Mark Smith - The Inquisitor

As he hung up, he noticed that a few of the patrons had paused in their separating and folding to stare at the guy yelling into the phone. He hadn’t realized he’d been shouting. He led Lily over to a line of chairs against a wall and sat down. His damaged, aching knee felt like a water balloon.

“Sit down, Lily,” he said. He gave her a little tug, but she remained standing, shifting back and forth from one foot to the other, in thrall with the motorized cacophony. Leaving the brownstone, he had dragged her three blocks before he’d been able to flag a cab. When the driver had asked where they wanted to go, Harry hadn’t answered for nearly ten seconds. In a city of infinite destinations, he was struck mute by the realization that he had nowhere to go. Finally, he told the driver he needed a pay phone, and they cruised Flatbush Avenue silently until the harsh fluorescents of the laundromat caught the driver’s eye.

Watching the machines tumble and whirl, Harry took stock. The de Kooning scenario had dipped to zero plausibility. David Matheson had something, or knew something, and Hall desperately wanted it or him. Hall was obviously a wired guy, and he seemed to have access to the most sophisticated kinds of techno-tracing. Kidnapping and violence were not an issue. The man had carte blanche in an a la carte world. But Harry couldn’t figure out how they had found his home. He’d made himself untraceable, unfindable. How had Hall ended up sitting in his living room, waiting for him to come out of the shower? He scrubbed the inside of his mouth with his tongue. He’d crunched two Pepcids to kill the lingering taste of vomit, but it hadn’t worked.

Lily let go of her brother’s hand and began slowly tracing a line on her right cheek with the tip of her middle finger, from cheekbone to jawline, up and down, like a rhythmic accompaniment as she started to sing.

“Hello, darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again…”

“You’re awfully talkative lately, Lil. What made you start singing that song? The bright bulbs?”

He slumped back and closed his eyes. Lily wandered off toward a little boy, three or four years old, who sat cross-legged on the floor at his mother’s feet as she folded bedsheets emblazoned with a web-throwing Spider-Man flying amid large-font “Wham!”s and “Kapow!”s.

Harry floated through the sheer walls of memory to his University Heights apartment in the 1990s, after his sister’s inner gears had started slipping and he’d taken her in and set her up in his bedroom. He would be half asleep on the living room sofa in the loneliest hours of the night, and Lily would shuffle in and hover over him and whisper, “Harry?” It was less an inquiry than an invitation to share the fantastic adventures conjured by her devolving mind. Then the visitations stopped, and sometimes at night Harry would peek into the bedroom and find her sitting on the window seat, talking to the city beyond the glass. She’d found a new listener no one else could see.

Harry opened his eyes and was on his feet in an instant. Lily was kneeling down before the young boy, who looked up at her from the pile of plastic superheroes in his lap.

“Hi,” the boy said.

“Wonderful,” said Lily.

She stared at him like Copernicus discovering the true place of Earth in the cosmos. Harry came for her just as she reached out and took the boy’s hand in hers. The mother glanced down as Harry arrived.

“Hey!” she barked.

“It’s okay,” Harry said. “She just-”

“ Aparta las manos! No touch!” she said.

Harry grabbed Lily by the arm and pulled her up to him. Her hand remained outstretched as the boy’s slipped from it.

“Sorry,” he said. “She’s a little… odd.”

“ Que? ”

“Excentrico. Muy excentrico.”

The woman cocked her head, and as she studied Harry’s expression her scowl relaxed into a sad, condoling smile.

He led Lily back to the chairs. He lowered his head into his hands, but it set off a hot, painful throb from Ray’s blow, and he straightened up.

“What am I going to do with you, sis?”

“Wonderful,” she said, her shining eyes staring at the little boy, who had picked up his action figures and resumed the eternal battle between good and evil.

As Geiger paced in the yard, Ezra watched the odd but precise movements of the man’s body. Most of the work seemed to be going on in the hips and ankles. The motion looked almost natural but wasn’t; he was clearly making adjustments for some sort of injury or disease. Ezra wondered if he had been in a terrible accident-maybe a smashup in a car, or something that happened in a war.

“Geiger, I’m real hungry.”

“I’ll make you something to eat.”

Geiger came across the yard and they both went into the kitchen. A black walnut counter lined two walls. There was a coffeemaker and a bean grinder, a sink and a Viking two-burner cooktop. Beneath it was a mahogany-paneled compact refrigerator. Atop one counter were a wood-block knife holder with two blades, a wooden utensils cart with two spoons, knives, and forks, and two large stainless steel bowls, one of them filled with fruit and vegetables. On a wall rack hung a cast-iron skillet and a stainless steel pot. In a corner was a combination washer-dryer. Everything gleamed beneath four hanging pendant lights. The room was handsome and minimal-there was nothing extra.

Geiger turned on the water, put some broccoli and asparagus on the counter, and took a knife from its slot.

“Weird,” said the boy.

“What?”

“You don’t have any cupboards or drawers.”

The only occasion when Geiger had ever spent time in a child’s presence was an afternoon years ago when he’d gone to La Bella to give Carmine his monthly loan payment and had been asked to stay for lunch with Carmine and his nephew. As always, the offer had been a smiling command presented in the form of an invitation. Geiger had sat silently while Carmine regaled him and the squirrelly boy, who had been about Ezra’s age, with stories about his stints in the navy and the teamsters. Then Carmine had leaned toward him and said:

“When you walked in the door, my nephew said something. Tell Geiger what you said, Michael.”

The boy had pointed his nose down at his pasta primavera. “I don’t remember,” he said. His glance at Carmine was dark with a sullen question: Why are you making me do this?

Carmine’s smile was benign, but then it always was. “Michael, tell Geiger what you said.”

“I said…” the boy mumbled, and looked at Geiger. “I said you looked weird.”

“Be specific, Michael,” Carmine prompted.

The boy looked resigned to his fate. “I said, ‘Look at that guy. I betcha he’s a freak job or a retard.’”

“Good,” said Carmine, and mussed the boy’s hair. He sat back, a sage preparing to dispense wisdom. “Now, there’s a reason I made you do that, Michael-it’s so you won’t forget lessons to be learned here. Lesson number one: Never insult someone you don’t know to somebody else, because the person you’re talking to might respect that person or care for him, like I do Geiger-in which case you’ve insulted both men. You see?”

The nephew nodded, his lips working nervously.

“And lesson two: Talk like that and you might end up becoming a spoiled little punk who gets his goddamn face slapped. Now go home.”

But with Ezra, there was an aura of gentleness, the kind of affect sometimes interpreted as sadness. Geiger also noticed that a stillness ruled the boy’s body. Apart from actions intended and necessary, he hardly moved at all-there were no impatient gestures or childish fidgets.

With a soft meow announcing a homecoming, the cat came through the flap on the pet slot at the bottom of the back door. He stopped for a five-second, one-eyed appraisal of the visitor.