Mark Smith - The Inquisitor

As he neared the boat, he dove under. Geiger swam forward through the blackness, and then desperate hands found him, clawing, grabbing. They pulled him into the thrashing madness.

Harry staggered down the dock. The river churned with unseen violence around the rowboat. Flailing, anonymous limbs broke the surface, then disappeared beneath it, as if the river had staked a claim to them. Then the commotion ceased.

The last pyrotechnics painted the sky with a majestic facsimile of the American flag. As the lights gradually dispersed and winked out, the flag dissolved, leaving only a few stars shining modestly in the blackness. The distant cheers faded to silence.

Harry watched the boat drift down the river, looking for any sign of life around it, desperately fighting against the pull of grief. Then he saw a figure surge up from beneath the river.

The swimmer started for shore, obviously exhausted. One arm slapped the water; the other dragged something behind. Harry raced off the dock and ran a few steps along the riverbank. Looking out across the black water, he still couldn’t tell who it was. When he reached a spot opposite the swimmer, he jumped down to the stones and mud. The skinny figure crawled the last few yards and collapsed on the shore, coughing, heaving. The gym bag lay beside him.

Harry knelt beside Ezra and gently put a hand on his back. Ignoring the shouts and the skittering flashlight beams coming from behind him, he slowly rolled the boy over.

Ezra looked up at him and hacked up some of the river.

“Easy,” Harry said. “Easy.”

He saw the question in Ezra’s eyes before it was asked.

“Geiger?” said the boy.

Harry shook his head, and Ezra began to cry, a silent, abyssal outpouring.

They sat on the top front step of Corley’s house-Ezra, wrapped in a blanket, and Harry, his chest bandaged from shoulder to waist, with his arm around the boy. They shared the same flat stare of fresh grief.

The lights of two police cars and an ambulance drew shimmering patterns of color on the yard. Earlier, sitting in the living room, a first round of questions had been asked of each of them, eliciting answers intended to confound instead of clarify. Theirs was a mystifying tale of a home invasion by two strangers who had attacked them for inexplicable reasons, resulting in one dead body and three people missing in the river. In all the drama and confusion, the gym bag had been tossed onto the kitchen counter, unexplored. At a break in the questioning, Harry had excused himself and paid a visit to the bathroom, where he had emptied the bag of its contents and hidden the discs in the toilet’s tank.

Now, as they sat on the step, Ezra finally turned to Harry and told him about what had happened in the river’s black turmoil. The boy had been no match for the strength of other hands pulling at him and grasping for control. Then someone had pried him free from the tangle of bodies, shoved the gym bag into his midsection, and pushed him up toward air and life. But the cost of his survival felt unbearable.

“I’m so sorry,” Ezra said, shaking his head.

Harry turned to him. “For what?”

“This is all because of me.”

Harry pulled him closer. “No, it’s not, Ezra. It’s just…” He was desperate for more words, for something wiser or more soothing to say to the boy, but nothing came.

A car drove out of the woods, and a policeman jogged forward and stood in front of it, his arms up. The car stopped, and a tall, lanky woman got out. The cop approached her, a ten-second conversation took place, and then she shoved him out of the way and marched forward.

“Ezra?”

The boy looked up, startled by the sound of a familiar voice. Harry, smiling, gave Ezra’s shoulder a squeeze.

The woman caught sight of her son and started to run.

Business was bad. A dog days heat wave had driven people from the street, and it didn’t help that the city had started hauling away the wreckage of Geiger’s house. A storm fence with a gate had been put up in front of the lot, and the demolition crew had cordoned off a strip of the sidewalk.

Mr. Memz took a half-smoked cigarette from his pack, flicked his Zippo, and lit up. When the skinny guy with the cane stopped at his table, it took Mr. Memz a second or two to place him. But then the scene came back to him, and he remembered the name, too.

“Harry, right? Yeah, Geiger’s Harry. The cane threw me off for a sec.”

Smiling faintly, Harry raised the dark cherry cane and showed Mr. Memz its carved handle.

“Distinguished, huh?”

“Wish I could use one. It’s a nice look.” Mr. Memz glanced up at Harry hopefully. “Hey, Harry, you got a smoke?”

“Nope, sorry.”

“Damn. Hardly anybody smokes anymore.”

Harry scanned the street, his new habit. “So how’s business?”

“Shit, man- what business?”

A loud crunch made them both turn. A tractor had just dropped a load of debris from the ruined house into a dump truck.

Turning back, the two men looked at each other.

“He’s gone, man,” Harry said.

“‘Gone’ as in gone away?”

“No-drowned. Upstate, five weeks ago.”

Mr. Memz’s lips twisted into a dark grimace, and he shook his head. “Was it that July Fourth thing I heard about, the one on the river?”

“Yeah.”

For a moment Mr. Memz sat utterly still, but then he growled and slammed a fist onto the table. His books jumped.

Harry sighed. “I just wanted you to know.”

Mr. Memz said nothing. The growl had become a hollow mutter.

Harry tapped his cane on the sidewalk. “I gotta go now, okay? I gotta be somewhere.”

“Okay.” Mr. Memz nodded, his eyes blank. “See ya ’round.”

“Probably not, actually.”

“Okay. Won’t see ya ’round.”

Harry put his hand inside a jacket pocket, brought out an envelope, and dropped it on the table. “Just tying up some loose ends.”

Mr. Memz glanced at the envelope. “What’s that?”

“Just something to hold you over till business picks up. I really gotta go, man. You take care.”

Mr. Memz watched Harry walk off toward Amsterdam Avenue, and then his gaze came back to the envelope. He picked it up and pulled its contents halfway out. He slowly fanned twenty five-hundred-dollar bills with his fingertips.

“Jesus…”

He turned and looked up the block. He saw a dozen people on the sidewalk-mostly strangers, a few familiar faces-but Harry was gone.

A cab pulled over at the corner of 110th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard. Harry got out and walked into the north end of Central Park. The waters of the Harlem Meer were still and slate gray; half a dozen mallards paddled about aimlessly near the shore.

Harry hobbled down the walk, giving way to the rollerbladers and skateboarders. The ghosts followed him wherever he went-there had been no bodies to identify, there were no fresh graves and etched headstones-and he could not lay them to rest. He was a shepherd of the dead: Geiger, though a peripheral presence, was always nearby, but it was Lily who Harry kept closest to him. The concept of his sister’s death was still entirely abstract. Her sudden and complete absence from his life had tipped its scales out of balance, and the fact that he would never see her again was unacceptable. His dreams overflowed with the giddy laughter and rituals of children. His grief was exhausting and perpetual.

He sat on a bench facing the lake.

“Harry?” the man next to him said.

“Sorry I’m late,” Harry said, turning to shake David Matheson’s extended hand.

“Good to meet you finally.”

Harry glanced at Matheson and then looked away. He put the cane between his legs and toggled it back and forth by the handle, another new habit.