hair. To Geiger, he looked like a praying mantis. He held a pair of disposable white latex gloves.
“My name is Dalton,” the man said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, though who would’ve thought it would happen like this?” His voice had the tranquil, measured tone of a high school teacher who knows every teenage trick in the book. He pulled one of the gloves on. The snap bounced around the room. “I like the lightly powdered,” he said. “What do you wear?”
“I don’t. I don’t like the way they feel.”
“You don’t worry about infection? Aids, Hep C…”
“There’s hardly ever any bleeding with me.”
Dalton put the other glove on. Snap. Geiger looked to the one-way mirror. Who else was here? Hall, certainly. Carmine? Probably not, but he heard the echo of his words: I do business with these people. You know who you’ve been fucking with? They’re government contractors.
Dalton followed Geiger’s eyes. “You have a wonderful place here, Geiger. You’ve got a real eye for the little things, the special touches. And the viewing room-beautiful.” Dalton walked behind Geiger, out of his sight, then came back around pushing the wheeled cart. “I brought some of my own things and picked out a few of yours, too.”
On the cart’s top shelf were a handheld butane torch, a box cutter with the grip wrapped in duct tape, an awl with a wooden handle, an aluminum baseball bat whose upper portion was encased in a four-inch layer of blue rubber foam, and Geiger’s antique straight razor. The bottom shelf of the cart was stocked with half a dozen white hand towels, a roll of gauze, a roll of adhesive tape, and a neatly folded khaki windbreaker.
“It must be very strange, being on the other end of this,” Dalton said.
Geiger looked at Dalton’s loose, oversized clothes; he couldn’t get a sense for whether the man’s body was in good shape. His face was sallow and free of wrinkles. He looked to be about fifty.
“How long have I been out?”
“About forty-five minutes.” Dalton took off his glasses and began polishing the lenses. “Now, first things first. I’m out of the loop on this. All I’ve been told is that they want to know where the boy is. So… where is the boy?”
Geiger remembered that he’d written Matheson’s cell number on his left hand. The hand was extended just past the end of the chair’s arm, palm facing the floor.
“That Jones in Iraq,” said Geiger. “Did you really cut off his lips?”
Dalton’s smile reminded Geiger of a dog baring its teeth just before it growls.
“Sorry,” Dalton said. “I never kiss and tell. But let me ask you something.” He put his glasses back on. “Do you know what they call you?”
“Who are ‘they’?” Geiger asked.
“Some of our mutual… friends. ”
“No,” said Geiger. “I don’t know what they call me.”
“They call you the Inquisitor. What do you think-you like it?”
Geiger was monitoring his pulse. It was slow. He considered the moniker: The Inquisitor. The royalty of torture. The CIA loved their code names.
Dalton looked slightly disappointed at Geiger’s apparent lack of interest. “Well, I like it. Very elegant.”
Geiger remained silent, waiting Dalton out.
“They’re in a real hurry about this, Geiger,” Dalton said, pulling the sleeves of his sweatshirt up to his elbows. “So I’m not going to bother with any head games-not that head games are my strong suit, and not that they’d work on you in any case. No, I’m going straight to the pain. That’s my humble expertise-that’s what I do.”
Dalton turned to the cart, and Geiger slowly rotated his palm so he could see it. The skin had a moist sheen. He stared at the number: 917 555 0617. He recited it silently, committing it to memory.
The door to the viewing room swung open and Hall barged out. Dalton turned at the disturbance.
“His hand!” Hall yelled. “He’s got something on his palm!”
Geiger clenched his hand into a fist, rubbing his fingertips against his palm, working at the skin, until Dalton grabbed the hand with both of his and pried the fingers open. Hall arrived as the palm was revealed-a smudged but still legible 917 5 was followed by a smear of blue ink.
“It’s a phone number,” said Dalton.
“I can see that,” growled Hall. He glowered at Geiger. “Don’t make this hard. You’re smarter than this.”
Geiger nodded. “How is your head, Mr. Hall?”
Hall ignored him. As he headed back to the viewing room, he spoke over his shoulder to Dalton: “Get to work on him-now!”
The door slammed. Dalton reached toward the cart and picked up the awl and the butane torch. The awl’s steel needle was four inches long and a sixteenth of an inch thick, and the wooden grip was darkened from the sweat of countless uses. The torch fit perfectly in his hand.
“As I was saying. Expertise…”
His thumb pressed the torch’s ignition button, and a thin, two-inch-long blue flame shot out of the nozzle.
“It’s always seemed to me the most egalitarian of assets,” Dalton said. “Anyone can have an expertise. You don’t have to be smart, or rich, or clever. You don’t need a degree. There’s no privilege involved, no genetic lottery. You can be a ditchdigger and have an expertise. A shoe salesman, a dishwasher, a garbageman…”
He brought the needle of the awl into the flame and kept it there.
“I’ve always felt that you can tell a lot about a person if they have a genuine expertise. If they do, you know for certain, without knowing anything else about them, that they are dedicated. They have applied themselves, they have a passion for something that has driven them to a point well beyond where most people would ever go. That says a lot about a person, don’t you think?”
The awl’s needle glowed red. Dalton turned off the torch and put it on the cart. Geiger stared at the incandescent needle; it looked like the nucleus of a hearth’s fire compressed into a single, lucent filament. He felt the past being awakened by it.
Dalton studied the needle’s tip, then brought it close to Geiger’s left cheek with an unwavering hand. He grabbed Geiger’s hair with his other hand to immobilize the head.
Geiger didn’t move. “You don’t have to do that,” he said.
“Where is the boy?”
Geiger shut his eyes. A single piano note cascaded down into a full chord, and luminous puffs of clouds bloomed, laced with streaks of bright, falsetto-fueled lightning. They say everything can be replaced. They say every distance is not near.
Very slowly, Dalton pushed the hot needle into Geiger’s cheek until Geiger felt the tip break through the inner side and poke at the edge of his tongue. Dalton wiggled the probe.
So I remember every face of every man who put me here.
“Geiger, where is the boy?”
As Dalton had intended, the torture delivered a dual sensation: the searing burn of the hot steel and the sharp pain of the piercing of flesh. Geiger’s brain had a moment to form a critique. Heating the needle was, ironically, counterproductive, since it produced something of a desensitizing effect on the skin, diminishing the intensity of the invasion.
Dalton adjusted the awl’s angle slightly downward and jabbed it in farther, into the soft, connective tissue beneath the tongue.
“Where is the boy?”
Any day now, any day now… The high, sweet voice weaved toward the hot blast of pain and, like a viper, wrapped itself around it and strangled it… I shall be released.
Dalton shoved the awl in deeper. Its point came up against something solid. Bone. The pain was molten. Geiger was inside the sun.
“Geiger… where is the boy?”
Geiger opened his mouth and spat blood. Dalton shook his head and pulled the awl out. The heat had created a circular pink flush on the cheek, and a crimson bubble of blood began to grow in its center. Dalton picked up one of the hand towels and began wiping off the instrument with short, measured strokes.
“I’m curious,” he said. “Professionally speaking, on a scale of one to ten, how much did that hurt?”
