Mark Smith - The Inquisitor

“Do you go up to your house often?” Geiger asked.

“No,” Corley said.

“Why not?”

Corley put his pad down on the desk. “We have to stop now.”

For Geiger, the morning walk to and from Corley’s office was always a sensory feast. Central Park West was a kaleidoscopic vista: taxis feinting in traffic like yellow-skinned middleweights; sluggish, ungainly buses chugging and wheezing; dogs and their walkers sniffing and eyeing each other; joggers stretching voluptuous hamstrings at red lights as they waited to enter the park; olive-skinned men trudging through the gutters, pulling their hot dog and souvlaki carts behind them like broken penitents. It was all pure stimuli for Geiger, an assault of colors, shapes, sounds, movement. Not the subtlest hue or tone or gesture went unnoticed or unheard, but no secondary, more sophisticated responses occurred. He took everything in and yet held nothing. He was both a vacuum and a bottomless pit.

He had lived in New York for fifteen years, and his arrival in the city marked the beginning of the only life he could remember. On September 6, 1996, Geiger was born an almost full-grown man of indeterminate age when a Greyhound driver shook him by the shoulder as he slept in a seat in the last row of a bus that had just pulled into New York’s Port Authority Terminal, on Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue. The boy/man guessed that he was in his late teens, but otherwise he was as much a stranger to himself as the people he passed on the sidewalks of the city. He was a scarred, aching body with an unencumbered mind, a human machine without a memory card. He ran solely on instinct.

The next day, while walking the streets of Harlem, he stopped to watch a member of a renovation crew sawing a new window frame for a run-down brownstone. A moment later, he walked through the doorless entry and asked for a job. It was a pure, thoughtless act, and when the crew chief asked if he knew carpentry he said Yes and didn’t know why.

He had worked “reno” for four years-never staying with one company for long, taking nonunion late shifts, mainly in Harlem and Brooklyn and SoHo, secretly sleeping in the basements of the buildings where he worked, saving his money. All the companies paid off-the-books cash-no ID numbers, no FICA, no paper trails. At first he’d used the name Gray, then Black. One day, passing a Barnes amp; Noble bookstore, he spotted a book about the artwork of H. R. Giger. The byzantine images appealed to him, as did the name with its twin g ’s. For visual symmetry, he added an e and so became Geiger.

One night, after finishing a shift in a brownstone in Williamsburg, he’d been sleeping in a crawl space in the building’s basement. Awakened at three A.M. by footsteps coming down the stairs, he lay there watching flashlight beams dance between two-by-fours, listening to two men discuss their task as they went about it-installing wiring behind fresh drywall for a bug that would attempt to record incriminating conversations regarding a certain Carmine Delanotte.

“I heard Delanotte owns a dozen of these,” one of the men said.

“My brother-in-law’s in real estate,” said the other. “Says everything around here will be worth a fortune once they push the spics and the blacks out. Buy low, fix ’em up, sell high.”

“This wire’s a waste of time, you know? Delanotte’s too smart.”

“Maybe. But I heard they’re close to turning one of his lieutenants around.”

“Yeah, well. They try and turn a lot of ’em, but most don’t talk. They throw everything they’ve got at these guys-mindfucks, blackmail, even the occasional beatdown. The fucking guys don’t talk.”

“Must be one very strange job.”

“What?”

“Trying to make guys talk. Cracking hard cases. You can’t just beat the shit out of ’em, right? You got to be smoother than that, you know?”

“There are guys who know how to do it, though. Interrogators, specialists-they know how to make people open up.”

As the two men-FBI techs, presumably-continued talking, Geiger lay in the darkness and felt the birth of something. It was a weightless, free-floating thing, but it was potent enough to muster his instincts toward a direction and a course of action. He’d felt this bloom and pull once before; standing outside the dilapidated Harlem brownstone, an urge had risen up in him as if from a molecular level. He felt it this time, too, a kind of genetic calling, a sense as powerful and thoughtless as an avalanche destroying everything in its path.

Harry Boddicker stared up at the brightly lit, tensile webs of the Brooklyn Bridge, and then at a helicopter as it glided over the East River, humming in the indigo summer sky like a giant firefly.

He glanced back at the dark blue van parked beneath the FDR Drive. The Jones was in the back, gagged, tied, and taped up inside a metal trunk. He was one of Carmine’s bagmen. Fifteen minutes ago, when three of Carmine’s men had made the delivery, they had informed Harry that when they’d picked up the guy-they’d snatched him while he was screwing his girlfriend in her apartment-they’d had to put the hammer down hard. They’d given him two black eyes and maybe a broken nose and a couple of busted ribs.

Now Harry had to call Geiger. The last time they’d gotten a damaged Jones-a business manager from Providence-Geiger had gone on about necessary states, compromised origins, and diminished potential, his satin voice never rising or falling, and then called the job off. Because Carmine would be getting his usual discount, this gig was worth only twelve grand, but the thought of losing his share, three thousand dollars, went straight from Harry’s brain to his stomach and pumped a bitter bubble of gas up his esophagus. They hadn’t had a job in five days. He popped two more Pepcid Completes. Whatever they’d added to the chalky mix to make the old stuff “new and improved” didn’t seem to matter to his gut. It still roiled and grumbled as always.

He walked a little farther away from the van and jabbed at his cell phone. Geiger would pick up after the third ring. Not one or two, not four. Always three.

“What is it, Harry?” Geiger answered.

“About tonight. There’s an issue. Damaged goods.”

“Details, Harry.”

Harry sighed. “One eye’s swollen shut. Nose might be broken. Ribs.”

After a brief pause, Geiger said, “Change of location, Harry. Take him to the Bronx instead.”

“Right,” Harry said, his eyes closing with relief. Geiger was willing to take the job.

“And use propofol instead of Brevital. Two cc’s.”

“Right. Propofol. Two cc’s.”

When Harry called, Geiger was in his backyard doing one-armed push-ups: fifty with the left arm, fifty with the right, then forty, then thirty, the breeze drying the sweat on his naked body. The yard was a twenty-by-fifteen-foot green oasis in the midst of a dense urban sprawl of geometric concrete, brick, and asphalt. The patch of grass, backed by an oak bench and a modest Norway maple, was surrounded on three sides by a tall wooden fence that Geiger had built with over one hundred ten-foot vertical slats. The fence’s longest side, opposite the back of the house, ran east-west, and Geiger had cut the top of each slat to a specific length and then shaved or carved each board so that when viewed from the back stoop the entire span was a perfect, to-scale replica of the jagged skyline of the buildings looming directly behind it.

Earlier, Geiger had studied the Jones’s file and built a scenario in his head. John “Jackie Cats” Massimo-one of Carmine’s men and a hard case by any measure-was forty-two, heavyset but muscular, and comfortable with physical violence. In his younger days he’d been knifed in the chest and had taken a shotgun blast in the thigh. And he was a cat lover: he had six of them. But now Massimo was already in physical pain and might have impaired vision, so Geiger would have to rework everything-the session room, tactics, methodology. He didn’t even think of canceling the job, however, because he wouldn’t do that to Carmine.