The Inquisitor: A Novel (7 page)

The downstairs buzzer sounded. Harry walked to the door and pressed the entry button on the wall. Four months ago, in a sudden act of contrition, he’d arranged to have Lily brought to his place by one of the psychiatric nurses on her day off and had found that, compared to visiting the blanched desert of her room in the home, bringing Lily to his apartment had a temporary numbing effect on his angst. Recently he had scheduled another one-night sleepover—for today.

Harry opened the door and stepped back a few feet, listening to footsteps ascending the stairs. A twenty-something woman with black, scarecrow hair, wearing green culottes and high-tops, came into the doorway’s frame with a small, canvas overnight bag in hand.

“Hi, Mr. Jones.”

“Hi, Melissa.”

She turned, reaching a hand out to the unseen hall. “C’mon, Lily. Let’s go.”

A soft, satin voice spoke: “Time to go.”

“That’s right,” said the nurse, and pulled Lily into the apartment.

Drugs and madness had made his sister gray and small. She was dressed in the short-sleeved pink blouse and lilac pedal pushers he’d bought for her a few years ago. Lily’s elbows, wrist bones, and cheekbones stood out prominently beneath her opalescent skin, and as always now, when Harry saw her he had to remind himself that she was six years younger than him.

“How’s she doing?” he asked.

“Same,” said Melissa. “Fine. Right, Lily?”

There was a stillness about her; hardly anything seemed to move, as if the psychosis was a cancer that had dissolved all her muscles and tendons and nerves. She looked light as air—a giant, beautiful origami figure. When her deep-set blue eyes finally shifted and settled on Harry, they gazed at him without a hint of recognition.

Harry stepped toward his sister. Her gaze was fixed on the small hollow beneath his Adam’s apple. He raised a hand and tapped the top of her head with his knuckles three times. “Anybody home?”

Lily’s lips bent ever so slightly at his touch.

Harry glanced at Melissa. “We used to do that as kids.”

His sister walked to the wide picture window. “I like it here,” Lily said. “Everything moves so fast. I like seeing everything move so fast.”

The East River, barely disturbed by a ripple, carried a near-perfect reflection of Manhattan’s skyline upon it. On summer days like this the city seemed to have a shining twin that lay just beneath the water.

Lily leaned her forehead against the glass and put her palms up flat against it. She began to sing haltingly in light, dancing syllables.

“Way down … below the ocean…”

Harry joined in.
“Where I want to be, she may be.”

Lily seemed deaf to his participation.

“Know that song, Melissa?” asked Harry. “‘Atlantis’?”

“Nuh-uh,” she said. “Any coffee?”

“In the pot. Make fresh if you like.”

Harry sat back down at the desk, and his chest rose and fell with a deep breath and a deeper sigh. He took the sheet of paper from the printer. As he read, he started nodding. He liked what he saw.

“Melissa, I may have to go out for a while.”

“Okay. We’ll be okay—Lily’s fine.”

Harry looked up with a tilted grin. “Yeah,” he said. “Lily’s fine.”

6

They sat at a booth in the diner on Columbus Avenue. Harry had been coming here since the 1980s, when he and his sister lived nearby. Now it was a twice-a-week breakfast place for him and Geiger. Harry would have his cheddar omelette and bacon, and Geiger would have black coffee. Harry would talk about the business—a tweak to the e-mail codec, new customized spyware, a database he’d hacked into—and Geiger would listen, sometimes responding with a one-sentence remark. Harry brought the
Times,
and when he was talked out they’d both read the paper. Harry never took the first section because Geiger read only the letters to the editor.

Harry emptied a third thimble of cream into his coffee to placate his stomach as Geiger opened the folder and extracted three sheets of paper. The first was the printout of the potential client’s website entry. His name, Richard Hall, and cell phone number were followed by his request:

I represent the owner of a private art collection. Two days ago a painting, a de Kooning, was stolen. We believe the thief is an art dealer who has served as a go-between in acquisitions for my client. My client feels that notifying law enforcement will not necessarily help recover the painting, so I have contacted you.

Harry watched Geiger’s gray eyes slide back and forth. Even after working for him for more than a decade, Harry knew little about Geiger. He’d pieced together a scant profile from random remarks—not from New York, a music lover, vegetarian, didn’t own a TV, lived somewhere in the city—but he had long ago stopped asking even the most casual personal questions. Whatever more particular sense of the man Harry had came from a tilt of Geiger’s head while listening, the speeds and patterns of his fluttering fingers, the occasional comment about a job. Harry had come to view the nature of their bond in the simplest of terms: need. Geiger had, for reasons Harry did not understand, entrusted him with a significant part of his life, and Harry had put the task of serving him at the empty center of his own. They were the strangest of partners—joined at the hip, light-years between them.

Richard Hall’s entry continued:

The man in question is David Matheson. He is 34 years old, resides at 64 West 75th Street, New York, New York, and his Soc. Sec. number is 379-11-6047. I have him under surveillance and would be able to “deliver” him, as I am told this is how the process works. It is likely that Matheson had a buyer in place
before
the theft, so it is crucial that this be dealt with quickly. I am authorized to pay an additional $200,000 should you retrieve information leading to the painting’s recovery. Please contact me by 2:00 p.m. or I will look for someone else. Sincerely, Richard Hall

Geiger put the first sheet down.

Harry grinned. “Not bad, huh? Would you do an asap?”

“One step at a time, Harry. We have a way of doing things.”

Harry nodded and stifled a frown and a burp.

The other pages were research on both the Jones and Richard Hall. Harry had hit a dozen different veins, as he liked to call them, while digging up information about David Matheson. He’d earned an undergraduate degree in international studies and a master’s in art history, and had worked for ten years as an art appraiser, consultant, and buyer. He was on watch lists in Greece and Egypt for meeting with suspected black marketeers in antiquities. He had lived in New York for thirteen years and was divorced; his only child, a son, lived with his mother in California. All Harry had on Hall was his birth date and Social, his honorable discharge from the National Guard in 1996, and thirteen years of FICA contributions from Elite Services Inc., an investigative outfit in Philadelphia.

Rita, the waitress with the bleached platinum beehive who often served them, arrived with her coffee pot. She knew not to bother talking to Geiger. With him it was always the same—black coffee, two refills, and hardly a word. Sometimes his gaze would meet hers, but there was no invitation in it. At first she’d taken his manner as coldness, but in time she’d seen her mistake: she’d interpreted his lack of warmth as the presence of its opposite, where, in truth, there was no emotion at all. She slid his cup over and poured, then slid it back and looked to Harry.

“Darlin’?”

Harry waved the offer away. “Already over my limit, Rita, and I’m paying for it.”

“Want the usual for breakfast, Harry?”

“Nothing today, hon.”

Rita moved on. Geiger put the sheets back in the folder.

“So what do you think?” Harry asked.

“Not a lot here to work with,” said Geiger.

Harry frowned. “I didn’t have a lot of time.”

“I wasn’t criticizing the effort, Harry.”

Harry nodded. There hadn’t been any negative edge to the words; there never was. Geiger’s neutral delivery was like an aural Rorschach test. Harry heard what he did or didn’t want to hear depending on his mood. Sometimes it made him nuts.

“Chances are very good that Hall’s client didn’t buy the painting legally,” said Geiger. “That’s why they don’t want the police.”

“That crossed my mind. Doesn’t matter, though—right?”

“Did you find out if any de Koonings have been stolen or gone missing in the last fifty years or so?”

“Uh-huh. Two—in 1979 and 1983.”

Geiger’s fingers danced on the tabletop.

“Harry, even if I get Hall the information he wants, there’s no way we’d know if his client ever actually gets the painting back. We’d never see the extra money.”

“We could make it part of the deal. If Matheson fesses up, I could go along with Hall when he gets the goods. Then we’d know.”

“No. The job is over when the session ends. We don’t go past that line. Inside versus outside, Harry. You know that.”

Harry’s head bobbed and his shirt-hanger shoulders hunched in a shrug.

“I know, I know. It’s just a ton of money.”

Geiger picked up his coffee, blew on it, and took a sip. Harry noted, as he often had before, that even this simple action was executed with the finesse of a ballet dancer.

“Harry, how much did we make last year?”

“A million and change.”

“Twenty-five percent of that is…?”

“Two hundred fifty.”

“And that’s how much if you paid taxes?”

“Four hundred and twenty thousand. Okay, okay.”

Geiger held his coffee cup against his chin. In an asap scenario the Jones is more of an X factor and the clock is ticking. Ordinarily Geiger didn’t like to count on luck, but when the client was in a hurry he had no choice: he was forced to hope that the Jones would slip up. Sooner rather than later, the Jones would have to show something—a weakness, a phobia, a demon—and then Geiger would play it for all it was worth. Asaps were always tricky, but they did provide their own kind of challenge.

Geiger put his cup down. It didn’t make a sound.

“Tell Hall it’s a go,” he said.

Harry’s lips sprang up at the corners in a hallelujah smile.

“Have him snatch Matheson now,” Geiger said. “Make the session for midnight, Ludlow Street.”

*   *   *

Geiger had an appointment with Corley coming up that afternoon, but first he wanted to go to the Museum of Modern Art because Harry had said there were some de Koonings there. Geiger had never been in a museum. Carmine had taken him to a gallery in SoHo once—Carmine was a serious collector—but Geiger had been unmoved. Paintings, sculpture, photographs—they weren’t like music. They were unchanging images, and staring at them was a static event for him. But having an appreciation of a Jones’s passion is a valuable asset in IR, so he was going to see what it was that David Matheson craved.

He walked through Central Park. The sun was a yellow decal stuck onto the sky, and softball teams were out in full regalia. The park was where he had first started studying squirrels. They were marvels of psychic economy, each reflex and movement ruled by fear. Geiger sometimes watched a squirrel stop in mid-step and freeze with its paw raised for thirty seconds as it weighed a potential threat.

Soon after he’d moved into his house, he’d started an experiment to see if he could change and control their behavior. For a week, he put a pile of sunflower seeds by the birch tree in the backyard and watched from the stoop as the squirrels ate them. Then one morning he sat down by the tree, hand open in his lap and filled with seeds. He stayed absolutely still for an hour. For three mornings, a squirrel would venture within five or six feet of him, freeze, and then sprint away. Geiger realized that as the squirrels came closer, his heightened anticipation caused changes in him—pulse rate, gaze, breathing pattern—that set off their internal alarms. He would have to change his behavior to control theirs.

The next morning he sat by the tree with his eyes shut, playing a symphony in his head, denying his senses all knowledge of the external. In two days they were picking seeds from his hand; after four days they were eating while perched on his calf or thigh.

Geiger brought that experience into the session room—the ability to change his behavior to suit a scenario and to create a state of dread in the Jones while he could still function and make choices. If a squirrel’s hardwiring allows a respite from fear only when it is up a tree, Geiger’s goal was not to make the Jones fear that he’d never get back to the tree, but to make him forget that trees existed at all.

Recently he had told the story of the squirrels to Corley. It was one of the few times he had volunteered information about a contemporary event, and Corley had responded by asking if he felt “disconnected from people.”

Geiger answered, “Martin, if you’ve never been plugged in, you can’t be disconnected.”

Geiger was aware of his differentness. Of the one hundred and sixty-eight hours in a week, he spent approximately five with Harry, one with Corley, and, on average, fifteen with the Joneses. Living the rest of his life alone was not a choice. It was his organic state. The parts of himself that Geiger knew, he knew very well. The parts he didn’t know, he knew not at all. Life before New York was without definition—a black room—and when he peered into it, the darkness offered faint answers. But when the dream started, it was as if a flash of lightning filled the room, and he could see that the space was endless, without borders. The dream gave him half a second’s glimpse of the room’s contents: countless faces, bodies, trees, unrecognizable shapes. That is where Corley came in. Geiger told him about the dream and its variations, and he used Corley’s eyes to help him see into the black room and discover who he was and what he had been. Geiger did this because the more he knew about himself, the more he could bring to the job. It was all about IR.

The dream had come to him again, last night, and the aftermath had been the same. He woke up at four
A.M.
and saw the flashes of lights announcing the powerful migraine that was already moving like a storm front into the left side of his brain. The dream’s details changed but the structure was always the same: Geiger, as a preteen boy, would rush out of someplace and try to get to a destination that was never clear. On his journey, which was filled with obstacles, he would sooner or later start to literally come apart: first his digits and then his limbs would drop off. When his head was about to fall off he would wake up.