hurt you. It doesn’t matter that you’re a child. In this room, you become ageless. That’s how it works. Nod if you understand.”
A fluidal sound, something between a sob and a gurgle, came from the boy’s gullet, and his head bobbed. It made Harry reflexively clear his throat.
“Good,” Geiger said. He flicked a switch on the wheelchair, and as it started across the black tiles he went to a wall and pushed a button. The low, moaning sound of a foghorn started up, rising and fading from the speakers in a random sequence. As it approached a corner, the wheelchair took a smooth left turn and settled into its route, circumnavigating the room, passing within inches of the walls. The noise presented itself to the boy as a dopplering fade, or a growing presence, or sudden sidelong blasts that made him quake in his bonds.
As Hall and Harry watched the spectacle, Geiger walked over to them.
“Harry…” Geiger said, almost a whisper. Harry picked up the attache case, stepped back into the elevator, quietly drew the gate closed, and descended out of sight. Geiger pointed toward a door beside a square mirror in a wall, and Hall followed him through. They turned to the one-way mirror and observed the wheelchair’s circular ritual.
“Disorientation?” Hall said.
“Yes. The chair is on a timer,” Geiger said. “Five minutes, then I’ll begin. Something to drink?”
Hall looked to the chrome bar. “Wine. Red.”
Geiger walked to the bar and began pouring some pinot noir.
“Does your client know you took the son?” he said.
“My client wants his painting back. How I get it is up to me.”
Geiger handed him the glass. The lights made the vermilion liquid flash. Hall took a long sip and let the wine linger in his mouth before he swallowed. He nodded with satisfaction.
“Do you know anything about him, Mr. Hall-besides what was in your report?”
“No. He lives most of the year with his mother. I’ve got his cell phone-two calls in the last twenty-four hours, one with a New Hampshire area code, and one with a Manhattan area code we figure is Matheson. We found the violin in his room in Matheson’s apartment. I thought maybe it might be of use to you.”
“Anything else in his room?”
“I didn’t notice. Does it matter?”
“Everything matters, Mr. Hall.”
Harry sat in the van’s driver’s seat. He had started counting the money, but he stopped as a gloominess crept in with the sticky evening air. When Geiger had spilled the kid out of the trunk it had been a pure what’s-wrong- with-this-picture moment. Even if he could rig his ethical arithmetic yet another time, it was a trickier task squaring Geiger’s reversal with everything he’d done in the past. Harry had become a moon in a steady orbit around Geiger, dependent on and secure in the man’s gravitational force, so experiencing a shift in Geiger’s axis of rules brought with it something vertiginous. Seeing Geiger do the unexpected was like watching the Statue of Liberty wink at him.
Harry sighed, and then went back to counting the money.
The wheelchair and its blind passenger continued tracing a circle, and the foghorn’s sad warning came out of the walls. Hall checked the time again.
“Just a little longer,” Geiger said. “A layman might think minors are easy to break, but it’s not necessarily true. In a context of intense fear, a child is apt to go inward and shut down-or to lie, say anything, and say it convincingly.” He poured a glass of water. “Mr. Hall, if you’re that concerned about time, telling me what this is really about will make my job easier-and quicker. It’s up to you.”
Hall watched him drink the glass down. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that you’re lying. That’s what I do, Mr. Hall-I determine whether someone is telling the truth or not.”
Hall took a sip of his wine. “All you need to be concerned about is doing whatever’s necessary to get the kid to talk.”
“All right. Just trying to be helpful.”
Geiger looked out to the boy. For a moment, the nature of time, and Geiger’s awareness of it, changed. It ceased to be perpetual and fluid and solidified into measured instants. Each brief moment had its own beginning and end, like the flickering frames of a movie glimpsed individually even as they ran together.
“I think it’s time,” he said, and his right fist shot straight out, his knuckles smashing into Hall’s chest an inch below the sternum, driving the breath from him in a loud, expulsive grunt. Hall stumbled back into the wall and slumped to his knees, chest heaving, hands on his quadriceps. A noise like a hacksaw cutting through copper pipe clawed its way up his throat as his diaphragm struggled to free itself from spasm and pull in air.
Geiger crouched down beside Hall. Spittle, tinted pink with pinot noir, was beginning to bubble out of his mouth. His lips opened slightly in a preface to speech.
“Uhhnff… uhhnff” was what came out.
The foghorn audio stopped, and Geiger rose to look through the window. The wheelchair rolled to a stop; the boy didn’t move. Geiger knelt back down. Hall seemed incapable of turning his head, but his wet eyes managed to swivel in their sockets until they found Geiger’s deadpan stare.
“Mr. Hall,” said Geiger.
The tears rolling down Hall’s cheeks made him look deeply unhappy, as if the tough-guy persona was an act and Geiger had said something mean and wounding.
“Fffff… fuck,” he gasped.
“I don’t know who you are, Mr. Hall-but I do know who you aren’t.”
The surface of Geiger’s words had a slight, gravelly patina that was unfamiliar and slightly unsettling. The unscheduled violence had ratcheted up Geiger’s pulse and breathing and altered the topography of his voice.
“Do you want to tell me who you really are?” Geiger said.
Hall’s head drooped, his shoulders stretching, his body searching for some physical accommodation, a way to breathe. His head levered back up; he blinked, coughed, and then blinked again, as if delivering an answer in some secret code he assumed Geiger knew.
Geiger planted his open palm tightly on Hall’s face and then rammed his skull back into the wall. The crunching sound announced the crushing of some substance-wood or bone, or both-and Hall’s eyes widened in further surprise before falling shut.
Geiger held Hall’s head in place, observing each partitioned instant as it passed. Some kink in his optical network reduced the depth of images going to his brain, rendering them flatter than normal, like Polaroid snapshots. Finally he took his hand away and Hall slumped sideways onto the floor, revealing a grapefruit-sized dent in the wall. It was an inch deep, and moist crimson specks mingled with the mashed fibers.
The pockets of Hall’s pants contained the expected: a wallet with American Express and Diners Club cards, about six hundred dollars in cash, a Pennsylvania driver’s license, a State Farm insurance ID for a 2006 silver Lexus coupe. In his jacket pockets were a pack of Camels, a lighter, and two cell phones, a BlackBerry and a Motorola Droid that Geiger assumed belonged to the boy. A black leather holster clipped to Hall’s belt held a Taurus Millennium Pro nine-millimeter semiautomatic.
Geiger stuck the phones in his pockets and stood up. The pulse in his eyes throbbed, producing a minuscule blip in his vision, a cambered shift of objects and surfaces. He put the gun on the bar and went through the door into the session room. He detected a hint of smoky aroma in his nostrils, and his breath was coming in long, strong exhalations, as if he were a runner pacing himself in the early stages of a marathon.
He walked over to the boy, his mind keenly aware that its moment-to-moment workings were, for the first time in memory, without premeditation. Overriding all thought and feeling was the pure, unencumbered sensation of moving toward some unknown destination. It was a feeling alien to his consciousness but familiar from another domain. He knew it from his dreams.
The boy sat slack in the chair, head listing. Geiger had set the room’s temperature to sixty-three degrees but the boy was sweating, his shirt and shorts flat and damp against his body, his exposed skin covered with a sheen of fear. Geiger watched the carotid artery in the boy’s neck gorge and shrink to the accelerated beat of his heart.
“Ezra…”
