The Inquisitor: A Novel (10 page)

“Harry…” Geiger said, almost a whisper. Harry picked up the attaché case, stepped back into the elevator, quietly drew the gate closed, and descended out of sight. Geiger pointed toward a door beside a square mirror in a wall, and Hall followed him through. They turned to the one-way mirror and observed the wheelchair’s circular ritual.

“Disorientation?” Hall said.

“Yes. The chair is on a timer,” Geiger said. “Five minutes, then I’ll begin. Something to drink?”

Hall looked to the chrome bar. “Wine. Red.”

Geiger walked to the bar and began pouring some pinot noir.

“Does your client know you took the son?” he said.

“My client wants his painting back. How I get it is up to me.”

Geiger handed him the glass. The lights made the vermilion liquid flash. Hall took a long sip and let the wine linger in his mouth before he swallowed. He nodded with satisfaction.

“Do you know anything about him, Mr. Hall—besides what was in your report?”

“No. He lives most of the year with his mother. I’ve got his cell phone—two calls in the last twenty-four hours, one with a New Hampshire area code, and one with a Manhattan area code we figure is Matheson. We found the violin in his room in Matheson’s apartment. I thought maybe it might be of use to you.”

“Anything else in his room?”

“I didn’t notice. Does it matter?”

“Everything matters, Mr. Hall.”

*   *   *

Harry sat in the van’s driver’s seat. He had started counting the money, but he stopped as a gloominess crept in with the sticky evening air. When Geiger had spilled the kid out of the trunk it had been a pure what’s-wrong-with-this-picture moment. Even if he could rig his ethical arithmetic yet another time, it was a trickier task squaring Geiger’s reversal with everything he’d done in the past. Harry had become a moon in a steady orbit around Geiger, dependent on and secure in the man’s gravitational force, so experiencing a shift in Geiger’s axis of rules brought with it something vertiginous. Seeing Geiger do the unexpected was like watching the Statue of Liberty wink at him.

Harry sighed, and then went back to counting the money.

*   *   *

The wheelchair and its blind passenger continued tracing a circle, and the foghorn’s sad warning came out of the walls. Hall checked the time again.

“Just a little longer,” Geiger said. “A layman might think minors are easy to break, but it’s not necessarily true. In a context of intense fear, a child is apt to go inward and shut down—or to lie, say anything, and say it convincingly.” He poured a glass of water. “Mr. Hall, if you’re that concerned about time, telling me what this is really about will make my job easier—and quicker. It’s up to you.”

Hall watched him drink the glass down. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that you’re lying. That’s what I do, Mr. Hall—I determine whether someone is telling the truth or not.”

Hall took a sip of his wine. “All you need to be concerned about is doing whatever’s necessary to get the kid to talk.”

“All right. Just trying to be helpful.”

Geiger looked out to the boy. For a moment, the nature of time, and Geiger’s awareness of it, changed. It ceased to be perpetual and fluid and solidified into measured instants. Each brief moment had its own beginning and end, like the flickering frames of a movie glimpsed individually even as they ran together.

“I think it’s time,” he said, and his right fist shot straight out, his knuckles smashing into Hall’s chest an inch below the sternum, driving the breath from him in a loud, expulsive grunt. Hall stumbled back into the wall and slumped to his knees, chest heaving, hands on his quadriceps. A noise like a hacksaw cutting through copper pipe clawed its way up his throat as his diaphragm struggled to free itself from spasm and pull in air.

Geiger crouched down beside Hall. Spittle, tinted pink with pinot noir, was beginning to bubble out of his mouth. His lips opened slightly in a preface to speech.

“Uhhnff … uhhnff” was what came out.

The foghorn audio stopped, and Geiger rose to look through the window. The wheelchair rolled to a stop; the boy didn’t move. Geiger knelt back down. Hall seemed incapable of turning his head, but his wet eyes managed to swivel in their sockets until they found Geiger’s deadpan stare.

“Mr. Hall,” said Geiger.

The tears rolling down Hall’s cheeks made him look deeply unhappy, as if the tough-guy persona was an act and Geiger had said something mean and wounding.

“Fffff … fuck,” he gasped.

“I don’t know who you are, Mr. Hall—but I do know who you aren’t.”

The surface of Geiger’s words had a slight, gravelly patina that was unfamiliar and slightly unsettling. The unscheduled violence had ratcheted up Geiger’s pulse and breathing and altered the topography of his voice.

“Do you want to tell me who you really are?” Geiger said.

Hall’s head drooped, his shoulders stretching, his body searching for some physical accommodation, a way to breathe. His head levered back up; he blinked, coughed, and then blinked again, as if delivering an answer in some secret code he assumed Geiger knew.

Geiger planted his open palm tightly on Hall’s face and then rammed his skull back into the wall. The crunching sound announced the crushing of some substance—wood or bone, or both—and Hall’s eyes widened in further surprise before falling shut.

Geiger held Hall’s head in place, observing each partitioned instant as it passed. Some kink in his optical network reduced the depth of images going to his brain, rendering them flatter than normal, like Polaroid snapshots. Finally he took his hand away and Hall slumped sideways onto the floor, revealing a grapefruit-sized dent in the wall. It was an inch deep, and moist crimson specks mingled with the mashed fibers.

The pockets of Hall’s pants contained the expected: a wallet with American Express and Diners Club cards, about six hundred dollars in cash, a Pennsylvania driver’s license, a State Farm insurance ID for a 2006 silver Lexus coupe. In his jacket pockets were a pack of Camels, a lighter, and two cell phones, a BlackBerry and a Motorola Droid that Geiger assumed belonged to the boy. A black leather holster clipped to Hall’s belt held a Taurus Millennium Pro nine-millimeter semiautomatic.

Geiger stuck the phones in his pockets and stood up. The pulse in his eyes throbbed, producing a minuscule blip in his vision, a cambered shift of objects and surfaces. He put the gun on the bar and went through the door into the session room. He detected a hint of smoky aroma in his nostrils, and his breath was coming in long, strong exhalations, as if he were a runner pacing himself in the early stages of a marathon.

He walked over to the boy, his mind keenly aware that its moment-to-moment workings were, for the first time in memory, without premeditation. Overriding all thought and feeling was the pure, unencumbered sensation of moving toward some unknown destination. It was a feeling alien to his consciousness but familiar from another domain. He knew it from his dreams.

The boy sat slack in the chair, head listing. Geiger had set the room’s temperature to sixty-three degrees but the boy was sweating, his shirt and shorts flat and damp against his body, his exposed skin covered with a sheen of fear. Geiger watched the carotid artery in the boy’s neck gorge and shrink to the accelerated beat of his heart.

“Ezra…”

The boy’s body violently snapped to attention like a soldier obeying a sergeant’s order.

“Ezra, there won’t be any questions now.”

The boy’s throat swelled with a squeaky grunt. Geiger took out his cell phone and pressed a key. Harry answered before the first ring finished.

“That was fast,” Harry said.

“Come on up—and bring the money.”

The silence on the line had a question mark at the end of it. “The money? Okay.”

Geiger walked back into the viewing room. Hall hadn’t moved; he lay on his right side in a near-fetal position. On the wall was the wet, arcing swath his wound had painted as his head had slid down from the point of impact to the floor.

Geiger heard faint music rousing itself deep within him. He saw flashes of violet and chartreuse sound begin to wave in time behind his eyes, and then the creak of an opening door and a sliver of dusty light invaded the pitch-black core of him. He felt a dull ache in his ankles. Rising up like a ballet dancer on the balls of his feet, he stretched his Achilles tendons and calf muscles. The pain and the music stopped, and then the sliver of light disappeared.

The elevator gate rattled.

“Geiger?” Harry said.

The word came to Geiger as if called to him across a canyon. He turned to find Harry standing in the doorway, bafflement breaking across his face.

“Jesus Christ. What the hell happened?”

Geiger glanced back at Hall. “We’re leaving,” he said, as if he were informing the body instead of Harry.

Harry put the attaché case down at his feet. “Oh fuck. What’d you do to him? Is—is he dead?”

“No. We have to go now.”

Geiger moved for the door, and Harry put his hands up like a traffic cop. Geiger stopped, staring at Harry’s raised palms.

“Wait a second,” Harry said. “Just wait, okay? Jesus Christ.” He put his palms to his cheeks. “What the hell is going on with you?”

“We have to go.”

“Can we talk about this for a minute?”

“Right now, Harry, it’s more important that we leave.”

“I disagree, man. This is crazy. This is truly nuts, okay?”

“Harry,” Geiger said, “it’s probable if not certain that one of Hall’s men followed him here and is waiting nearby. Wouldn’t you say?”

“I have no fucking idea.”

“And that’s why we need to leave—now. The longer we wait, the more complicated things will get.”

“
Complicated?
You just coldcocked a client!”

Harry looked over at the bar, at the multicolored skyline of bottles. He hadn’t had a drink since the day he took Geiger up on his offer. It had been Geiger’s one requirement—that he stop drinking—and consciously or not, his sobriety had become another reason to see Geiger as his lifesaver. But even after eleven years he could still summon the taste of cheap bourbon at the back of his mouth. He was beginning to understand what the body on the floor meant, how it would likely redefine his life from this moment on, and he wanted a drink, now, to flatten the thumping pulse in his ears.

“We’re going now, Harry. Out the back.”

“Going where?”

Geiger sighed. Harry was stunned; he realized that he had never seen Geiger sigh before. He couldn’t have been more surprised if Geiger had screamed.

“And we leave the money,” Geiger said.

The statement sent a dull pang through Harry’s chest, but somehow he had seen it coming. He nodded sadly. “If we leave the money, you think this can all be smoothed out?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t think the money’s important to Hall—and because I’m taking the boy with me.”

“
With
you?”

Harry looked back through the doorway. He’d forgotten about the boy. The sight of him, silent and inert, kicked an angry squall to life in Harry’s stomach.

Harry turned back to Geiger. “This is absolutely fucking crazy. You tell Hall you don’t do kids, then you change your mind and say yes. And then you punch him out.
Why,
man?”

“We need a car, Harry. Go out through the alley—”

“What the fuck is this about, Geiger?”

“Take a cab to the Thrifty rental. They stay open late—”

“Geiger—”

“Get a car, bring it to the alley, back it in, and knock on the door. We’ll—”

A wet cough popped out of Hall, and Geiger and Harry turned to see one of Hall’s legs move, shifting from a ninety-degree angle to about forty-five. Geiger crouched beside him.

“Geiger,” Harry said, “have you even begun to think this through?”

Geiger undid Hall’s tie and began lashing his ankles with it.

“For starters,” Harry said, “you broke your own first commandment:
Never let the outside change the inside.
I’m not saying I think you were wrong—he’s just a kid—but I don’t know where the hell that leaves us.”

Geiger finished tying up Hall’s ankles and pulled the knot tight.

“Second, maybe there’s still a chance we could finesse this thing—
maybe
—but if you snatch that kid, then you’ve just retired yourself. Do you get that? Word gets out and we’re done, man. Finished. Not even Carmine would touch us. Jesus—did you think about any of that?”

Geiger rose and faced Harry. “No. I didn’t think about any of that.”

“Well maybe you’d better—”

“Harry, listen to me.”

“I cannot fucking believe you just—”

Geiger grabbed his partner and slammed him up against the doorjamb. “You’re not listening to me, Harry. Stop talking, take a deep breath, and listen to me.”

Harry felt completely incapable of taking a deep breath, but he nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

Geiger’s pupils flared. They were like two shotgun barrels in a gray mist aimed at Harry.

“This,” Geiger said, “is not about a painting.”

He let go of Harry, walked to the bar, and poured another glass of water and began to drink. Harry’s shoulder blades ached from the impact with the wall. It was the first and only time Geiger had ever touched him. Clearly, this was going to be a night full of firsts—and probably lasts. He watched Geiger’s Adam’s apple bob up and down until he lowered his empty glass.

“Mr. Hall,” Geiger said, “is not a private detective working for a rich man with an art collection.”

“How do you know?”

“He said he came to me because he knew I was more ‘understated’ than Dalton, but if I turned the job down he’d take Ezra to Dalton anyway, knowing he could end up a bloody mess, a norell. Would you do that if you were looking for a stolen painting?”

“Then who is he?”

“I don’t know.” He turned back to Harry. “But whoever he is, I don’t think he’s going to stop—and his job description may include murder as an acceptable option.”