“One hundred and fifty dollars a night.”
“Cash, off the books. So it’s really more like two hundred and twenty a day.”
“Yes.”
“That’s more than enough to rent a room, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“But you’re sleeping in one of my houses. That’s not allowed, Mr. Geiger.”
“I know.”
“Then why do you do it?”
“I save a lot of money that way.”
The corners of Carmine’s wide lips tilted up. “Are you fucking with me, Geiger?”
“No.”
“You do know who I am, right?”
“Yes, Mr. Delanotte. I’ve read about you.”
Carmine’s lips finished their arc into a fully fashioned smile. “Okay,” he said. “First thing: you don’t sleep in my houses anymore. Second thing: I appreciate the heads-up about the feds. I’ll deal with it.” He slipped a hand inside his suit jacket and took out a taupe leather billfold. “Five hundred sound fair?”
“I don’t want your money,” Geiger said.
“No? You’re so flush from sleeping free in my houses that you don’t need it?”
“I have a question.”
“Ask me.”
“About your ‘lieutenants.’ How will you find out which one is going to betray you?”
Carmine scowled. “Could be any one of five or six. I know a guy. He’ll find out.”
“I could do it,” Geiger said.
“ What is it you could do?” asked Carmine.
“Find out what you need to know.”
“And how would you do that, Geiger?”
“I’ll ask your lieutenants questions, and they’ll tell me the truth.”
“So-when you’re not doing reno, you’re in the truth business?”
“Information retrieval.”
Carmine’s head tilted, like a dog’s hearing a distant whistle. He was evaluating the tone of voice; Geiger had spoken the two words without the slightest hint of irony or sarcasm.
“Information retrieval,” Carmine said. “Got it. All right-so what am I thinking right now?”
“I’m not a mind reader, Mr. Delanotte.” Geiger turned his head to the right; there was a barely audible click. “But you are probably wondering if I might be psychotic-or retarded.”
Carmine’s grin lurked just beneath the surface, like a shark in shallow water. “I guess I can’t really ask for a resume, can I? You’ve got experience in… information retrieval, is it? The truth business?”
“I can tell when someone is lying. I can tell a lot about someone just by looking at them.” Geiger turned his head to the left. Another click. “You’re left-handed,” he said.
“That’s right. How’d you know that?”
“Your eyebrows.”
“My eyebrows, huh? You gonna read my palm and tell my fortune next?”
“I don’t know how to do that. But you see better out of your right eye than your left-and you had two, maybe three fingers on your left hand dislocated a long time ago. They still hurt. Probably arthritic.”
Carmine involuntarily flexed the fingers of his right hand, then leaned toward Geiger until their faces were inches apart. “Has anyone ever told you that you are one very strange motherfucker?”
“Yes. A number of people.” Geiger’s fingers fluttered on the tabletop. “Let me come to the first interrogation.”
Carmine frowned and poured another two inches of liquor. He stared at the glass, and for a moment he was absolutely still, as if listening to the sound of ten thousand hunches-his whole life, built upon them-and then his eyes started to shine with the wisdom of intuition.
“Geiger, do you own a cell phone?” he asked.
“No.”
“Get one.”
His daily regimen of push-ups done, Geiger went back into the house and stood in front of his enormous CD case. He had designed and built it himself; six feet square, it was made of flawless cherry, had ten open shelves on rollers, and held over eighteen hundred albums. He scanned the jewel cases and slid out Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks, flicked on the amplifier, and slipped the CD into the player. A tripping cascade of violins poured from the Hyperions.
He walked to a door and opened it. Inside was a small closet, just four feet by four feet, with mirrored walls from floor to ceiling. The music flowed into the closet from two mounted Bose mini-speakers.
Still naked, Geiger stared at his triple reflections. He surveyed the cabled muscles beneath taut skin, the crooked kneecaps and pronounced bumps of the outer ankles. He turned and craned his head around to see the slight, scoliotic curve of the upper spine and the oddly flattened iliac crests at the hips. And as always, he gazed with particular intensity at the myriad razor-thin scars running in horizontal columns down his hamstrings and his calves, all the way to his Achilles tendons. They looked like patient, punctilious markings etched by an inmate on a prison-cell wall.
Geiger stepped inside the closet and lay down on his side, curling himself into a ball to fit. He reached up and pulled the door closed. He closed his eyes. As the music swirled around him, each note burst into a drop of radiantly colored light that left a dying trail like a falling star against a night sky. He could taste the sounds, too; each instrument and tone delivered a different flavor. The cello painted long, aquamarine streaks that tasted sweet and cool. The violins splashed hot red lines with hints of cinnamon.
He was in the darkness now. He needed to think.
4
Jackie Cats awakened to the sound of a cat meowing plaintively. His eyes ached, and he could open only one of them. He remembered being yanked out of bed; he remembered being taped up and forced into a large, coffinlike aluminum trunk; and he remembered, later on, some guy opening the trunk and shoving a needle into his neck. The rest was a blank-until now.
He was in a dark place and he couldn’t get a sense of its dimensions. He could see that he was suspended upright in a spread-eagled position in the center of a geometric construction made of steel bars that had been bolted together at ninety-degree angles to form a hollow cube about ten feet by ten feet. He was naked, arms and legs stretched out at forty-five-degree angles, wrists and ankles tethered tightly to the upper and lower horizontal bars by leather straps. Beneath him in the floor was a round metal grille, about four feet in diameter.
His bruised body was bathed in the hard light of mini-spots shining from the eight corners of the cube. There was no other illumination, and outside the cube the black floor and ceiling merged with the darkness. He didn’t know where he was, but he knew why, and what was coming. He pulled on his ties, testing them. There was no give.
The meowing dropped down into the guttural yowl of an angry feline, and soon another slow, bending yowl joined in, announcing a second cat.
Jackie Cats shouted, “Shut the fuck up, huh?”
He couldn’t believe what a schmuck he was. A dumb, fucking minchione. He’d waited years for his shot, put up with Carmine’s bullshit, got the right crew together, pulled it off without a snag. Free, clear, and rich. If he’d stuck to his plan, he’d be thirty-five thousand feet up right now, six little Chivas bottles on the fold-down table, listening to Learn to Speak Portuguese on his iPod. But he went over to Nicki’s to do her one more time, and ended up fucking himself instead. He shook his head ruefully, and it made his eyes throb.
