The Confessor (6 page)

‘No. Where is the money you embezzled from Mr. Redding, Charles?’

The Jones didn’t hesitate. ‘Falstead Channel Islands Bank and Cayman Royal Bank. Three accounts in each.’ He sighed, and his head listed a few degrees. Geiger was uncertain why. Maybe exhaustion – or relief.

‘How do you do it?’ asked the man.

‘How is it I haven’t been wrong?’ Geiger turned his head to the left until he got a
click
. ‘Do you know how a piano is tuned?’

‘No.’

‘The piano tuner uses a tuning fork, today often an electronic device, to set one note out of eighty-eight to the correct pitch, usually A above middle C – then, by ear, tunes every other note in relation to that first note. If the harmonics don’t coincide perfectly, a master tuner can hear it – can feel the slightest fluctuations in the air. In IR, Charles, truth is A above middle C, and I have perfect pitch. I know a lie when I hear it.’ His head turned right.
Click
. ‘What are the names and numbers on the accounts?’

‘The name on the Cayman Island accounts is Earl Kent. K – E – N – T. The Channel Island accounts’ name is Byron Keats. K – E – A – T – S. I don’t remember the account numbers, but they aren’t necessary. Go online to the banks, enter the account name and the password – Richard The Third – one word, no spaces . . . and you’re in.’

Geiger stepped forward until his knees almost touched the man’s. His gray eyes were still. The whole world was silent. Then his right hand rose from his side and reached toward the man. The Jones’s fear reflex pushed him back against the seatback.

‘Woah, woah . . . I was telling the truth.’

Geiger’s hand rested on the man’s neck. ‘I know,’ he said, and undid the strap. The man rolled his head – and Geiger started toward the door of the viewing room.

‘That’s it?’ said the Jones. ‘No more questions? We’re done?’

‘I’m not a confidant, Charles – or a priest.’ Geiger reached for the doorknob.

‘Maybe you are. Maybe you’re my father confessor. Ever think of it that way?’

Geiger stopped. He had never spoken to a Jones after the retrieval, but he was turning round now. ‘Is there something else you have to tell me, Charles?’

The man’s countenance softened. ‘I have a hundred things to tell you. A
thousand
things. And – I have one last question.’

Geiger felt the pull of the supplication, despair tugging at his sleeve, and came back to the Jones.

‘All right. Ask me one last question.’

The Jones’s eyes suddenly took on a flat gloss of lifelessness – a dead man’s eyes, wide open, powerless to ever close again.

‘Tell me,’ the man said. ‘Do you remember
her
?’

Geiger awoke. The muscles in the back of his neck were growing taut, and the dots of light were floating around him. The post-dream/pre-migraine aura had come to call, on schedule. He sat up on the mattress and stood. The floor’s concrete was cold, the sealant smooth like new ice, and the planet accommodated his listing as he walked to his desk and sat down. The chair’s leather was cool against his bare skin. He clicked on his laptop’s icon of a microphone. He didn’t know how far he’d get before the storm hit – the hot tendrils were starting to wend their way down from the top of his skull.

‘Dream seventeen,’ he said.

Since July Fourth his ritual of recurrent dreams had continued, but their nature had changed – no longer a child’s quests to unknown destinations where his body ultimately, literally, fell apart. Now, they were authentic replays of past IR sessions – until some demon driver took the wheel and steered them down a route of shadows into another realm, always to the same denouement. The same question. It was as if the river’s blunt, cold power had flicked off one switch in his subconscious and turned another on.

He sat back and closed his eyes. Without Dr. Corley in his life, Geiger had been keeping a verbal record of the new dreams in an attempt to simulate the psychiatrist’s presence and guidance – as if he was lying on the leather couch with Corley sitting behind him, legs crossed, pen and pad in hand, his questions soft, simple steps down a path.

Was this dream like the others?

‘Yes . . . another IR session – completely realistic, until it shifts.’

You often use that word – shift – when you describe the dreams.

‘There’s a point where I can feel the texture starting to change.’

An actual physical sensation?

‘Like a pulling. Like changing gears.’

And the Jones asked the question?

‘The last thing he said, like they all do: “Do you remember
her
?”’

Can you get back in that moment – and describe your reaction. Anything – physical, emotional, cerebral . . .

‘I woke up as soon as he said it, before I could have any reaction at all. It’s as if the question, in the very asking, demands an answer and denies it at the same time . . .’

The hum in his head was rising to a howl. It was time.

He went into iTunes. His eighteen hundred CDs had been destroyed when his Manhattan house exploded last July, but years before Harry had begun storing their data in the cloud – dossiers, session transcripts and video, software, DoYouMrJones.com’s website info, audio files, Geiger’s CDs – so Geiger had retrieved and downloaded all his music from the cloud when he bought a new laptop.

He chose a playlist that melded dark and light, sublime and brutal – Hendrix, Mussorgsky, Liszt, Coltrane. When the pain burst into bloom, so would the music’s color and taste. He’d let the pain grow until it was all he felt – then mount the beast and ride it into the blackness until thought was gone and everything was white-hot sensation laced with a thousand hues of sound. Then he’d pluck a silver melody from the swirl and fashion it into a sword, and plunge it into the heart of the galloping beast – and kill it.

He clicked ‘play’ and headed unsteadily toward the closet. He knew the tendrils in his brain would turn into lightning bolts and the thunder would send him reeling. He opened the door and stepped inside. The staccato crack of lead guitar poured out of the Bose cube speakers mounted on the walls.
‘Purple haze is in my brain . . .’
He pulled the door closed, lay down on his side in the darkness and pulled his knees up so he fit snugly against the walls. It would be any second now.
‘S’cuse me while I kiss the sky.’

For a moment, the ancient, dull ache in his iliac crests and ankles yanked him back into his child’s mind, to the cabin’s closet his father had built for him – curled up on the floor, arms wrapped round the cassette player – and a voice came through the door. But it wasn’t Hendrix. It was rich and arctic. His father.

‘You go to sleep now, boy.’

And then the storm hit – and Geiger reached out and grabbed hold of a golden rope of a guitar’s scream and held on with all his might.

Harry turned off the shower, and his left hand went to his groin and probed the flesh. The smooth surfaces triggered an exhale. The grape-sized bump he had assumed was cancer, that had taken four months to shrink to nothing, hadn’t come back. The fact that he still checked every day told him he expected it
would
– but, as with most things now, even his dread of fated calamities had lost some of its boil. His cell rang and he walked out and picked it up off the folding table. Only one person had his number.

‘Hi,’ he said.

The voice on the line was measured, but there was a charge in it. ‘Something just came in an e-mail to the site. I need you to look at it.’

‘So send it. Use the program I installed last month. It’s secure.’

‘Doing it now. Harry, this is big – if it’s real.’

Harry glanced at his laptop’s screensaver, the revolving series of Jackson Pollock paintings he’d used as a natural tranquilizer for a decade, and the laptop gave a
ding
.

‘I got it,’ he said, poking the mail icon with a fingertip; he squinted at its content – a few lines of text.

‘Scroll down to the photo.’

Harry did so ‘Who are they?’

Two men sat at a table filled with plates of delicacies and demitasses, smiling, hands raised in conversation. One was dressed in a short-sleeved shirt and elegant beige slacks. The other man wore a masqati cap and a keffiyeh over an expensive suit, the classic modern meld of Middle Eastern and Western style, a snake of smoke from his cigarette frozen in the air.

‘The guy in short sleeves is the former US Assistant Secretary of State – who now owns a major chunk of Argent Industries International.’

Harry nodded. ‘It’s good to be king, huh?’

‘The other guy is number two in the Afghan Ministry of Economic Development. Now there’s an oxymoron for you. Harry . . . there’s software that can tell if an image is real or fake – right?’

Harry put his nose two inches from the laptop. ‘Yeah – but these days the fakes are so good you really need the pro stuff the spooks use.’

‘You have it?’

‘Yeah, but not here. It’s at my apartment in the Heights.’

‘Shit.’ A deep breath came through the phone, signaling contemplation of a difficult subject. ‘You’ve got to get it, Harry.’

Harry shook his head at no one. ‘You know I can’t do that.’

‘I know you
haven’t –
but you could.’

‘C’mon, man. The deal was I’d help you with the tech end. I don’t remember anything about getting myself killed.’

‘You’re paranoid, Harry.’

‘I’m breathing, too.’

There was a five-second, silent hole in the conversation.

‘You’re right, Harry. This is my work, not yours – so here’s what we’ll do: Let’s meet tomorrow, I’ll come to you, you give me the keys to your place in Brooklyn.
I’ll
go – by myself.’

A scowl took up residence on Harry’s face. He burped. It burned, a come-to-life ember dead-center in his chest. Harry blew out a weary breath. With Geiger’s death and the end of their sordid, lucrative business, his conscience had slowly come out of hiding. He liked having it around again, but not at this particular moment – because he knew he’d be the one retrieving the disk. He was finally going home.

‘You’re a manipulative prick, y’know that?’

‘Harry, I’m not in this business to make friends. On the contrary. If I’m not making enemies then I’m not doing the job right – right?’

‘Right,’ he said.

Brooklyn Heights felt light years from Chinatown. Remsen Street was a narrow passage and held onto the late-March mist from the East River, muffling the few, scattered 3 a.m. noises that slipped out of brownstone windows. The streetlamps’ fan of light made the sidewalks chalky and shadows blacker. Coming down the street, eyes swiveling side to side, Harry’s heart had a heavyweight slugfest going on inside it – jabs of fear and counter-punches of anticipation. He felt a touch of fatalism. He was almost home.

If, in fact, there was a ‘they’ after him, it was the same folks who hired Hall and company to retrieve the torture vids – and they would want him dead. One less loose end. And if they were here now they knew he was, too – and they’d wait till he was off the street, inside. Make a neat job of it. Then again, he was aware of his penchant for paranoia, and that it was quite possible all that life had in store was a future much like the present. Still, his hands stayed in his raincoat’s pockets so he could steady the Louisville Slugger concealed beneath it. He had three false front teeth and thirty stitches in his scalp – mementos from the Central Park mugging that had cast a stranger named Geiger as his savior twelve years ago – and he wasn’t going down without a fight ever again.

The sight of his darkened, second-floor picture window slowed him. He could see Lily standing at it, her favorite post when they brought her from the home for weekend visits. Nose pressed to the glass, staring at the reflection of Manhattan’s skyline lying on the river’s surface, singing about the city she could see beneath the water.
‘Way down below the ocean . . . where I want to be . . .’
His anguish caught on the edge of his grief and made him wince. He needed a Pepcid – and a few bourbons to wash it down.

He headed for his front door. He slid the baseball bat out as he neared the step-down recess off the sidewalk where the garbage bins were, peered into its shadows, and went up the stairs. He opened the door, gave the street a final look, and stepped inside. He unlocked the inside door and went to the first-floor apartment’s door. He leaned to it, heard nothing, and headed up the stairs. The old wood still moaned at every imposition. The bulb on the second floor was out and every step took him into thicker darkness. When he tried to fit the key in the lock of his door, his hand shook so it took three tries to open up and go inside.

A musty odor came at him, he waved it away, locked the door and went to the drapes and drew them closed. He put the bat against a wall, took out a penlight and turned it on. A galaxy of dust fairies did a lazy jig in the shaft of light. His large dracaena had died a slow and lonely death, its withered leaves in the pot and on the floor. He lowered the beam, and discovered he was standing on a large maroon stain in the rug. Ray’s blood.

The memory rushed at him – the last time he stood here: Hall in a chair, stunned at the gun in Harry’s hand . . . Lily lying where Ray had tossed her like a rag doll . . . the queasy, thrilling sensation of crushing bone as he smashed his Beretta into Ray’s smirk . . .

He pulled out the desk’s center drawer and trained the light, picked out a jewel case labeled ‘Video Verify’ and slid it in his pocket. He had given himself a talking-to before coming here – get in and out. This was no longer home-sweet-home. That life was gone.

His stomach sent a corrosive comment via his esophagus and he patted his pockets for a remedy, then headed down the hall to the bathroom. He turned on the light and met his face in the mirror. The gray-specked beard still surprised him. He opened the cabinet and the annoying squeak of the hinges brought a grin. No amount of WD-40 ever silenced it. He found some Pepcid Complete on a shelf. The expiration date was six months ago.