The Inquisitor: A Novel (5 page)

Carmine’s grin lurked just beneath the surface, like a shark in shallow water. “I guess I can’t really ask for a résumé, can I? You’ve got experience in … information retrieval, is it? The truth business?”

“I can tell when someone is lying. I can tell a lot about someone just by looking at them.” Geiger turned his head to the left. Another
click.
“You’re left-handed,” he said.

“That’s right. How’d you know that?”

“Your eyebrows.”

“My eyebrows
,
huh? You gonna read my palm and tell my fortune next?”

“I don’t know how to do that. But you see better out of your right eye than your left—and you had two, maybe three fingers on your left hand dislocated a long time ago. They still hurt. Probably arthritic.”

Carmine involuntarily flexed the fingers of his right hand, then leaned toward Geiger until their faces were inches apart. “Has anyone ever told you that you are one very strange motherfucker?”

“Yes. A number of people.” Geiger’s fingers fluttered on the tabletop. “Let me come to the first interrogation.”

Carmine frowned and poured another two inches of liquor. He stared at the glass, and for a moment he was absolutely still, as if listening to the sound of ten thousand hunches—his whole life, built upon them—and then his eyes started to shine with the wisdom of intuition.

“Geiger, do you own a cell phone?” he asked.

“No.”

“Get one.”

*   *   *

His daily regimen of push-ups done, Geiger went back into the house and stood in front of his enormous CD case. He had designed and built it himself; six feet square, it was made of flawless cherry, had ten open shelves on rollers, and held over eighteen hundred albums. He scanned the jewel cases and slid out Stravinsky’s
Dumbarton Oaks,
flicked on the amplifier, and slipped the CD into the player. A tripping cascade of violins poured from the Hyperions.

He walked to a door and opened it. Inside was a small closet, just four feet by four feet, with mirrored walls from floor to ceiling. The music flowed into the closet from two mounted Bose mini-speakers.

Still naked, Geiger stared at his triple reflections. He surveyed the cabled muscles beneath taut skin, the crooked kneecaps and pronounced bumps of the outer ankles. He turned and craned his head around to see the slight, scoliotic curve of the upper spine and the oddly flattened iliac crests at the hips. And as always, he gazed with particular intensity at the myriad razor-thin scars running in horizontal columns down his hamstrings and his calves, all the way to his Achilles tendons. They looked like patient, punctilious markings etched by an inmate on a prison-cell wall.

Geiger stepped inside the closet and lay down on his side, curling himself into a ball to fit. He reached up and pulled the door closed. He closed his eyes. As the music swirled around him, each note burst into a drop of radiantly colored light that left a dying trail like a falling star against a night sky. He could taste the sounds, too; each instrument and tone delivered a different flavor. The cello painted long, aquamarine streaks that tasted sweet and cool. The violins splashed hot red lines with hints of cinnamon.

He was in the darkness now. He needed to think.

4

Jackie Cats awakened to the sound of a cat meowing plaintively. His eyes ached, and he could open only one of them. He remembered being yanked out of bed; he remembered being taped up and forced into a large, coffinlike aluminum trunk; and he remembered, later on, some guy opening the trunk and shoving a needle into his neck. The rest was a blank—until now.

He was in a dark place and he couldn’t get a sense of its dimensions. He could see that he was suspended upright in a spread-eagled position in the center of a geometric construction made of steel bars that had been bolted together at ninety-degree angles to form a hollow cube about ten feet by ten feet. He was naked, arms and legs stretched out at forty-five-degree angles, wrists and ankles tethered tightly to the upper and lower horizontal bars by leather straps. Beneath him in the floor was a round metal grille, about four feet in diameter.

His bruised body was bathed in the hard light of mini-spots shining from the eight corners of the cube. There was no other illumination, and outside the cube the black floor and ceiling merged with the darkness. He didn’t know where he was, but he knew why, and what was coming. He pulled on his ties, testing them. There was no give.

The meowing dropped down into the guttural yowl of an angry feline, and soon another slow, bending yowl joined in, announcing a second cat.

Jackie Cats shouted, “Shut the fuck up, huh?”

He couldn’t believe what a schmuck he was. A dumb, fucking minchione. He’d waited years for his shot, put up with Carmine’s bullshit, got the right crew together, pulled it off without a snag. Free, clear, and rich. If he’d stuck to his plan, he’d be thirty-five thousand feet up right now, six little Chivas bottles on the fold-down table, listening to
Learn to Speak Portuguese
on his iPod. But he went over to Nicki’s to do her one more time, and ended up fucking himself instead. He shook his head ruefully, and it made his eyes throb.

“Fuck me!”

The yowling escalated to hisses and throaty growls, and then the unseen cats went at each other. The sound of small, thudding bodies, vicious snarls, and chalk-on-a-blackboard screams weaved into a shrill cacophony. It made him grit his teeth, and that made his eyes hurt again.

The howls stopped and he was surrounded with a thick, pulsating silence. Just past the fringe of light he saw two unblinking eyes floating in the blackness, staring at him.

“Here, pussy, pussy,” he said, chuckling. He’d made his peace with fear a long time ago. He’d looked down the barrel of a shotgun, felt a stiletto sink into his flesh, did five and a half in Attica with the beasties and the bush babies. And he had a theory about fear. It was all about regret. If you make what you want out of life and don’t bullshit yourself about your choices, then there are no regrets, and a man without regret isn’t afraid of anything.

Then again, he did wish that he hadn’t paid that last visit to Nicki …

The eyes darted toward him, and something swung into the light with a
whoosh
—it was a long wooden oar—and struck him flat-sided on the sternum. His body reflexively tried to double up, but the bonds prevented it, so he shook and spasmed like a large fish on a hook, and then slowly came to rest.

“Muh—ther—fuck—er,” came out of him.

The pain crawled up into his neck and flooded his eyes with tears. Someone was standing outside the cube; he was dressed in black and wore gloves and a hood. Jackie Cats knew he wasn’t dealing with Carmine or any of the guys. They’d taken him to a pro. He remembered Carmine talking about two guys in the past. One name started with a
D
—Denton, Durbin, something like that. He couldn’t remember the other guy’s name.

“Jesus,” he said. “A fucking
boat paddle
?”

The oar’s head smacked into the small of his back. His body tried to arch forward and the oar slammed into his stomach. The blows were wreaking havoc on his involuntary reflexes. Before his muscles could finish one violent spasm they were jolted by another. He was twisting up inside. He felt as if parts of him were being pulled from their moorings. Bile rose in his throat like volcanic magma.

“You picked a helluva way to make a living, you sick fuck. It must pay well. Don’t mind if I puke, do you?”

His lunch shot out onto the floor. It occurred to him that it had probably been his last meal, and he hadn’t enjoyed it. The veal had been tough. He greedily gathered air back into his lungs.

“I’m not giving anybody up, asshole,” he said.

Behind him, a soft voice said, “I need the names of the men who helped you steal the money, John.”

Jackie Cats turned his head as far as he could. The guy was back there, but all he could see was blackness. “You hear what I just said?” he barked.

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

“Are you fucking deaf or—”

The edge of the oar met his chest with a
crack.
He howled, his head swiveling back around in time to see the oar disappear. The voice was behind him, so how could the guy be in front of him? Was there more than one of them?

“You tell Carmine—he’s got his money back, and he’s got me, so leave it alone. I’m not ratting. And you can suck my dick.”

He heard a click, and a stream of tepid liquid poured down on his head and shoulders, down his body, drenching him and dripping down into the grille.

“What the fuck?”

The dousing slowed to a trickle and stopped, and the mini-spots grew brighter. The stuff stung his eyes, like too much chlorine in a pool. It tasted bitter.

“It’s a mixture of water and three chemical agents,” the voice said. “Under the lights, it will start to heat up as it dries on the skin. It feels good, at first.”

*   *   *

For a few minutes, it did. Jackie Cats remembered lying on the tar roof of their house off Flatbush Avenue when he was a kid, the sun on his face and the heat coming up through his towel and warming his back. But now his skin was burning hot. He felt like a slab of meat on a spit. He could almost hear the sizzle.

“So how does it work?” he asked the darkness. “You don’t get paid unless I give you names? That it? ’Cuz if it is, you’re doing this one pro bono. I’m telling you—you can wait till I’m fucking charcoal-broiled, but Jackie Cats ain’t talking.”

“I told you what I need, John, but at the moment I’m not asking you for anything. It isn’t time yet.”

“So who are you—Denton or the other guy?”

“His name is Dalton.”

“Whatever.”

His skin felt like it was shrinking, tightening on his bones. His hands had gone numb. He’d begun to feel very strange: suspended this way, he was losing the sense of where his own body started and ended. If he could just touch something …

“How ’bout this? One mean, crazy prick to another. Trust me when I tell you I ain’t giving anybody up, so how ’bout we cut to the chase and you take me out right now? Get it over with.”

He heard the
whoosh
just before the oar met his left kneecap. His bellow sounded hoarse and unfamiliar.

“Should I take that as a no?” He laughed, and that sounded different now, too. Tinny and high-pitched. “Tell you what, then. I’m gonna explain something to you. Try and make you see why you might as well do me now.”

Another
whoosh
brought the oar smashing into his right kneecap. His teeth bit into his lower lip. He tasted blood. Harsh lights suddenly came on in the walls and ceiling. The optical shift delivered such a sensory jolt that his body stiffened as if he’d been hit again.

The room was large, about twenty feet square. There was nothing else in it except a man who stood before him just outside the steel frame. Clothed completely in black, he held the oar in his hand.

“Nice to meet you, motherfucker,” Jackie Cats said.

Geiger pulled off his ski mask. He was satisfied with how things were going. He’d used force moderately, just enough to keep Massimo’s primal senses in the moment while the cube and the sodium hydroxide solution gradually did their work. Slowly the man’s concrete sense of the physical self would alter and diminish, ultimately affecting his mind and loosening his sense of resolve, priorities, loyalties. Massimo was telling him how tough he was, explaining why he couldn’t be broken. It was a good sign.

“Go on, John,” Geiger said. “Tell me why we should cut this session short. I’m listening.”

“Okay then. See, the way I see things, life and death is a no-lose proposition. I’ve felt that way for thirty years and I’m gonna feel that way no matter what kind of shitstorm you bring down on me. You know why that is?”

Geiger started to walk slowly around the cube. The oar hung down at his side. “Tell me, John.”

“Here’s why. The way I live life in my world, somebody wants to take me out? Fine. Take your best shot and see if I go down. If I do, hey, it’s cool with me, ’cuz I’m dead now and I don’t give a shit. I don’t care that you whacked me, or that you’re fucking my wife or pissing on my tombstone. Do whatever the fuck you like, or don’t. You staying with me on this, Mr. X?”

“Go on, John.”

“But if you try to whack me and I
don’t
go down … well, you gotta know I’m coming back at you and there’s a truckload of righteous retribution pulling up to your door. Because now I’m feeling like God on a long weekend with nothing to do but some really terrible fucking damage. And before I’m through with you, you’re gonna tell your wife to get on her knees and suck my hose till she chokes. To make me stop your pain, you’re gonna beg me to do things to her you’d never even let yourself dream about doing to the sorriest whore you could ever stick a cock in. Okay?”

Geiger knew it wouldn’t be long now.

“So either way,” Jackie Cats said, “dead or alive, I’m doing okay—see? Life and death’s a no-lose proposition on a silver fucking platter. And I’m not ratting.
Not ever.
”

“I have a question, John.”

“Yeah?”

“What if you were the other guy?”

“What other guy?”

“The man in your story who you’re punishing—who chooses to offer up his wife to sexual degradation in order to stop his own physical torture. Are you saying you wouldn’t make that choice if you were him?”

“Fucking A right! What’ve I just been trying to tell you?”

“Then how are you different from him?” Geiger stepped inside the cube. This close, he could smell the residue of the sodium hydroxide solution. He’d give him a second dose soon. “Tell me, John. What makes you different from him?”

Jackie Cats’s reddened face screwed up in angry confusion. “What the fuck’re you talking about?”