The Inquisitor: A Novel (3 page)

Waterboarding was another brainchild of the Inquisition’s interrogators. They understood that whereas submerging a Jones in water might prove effective over time, waterboarding triggered the gag reflex almost instantaneously, heightening the fear of death.

Intense heat had always been a staple of the torturer’s trade—consider the phrase “putting one’s feet to the fire”—as had the ripping and flaying of flesh. Also useful was a wide array of tools, from the simple—such as pliers for denailing—to the complex—such as the Pear, a hinged and often exquisitely etched steel tool inserted into the vagina or anus and slowly expanded by means of a screw handle. The catalog of tools was extensive: the Wheel, the Cat’s Paw, the Head Crusher, the Crocodile Tube, the Picquet, the Strappado. All these and more had been invented before the Industrial Revolution, and Geiger had come to understand that the practice of torture was not an aberration. In the cause of expedience and the quest for information, man has always been willing to trump his laws and betray his beliefs to legitimize the torture of those who do not share them.

After much study and consideration, Geiger had devised a standard operating procedure. He worked only by referral. If a company or individual was in need of his services, they were directed to his website and given the password. Harry, his partner, would immediately review the request; if he didn’t see any red flags, he asked the potential client to send some preliminary information about the Jones. Then Harry started digging, and within a couple of days he put together a detailed profile. Harry was prickly, but there was no one better at what he did. He could find out things about a Jones that the spouse or best friend didn’t know, the government didn’t know, even the Jones didn’t know. Once Geiger read the dossier, he would tell Harry whether the job was a go.

Geiger had three rules. He didn’t work with children, though Harry had never received such a request. He didn’t work with people who’d had coronary events in the past. And he didn’t work with people over seventy-two—Geiger had reviewed studies showing that the risk of heart attack and stroke rose to unacceptable levels after that age.

But there was one gray area: the asap. Geiger’s corollary to “Everything matters” was “A Jones is not the perfect sum of his or her parts.” So if a client wanted an asap—a rush job—Geiger would often decline. There was so much to take in: body language, verbal response, vocal tone, facial expressions, a constant stream of information that shaped his choices and decisions—and a miscalculation or an incorrect conclusion, no matter how minor, could blow up a session or even tear a hole in his private universe. Which is why Geiger preferred to work inside out and follow a game plan based on Harry’s research. Some pros, like Dalton, worked from the outside in and used a more single-minded, head-on application of brutality. But with this approach, the client couldn’t always be sure what shape the Jones would be in when the session was over—although in some cases, that wasn’t an issue.

Geiger, like everyone in the IR business, had heard a number of stories about Dalton. The most famous one dated from Desert Storm, when Kuwaiti cops caught one of Saddam’s henchmen sneaking across the border. They worked on the Iraqi for a week and got nothing, so they brought Dalton over and gave him carte blanche. That kind of session was called a “norell,” short for “no release likely,” meaning that it would probably be unwise to allow the world to see the Jones again after the interrogation was completed. The first time Dalton asked a question, the Iraqi smiled and Dalton sliced off a lip with a rotary knife. Then he went to work with a pneumatic nail gun—and the Jones gave Dalton what he wanted. The story may have been apocryphal, but it made Dalton’s career. In IR it didn’t hurt to have that reputation—that you were capable of anything—because most clients saw the Jones as the enemy and, in truth, wanted more than recompense or enlightenment. They wanted their pound of flesh.

The way Geiger saw it, politics, business, and religion were the three remaining fingers of a battle-scarred fist. Truth, meanwhile, was a weapon that even a damaged fist could still grasp and wield. It was a remarkably versatile commodity; it could be traded, or help serve an end, or produce a profit. But it was an unstable element with a short half-life, so it had to be used quickly, before it blew up in the client’s face. Early on, Geiger had learned that truth was no longer sacred—it was simply the hottest thing on the market, and anyone in IR who believed that they acted within the parameters of some righteous code was at the very least deluded.

The cat jumped from Geiger’s shoulder to the porch railing and went on his nightly way. Without fail, he would be back around five
A.M.
; the creature’s clock was a nearly perfect thing.

The spider had finished its night’s work. A large, striped moth was already caught dead center in the web, struggling furiously, not knowing that the more it tried to free itself, the tighter its shackles grew. Moving without haste, the spider came down from the web’s upper right-hand corner. It demonstrated no sense of urgency, as if the ends were secondary to the means, the meal simply a by-product of the art that had snared it.

Geiger lit another Lucky, and as the spider reached its prize Geiger put his lighter’s flame to an anchoring strand. The web, moth, and spider all went up in a puff of fire.

Geiger decided not to think about his action just now, and headed back inside. He would talk about it with Corley tomorrow.

2

Dr. Martin Corley stood at the railing of his eighteenth-floor terrace, drew on his between-sessions Marlboro Light, and frowned. Since he’d switched from the regular brand, this ritual had become the latest in a series of unsatisfying acts of self-denial intended to ward off incursions of mortality. It hadn’t been the milestone of sixty that had whetted his focus and pushed him away from old habits but the aftermath of his divorce. The long marriage and its countless traditions, however threadbare and static, had provided a numbing continuity, a sameness that masked the passing of time. Since Sara had left, it was his aloneness that informed him, daily, of his age and the potential for further deterioration. First came the shift to one percent milk instead of cream in his coffee. Next came Diet Coke instead of the real thing, trading flavor for the chemical aftertaste. Then Amstel Light, which required an act of self-delusion for him to believe he was drinking beer. Now this joyless sucking of thin smoke, waiting for the hop in his pulse that no longer came. Without the attendant pleasure, smoking was unmasked for what it was—an addiction perpetuated by a mind grown too indolent to explore itself with the diligence it brought to the terrain of others.

Looking down to West Eighty-eighth Street, Corley saw Geiger come around the corner and approach the side door to his building. Geiger had called for an appointment eight months ago, after finding Corley’s name listed on a psychiatric website. At their first session, he revealed the reason for his presence: two months earlier he’d had a dream of epic intricacy and drama, followed by a massive migraine. Since then, Corley had learned, the dream had been playing every two or three weeks in slightly different versions on his mind’s stage, and in each case an excruciating migraine had provided the second act. In all their sessions, Geiger had been precise and devoid of guile, a provider of emotionless reportage. Corley found his new patient to be an intriguing contradiction, the equivalent of an intelligent stone.

At the end of the first session, when Geiger had decided to continue the process, he’d voiced two requirements. First, he would talk only about the dream. He would not speak about his past, or his life outside the walls of Corley’s office. Second, he must be given a key to the building’s service entrance so that he wouldn’t have to walk through the lobby.

Corley had sat back in his chair, scratching his white-streaked beard, and asked why.

“Because I know what works best for me,” Geiger had answered.

It was the first of countless times that Corley had been struck by a tone Geiger often summoned. Though equable and uninflected, it was anchored in a certainty that made further discussion seem unnecessary, even pointless. Geiger’s first rule, limiting all discussion to the events of a dream world, meant severely constricting the usual therapeutic borders, and his request for a key was far beyond the accepted rules—no patient had ever asked for one. But Corley had agreed to both. Geiger’s dream, proof of some radical turmoil the man was clearly incognizant of, had been gasoline poured on the pale embers of Corley’s passion. He had wanted Geiger to come back.

From his terrace, Corley watched Geiger unlock the service entrance and go inside. After dropping his cigarette in a flowerless clay pot, Corley walked back into his office.

*   *   *

Corley stared at the notepad on his lap. He’d started taking notes during sessions only recently. In the past, he’d jot down a few notes in between patients and flesh them out at night. Then he began to notice a slight, nocturnal stutter in his memory, a minor lag in recalling details. He’d given ginkgo biloba a try, but stopped because he kept forgetting to take it.

“So,” he said, “the web was finished, a moth was snared, and you put a flame to everything. What do you think that was about?”

Geiger lay on the couch staring at the bookshelves on the wall. He knew the literary skyline by heart—every title, author, color, and font. In the center of the lower shelf was a framed photograph of a large, rambling house set on a rolling lawn amid majestic trees. Its strong lines and angled roof appealed to him. He’d asked Corley about the house in the past and received curt responses. All Geiger knew was that it was a hundred years old and located in Cold Spring, New York, about an hour away.

“What do I think that was about?” said Geiger. “I’m not sure. What do you think it was about?”

“Well,” said Corley, “it could’ve been about control. Power.”

Geiger’s fingertips tapped the couch in shifting combinations of sequence, speed, and rhythm. For Corley, the sound had become part of the sessions, a soft percussive accompaniment to spoken words. For the first four months of therapy, Geiger had called for an appointment only after a dream-migraine event, and that was the only subject discussed. But gradually the irregular sessions evolved into a weekly visit, sometimes twice a week, and lately Geiger seemed less strict about his first rule. Sometimes, as he’d done today, he would even chronicle a real-life event.

“Maybe it was about completion,” Geiger said.

“Interesting.”

“Is it?”

“I think so,” Corley replied. “You might have said ‘destruction,’ which could be considered the
opposite
of completion.”

“Good point, Martin.”

Before Geiger, no patient had ever addressed Corley by his first name, in thirty years of sessions. The first time, it had sent ripples skipping across the calm surface between them, leaving the psychiatrist unsettled and shifting in his chair. It had stirred something in him, the unforced familiarity in the gesture so contradictory to Geiger’s basic inscrutability. Corley had never said anything about it, and ultimately he’d embraced it as part of their unusual dynamic.

“Everything’s a process,” Geiger said. “Beginning, middle, end. That’s what works best for me. You know that. Completion.”

Geiger’s gaze drifted to the ceiling. Years ago there had been water damage. His eye was always drawn to the subtle change in texture caused by the repair. He knew, step by step, exactly how they’d gone about the work, because he’d done the same kind of job hundreds of times himself.

“Why do you think we’re talking about the spider?” said Corley.

Geiger bent his right knee and pulled the leg slowly up to his chest. Corley waited for the familiar, soft
pop
in the sacral joint.

“The spider had finished its web,” Geiger said. “So why did I torch it? I’m not sure. Because it’s in my territory?”

“And only you decide when something’s finished in your domain?”

“King of all I see?” A soft sound slipped out of him. It could have been a sigh. “That’s a line from something, isn’t it?”

“
Richard the Third
?” said Corley. “
Yertle the Turtle
?”

“What?”

“The children’s book.”

Corley waited, scraping fingertips down one bearded cheek and then the other. But Geiger’s silence was like the sound of a door slamming shut.

“Do you remember any children’s books?” Corley asked. “Or songs? Does anything come to mind? Maybe toys, or—”

“No. Nothing comes to mind.”

Over time, Corley had come to think of Geiger as a lost and beleaguered boy who had somehow remained undaunted. Because Geiger’s dreams were virtually the sole context in which Corley could work, he knew almost nothing about the man and could only guess at what lay beyond the borders of their sessions. Even so, Geiger’s story about the spider and conversations like this one convinced him that the child in Geiger was buried beneath so much traumatic rubble that it was more ghost than real. Sometimes Corley felt like a medium at a séance trying to contact the dead.

Corley glanced at his watch. It was the last gift his wife had given him. Engraved on the back was
Where does the time go? Love, Sara.

“We’re almost out of time,” he said, “so let me put something out there for you to think about—about the spider.” He straightened the pad on his knee and wrote,
Empathic?
“Maybe setting fire to the web wasn’t about completion or dominion.” He noticed the dance of Geiger’s fingers becoming more intense. “Maybe you didn’t want the spider to kill the moth.”

Geiger’s fingers came to rest, and he sat up. Corley watched the overdeveloped trapezius muscles shift beneath his shirt. Geiger’s shirts were always long-sleeved, brushed black cotton, and closed at the neck.