The Confessor (24 page)

‘Yes . . .’ said Victor.

‘He got out of the cab on Boulevard de Clichy. Lots of sex shops and clubs around here. And hookers. He’s talking to one now.’

Victor was seated at a small table in Zanni’s room, the crossword puzzle before him. He turned to her. She was lying on the bed, watching BBC News on the television.

‘Geiger is in the red light district, making a whore’s acquaintance.’

Zanni’s right brow did a quick jump. ‘Really . . .’

Victor grinned. ‘It would appear the mystical Inquisitor is flesh and blood after all.’

‘I guess so – but why do I think there’s something wrong with this picture?’ She straightened up. ‘You don’t?’

His grin widened, and he shook his head. ‘No, Zanni. I am French.’

Dewey turned the defrost fan up to keep the fog off the windshield.

‘Dewey?’ It was Victor on the cell.

‘Yeah?’

‘Continue as you are. Stay in touch.’

‘Right.’ Dewey punched off and stared at his quarry. ‘Wanna get laid one last time, huh? I don’t blame you, man.’

Her hot pants were shiny cobalt blue, her boots ended two inches above her knees, her short silver jacket was made of some kind of faux leather, and she wore her brows at a constant, weary elevation. The pale eyes beneath them appraised Geiger.

‘Do you speak English?’ he asked.

‘Un peu.’ The sardonic twist to her lips flipped into a grin. ‘Oh, baby – sooooo good.’

Geiger watched the grin wane. He was aware of how being so much in the world was rerouting his senses, and energy, and focus – the strategies, the interactions, the conversations and explanations. He was navigating in moderate but capricious currents, and it was tiring.

‘Does one of you speak English? You’ll both be paid.’

‘Très belle.’ She surveyed the players in the area. ‘Paulette! Viens ici!’

Down a few storefronts, a tall, red-haired woman stuck her head out of a doorway, pulled the collar of her long coat up and stepped into the rain, walking with an unhurried stride. She gave Geiger a quick look as she came alongside him.

‘Astrid . . .’ she said. ‘Quoi d’neuf?’

‘Ménage à trois,’ said the first woman. ‘Speak English.’

The redhead smiled at Geiger. ‘Good evening, monsieur. You would like to party?’ She spoke French and English with an Eastern European accent

Geiger looked from one woman to the other. ‘Party? No. I don’t want a party.’

‘But you would like to have us both, together?’

Geiger’s fingers flicked at his sides. ‘Yes, and no.’

‘Pardon?’

‘I will pay you both, but I don’t want to have sex with you.’

The women shared a wise glance.

‘Ah . . . You would like to watch us then?’

‘No. This is not about sex.’

The redhead’s smile was a ribbon wrapped around a secret. ‘Chéri . . . It is always about sex – even when it is not about sex.’

‘I need you for five minutes. Three hundred euros each.’

She’d been negotiating for years. There was nothing new under the sun – only different ways of getting the same old thing. But the number stunned her.

‘Three hundred –
each
?’

‘Yes.’

‘Bon. If it is not to have sex, and you do not wish to watch – then what?’

Through the sliding drops on the windshield, Dewey saw Geiger come out from the doorway with a woman in a silver jacket. She slid her arm inside his as they headed down the sidewalk in his direction, on the opposite side of the street. Dewey’s breath slowed and he sank down a bit in his seat – but the couple stopped at a door of a narrow building next to a shop called ‘Sex Time’. The woman unlocked the door and they went inside. Dewey straightened up.

‘Make it last, man,’ he said. He turned on the car radio, hit the scan button, and listened to the stations go by in three-second doses, hoping to catch an American song – something with a rough edge and a lot of guitar. Finding one was a rarity in this town. That’s what he missed the most – some made-in-the-USA rock and roll.

The two taps on his window made him jump, and his hand slid inside his coat pocket as he turned. The redhead smiled at him from the other side of the speckled glass.

‘Looking for me, handsome?’

Dewey waved her off with a scowl, and turned back to watch the door.

‘A special tonight,’ she offered. ‘Fifty euros – whatever you like.’

‘Not interested,’ he said without turning.

‘Twenty for a hand-job . . .’

‘Just take a walk, okay?’ He couldn’t help grinning to himself. Fifty euros was a lot cheaper than Madrid.

‘Want a look at what you’re missing, handsome?’

Dewey sighed, turned round and lowered the window. ‘Listen . . . Maybe some other night – but I’m
not
interested now. Comprenez-vous, babe?’

The hooker’s smile held its place. ‘You can look for free,’ she said, and undid the top three buttons of her coat and spread it open, revealing full breasts in a skimpy, sequined bra. Dewey nodded.

‘Nice rack. Truly fine, babe. Now take it someplace else – okay?’ He noticed the almost imperceptible shift of surprise in her eyes as she closed her coat, and when he felt the touch of cold air on the back of his neck his brain instantaneously understood that the passenger-side door had been opened – and then four things happened in less than a second:

. . . he started to turn round . . .

. . . as the realization that he’d been set up began to take shape . . .

. . . then a fist slammed into the side of his neck, just below the jawline . . .

. . . and he heard the hooker gasp ‘Mon dieu!’ with utter sincerity just as his brain shut down the parts that managed cognition and consciousness.

His first thought, at the cusp of waking, was that he was not alone. There was the soft, rhythmic sound, a rustle like air through nostrils, in and out. It was so dark, he blinked a few times to make sure his eyes were open. He began to get a sense of his body – immobilized around the chest, arms and legs bound to something solid. His ass was on a flat surface, his back up snug against something, so he was fairly sure he was sitting in a chair. His mouth was taped shut.

The repetitive sound grew louder, and reminded Dewey of the hose-suckers they had him lying next to in the clinic after the Kandahar IED, and it made his heart sag. He tried to pull against his binds and found they had minimal give. It had to be some kind of tape. He didn’t like the feeling of being immobilized. He never had. It made him feel weak. Then he remembered the hooker and what had gone down in the car, and his mortification hurt more than the pulsing pain in his head. The throb was like a Morse code message: You fucked up . . . you fucked up . . . you fucked up . . .

When the toy piano joined in he realized it was taped audio. Fourteen tinny notes – over and over – some randomly out of sync and just barely out of key. Frè-re Ja-cques, frè-re . . .
Jaaa
-cques, dor-mez . . .
vooous
, dor-mez . . .
vooous . . .

A third layer of audio began, a hardcore smoker’s cough – a dry, cutting hack. The aural tapestry started making him see things in the heavy pitch-black – tiny pricks of light . . . fuzzy, floating wraiths . . . shifting shades of black on black. It didn’t matter if he closed his eyes or kept them open. The circuitry of the brain ensured that when a sound registered it sought imagery, even when there was none to be found. It couldn’t stop itself.

Geiger had decided to wait until the tape played out. The last eight of the thirty minutes was only one layer – hesitant, labored huffs of breath, the aftermath of someone who is struggling for calm, and just when it seemed the sufferer would attain some peace, it broke into sobs again. On and on. When the tape ended, silence barged into the place like a mute beast – dense and heavy. Dewey had been relatively quiet through it all – clearing his throat half a dozen times and groaning once or twice – but the end of the ordeal brought a loud, guttural grunt of relief.

Geiger reached for the left lamp. Turning it on would take him back in time, and start it all again. Shining the light would deliver him to his darkest place. But there was no other way.

Geiger turned the lamp on – and a piercing beam illuminated half of Dewey’s face and made him turn away with a wince and mutter.

‘Your license says your name is Dwayne Brock.’

Dewey’s right eye squinted open, searching the black behind the light.

‘It works best for me if I call you by your name. Nod if your name is really Dwayne.’

Dewey sighed, his head bobbed, and his eye closed.

Geiger’s fingers stirred at his sides. He moved to the lamp on the right and switched it on. The lights were only two feet away from Dewey, and bleached his face into a death mask. The grey, two-inch duct tape that encircled his head at mouth-level had a thin, darkened line of moisture where his lips joined, and there was a large welt where jaw met neck that resembled an oblong port-wine stain.

‘My name is Geiger. I’m not aware of how much you know about me and the man who hired you. His name is Dalton. Dalton and I worked in Information Retrieval. Our clients hired us to get information from people, and we were both adept at it – though our approaches and methodologies were very different. Dalton was violent, aggressive. I was more psychologically oriented – and understated, perhaps. They called me the Inquisitor.’

Geiger leaned to one of the lamps, bending the neck – a two-inch adjustment.

‘I’m telling you this because it’s important you understand the nature of this particular event. Point one . . . I am working with very little time. In IR, we call that an asap. Point two . . . I know very little about you – only what you do for a living and, because of your tattoo, that you served in Afghanistan – so the lack of time and personal data will limit what techniques I would usually employ.’

Geiger paused, aware his body was about to perform a very rare action – and he yawned. The sleep deprivation was making itself known – with him in the room, a Morphean presence tugging at his sleeve, offering dreams, softening the edges of focus. He headed for the wall. He hadn’t planned on turning the overhead room light on this soon, but it might banish his visitor, for a while. He reached out in the dark, found the rough concrete, and ran his palms across it like a blind man until he found the switch and flicked it.

He turned, and they shared a stare. Dewey was stripped to his jockeys – taped to the chair around the chest, his legs taped to the chair’s legs from ankle to knee, and his arms taped to the chair’s from the wrists to the elbows. On the table was Geiger’s iPad, connected to the two speakers, the knife, Dewey’s clothes, neatly folded, and a pile of electronic innards that had been Dewey’s cell phone before Geiger dismantled it to make sure it couldn’t be traced.

Geiger started back toward his prisoner. ‘Point three . . . In this session, I’m not just the interrogator – I am also the client. I am the one who needs the information . . . and I have never been in this position before. Taking all three points into consideration, what I’m saying is – I may end up doing things I never would have considered in the past. Honestly, it concerns me, deeply – because this session may be much more about pain than fear. Nod if you understand me.’

An indecipherable grumble came out of Dewey through the tape – and Geiger leaned forward, the fingers of his right hand stiffening to make a paddle as it flashed up –and swacked Dewey’s left ear with a loud clap. The blow set off a deep gnarl while Dewey seized up from the face all the way down his body, like a chain reaction – muscles tightening, bungee cords popping up under the flesh. Then a rush of breath pouring out of his nostrils ended his noise and his body relaxed.

‘Nod if you understood me.’

Dewey’s head dipped up and down. Geiger counted the number of nods – two – and their speed – unhurried. Everything mattered.

‘Good,’ said Geiger, though he would have preferred at least three nods, at a faster rate. He stepped behind Dewey and undid the duct tape from around the mouth.

Dewey stretched his jaw open as wide as a cat’s yawn, and then blew out a breath.

‘Tell me your real name now.’

Dewey grinned. ‘Okay, you got me. It’s Darryl.’

Geiger grabbed a generous clump of Dewey’s blond curls at the side of his head and started to twist it, clockwise. Dewey’s jaw snapped shut, lips stretching back, teeth bared in an angry mutt’s snarl. Geiger’s fist continued its slow rotation – and Dewey’s mouth finally sprung open.

‘Okay! Dewey! Stop! Fuck! It’s
Dewey
!’

Geiger let go, and Dewey shook his head wildly, like a man whose hair was on fire. ‘
Muhh–thurr–fuhhck!
’

Geiger’s violence had been less strenuous than hammering a nail, but left a slight tremor in his hands. He folded the used tape carefully, again and again, trying to kill it.

‘Dewey . . . Do you know who Harry Boddicker is?’

Dewey’s reply was without hesitation, and matter-of-fact. ‘Yes. One of the guys Dalton has.’

‘Do you know who David Matheson is?’

‘Yeah. The other guy. The Veritas Arcana guy.’

Geiger didn’t care about these answers. They were like pre-test control questions for a polygraph where the tester already knows the true and false. He was getting a sense of Dewey’s cadence, timbre, vocal tendencies.

‘Dewey . . . Who do you work for – Soames or Dalton?’

Dewey tilted his head like a cock o’ the walk. ‘Let me tell
you
something, dude. You’re fucking with the wrong guy. I had the SERE training before I shipped out, okay? I know how to deal with this shit. Survival, Evasion, Resistance and—’

Geiger’s hand came up and paddled Dewey’s right ear. It sounded like someone slamming a door shut – and Dewey’s roar started down in the pit of him, and grew in volume as it climbed some inner ladder and finally burst out like a shotgun blast.

‘Fffffffffffffffffuck, man!’

Geiger came around to face him. ‘Dewey . . . I can tell you with near certainty that your training will not play a major role in what happens tonight in this room.’