thing.”
“Then how about coffee? You drink coffee, don’t you?”
For a moment, Geiger looked at Harry with his steady, unblinking eyes and said nothing. Harry suddenly felt uneasy; the man seemed to be inspecting him, judging him. Then Geiger nodded and said, “All right, Harry.”
They went to a bar on Broadway and took a booth in the ammonia-scented shadows. While Geiger nursed a black coffee, Harry had three Wild Turkeys. Over the next three hours, Harry delivered a biographical monologue that was half an eager act of sharing and half an attempt at reaffirmation, as if the tether to his past was dangerously frayed and recounting events would buttress his place in the present.
The pace of his story picked up when he told Geiger about landing a job at the Times, straight out of City College, as a researcher. “That’s when I discovered I had a talent for digging stuff up. They called me ‘Shovel.’ Funny how sometimes it takes a while before you find out you’re good at something.”
He told Geiger about nights spent sneaking into computer networks using software of his own design, about deploying those skills to unearth secrets and connect dots, about writing a major piece on racial profiling that made his reputation as a reporter.
“One morning there it was, second section, page one. ‘By Harry Boddicker.’ It was like, Hey, that’s me. ”
As Harry talked, Geiger said little beyond answering yes or no a few times. He nodded or shook his head to other queries, and although that was the extent of his active participation, he never had the urge to leave. He noticed that Harry tilted precipitously toward the melancholic as the alcohol settled in, and that Harry’s recollections became less detailed and more scattershot as his story went on. Geiger also sensed that Harry was leaving out an important chapter: he talked about his life as if he’d lived in two distinct eras, but he never once mentioned the event that had ended one and brought on the next. At first Harry’s tale was full of excitement and the pride of accomplishment, but then it veered into darker alleyways. His passion for the work waned; the quality of his stories declined precipitously; facts were smudged, deadlines missed. Drinking went from hobby to habit. After months of admonishments, the Times had given him one last chance and a desk in the Obits department.
“You know that sensation,” Harry said, “when you feel like you’ve hit bottom, and you realize you’re right where you belong?”
Harry told Geiger that being relegated to Obits had been like a homecoming-he lived with ghosts and their pasts, immersed in their deeds and declines. But it had also spurred him to create ever more sophisticated and cunning search programs. Filling in blanks, giving continuity to chaos-it became an obsession, a strange kind of resurrection.
Listening to this epic story had been a singular experience for Geiger. In those three hours, he learned more about Harry than he’d ever known about anyone, and as he ran home in the dawn light, a thought came to him as if delivered by an unseen hand. This would not be the last time he saw Harry Boddicker.
The ding of Harry’s computer signaled a visit to the website. The sound was always a tonic. It meant work, the challenge of putting the puzzle of a person’s life together, and money. Harry had discovered an appreciation for money only after he’d started working with Geiger and making a lot of it. The money was useful, of course, but it was also a salve for the shame over how he made it.
Harry had never been present at a session, but he’d come to understand that for Geiger, the work wasn’t about money. God knows what it was about, but Harry never asked. That would be like asking Van Gogh why he painted, or asking Jack the Ripper why he went out for a stroll at night. In time Harry realized that Geiger had to do it, and like everything else about the man, this intrigued Harry. He dimly remembered that feeling, the thrill of a powerful undertow that could pull him out to some roiling sea. Geiger, for all his stoic strangeness, reminded Harry of what passion used to feel like.
Harry watched the website on his screen. Ninety-five percent of the hits on DoYouMrJones. com were Dylan fans, who found a home page with a picture of the singer, but the bell meant someone had clicked on “password” to venture deeper into the site. The password had to be a five-word phrase extrapolated from the letters of “melon,” Harry’s favorite fruit. If they got the password right, it meant they had a legitimate referral.
Harry sipped his coffee and smiled when the current visitor entered “Men everywhere live on nuts.” Not bad, he thought. Of course, no one had ever matched Carmine’s first log-in, in 1999. “Minestrone, eggplant, linguine, ossibuchi, nougat.” A classic five-course Italian meal from a man whose appetite and sense of humor were as big as his sense of vengeance, who lived life the same way he wielded power-to the fullest.
The site accepted the phrase and asked for a referral. When the visitor typed in the name-Colicos-Harry recognized it. Colicos was a scrap metal baron who had used Geiger twice in the past. Harry waited while the visitor followed the instructions and provided his name, cell phone number, the identity of the Jones, and the reason why the client needed Geiger’s services.
Again Harry gently squeezed the lump in his groin and considered having someone look at it. But he hated going to doctors almost as much as knowing that he had a reason to do so. Geiger had taught him how to create various false identities, but health insurance was too dicey for someone living off the grid, so he paid his medical bills in cash. He did not relish the thought of doling out large sums for exams, tests, biopsies, and all the rest.
The web page filled up with information, and then another tone signaled the visitor’s exit. Harry hit “print” and checked his watch. Lily would be arriving soon.
His gaze went to her photograph on the corner table; curled up on a couch, she looked out at him with her mischievous, “I know a secret” smile. But his sister hadn’t looked like that in a very long time. Ten years ago, he had put her in a home, and every other Sunday since then he had made the trip to New Rochelle to visit her. Sitting beside her while she stared at nothing and sang snippets of old songs, he listened to a voice that sounded ancient, as if she’d already lived a dozen lifetimes. She seemed to have become something out of a science fiction movie, a being taken over by an alien life-form, its movements awkward, its speech quaint and disjointed, its motives unknowable.
Even so, Harry was convinced that Lily maintained a firm grip on the absurdity of her life, and her persistence haunted him. Harry had tried to train himself to not think about Lily, but his sister had become a squatter in his nearly vacant conscience, refusing to be evicted. His guilt was not about the business of surrogacy-he paid a fortune to keep her in the home. Instead, he was tormented by the serrated truth that had lodged itself in him long ago. He wasn’t shelling out over a hundred thousand dollars a year because he loved Lily; he was doing it because he wished she were dead. These days, six figures seemed to be the going rate for Boddicker guilt.
The downstairs buzzer sounded. Harry walked to the door and pressed the entry button on the wall. Four months ago, in a sudden act of contrition, he’d arranged to have Lily brought to his place by one of the psychiatric nurses on her day off and had found that, compared to visiting the blanched desert of her room in the home, bringing Lily to his apartment had a temporary numbing effect on his angst. Recently he had scheduled another one-night sleepover-for today.
Harry opened the door and stepped back a few feet, listening to footsteps ascending the stairs. A twenty- something woman with black, scarecrow hair, wearing green culottes and high-tops, came into the doorway’s frame with a small, canvas overnight bag in hand.
“Hi, Mr. Jones.”
“Hi, Melissa.”
She turned, reaching a hand out to the unseen hall. “C’mon, Lily. Let’s go.”
A soft, satin voice spoke: “Time to go.”
“That’s right,” said the nurse, and pulled Lily into the apartment.
Drugs and madness had made his sister gray and small. She was dressed in the short-sleeved pink blouse and lilac pedal pushers he’d bought for her a few years ago. Lily’s elbows, wrist bones, and cheekbones stood out prominently beneath her opalescent skin, and as always now, when Harry saw her he had to remind himself that she was six years younger than him.
“How’s she doing?” he asked.
“Same,” said Melissa. “Fine. Right, Lily?”
There was a stillness about her; hardly anything seemed to move, as if the psychosis was a cancer that had dissolved all her muscles and tendons and nerves. She looked light as air-a giant, beautiful origami figure. When her deep-set blue eyes finally shifted and settled on Harry, they gazed at him without a hint of recognition.
Harry stepped toward his sister. Her gaze was fixed on the small hollow beneath his Adam’s apple. He raised a hand and tapped the top of her head with his knuckles three times. “Anybody home?”
