Mark Smith - The Inquisitor

Harry watched Geiger go into what he had privately coined “dead mode”-a state that visited Geiger when he seemed to be considering something. Eyes unblinking, chest unmoving, he stood completely still for several seconds. Then a single blink seemed to bring him back to life.

“Let’s get the kid in the chair,” Geiger said.

Hall’s eyebrows curled into question marks, and he turned to look at Harry as if Geiger had spoken in an unknown dialect and Harry was the official translator. Harry stared back silently. He’d never delivered an underage Jones, never even considered the possibility. It had been a long time since Geiger had surprised him.

“All right, then,” Hall said. “Great.”

He reached to the trunk and pulled the lid up. Harry bent down and caught the manila envelope as it slid toward the floor.

Geiger looked in the trunk. Matheson’s son was on his side, wrists and ankles cinched together with thin plastic self-locking ties. Three strips of silver duct tape circled his head, one across his eyes and two across his mouth. His long, wavy blond hair was sodden, stuck to his forehead and cheeks like seaweed on a beach. He was dressed in a blue T-shirt, silver gym shorts, and red-and-black Nike Air LeBrons. The skin of his slender arms and legs was tanned, and his head rested on a violin case. He looked asleep, or in a coma.

“His name?” Geiger asked.

“Ezra.”

“Did you give him anything?”

“No. But he was a handful.”

Geiger knelt beside the trunk. Harry thought there was almost something of the supplicant in the action.

“Ezra…” Geiger said softly, like a parent waking a child from a nap. The blinded, muted body showed no reaction to its name. “Ezra, time to get up.”

Geiger started to straighten up, and as he did he grabbed the handle at one end of the trunk and suddenly yanked it up, standing it on its end. The boy and the violin case came tumbling out onto the floor. Harry took two involuntary steps backward, staring at the moaning body.

Geiger took hold of the plastic cable tie at the boy’s ankles and began dragging him across the floor. The boy twisted furiously, like a marlin on a gaff, and muffled whimpers escaped from beneath the duct tape. At the wheelchair, Geiger grabbed the boy under the armpits and hoisted him roughly onto the seat. Then he began securing the chair’s straps around the boy’s ankles, arms, and chest.

Hall watched the proceedings with a hint of admiration at his lips.

“Ezra,” Geiger said as he worked, “you’re going for a ride now. You won’t struggle-you’ll stay completely still in this wheelchair. In a little while I’m going to ask you questions about your father, and you are going to tell me everything I need to know.” The strapping was finished. Geiger clicked his neck. Left, right. “I’m telling you the truth, Ezra, and you’re going to tell me the truth. That’s why we’re here. Any answer that is less than truthful-I’ll hurt you. It doesn’t matter that you’re a child. In this room, you become ageless. That’s how it works. Nod if you understand.”

A fluidal sound, something between a sob and a gurgle, came from the boy’s gullet, and his head bobbed. It made Harry reflexively clear his throat.

“Good,” Geiger said. He flicked a switch on the wheelchair, and as it started across the black tiles he went to a wall and pushed a button. The low, moaning sound of a foghorn started up, rising and fading from the speakers in a random sequence. As it approached a corner, the wheelchair took a smooth left turn and settled into its route, circumnavigating the room, passing within inches of the walls. The noise presented itself to the boy as a dopplering fade, or a growing presence, or sudden sidelong blasts that made him quake in his bonds.

As Hall and Harry watched the spectacle, Geiger walked over to them.

“Harry…” Geiger said, almost a whisper. Harry picked up the attache case, stepped back into the elevator, quietly drew the gate closed, and descended out of sight. Geiger pointed toward a door beside a square mirror in a wall, and Hall followed him through. They turned to the one-way mirror and observed the wheelchair’s circular ritual.

“Disorientation?” Hall said.

“Yes. The chair is on a timer,” Geiger said. “Five minutes, then I’ll begin. Something to drink?”

Hall looked to the chrome bar. “Wine. Red.”

Geiger walked to the bar and began pouring some pinot noir.

“Does your client know you took the son?” he said.

“My client wants his painting back. How I get it is up to me.”

Geiger handed him the glass. The lights made the vermilion liquid flash. Hall took a long sip and let the wine linger in his mouth before he swallowed. He nodded with satisfaction.

“Do you know anything about him, Mr. Hall-besides what was in your report?”

“No. He lives most of the year with his mother. I’ve got his cell phone-two calls in the last twenty-four hours, one with a New Hampshire area code, and one with a Manhattan area code we figure is Matheson. We found the violin in his room in Matheson’s apartment. I thought maybe it might be of use to you.”

“Anything else in his room?”

“I didn’t notice. Does it matter?”

“Everything matters, Mr. Hall.”

Harry sat in the van’s driver’s seat. He had started counting the money, but he stopped as a gloominess crept in with the sticky evening air. When Geiger had spilled the kid out of the trunk it had been a pure what’s-wrong-with-this-picture moment. Even if he could rig his ethical arithmetic yet another time, it was a trickier task squaring Geiger’s reversal with everything he’d done in the past. Harry had become a moon in a steady orbit around Geiger, dependent on and secure in the man’s gravitational force, so experiencing a shift in Geiger’s axis of rules brought with it something vertiginous. Seeing Geiger do the unexpected was like watching the Statue of Liberty wink at him.

Harry sighed, and then went back to counting the money.

The wheelchair and its blind passenger continued tracing a circle, and the foghorn’s sad warning came out of the walls. Hall checked the time again.

“Just a little longer,” Geiger said. “A layman might think minors are easy to break, but it’s not necessarily true. In a context of intense fear, a child is apt to go inward and shut down-or to lie, say anything, and say it convincingly.” He poured a glass of water. “Mr. Hall, if you’re that concerned about time, telling me what this is really about will make my job easier-and quicker. It’s up to you.”

Hall watched him drink the glass down. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that you’re lying. That’s what I do, Mr. Hall-I determine whether someone is telling the truth or not.”

Hall took a sip of his wine. “All you need to be concerned about is doing whatever’s necessary to get the kid to talk.”

“All right. Just trying to be helpful.”

Geiger looked out to the boy. For a moment, the nature of time, and Geiger’s awareness of it, changed. It ceased to be perpetual and fluid and solidified into measured instants. Each brief moment had its own beginning and end, like the flickering frames of a movie glimpsed individually even as they ran together.

“I think it’s time,” he said, and his right fist shot straight out, his knuckles smashing into Hall’s chest an inch below the sternum, driving the breath from him in a loud, expulsive grunt. Hall stumbled back into the wall and slumped to his knees, chest heaving, hands on his quadriceps. A noise like a hacksaw cutting through copper pipe clawed its way up his throat as his diaphragm struggled to free itself from spasm and pull in air.

Geiger crouched down beside Hall. Spittle, tinted pink with pinot noir, was beginning to bubble out of his mouth. His lips opened slightly in a preface to speech.