The Inquisitor: A Novel (19 page)

Geiger stopped. He had seen something on the table, and the image pulled at him like a harpoon in his back. He returned to Mr. Memz’s station.

“So what’s it gonna be today, BT?”

“Two dollars.”

“
Two dollars?
You think I live on Twinkies? You know what a GI with stumps gets from the government every month? And have I ever told you what ‘Nam Vet’ stands for?”

“Yes.”

“‘Not a motherfucking vacation ever taken.’”

“Okay, five dollars.”

“Now, that’s a number a man could get to like, BT,” said Mr. Memz, and his fingertips scratched at his granite beard.

Geiger put down his Burger King and drugstore bags, and picked up a well-thumbed copy of Jack London’s
The Sea-Wolf
.

“Nice choice, BT.” Mr. Memz stretched back in his chair. “Give me a smoke.”

Geiger took out a pack of Luckies and nudged one out. Mr. Memz stuck it in his lips as Geiger brandished his plastic Bic lighter, but Mr. Memz waved it off.

“Shit, man, have a little self-respect. Gonna kill yourself, do it with style, huh?” He picked up his worn chrome Zippo from the table. “This baby’s been with me since Nam. I used it in-country forty times a day. Worked every time, even in that endless, motherfucking rain.” He flicked it open and grinned at the singular
click.
“Great fucking sound.”

Mr. Memz talked more than any person Geiger had ever met, but Geiger liked listening to his recitals. And he liked watching the way Mr. Memz moved, how he’d refashioned his approach to a world created for two-legged men. Decades of whiskey and smoke had worn away the edges of his voice, making it a gruff foghorn. Sometimes, when there was bourbon in his blood, Mr. Memz would tug on his ponytail and talk about the friendship between physical pain and his body, and Geiger would pay close attention. The man knew all about pain.

Mr. Memz lit his cigarette and left it smoldering in his lips. “Let’s go.”

Geiger paged through the book. Without understanding how, he knew what he was looking for, and though the small letters shifted on the paper like jittery ants, he found the passage almost immediately.

“‘He sprang for me with a half-roar, gripping my arm,’” Geiger read, still unused to the rolling tumble of his voice inside his ears. Mr. Memz’s eyes looked up into his, and he began to speak, words and smoke coming out of him like a salvo of shots.

“‘He sprang for me with a half-roar, gripping my arm. I had steeled myself to brazen it out, though I was trembling inwardly…’”

*   *   *

“‘… though I was trembling inwardly,’” the nine-year-old boy read aloud from the book.

The boy’s father sat before the stone hearth, his thick body clothed in faded denim overalls. His right hand pulled at his dense clipped beard. He drew deeply on his cigarette, and as he exhaled the smoke turned pale amber from the fire’s light.

The cabin was the work of a master carpenter. The walls and cathedral roof were made of massive split logs. Windows were set high, so the view from within was only of lush treetops and infinite sky. The floor was an astonishing work of art, a detailed re-creation of Bosch’s
Garden of Earthly Delights,
the thousands of inlays a testament to virtuosity and obsession.

“‘He had gripped me by the biceps with his single hand, and when that grip tightened I wilted and shrieked aloud. My feet went out from under me. I simply could not stand upright and endure the agony.’”

“Stop now, son. He is overcome with pain, but the question is—why?”

“Because … because he is weak?”

“Weak, yes—but not of the body. True strength has nothing to do with muscles. His mind is weak because he doesn’t know pain—and what we don’t know, we fear. And it is fear that makes us weak.” He sucked on his cigarette. “Watch now.” He blew on the tip, sending the loose ash drifting away, revealing the hot orange flush. He lowered the cigarette and ground it into the top of his hand without a flinch or a sound.

“You see, son? Not the body. The
mind.
”

*   *   *

Geiger became aware that Mr. Memz had finished his recitation and was now sitting back in his chair. With his eyes on Geiger, he flicked his butt away and offered up the smile of a charming lunatic. Geiger took a five-dollar bill from his pocket and held it out to Mr. Memz, who took the money and kissed it.

“Question, BT.”

“What?”

“During my splendid performance, you weren’t looking at the page and following along. So how do you know I got it right?”

“I’ve read it before. Many times.”

“Why didn’t you say so, man?”

“Because I’d forgotten.”

He started away. It was a downhill journey, and the spinning earth tugged at him. The heat rising off the street turned the view into a rippling, molten curtain. Two men at the entrance to the auto body shop wielded clamorous pneumatic tools, loosening bolts on the wheel hubs of a jacked-up, blood-red Magnum. The sun made the sweat on their bare mahogany backs a glistening polish.

A flash of light pulled at Geiger’s eyes. He turned and saw a silver Lexus with tinted windows cruising slowly up the street. Geiger crouched down behind a parked car and watched the Lexus pass by and then pull over at Mr. Memz’s post. The driver’s window came down and smoke drifted out from inside the car. A hand came out holding up a six-inch square card, its glossy surface glinting in the sun. Mr. Memz leaned forward in his chair and looked closely at the card. His lips moved, but Geiger couldn’t hear what he said.

The dark glass slid up and the Lexus pulled away. Geiger remembered that Hall’s insurance card said he drove a Lexus, but he couldn’t remember what color. His memory wouldn’t give up the information. He watched the car turn onto Amsterdam and drive out of sight, and then he moved quickly to Mr. Memz, leaning down to his ear from behind.

“Mr. Memz.”

The vet seized up in a flinch as if someone had hollered, “Incoming!” He twisted around.

“Fuck, man! Don’t be coming up on me like that!”

“I need to ask you something,” Geiger said.

Mr. Memz’s back rose and fell with a deep breath. “BT, I think I liked you better when you kept your mouth shut.”

“The Lexus. What did the driver want?”

“He showed me a photograph of somebody who looked a lot like you. Asked if I’d seen the guy around and said his name was Geiger. That your name, BT? Geiger?”

Where did they get a photograph of him? Geiger felt his ruptured seams being tested again. The more the world poured into him, the wider they stretched.

“What did you tell him?”

Mr. Memz’s thumbnail raked his beard. “‘I will give no information or take part in any action which might be harmful to my comrades.’”

“What?”

“Article Four, man. Code of Conduct. You don’t give up your own.” Mr. Memz smiled. “I told the guy I’d never seen you.”

As Geiger rose, he saw a double image of Mr. Memz that was gauzy at its edges. He knew what it meant, and what was on the way.

“Thank you,” he said, and headed for home.

“Hey, BT,” Mr. Memz called out. “Dude’s got sniper’s eyes! I know ’em when I see ’em, man, so watch your skinny ass!”

*   *   *

As soon as he entered the code to the front door lock and stepped inside, Geiger saw the boy sitting at the desk. Three of the black binders were spread open before him.

Ezra slowly turned to Geiger, his eyes ablaze. “This is what you do?
This?
”

The pressure in Geiger’s head was almost unbearable, but he had the presence of mind to reach for the keypad and punch in the interior code.

“What’s
wrong
with you?” cried the boy, rising from the chair. He was frantic, panicky, his body swaying and his arms waving, like a jack-in-the-box set free of its coil. The boy’s movements left stuttering trails across Geiger’s vision.

“Don’t talk now,” Geiger said. His voice reached him from somewhere far away. The visitation was very close now; the tiny lights had come calling. The textbooks called it the “aura”—a rare, warping prognostic of the migraine.

“If this is what you do, then why didn’t you do it to
me
?”

The boy was yelling now, the volume ramping up the pitch of his voice and whetting it. His words cut like a knife.

“Don’t … talk,” Geiger said.

Geiger started toward him, but the movement triggered a vertiginous light-headedness and he stopped. He heard his own gathering breath; it roared in his ears as if coming from a stranger standing behind him. He dropped the bags and turned for the CD rack. He’d need the music before he went into the closet. He tried to focus on the countless shimmering jewel cases, but the slightest shift of eye in socket rendered the titles on their spines indecipherable. The aura’s magnitude was beyond his past experiences—the degree of distortion, the recasting of light into barbed stars, the conversion of symmetry into chaos and flux. When he reached toward a shelf, the assault began, an incendiary device going off in his skull, near the crest, sending white-hot tendrils down toward the backs of his eyes.

But Ezra, his fear running wild, was not finished.
“Why did you save me?”
he shouted.

“Stop!”
Geiger yelled, and then the migraine hit him full force. He howled and fell to his knees as if smitten.

Ezra stumbled back against the desk. “What … what’s the matter with you?!”

Swaying, Geiger grabbed hold of his temples. He made a noise that might have been a word.

“I’m sorry!” said the boy. “I’m sorry! Please don’t flip out on me!”

Geiger started crawling for the sanctuary of the closet, his fingers feeling the smooth marquetry, his eyes shut tight to keep the light at bay. He extended his right hand until it brushed against the closet door, then turned the cold brass knob and dragged himself inside. He pulled the door closed and let the darkness come.

Gradually he became aware that Ezra was calling to him.

“Geiger! Say something!”

“Music,” Geiger croaked. “Put on the music.”

He lay in the dark, his right forearm a pillow for his head, his left arm holding his knees up close to his chest. His brain was on fire. Something had been breached. The pain was breathtaking, and now it had a face. Geiger could see it: a phantom gaining flesh and blood.

Then he heard music. A single strand of it—elegant, melancholy, consoling. He closed his eyes. He could see the colored puddles of sound, taste the notes, feel them falling on him like a cold rain, cooling the fire in his mind.

*   *   *

When Ezra had heard Geiger’s plea for music, he had dashed for the CD rack but then swerved to the couch when he caught sight of his violin case. Now he stood at the closet door, his trembling fingers drawing the bow across the instrument’s strings. Nestled beneath his chin, the violin was more than a comfort; it felt like crucial ballast, the weight of something known and good that could prevent him from being tossed about by the maelstrom all around him. He closed his eyes, and as he played, there came a flicker of understanding—he, too, needed the music to ease the pain and take him to his own place of peace.

14

Harry had always steered clear of Internet cafés. He didn’t want somebody sitting next to him, craning a neck. And he didn’t trust these places—even if they had online security, it would be useless. But desperate times called, so here he sat at a counter in Charlotte’s Web Café, at one of its six laptops. Lily sat to his left, her spindly fingers picking walnut crumbs off a scone, holding each up close to her eyes like a forty-niner admiring a shiny, newfound nugget.

Outside, the sun was a shimmering white wafer turning the city into a skillet. It was the kind of heat that turns a driver’s honk into an insult, a frown into a threat. But the café was well air-conditioned, which made Harry inclined to forgive the low-fat jazz that simpered from the wall speakers. And the coffee he’d bought from the Asian guy working behind the counter wasn’t bad either.

Harry rolled a sip of coffee around in his mouth and thought about how to word his plea to Geiger. He had logged on to AIM as Stickler and checked out the status of GGGG. Geiger was active. What should he write? How about “I’m about to lose it, man. I hurt all over and I’ve got a crazy person in tow and those fuckers are following me. Just tell me your address.” How had it come to this? He didn’t even know where the one person he considered a comrade lived.

He’d thought about calling Carmine and asking for help or at least a place to lie low, but the man gave him the creeps. He’d last seen him a year ago, at a session. The Jones had been supplying Carmine with bathroom fixtures for some townhouses, and Carmine had been tipped off that, as he’d put it to Harry, “the prick likes to spell ‘refurbished’ N-E-W.” The Jones had caved within minutes while Carmine watched, sipping Chartreuse VEP Green that cost one hundred and eighty-five dollars. After Harry had repacked the Jones for transport back to one of Carmine’s safe houses—an oxymoron if Harry had ever heard one—Carmine had come to him, squeezed his shoulder, and said:

“Harry, Harry. Our boy’s a thing of beauty, isn’t he? It’s like watching a chess match in a boxing ring.”

“Nicely put, sir.”

“Kasparov and Ali rolled into one. He’s a genius, our boy.”

Harry still remembered the chuckle that had finished the exchange; it was as smooth as the perfectly folded silk handkerchief that peeked from Carmine’s suit pocket. Carmine served as a reminder to Harry that some people did exactly what they pleased and got everything they wanted, usually because they had eyes in the back of their heads, a seemingly endless supply of aces and dirks up their sleeves, and no qualms or guilt about using them.