The Inquisitor: A Novel (6 page)

“Why wouldn’t you sink to those depths? What is it about you? Is it physical strength? Are you tougher?”

Geiger raised the oar and brought the edge down on the outside of Jackie Cats’s right ankle with a sharp
crack.

“Do you have a higher threshold of pain?”

He whacked the left ankle and Jackie Cats growled.

“Are you braver?”

He flipped his grip on the oar and hammered the rounded end into Jackie Cats’s right clavicle. A deep gasp burst out of his bleeding lips.

“Or more noble—or loyal?”

He drove the oar into the left clavicle, picking spots where he would inflict intense pain without breaking anything.

“Or more loving?”

Geiger raised the oar like a spear so the bridge of Jackie Cats’s nose became a bull’s-eye. As he thrust it forward, Jackie Cats winced at the imminent impact—and the oar stopped an inch from him. His eyes rolled back and his head tipped to the side.

“John. What I have to say now is important, so nod if I’m coming through to you.”

“Go … fuck … yourself.”

Geiger’s fingers started their dance beside his thigh.

“In this room, John, we try to deal in truth, and we stay here until we find it. Now, I do think you believe that what you just told me about yourself is true. I think that’s who you think you are—but I don’t agree with you.” He stepped out of the cube. “John, my job is to retrieve information, but sometimes, in order to do that, first I have to help you become more aware of your strengths and weaknesses, what you’re capable of and what you’re not. Discovering your true self, John—that’s what this is really about.”

Geiger walked to the wall directly in front of Jackie Cats.

“So you try to take a look at who you really are when all the poses and nicknames are stripped away. Give it a shot, John, and then you and I will talk again and see where we end up. I might even ask for the information I need.”

Geiger reached out to a black control panel on the wall, pushed a button, and another shower came down on Jackie Cats, who grunted but hardly moved. Geiger punched another button and all the lights except for the cube’s mini-spots went out.

“Been there, done that, motherfucker,” Jackie Cats muttered.

The sound of the cats’ hissing and yowling started again, and then Geiger’s voice spoke from the dark as it had earlier.

“I need the names of the men who helped you steal the money, John.”

The sentence became an audio loop. Interweaving with the feline mayhem, the voice said the same words over and over.
I need the names of the men who helped you steal the money, John. I need the names of the men who helped you steal the money, John. I need the names …

Then a noise slipped out of Jackie Cats. Even in his impaired state, the sound stunned him. It was a whimper.

5

Sipping his morning coffee and sitting at the desk in his Brooklyn Heights living room, Harry looked out at the East River. He slid his hand inside his sweatpants and felt around gingerly, his scowl like a horseshoe embedded in his unshaven face. Last night, during one of his marathon showers, he’d discovered something that made him shiver in the hot steam—a small, subcutaneous
something
in his groin. The bulge was the size of a grape and semihard.

During his years in the Obituaries department at the
New York Times,
which is where he’d worked before he met Geiger, Harry had developed the conviction that if you lived past forty, sooner or later you’d get cancer. The small percentage who didn’t make it to forty—who died in a head-on or were murdered or stroked out—they
would
have gotten cancer if they’d lived longer. Now Harry was forty-four, and his body, once a brother-in-arms against the world, could no longer be trusted. He knew from all the lives he’d sifted through that within every man is his own Caesar and Brutus, and from this point on his flesh could betray him at any time. The “Et tu” moment would come, not as a dagger in the back but as a swollen node felt while swallowing, or an enlarged pupil glimpsed in the mirror, or a grape-sized mass found by a fingertip during a shower.

At times like these Harry envied Geiger. He wouldn’t change places for any price—clearly, the man had more demons than a Hieronymus Bosch painting—but that steel-trap heart and mind had a definite appeal. Nothing ever seemed out of the ordinary to Geiger. He was like some mystical engineer who’d found a way to shut down the highs and lows of happenstance and their impact. Back at the beginning of their partnership, Harry had decided that Geiger was on a mood equalizer, one of those drugs that sandpaper the rough edges off experience. But eventually Harry had changed his mind. If Geiger was on a drug, it was something he produced in his brain, and whatever that chemoneural cocktail was, Harry coveted it.

They had met eleven years ago in Central Park at three
A.M.
Harry was drunk, as was his nightly custom then, and he was getting his head kicked in by two skinheads. A few years earlier he had become a dreamless man—not the nocturnal variety, but a man who had let go of any notion of prospects, any promise of the new and different, any hope of
something else.
The dreams of his youth were as dead as the people he wrote about, ashes and dust, and so the arrhythmic pounding of boot toes on bones and flesh and the breath-sapping pain and the possibility of being ushered out of the world had all felt almost right. Loss had become a sidekick; it was always near, shambling along a few steps behind him. The thought of finally bidding it good-bye was stretching Harry’s battered lips into a smile across broken teeth when Geiger stopped his nighttime run just long enough to lay out the punks in a blur of lethal hands and feet, and then go on his way before Harry could summon breath to speak.

Two weeks later, with thirty stitches and two new teeth in his head, Harry began a nightly vigil at the site of his humiliation. He didn’t have to wait long: on the second night, in a downpour, Geiger came down the path in T-shirt and sweatpants, and Harry stepped into his route. Geiger stopped, running in place.

“What do you want?” Geiger asked.

“I just wanted to say thank you.”

Geiger’s wet hair shone black as polish. Drops of rain slid down out of his brows and into his eyes, but they didn’t appear to bother him. Harry noticed that he hardly ever blinked.

“My name’s Harry. Harry Boddicker.”

He put out his hand, but Geiger didn’t even glance at it.

“Buy you a drink?” Harry asked.

“I don’t drink.”

“Well, I just thought, seeing as how you saved my life—”

“It was chance, Harry. It had nothing to do with you. If they’d been kicking a dog I would’ve done the same thing.”

“Then how about coffee? You drink coffee, don’t you?”

For a moment, Geiger looked at Harry with his steady, unblinking eyes and said nothing. Harry suddenly felt uneasy; the man seemed to be inspecting him, judging him. Then Geiger nodded and said, “All right, Harry.”

They went to a bar on Broadway and took a booth in the ammonia-scented shadows. While Geiger nursed a black coffee, Harry had three Wild Turkeys. Over the next three hours, Harry delivered a biographical monologue that was half an eager act of sharing and half an attempt at reaffirmation, as if the tether to his past was dangerously frayed and recounting events would buttress his place in the present.

The pace of his story picked up when he told Geiger about landing a job at the
Times,
straight out of City College, as a researcher. “That’s when I discovered I had a talent for digging stuff up. They called me ‘Shovel.’ Funny how sometimes it takes a while before you find out you’re good at something.”

He told Geiger about nights spent sneaking into computer networks using software of his own design, about deploying those skills to unearth secrets and connect dots, about writing a major piece on racial profiling that made his reputation as a reporter.

“One morning there it was, second section, page one. ‘By Harry Boddicker.’ It was like, Hey, that’s
me.
”

As Harry talked, Geiger said little beyond answering yes or no a few times. He nodded or shook his head to other queries, and although that was the extent of his active participation, he never had the urge to leave. He noticed that Harry tilted precipitously toward the melancholic as the alcohol settled in, and that Harry’s recollections became less detailed and more scattershot as his story went on. Geiger also sensed that Harry was leaving out an important chapter: he talked about his life as if he’d lived in two distinct eras, but he never once mentioned the event that had ended one and brought on the next. At first Harry’s tale was full of excitement and the pride of accomplishment, but then it veered into darker alleyways. His passion for the work waned; the quality of his stories declined precipitously; facts were smudged, deadlines missed. Drinking went from hobby to habit. After months of admonishments, the
Times
had given him one last chance and a desk in the Obits department.

“You know that sensation,” Harry said, “when you feel like you’ve hit bottom, and you realize you’re right where you belong?”

Harry told Geiger that being relegated to Obits had been like a homecoming—he lived with ghosts and their pasts, immersed in their deeds and declines. But it had also spurred him to create ever more sophisticated and cunning search programs. Filling in blanks, giving continuity to chaos—it became an obsession, a strange kind of resurrection.

Listening to this epic story had been a singular experience for Geiger. In those three hours, he learned more about Harry than he’d ever known about anyone, and as he ran home in the dawn light, a thought came to him as if delivered by an unseen hand. This would not be the last time he saw Harry Boddicker.

*   *   *

The
ding
of Harry’s computer signaled a visit to the website. The sound was always a tonic. It meant work, the challenge of putting the puzzle of a person’s life together, and money. Harry had discovered an appreciation for money only after he’d started working with Geiger and making a lot of it. The money was useful, of course, but it was also a salve for the shame over how he made it.

Harry had never been present at a session, but he’d come to understand that for Geiger, the work wasn’t about money. God knows what it
was
about, but Harry never asked. That would be like asking Van Gogh why he painted, or asking Jack the Ripper why he went out for a stroll at night. In time Harry realized that Geiger
had
to do it, and like everything else about the man, this intrigued Harry. He dimly remembered that feeling, the thrill of a powerful undertow that could pull him out to some roiling sea. Geiger, for all his stoic strangeness, reminded Harry of what passion used to feel like.

Harry watched the website on his screen. Ninety-five percent of the hits on DoYouMrJones.com were Dylan fans, who found a home page with a picture of the singer, but the bell meant someone had clicked on “password” to venture deeper into the site. The password had to be a five-word phrase extrapolated from the letters of “melon,” Harry’s favorite fruit. If they got the password right, it meant they had a legitimate referral.

Harry sipped his coffee and smiled when the current visitor entered “Men everywhere live on nuts.” Not bad, he thought. Of course, no one had ever matched Carmine’s first log-in, in 1999. “Minestrone, eggplant, linguine, ossibuchi, nougat.” A classic five-course Italian meal from a man whose appetite and sense of humor were as big as his sense of vengeance, who lived life the same way he wielded power—to the fullest.

The site accepted the phrase and asked for a referral. When the visitor typed in the name—Colicos—Harry recognized it. Colicos was a scrap metal baron who had used Geiger twice in the past. Harry waited while the visitor followed the instructions and provided his name, cell phone number, the identity of the Jones, and the reason why the client needed Geiger’s services.

Again Harry gently squeezed the lump in his groin and considered having someone look at it. But he hated going to doctors almost as much as knowing that he had a reason to do so. Geiger had taught him how to create various false identities, but health insurance was too dicey for someone living off the grid, so he paid his medical bills in cash. He did not relish the thought of doling out large sums for exams, tests, biopsies, and all the rest.

The web page filled up with information, and then another tone signaled the visitor’s exit. Harry hit “print” and checked his watch. Lily would be arriving soon.

His gaze went to her photograph on the corner table; curled up on a couch, she looked out at him with her mischievous, “I know a secret” smile. But his sister hadn’t looked like that in a very long time. Ten years ago, he had put her in a home, and every other Sunday since then he had made the trip to New Rochelle to visit her. Sitting beside her while she stared at nothing and sang snippets of old songs, he listened to a voice that sounded ancient, as if she’d already lived a dozen lifetimes. She seemed to have become something out of a science fiction movie, a being taken over by an alien life-form, its movements awkward, its speech quaint and disjointed, its motives unknowable.

Even so, Harry was convinced that Lily maintained a firm grip on the absurdity of her life, and her persistence haunted him. Harry had tried to train himself to not think about Lily, but his sister had become a squatter in his nearly vacant conscience, refusing to be evicted. His guilt was not about the business of surrogacy—he paid a fortune to keep her in the home. Instead, he was tormented by the serrated truth that had lodged itself in him long ago. He wasn’t shelling out over a hundred thousand dollars a year because he loved Lily; he was doing it because he wished she were dead. These days, six figures seemed to be the going rate for Boddicker guilt.