Black Diamond Fall

by Joseph Olshan

  Then another piece of the puzzle suddenly dropped into place. “Reuben Faro?” Julien gasped. “You’re married to Julia—I mean, Sabine?”

  Reuben Faro let out a short sharp laugh. “Not quite.”

  “I don’t understand. Your name was on her records.”

  “A placeholder of a sort. Nobody’s ever going to see those records once this is over.”

  “What do you mean, ‘over’?”

  “Oh, Julien. Dr. Asfour? No, I think Julien suits our relationship better. We aren’t doctor and patient, so I don’t have to go by hospital conventions. I’m sorry for keeping you in the dark. But this is a complicated situation.” Faro swept his arm around in a wide circle.

  Julien wondered if there were more of them coming: Agents, Officers, Security waiting with weapons, restraints, and chemicals. “I’m the one who decides what’s complicated here, Mr. Faro.”

  Faro’s hand landed on Julien’s arm in a tight grip just above the elbow. “You make the decisions between life and death for one person at a time, Julien. I’m in charge of who lives and dies on a much bigger scale. I don’t think you’d want my job.”

  Faro marched Julien to the elevator, then pushed him inside. He waved his hand against the display and brought up a colored administrative panel that Julien had never seen before. Faro tapped in a short code. The elevator moved up halfway between two floors, and stopped with a judder.

  Faro smiled at Julien. “Isn’t this better? We can talk privately now. Man-to-man.”

  Julien kept his voice calm and low. “Open these doors immediately and let me go.”

  Faro leaned back and folded his arms across his chest. “I’ve actually been following you, Julien, since I came to your graduation all those years ago. When the time was right, maybe a year from now, maybe in five years, I would have come to you and asked if you’d wanted to join us. We’re always looking out for leaders, for people with potential. But it seems your chance has come sooner than expected. If you help me, I can make big things happen very quickly for you.”

  Faro’s presence was so imposing that Julien almost felt a lack of oxygen in the elevator; he didn’t want to look at the man but Faro’s eyes followed him everywhere, like an optical illusion. The wrinkles were cut deep into the older man’s forehead and cheeks.

  “Now listen to me carefully, Julien. I want you to answer my questions. It’ll go better for you, I promise. How is Sabine? Can she stand? Can she walk? Is she well enough to leave here?”

  “I’m not required to tell you anything about her.”

  Faro spun Julien around until he was pressed against the back wall of the elevator. Faro’s left arm, sturdy as a ship’s mast, pressed down between Julien’s shoulders and neck, his fist bunched against Julien’s lower spine, applying a subtle pressure that could turn into disabling pain with one short, sharp punch. Julien was younger and taller than Faro, but he possessed none of the oaken strength of Faro’s body, nor his edge of violence.

  “Look, you have Sabine. Nobody else is going to find out; I’ll make sure of that. But I want her ready to be moved in the next four hours, and then I’m taking her.”

  “Taking her where?” Julien gasped, twisting his head around to look at Faro out of the corner of his eyes. The pressure in his head made him feel his eyes might burst. Faro could easily snap his neck and leave him dead there in the elevator.

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “You’ve made it my business! When you dumped her here and left her in my care, you made her my business!”

  Faro suddenly released Julien from the bind and took a step back. “You’re right. My apologies. But I still can’t tell you anything more than what you already know.”

  Julien turned around slowly, coughing. “Are you going to take her back to the Panah?” he managed, between wheezes. Faro did a double take, and it pleased Julien, beneath the pain, to wrong-foot the man.

  “She told you about the Panah, did she? Did she tell you about Lin Serfati?”

  Julien watched him warily, wondering why the man was bringing up Lin’s name. “I know about the Panah,” he said cautiously, not wanting to reveal anything to Faro. “It’s where she wants to go. Back home.”

  “She’ll be dealt with appropriately. You’ve done your job. Let me do mine.”

  “You’re willing to eliminate a woman?” Julien leapt to what seemed like the most logical conclusion.

  “I wouldn’t be, but the authorities would, if they found out about her. Now you know how serious this really is. I’m the only one who can protect her from them.”

  Julien knew that Sabine was of equal value to both of them, though for vastly different reasons. For both of them to fight over her went against every rule in Green City: women were to be valued, respected, shared, never the source of conflict between men. Men were, after all, the protectors and guardians of Green City’s most precious resource. They had been noble enough to make the sacrifice of sharing wives: they must not belittle themselves by letting their jealousy or competition come to the surface.

  Julien straightened himself with difficulty, tried to inject as much strength into his voice as he could. “You are the authorities.”

  Faro’s voice was low-pitched and urgent now. “You really don’t understand, do you? She’s not a bag of groceries that I can just lift and haul from one place to another.”

  The colorful panel started to flash a silent alarm. In a few minutes the main system would summon Security to investigate. Julien pointed silently at the panel. Faro turned around and glanced at it, puzzled.

  “Oh,” Faro said, “I forgot about that. You see? I can’t make everything go according to my wishes. Not all the time, anyway.”

  “Then you’re not as powerful as you’d like to think,” said Julien.

  “Power’s an illusion,” said Faro sadly, before he waved his hand in front of the panel. As the doors slid open, he turned back to Julien, his confidence and authority back in place, as if the mask had never cracked. “Four hours. Then I’m coming for her. A word of advice: don’t risk your career for her sake. She’s not worth it. Nobody is.” Faro brought his lips very close to Julien’s ear. “But if you try to stop me, you’ll share her fate. You’ll leave me no choice, Julien. As much as I like you, I’ll have to eliminate you as well.”

  Lin

  Was there news of a missing Wife on the Info Bulletin? Has any other Client mentioned Sabine? Has anyone acted strangely in any other way?”

  Lin’s eyes raked one woman’s face, then the next, looking for answers. They were all silent and frightened. Only Rupa had color in her cheeks, her bright eyes and the high pitch of her voice betraying her excitement at being the one to deliver the bad news.

  “Nothing at all? Fine.” Lin turned on her heel with the precision of a soldier and walked to her room in measured steps, calling out behind her, “I don’t want to be disturbed.” She was in no mood to stay and reassure them. She would not participate in a public show of fear, even if she was more terrified than the rest of them.

  She locked the door, then sat down at her desk and typed out a desperate message to Reuben: “Any news of bird?” They’d always made their messages as short and cryptic as possible, working out a mutual code that relied on innocuous symbols and images. She steeled herself, then sent the message.

  How could this catastrophe have happened? Lin paid exorbitant sums of money to certain Officers and Agents. She kept scrupulous tabs on Clients, tracking the details of their homes and offices, finding out about their finances, their vacations, their families. She’d vetted them all until her suspicions were allayed, because any link in the chain was an opportunity for betrayal. Whatever had happened to Sabine had to be because of an outside force, something entirely beyond her control. Every moment that passed by without word from Reuben felt like a noose tightening slowly around her neck. Her min
d churned furiously, trying to imagine exactly what had happened to Sabine. Had she been captured? Kidnapped? Fallen ill? Gotten lost?

  Then, the horrifying thought: had she betrayed them all by turning herself in? If Sabine had surrendered to the Agency, she would receive a lesser punishment if she surrendered information about the Panah.

  Lin thought back to the Info Bulletin they’d seen weeks ago, the Wife—Nurya Salem—found in a pool of her own blood. How had that slipped by the censors? The Bureau trotted out women regularly on the Networks: young, beautiful faces unlined with care or worry. Those winsome puppets testified to the happiness and success of their blended families, how well looked after they were, how they were treated like queens by their Husbands: breathless, saccharine testimonials to the perfection of life in Green City.

  Whoever had allowed the news of Nurya Salem’s suicide to go on air was sending a warning to every woman in Green City. The Agency must have instructed the censors to leave the news item uncut, so that everyone could see that there was no redress for anyone who resisted. Had Sabine been undone by their cunning?

  For hours Lin sat bathed in the eerie red-orange glow of the Moroccan lamp, the cutout designs on its four sides casting shadows like large flowers on the walls of her room, on the table and bed, moving and changing as the lamp turned above her head. The lamp etched tattoos of light on her skin and she looked down at them, wondering how it had all come to this.

  When Ilona died twenty years ago and Lin had taken over the Panah, she’d wanted to help the young women who were running away from horrible futures. They were brave; Lin met their courage with strength of her own. For twenty years she had performed her duties with a devotion bordering on obsession.

  She’d thought they were escaping the system, but when it came down to it, she’d still had to ask Reuben for help. Truth be told, she was as dependent on a man as if she’d been married to one. For the first time, Lin broke down and wept freely. She wondered if she should turn herself in to the Agency before she slipped under the waterline of sanity.

  At last, many hours later, the return message from Reuben finally arrived, the notification sending a jolt straight to her heart: “Located bird. All well. More later.”

  Her fingers hovered over the device, but the words wouldn’t come to her head. She slammed her hand down on the desk, then screamed out in frustration and pain. Damn him! Why couldn’t he tell her any more than that? Didn’t he know she needed every detail from beginning to end? This was his way of keeping her under control, in breathless anticipation of his next message.

  As she searched frantically for the right response, she heard a noise coming from the other side of the door. Damn them, she’d told them not to disturb her. She pushed her chair back from the desk, ignoring the ugly squeal as its legs scraped across the floor. When she reached her full height her head struck the Moroccan lamp overhead, sending it into a wild orbit that threw a kaleidoscope of stars jittering back and forth across the walls.

  She threw open the door: nothing there. But she hadn’t imagined the noise. She was about to close the door and turn back into the room when heard the noise again, coupled with a shadow crossing the wall across the door. She slipped out of her room to track it, followed it all the way down the hall, past the kitchen, and then toward Sabine’s door. Lin flattened herself against the wall, listening to the muffled sound of a hand trying out the handle cautiously against the electronic lock Lin had activated an hour ago.

  Lin stood and waited until the woman turned around. She slowly met Rupa’s beautiful brown eyes, full of shock and fear.

  “What are you doing?” asked Lin.

  “Nothing.”

  “Why were you trying to go into Sabine’s room? Answer me.”

  “I wasn’t doing anything, I was just worried about Sabine, I came here to see if I could help, do anything...”

  Something slipped just then from Rupa’s grasp, landed with a metallic thunk on the floor, and rolled towards Lin’s feet.

  Lin bent down to pick it up. She held it up to the dim light of the corridor. It was Sabine’s flask, the one that Lin filled with tea and sent to her in the car every time she came home from a night with a Client. She turned it around in her hands, feeling its weight and circumference. It was still full; the mixture sloshing inside took on a new significance, now that Sabine was missing.

  “Why do you have this, Rupa? It belongs to Sabine.”

  Faces, stretched and pale, appeared in the gloom of the corridor: Diyah, Su-Yin, a few of the other girls. Lin searched for Sabine’s face among them, then remembered again that she was gone. “What are you doing with this?”

  Rupa whispered, “It was in the car. I was washing it.”

  “Why? It’s not your job to wash it.” She waved the flask threateningly in Rupa’s face; Rupa flinched and reflexively lifted her arms to protect herself.

  “Please don’t... please, Lin. I came here to tell you something. It’s about Sabine.”

  Lin moved only her eyes, but her sidelong glance made Diyah and the other women step back hastily. They’d all known fear and anger in their lives, but none of them had ever seen Lin like this, her features twisted with a fury they could not relate to the poised, dignified woman they knew.

  “Go away,” Lin said to the other women, without looking at them. They skittered away like birds startled by a gunshot. She didn’t care where they went, what they would talk about among themselves. She needed to concentrate on Rupa right now.

  Rupa sat on her haunches, her hands resting in her lap, the position of the penitent. Lin realized that she had never understood this girl, haunted by ghosts that she could not exorcise. Rupa had chosen to carry her secrets inside her skin, where they ate into her and poisoned her from the inside out. She mumbled over and over again something that Lin couldn’t make out.

  “What did you say?”

  “It’s my fault.”

  “What?”

  “It’s my fault Sabine’s gone. This happened because of me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Joseph. He’s in love with Sabine...”

  “I know that. What does that have to do with you?”

  Rupa raised her head to look at Lin, her rich, beautiful eyes red with embers of fear. “He’s crazy about Sabine, but she hates him, and he knows it. He asked me what to do, and I wanted to help.”

  “I don’t understand. How were you supposed to help?”

  “He wanted me to tell him how to make him like her. I told him to give her a drink and see if it helped her relax around him.”

  “What do you mean, a drink?”

  “You know, something with alcohol. Her assignations with Joseph would go better if she was more...”

  “But she doesn’t drink!”

  “I know. I told him not to get her drunk. I didn’t think it would do any harm.”

  And then suddenly, Lin remembered. The drug. Sleep, the one Reuben had given her, that she’d been administering to Sabine. His warning that it wasn’t supposed to be mixed with alcohol.

  Lin forced herself to think hard. Sabine only drank from the flask of tea when she was in the car, returning from a Client. But if the drug had been in her system over the weeks Lin had been putting it in the tea—oh God, what if she’d been giving Sabine too much? If Joseph had given her alcohol, could it have made Sabine sick? Could it have killed her, or was it more likely just to render her unconscious? Lin shuddered thinking about what Joseph might have done to Sabine, vulnerable and insensate.

  Lin put her hand out to the wall to steady herself. “When did this happen?” she asked Rupa. “When did you tell him to do this?”

  “Rupa said, “My last visit to Joseph. A couple of months ago. I wasn’t trying to hurt her. I only wanted to help, I promise.”

  Lin stared at Rupa. The girl’s words were an echo o
f her own thoughts. She’d been so worried seeing Sabine night after sleepless night, her cheeks drawn and dry with lack of sleep. Lin made so many decisions over the course of the day to safeguard the women of the Panah, over so many years. Sabine’s stubborn refusal to accept anyone’s help for her insomnia had irked Lin more than she liked to admit. She was no better than any Bureau worker, exercising her dominion over Sabine’s body. But now she knew she’d miscalculated. She should never have experimented like that with a drug without Sabine’s knowing.

  Rupa was still talking, unaware of Lin’s inner tumult: “I thought she’d enjoy Joseph’s company more if she was less stressed about being with him. It’s not easy to do what we do, you know. It helps if a Client is—well, if you like the Client. And Sabine doesn’t like her Clients. She isn’t like me: she’s not as friendly as I am... or as open-minded.”

  Lin heard the words through the fog in her head, and something in them made her realize that Rupa, too, had lived among them while not truly wanting to be there. Her heart had never been with them in the first place.

  Whenever young women climbed down into the elevator shaft and knocked on the door of the Panah, they were always high on adrenaline, euphoric with triumph at having escaped. Their eyes shone and their skin glowed. It took a few days, maybe a week, for the high to wear off. Then the realization crept into their minds that their lives had been bisected by their escape into before and after. There would always be a date in each woman’s mind to mark the death of everything they’d known before entering the Panah. What came, usually after a few weeks, was a deep depression as the women came to terms with where they were now, as well as the constraints of life underground, the rules and the regulations of Panah life. Those, like Diyah, who did well accepted where they were and tried to make the best of it, choosing to turn the date of arrival into a second birthday, a second chance. Once a woman was at the Panah, she was granted sanctuary for the rest of her life—if she wanted it.