on a silver fucking platter. And I’m not ratting. Not ever. ”
“I have a question, John.”
“Yeah?”
“What if you were the other guy?”
“What other guy?”
“The man in your story who you’re punishing-who chooses to offer up his wife to sexual degradation in order to stop his own physical torture. Are you saying you wouldn’t make that choice if you were him?”
“Fucking A right! What’ve I just been trying to tell you?”
“Then how are you different from him?” Geiger stepped inside the cube. This close, he could smell the residue of the sodium hydroxide solution. He’d give him a second dose soon. “Tell me, John. What makes you different from him?”
Jackie Cats’s reddened face screwed up in angry confusion. “What the fuck’re you talking about?”
“Why wouldn’t you sink to those depths? What is it about you? Is it physical strength? Are you tougher?”
Geiger raised the oar and brought the edge down on the outside of Jackie Cats’s right ankle with a sharp crack.
“Do you have a higher threshold of pain?”
He whacked the left ankle and Jackie Cats growled.
“Are you braver?”
He flipped his grip on the oar and hammered the rounded end into Jackie Cats’s right clavicle. A deep gasp burst out of his bleeding lips.
“Or more noble-or loyal?”
He drove the oar into the left clavicle, picking spots where he would inflict intense pain without breaking anything.
“Or more loving?”
Geiger raised the oar like a spear so the bridge of Jackie Cats’s nose became a bull’s-eye. As he thrust it forward, Jackie Cats winced at the imminent impact-and the oar stopped an inch from him. His eyes rolled back and his head tipped to the side.
“John. What I have to say now is important, so nod if I’m coming through to you.”
“Go… fuck… yourself.”
Geiger’s fingers started their dance beside his thigh.
“In this room, John, we try to deal in truth, and we stay here until we find it. Now, I do think you believe that what you just told me about yourself is true. I think that’s who you think you are-but I don’t agree with you.” He stepped out of the cube. “John, my job is to retrieve information, but sometimes, in order to do that, first I have to help you become more aware of your strengths and weaknesses, what you’re capable of and what you’re not. Discovering your true self, John-that’s what this is really about.”
Geiger walked to the wall directly in front of Jackie Cats.
“So you try to take a look at who you really are when all the poses and nicknames are stripped away. Give it a shot, John, and then you and I will talk again and see where we end up. I might even ask for the information I need.”
Geiger reached out to a black control panel on the wall, pushed a button, and another shower came down on Jackie Cats, who grunted but hardly moved. Geiger punched another button and all the lights except for the cube’s mini-spots went out.
“Been there, done that, motherfucker,” Jackie Cats muttered.
The sound of the cats’ hissing and yowling started again, and then Geiger’s voice spoke from the dark as it had earlier.
“I need the names of the men who helped you steal the money, John.”
The sentence became an audio loop. Interweaving with the feline mayhem, the voice said the same words over and over. I need the names of the men who helped you steal the money, John. I need the names of the men who helped you steal the money, John. I need the names…
Then a noise slipped out of Jackie Cats. Even in his impaired state, the sound stunned him. It was a whimper.
5
Sipping his morning coffee and sitting at the desk in his Brooklyn Heights living room, Harry looked out at the East River. He slid his hand inside his sweatpants and felt around gingerly, his scowl like a horseshoe embedded in his unshaven face. Last night, during one of his marathon showers, he’d discovered something that made him shiver in the hot steam-a small, subcutaneous something in his groin. The bulge was the size of a grape and semihard.
During his years in the Obituaries department at the New York Times, which is where he’d worked before he met Geiger, Harry had developed the conviction that if you lived past forty, sooner or later you’d get cancer. The small percentage who didn’t make it to forty-who died in a head-on or were murdered or stroked out-they would have gotten cancer if they’d lived longer. Now Harry was forty-four, and his body, once a brother-in-arms against the world, could no longer be trusted. He knew from all the lives he’d sifted through that within every man is his own Caesar and Brutus, and from this point on his flesh could betray him at any time. The “Et tu” moment would come, not as a dagger in the back but as a swollen node felt while swallowing, or an enlarged pupil glimpsed in the mirror, or a grape-sized mass found by a fingertip during a shower.
At times like these Harry envied Geiger. He wouldn’t change places for any price-clearly, the man had more demons than a Hieronymus Bosch painting-but that steel-trap heart and mind had a definite appeal. Nothing ever seemed out of the ordinary to Geiger. He was like some mystical engineer who’d found a way to shut down the highs and lows of happenstance and their impact. Back at the beginning of their partnership, Harry had decided that Geiger was on a mood equalizer, one of those drugs that sandpaper the rough edges off experience. But eventually Harry had changed his mind. If Geiger was on a drug, it was something he produced in his brain, and whatever that chemoneural cocktail was, Harry coveted it.
They had met eleven years ago in Central Park at three A.M. Harry was drunk, as was his nightly custom then, and he was getting his head kicked in by two skinheads. A few years earlier he had become a dreamless man-not the nocturnal variety, but a man who had let go of any notion of prospects, any promise of the new and different, any hope of something else. The dreams of his youth were as dead as the people he wrote about, ashes and dust, and so the arrhythmic pounding of boot toes on bones and flesh and the breath-sapping pain and the possibility of being ushered out of the world had all felt almost right. Loss had become a sidekick; it was always near, shambling along a few steps behind him. The thought of finally bidding it good-bye was stretching Harry’s battered lips into a smile across broken teeth when Geiger stopped his nighttime run just long enough to lay out the punks in a blur of lethal hands and feet, and then go on his way before Harry could summon breath to speak.
Two weeks later, with thirty stitches and two new teeth in his head, Harry began a nightly vigil at the site of his humiliation. He didn’t have to wait long: on the second night, in a downpour, Geiger came down the path in T- shirt and sweatpants, and Harry stepped into his route. Geiger stopped, running in place.
“What do you want?” Geiger asked.
“I just wanted to say thank you.”
Geiger’s wet hair shone black as polish. Drops of rain slid down out of his brows and into his eyes, but they didn’t appear to bother him. Harry noticed that he hardly ever blinked.
“My name’s Harry. Harry Boddicker.”
He put out his hand, but Geiger didn’t even glance at it.
“Buy you a drink?” Harry asked.
“I don’t drink.”
“Well, I just thought, seeing as how you saved my life-”
“It was chance, Harry. It had nothing to do with you. If they’d been kicking a dog I would’ve done the same
