When the light turned green he hit the gas and then saw the wet blur of a bicyclist speeding into the intersection. Geiger swerved right but heard the car’s front bumper clip the back wheel of the bicycle, followed by the tinny scraping of metal skidding across asphalt. He pounded the brakes, sending the boy thudding to the floor in back.
The rider had come to a stop against a parked car, pinned beneath his mangled ten-speed. He wasn’t moving. Geiger turned around to check on the boy: he was wedged down sideways against the backs of the front seats, grunting through the tape across his mouth.
Geiger reached down and pulled him up onto the backseat. “You okay?”
A loud crack swiveled Geiger’s head to the driver’s window. Outside, the bicyclist stood with a tire pump held high beside his head in a tight fist. In the misty light of the streetlamps, it was impossible to tell whether the dark patches on his glowering face were blood or grime.
“Get out of the car, motherfucker!” the rider yelled through the window.
He was tall and chiseled, ropy muscles stretching out of his T-shirt and spandex riding shorts. Both upper arms were emblazoned with tattoos of barbed helixes. After trying the door handle and discovering that it was locked, he hammered the window again with the pump. A nickel-sized spider’s web bloomed in the glass.
“Get the fuck out here!”
Geiger’s ears were ringing. The inside of his skull felt crowded, as if his brain had grown too big for its casing. His eyes danced forward, taking in the views of the windshield and rearview mirror at the same time. Headlights in the rain cruised toward him.
“Are you coming out of that car or am I coming in?”
Geiger turned back to the bicyclist, and there, just outside the window, was a man in overalls. His wide, flat forehead shone with sweat; in his hand he held something thin and shiny. For half a heartbeat, his father stood before him. Then he was gone.
The tire pump came down on the window again, and the glass burst into a thousand tiny diamonds. The rider reached in and grabbed hold of Geiger’s jumpsuit.
“Get out here, asshole!”
Geiger’s right hand shot out the window frame, anchored itself in the bicyclist’s hair, and pulled him halfway into the front seat. Growling in anger, the man tried to bring his arms through the opening to wage some form of attack, but the fingertips of Geiger’s left hand dug into the soft cavity above the man’s clavicle. The growls turned to screams.
Geiger pulled the man nose to nose. His fingers relaxed and the screaming stopped.
“Go-away-now,” Geiger said.
The man stared at him wide-eyed, breathless, raindrops beaded on his face.
“Do you understand?” Geiger asked.
The man nodded. Geiger let go and the rider wriggled his way out the window, stumbling back onto the street, hands going up to his neck.
Geiger’s foot found the gas pedal and he drove off, keeping the point of the speedometer’s arrow exactly between 30 and 40.
Geiger’s block was quiet. Nothing moved except for rainwater in the gutters. There were few residential units on the street, and the uniform shop and bodega didn’t open until six, the auto body shop and storage warehouse an hour later. Geiger’s building was between a bath and shower supply outlet and an empty storefront. Constructed of tawny bricks, it was twenty feet wide, thirty feet deep, and two stories high. Its windows were boarded up and had been for a long time.
Years ago, the place had belonged to a Serb with whom Geiger had worked in renovation. When jobs were scarce, the Serb would offer Chinese food to friends and coworkers in exchange for their help in gutting the place, and before Geiger went into his current line of work he’d spent a dozen nights ripping out rotted walls and flooring. Five years later, he had gone back. Boards covered the windows, and the dumpster in the alley was filled with drywall so moldy that it obviously hadn’t been emptied in months. But the Serb still lived there; he invited Geiger in and told him that he’d run out of money and the dream had died. That same afternoon, Geiger and the Serb worked out a deal, and two days later Geiger paid him in cash. He had had two-thirds of the price in hand and borrowed the rest from Carmine on friendly terms.
Geiger had done all the work on the place himself. He insulated the second floor and closed it off, upgraded the plumbing and wiring, and fenced in the small backyard. Before putting up drywall, he built a floor-to-ceiling layer of cinder blocks across all the walls and then fit every fourth block with a mixture of nitroglycerine and RDX in shaped charges that would detonate inward. He painted the walls with a soft gray he found at Sherwin-Williams called Tradewind.
Then he began creating the floor.
He had carried the design around in his head for years. Three or four days a week he made the rounds of reno sites in Brooklyn and Harlem-brownstones, small buildings, factories-searching for and buying discarded antique flooring. Sometimes he might come back with a six-foot plank of chestnut, other times a few eight-inch squares of hemlock. Employees at lumber and reclamation companies in the boroughs came to expect his biweekly visits as he sought out the more esoteric kinds of wood he needed.
Whatever the type of wood, whatever its shape or state, the process was always the same. Geiger would saw, shave, and whittle-as much by instinct as finite measure-to create the shape of the piece he saw in his head. Three lengthy sanding sessions with increasingly fine paper would take the wood down to its original, natural surface. Then, after treating all sides of the piece with a homemade concoction of beeswax and china wood oil, he would set it into the whole. One after another, the scraps became part of a huge, six-hundred-square-foot jigsaw puzzle.
He started from the outer borders and worked inward. He used more than seven hundred pieces, some as long as five feet and as wide as four inches, some no bigger than a bottle cap. The wood was teak, Brazilian tigerwood, oak, mahogany, ash, hemlock, elm, chestnut, heart pine. It took Geiger seven months to complete the fantastic mosaic, a creation a visitor would have marveled at had any seen it. In fact, the boy would be the first ever to set foot inside the place.
Geiger pulled up and parked twenty feet from his door. He looked into the rearview mirror and studied himself. He could feel his brow starting to tighten; from the far horizon of his mind, a storm had begun to move in.
He turned around and spoke to the boy, who was still stretched out on the seat.
“We’re going inside now. Twenty feet on the sidewalk, then three steps up, and then we’ll be in.”
He got out, opened the back door, and reached in. He took one of the boy’s cuffed hands and pulled him up into a sitting position.
“Ready?”
The masked head gave a tired nod; the boy could hardly hold his chin up. The tape across his mouth had a horizontal, inward crease where his mouth had reflexively tried to suck in air for hours. Geiger grabbed the violin case and glanced up and down the block. There was no one in sight.
“We’re going to walk fast now. Watch your head.”
He kept hold of the boy’s hand as he slid across the seat to the door. When he swung his legs out, Geiger pulled him up and the boy immediately turned his blinded face up to the rain as if seeking some form of purification.
“Let’s go,” Geiger said.
He linked his arm inside one of the boy’s and ushered him toward the house. “Three steps,” he said, and they went up without incident to the front door, which, exactly like the one at Ludlow Street, was made of heavy-gauge steel and had no external locks or knobs. On the wall beside the door was a keypad; Geiger punched in the code and a soft chirp preceded a louder click of disengaging chambers. After the door opened inward an inch or two, he pushed it open all the way and steered the boy inside. The door closed behind them, the locks clacking as they automatically reengaged.
Geiger knew that his actions had set something seismic in motion and that his place in the universe was somehow being redefined. But for a moment the silence was a palliative, a welcoming home. He put down the violin case, took a Swiss Army knife from a pocket, and cut the ties at the boy’s wrists.
