second cut in a movie trailer. Nighttime. Ludlow Street. Ray in his homeless person guise getting in Harry’s face, then grabbing him by the lapels and pulling him close.

Harry turned over his lapels and spotted a small circle of gummy residue on the fabric of one. He nodded with admiration and astonishment. That’s how they’d found his place so easily. Ray had planted the thing on him. A whole production before the session, the little girl included, just in case something went wrong later on.

Harry took the tracer and stuck it on the back of the seat in front of him.

At the bottom of the ramp from the bridge, the cabbie stopped as the light changed to yellow at Canal Street. He turned around again and gave Lily a smile. He had a ruddy scrub brush of a mustache, and the gap between his front teeth amplified the good ol’ boy aura.

“You okay now, honey?” he said.

Lily’s head was turned to her window. Outside, a bus idled beside the taxi, rattling and snorting. She said nothing.

Harry reached out and pushed her hair back from her eyes and let his fingertips caress her cheek. She took no notice of the gesture.

“I’ll tell you something, buddy,” said the cabbie. “You’re a good man, the way you look after her. The world today—folks don’t treat their own like they used to.” He took off his cap and ran a hand through his thick tangerine hair. “They talk that stuff ’bout global warming? Well, it seems to me the warmer it gets on the outside, the colder we get in our hearts. Hell, look at me. I got a sister, too—she’s divorced, lives down in Baton Rouge—and I ain’t seen her in four years.” He turned back to the windshield. “I’ll tell you, buddy, you bring the shame up in me. When I go on break, I’m gonna give her a call.”

Harry turned around and squinted out the back window at the long line of vehicles idling in the drizzle behind them. Farther back, the cars and cabs melted into a stubborn river fog. Harry felt as if the world had suddenly become very small.

He turned back to the driver. “Hey, I got a question.”

“Shoot.”

“For an extra twenty, can you step on it, zig and zag, shave a couple of lights?”

The cabbie chuckled. “Somebody following you, buddy?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Well, whatever. You want the hammer down, you got it.”

The light turned green and the cab lurched forward and veered sharply into the next lane. A horn blared in their wake.

Harry closed his eyes. “De Kooning, my ass.”

*   *   *

Ezra opened the bathroom door. Geiger’s shorts almost reached his knees, ballooning around his legs. His bare chest and arms had half a dozen purple bruises from the previous day’s manhandling, and the stripes on his face were redder now.

“I’m sore all over. Can I have some Advil?”

“I don’t have any,” Geiger said.

“Tylenol?”

“No. I don’t take drugs.”

“
Drugs?
Advil’s not cocaine, you know?”

He pulled Geiger’s T-shirt on, wincing from the effort. Its hem came to rest halfway down his thighs. The getup made him look even younger, like a kid playing dress-up with his father’s clothes. He sat on the toilet seat and started putting on his sneakers.

“What happens now?” he asked, his head bent to the task. “If you aren’t one of them, then what’re you gonna do with me?”

“Do you have any relatives nearby?”

“Uh-uh.”

“No grandparents?”

“Dead.”

“Uncles, aunts?”

“No.”

Geiger watched him lacing up, the long fingers working systematically, making precise knots and matching loops.

“Dad knew, didn’t he? He knew when he left that those guys were after him, right?”

“I don’t know, Ezra.”

Geiger stepped aside as Ezra stood up and came out. Then he followed the boy back toward the couch.

“This really sucks, man. I mean, I don’t want to be here. I want to be home with my mom and sleeping in my own bed.” He looked over at the pieces of his cell phone strewn on the floor. “Mom’s gonna freak.”

“We’ll call her. We’ll find a pay phone and call her cell.”

“Why can’t you just call her now on your cell?”

“I can’t let her know my number. I can’t let anyone know that.” Geiger could imagine her standing somewhere, dialing Ezra’s number again, growing a little anxious.

Ezra sat on the couch and put his head down in his hands. Webern was rising to a powerful, melancholy arc, and Ezra’s fingers came alive at his temples, wiggling along with the violin, coaxing the notes out of the air.

“This is great, right here where it climbs,” he said. “Sounds like crying, doesn’t it?” He hummed along, his voice cracking at the summit of the melody, and then his focus shifted and he leaned closer to the floor, as if noticing it for the first time. He reached down and ran a fingertip across the ornate design.

“Man, this floor is cool. Where’d you find something like this?”

“I made it.”

Ezra tilted his head at Geiger as one might at an idiot child. “You made the floor with your
hands
?”

Geiger nodded, feeling as he did the muscles at the back of his neck, stubborn and ungiving.

Ezra got up and began to prowl across the shining surface, studying the network of designs, the stars and disks and crescents, shaking his head as if encountering an impossible creation. “This is amazing,” he said. “People’ve told you that, right?”

“You’re the first person to see it.”

The boy looked up. “Like … nobody’s been in here?”

“No.”

“Never ever? How long have you lived here?”

“Almost seven years.”

“You don’t hang with anybody?”

“No. That’s what works best for me. Being alone.”

Ezra’s smile bloomed for the first time. It came out slowly, wistful and melancholy. It unsettled Geiger to see it on such a young face.

“Yeah,” the boy said. “I’m not Mr. Cool either.”

There was a continual stutter in Geiger’s experience of things—in sound, sight, and action. It was as if he were reading a book, a story about Ezra and himself, and every few seconds it all paused—balanced for a moment on a temporal cusp while he turned the page—and then the story resumed. He was aware that the sensation bled into his physical state as well, a minute hesitation in his breathing and heartbeat accompanying the stutter.

Every few feet, Ezra stopped his tour of the floor and turned around to view the masterpiece. “It changes,” he said. “When you move to a different place, it looks different.” He leaned against a wall and folded his arms. “Know what it’s like? It’s like a kaleidoscope.”

“Yes. It is.”

“My dad would really like it. He knows a lot about art.”

“He buys and sells art?”

“Uh-huh. Goes all over the world. That’s why Mom got me in the divorce, ’cuz he isn’t around a lot—which is sort of why they got divorced in the first place, I guess.”

His shrug was almost lost within Geiger’s shirt. He looked like some woeful survivor from a disaster—the oversized clothes, the discolored flesh on his face and arms, the solemn look of shock. A slow flush started to rise on the boy’s face like an infusion of dye.

“Why didn’t he call me?” Ezra asked. Anger screwed his voice into a wounded sound, as if invisible hands had hold of his throat. “Where
is
he? Why didn’t he
call
?”

The boy’s yelp buzzed inside Geiger’s ears like the whine of insects. He swiveled his neck to the left but the click wouldn’t come. He needed it. He needed the sound and sensation of realignment, of pieces sliding into their proper place. He turned his neck to the right. The vertebrae refused to obey.

“I
hate
him!” Ezra smacked the wall with his palms, and the action seemed to recharge him and propel him unsteadily toward Geiger. “He left me behind. That’s what he did, right?” He stopped inches from Geiger, his outrage already dying out, doused by a heavy sadness.“How could he do that?” It was not a question born of confusion or disbelief but a statement of wonder. He went back to the couch, sat down, and stared at the patterns in the floor. “I can’t believe how bad I feel,” he said. “I’ve never felt anywhere near this bad.”

Ezra had known different degrees of betrayal: a friend turning cold and distant, a music teacher stinging him with an insult, a bully humiliating him in a locker room. The divorce had been a dual betrayal—in the end, neither his mother nor his father loved him enough to put him before their own discontent—but he was in new emotional territory now.

The cat came to Geiger, got up on his hind legs, and started using Geiger’s pants as a scratching post. Geiger picked him up by the scruff of the neck and perched him on his shoulder. The boy smiled in spite of himself.

“He likes it up there, huh?”

“Ezra, do you want to go to the police?”

“You’d take me to the police?”

“I can’t go in with you, but I’ll take you there if you want. There’s a precinct nearby.”

“What’ll the police do with me?”

“They’d take you somewhere and look after you until your mother got here.”

Images of cramped rooms with cots and men with handcuffs on their belts crept into the boy’s mind. He saw windows with dark bars.

“Somewhere like what?”

“Somewhere for children. Someplace safe.”

“I’m safe here, aren’t I?”

“I think so.”

“What do you mean? Do they know where you live?”

“No,” said Geiger, “they don’t. But what I’m trying to say is”—he struggled to line up the words—“I don’t know who those men are. I don’t know what they’re capable of finding out.”