Quicksilver, page 27
What I had done to Tim had no impact on Emmerich that I could discern, as though the soul child had meant less to him than a house pet, no more than an iRobot vacuum cleaner that I had disabled. His apathy revealed an absence of concern about those in his flock, but also a strange inability to assess the threat to himself in this situation.
As if speaking to errant children whom he could not bear to correct in other than the gentlest tone of voice, he said, “I see from your emanations that you are alphas, as are we all here. You need not resort to violence.”
Sparky said, “That’s reassuring, your majesty, but after a tour of your Playboy Mansion gulag, we still feel that a hand extended in friendship might be cut off at the wrist.”
The words your majesty and the scorn with which they’d been spoken must have inflicted at least a small laceration on Emmerich’s ego, considering that he considered himself a godling, above mere royalty. Yet he didn’t react to the slight in any visible way. With papal beneficence, he said, “The Oasis is also the Temple of the Way. We gather in this sacred place because we believe two things about the desire for pleasure and possessions. As to our pleasure, it is always an alpha’s right to have whatever he or she wants, and one alpha will always agree to satisfy another. Among alphas, there is no competition, only a mutual seeking after the many pleasures that the body provides. Satisfaction is the source of peace.”
His spiel was as puerile as that of any film producer flacking a movie crafted with the grandiose intention to change the world. I listened to it nonetheless. If I hadn’t allowed him to drone awhile and cool my fury with his chilling nonsense, I might have shot him before he told me what I wanted to know.
Bridget, Panthea, and Sparky—and for sure Winston—evidently knew my trigger wire was dangerously taut, so they took their cue from me and indulged the Light.
“As to material possessions,” Emmerich continued, “whatever an alpha wants is rightfully his or hers, to be taken not from other alphas, but from the masses of Moujiks by any means necessary. We revere Nature in her fertile goodness, for the ecstasy she allows. They revere her in her darker aspect as the Queen of the Void. We value life. They value death. I’ve taken fortunes from the Moujiks. You won’t be taking from me, but from them, when I share with you what I wish. In recognition of your alpha boldness, I’ll give you a few million dollars each. More important, I will welcome you into the Way and teach you how to use the internet and other tools to extract your fortunes from the Moujiks, so that each of you might build your own Oasis. I have been waiting for potentials as bold as you, that the Way might be evangelized across this troubled nation.”
Emmerich’s supreme confidence beggared belief. Four people and a formidable-looking dog had penetrated a front entrance that was as thick as a bank-vault door, bypassed his electronic locks, foiled his fingerprint scanners. We now stood with four weapons trained on him. Yet I had no doubt that his apparent calm was real. If he had founded his cult in the spirit of a con man, seeking an absolute power over others that money alone couldn’t buy, he had nevertheless come to believe his own crazy rap. He thought he was immortal, that his words and carriage and demeanor and charisma wove together to form a body armor to ensure that no assault could even so much as abrade him.
I took a deep breath. “I’m interested in the people you call the Special Selections. Soul Timothy showed us photos. One was exceptional. He said her name is Camilla.”
His pencil-line smile widened into a generous brushstroke. In his sun-bronzed face, his teeth appeared sufficiently irradiated to peg a Geiger counter at the high end of its scale. In part, Bodie Emmerich’s delight might have arisen from the mistaken belief that we had recognized his invulnerability and had entered negotiations. But it was also the leer of a satyr, ravisher, rapist for whom the name Camilla conjured potent memories of the brutality with which he had treated her. His own words belied his pose as some New Age holy man when he said, “What you want to do with her is a confirmation of your alpha nature. If I had to encapsulate the fundamental meaning of the Way in a single word, it would be Camilla, for to do with her what you will is to do to all the Moujiks what must be done to make this a world of pleasure and peace.”
“What’s that word—‘Moujiks’?”
“It’s Russian for peasants.”
“Why not just call them peasants?”
“Because ‘Moujiks’ is the better word. It means poor but not always in a financial sense. Moujiks may be rich or penniless or in between. They are peasants because they’re ignorant and willfully so, grievously superstitious. The Moujiks are devoted to customs and traditions and stifling institutions and ways of thinking that they believe provide stability in their lives but that in fact only prevent them from being truly free.”
For as long as I could tolerate, in order to be able to draw him out on the subject of Camilla, I needed to play to his absurd belief that he had, by his charisma, bespelled us into negotiations. I returned my Glock to its holster. Turning to my three companions, I said, “Hey, guys, we’re all right. We’re all of like minds here.” I smiled at Emmerich. “Sorry about clubbing Tim. I wasn’t sure how our unconventional entrance would ultimately be received. But you’re a man I think we can do business with.”
Bridget, Panthea, and Sparky might have been astonished by this development, but they did not object. They holstered their weapons. Their understanding was a testament to the supernatural connections that were, hour by hour, uniting the four of us in a cause.
To Emmerich, I said, “Camilla. So delicious. How on earth did you . . . acquire her?”
A narcissist absolutely convinced that he had transcended all human limitations, including mortality, Emmerich preened as if we were discussing nothing more dangerous to his future than collecting butterflies to pin to a specimen board. “I have field agents who’re always scouting for a certain type, for women and men who combine beauty and innocence, who are intelligent but guileless. To qualify as a Special Selection, their elegance must make them appear to be delicate, even fragile, but they should in fact be mentally strong, so they can withstand being emotionally broken over and over again. Visitors who come here, people of accomplishment, wield great power in government, industry, media, and the arts—and yet can’t risk fulfilling certain needs in the Moujik society. It is those like Camilla who draw them here. Because these elites find their desires fulfilled, their protection is extended to the Oasis, ensuring that we may forever operate as though we are an independent nation.”
“Nihilim,” I said.
He looked puzzled. “Excuse me?”
I struggled to keep my voice light, to seem merely curious rather than like an interrogator. “Your field agents, your scouts, those who find these Special Selections and present them to you—are they Nihilim?”
“I’m not familiar with that word.”
“Well, I mean, do you know the true names of these scouts? Do you background them? How can you confidently vet someone to commit a kidnapping for you?”
He frowned. “They prove their worth and are rewarded. In some lines of work, you understand, résumés and letters of recommendation aren’t in the interest of either employee or employer.”
I smiled, nodded. “Yes, of course, snatching a delicious item like Camilla, leaving no slightest trail to be followed, making sure that those who cared about her are led only into blind alleys—that would require the scouts to have great skill in such matters. The trust between you and them would have to be mutual, beyond doubt. Listen, Mr. Emmerich, I want to be with Camilla.”
Stepping away from the podium, as if prepared to lead us to her, he instead raised both hands with his palms toward me in a no-can-do gesture. “I’m sorry to say that’s not possible. But we can review the others, any one of which will satisfy as surely as she would have done.”
“But why not Camilla?”
He shrugged and shook his head. “It is the nature of desire that sometimes it becomes all consuming and all demanding and must be satisfied even at great cost. In Camilla’s case, a recent visitor was required to compensate the Oasis in the amount of five hundred thousand dollars for his indulgence. A Moujik is only a Moujik, but one of them special enough for our Special Selections can’t just be written off as if she were a sofa pillow stained by spilled wine.”
I stood benumbed, unable to move, but I could think and feel. I felt too much, and all of it too sharply. My heart pumped more than blood through me, pumped a darkness that I’d never known before, not the sludge of depression, but the black fog of wrath. “She’s dead?”
“The overly passionate visitor knew the cost before he did the deed. He didn’t feel imposed upon. We are honored by the caliber of our visitors and never take advantage of them.”
“Half a million dollars,” I said. “That’s what a life is worth here?”
“This one would have been worth more if she were twenty instead of twenty-eight, and if she hadn’t been here six years already. Much good use was made of her, with less to come.”
Emmerich’s years in the Oasis, his long immersion in the Way, had left him so obtuse that when his moral sense evaporated, so did his survival instinct. Having never been punished for his heinous crimes, having redefined them as virtues, and having been rewarded—endlessly pleasured—for them, he was no longer capable of feeling guilt or of experiencing a fight-or-flight reaction.
“She was worth more, so much more,” I said. “I would have done anything to keep her alive.”
“Well,” Emmerich said, “value is in the eye of the beholder. There are important visitors who will be very dissatisfied not to see her in the Selections henceforth. But the scouts are now busy searching. And in the end, as I said, even the most desirable Moujik is nothing more than a Moujik, after all. Another one who excites extreme desire will be found. More than one. A dozen. And then a choice will be made. Meanwhile, I assure you, others are available to bring you a satisfaction so intense, so complete, that it is beyond your wildest dreams.”
I saw no point in telling him that he was evil or that the profundity of his evil had rendered him insane, as mad as any man who had ever lived. He believed that he had transcended humanity, and in that delusion, he was halfway to embracing solipsism, the weird conviction that only he was real, that all other people were figments of his imagination or eidolons that some higher power had projected into the Oasis to serve him as he wished. He could not be shamed or even humbled by words. The most vicious threats could not alarm him. A knife brandished at his throat would be nothing more to him than an opportunity to prove his invulnerability, for no mere instrument of metal could spill the blood of a godling.
I was a champion of the law (aluf shel halakha), a guardian of the natural law (Legis naturalis propugnator). I had never asked to fill the terrible role of a scourge. But I couldn’t simply unpin a badge from my shirt and walk away, for it was pinned to my heart. With no concern that the sound would travel far in this solid and well-insulated structure, I shot Bodie Emmerich three times. The bullets did even to him what bullets do to anyone.
| 35 |
In the circular vestibule with the gold-leafed sapphire-inlaid ceiling and the cunning crystal walls, fractured light shaped us with prisms and graced our skin with rainbows.
Panthea bypassed the fingerprint scanner and put her hand flat on the door to the quarters where the Special Selections were kept. The electronic lock released and the door came open.
A corridor, less grand than those through which we’d made our way before, served twelve small suites, each with a stout door and an electronic lock. Here we discovered that Bridget and I could now fling them wide, as Panthea had done, with no need to say open sesame.
Our talents were maturing so that we might fulfill the task that had been set before us. I was excited but also apprehensive, because there would be no way back to the Quinn I had been when we fully became what we were becoming.
Now that Annie Piper was dead, there were six women and three men in these rooms. At first they came forth with trepidation, sure that they were being called to the suites of visitors whose desires might include inflicting humiliation or physical pain. On standby prior to the fall of night, they were disciplined to be ready to be used by visitors or Bodie Emmerich, perhaps by the merciless live-in physicians who practiced medicine in this place, and by others. They were all dressed demurely and in white, the better to project the purity and the innocence that especially inflamed those who traveled to this remote sink of corruption to abuse them.
As Emmerich had promised, they were preternaturally beautiful, though not in a bold, salacious sense. Ethereal. Elegant. None was unnaturally thin or frail, but each nonetheless seemed delicate, breakable. Their eyes were wells of sorrow, yet also bright with intelligence and challenge. When we threw open the doors to their rooms, they didn’t immediately understand our intentions, could only assume that we meant to be their absolute masters. And yet they neither bowed their heads submissively nor gave us the satisfaction of evident fear, which would have been wanted by those they were accustomed to serving.
They appeared haunted, as well they might, but they were of the type who, across this troubled world and throughout time, had the character to endure, to survive the reeducation and hard-labor camps where so many others perished, and in time to stand before a court and testify against those who had enslaved and tortured them. They were of that character in spite of the beauty that could have eased them through the world, and they would have possessed it if they had not been beautiful. If we hadn’t come along, Bodie Emmerich would eventually have learned, to his surprise, that one of these—whom he thought had been born to be emotionally broken again and again for the pleasure of others—would prove not to have been broken at all, and would have found the perfect moment to break him as thoroughly as I had done with three bullets.
As they were released from their cells one by one, they became quietly excited by the prospect of freedom. However, they were too smart and too battered by experience to let down their guard or even to share words of encouragement with one another. The Way had been a path of fire and broken glass for them, and they might expect the way out to be no less gruesome.
While we freed them and counseled them as to the manner and route by which we’d be leaving, I wondered how many Nihilim thrived in the Oasis, where they were, and when they might attack. If they did indeed sometimes eat human hearts for the taste and symbolism of that repast, they would seek a salad, an appetizer, an entrée, and a dessert from Sparky, Panthea, Bridget, and me.
I thought the only terrible surprise remaining would involve those Nihilim. Wrong. When Panthea opened the final suite in that corridor and freed the last woman, my heart felt painfully bitten when I recognized Keiko Ishiguro—that sweet, shy, slip of a girl with lustrous ink-black eyes—who had cared so tenderly for Rafael, the orphanage dog, after Annie Piper went away to college and to her abduction.
Later, I would learn that Keiko’s cousin Ichiro Sugimura, her only living relative, had not been her relative at all or anything else he claimed to be. Soon after she moved to Austin and found a job there to be close to the only family she had, Ichiro introduced her to Malik Maimon, who courted her and proposed marriage. He was as much a fraud as Ichiro. Before the wedding could occur, Keiko awakened to find that she was locked in the Oasis. Thereafter she was schooled by Bodie Emmerich to satisfy his more extreme desires and subsequently those of the most eminent and depraved visitors.
When she saw me in that hallway, she came into my arms, and we hugged each other fiercely. With a sob of grief but allowing herself no tears, she said, “Annie,” and I said, “Yes, I know.”
She was no less astonished by the sight of me than I was to find her in that hateful place. I’d thought that Annie’s subjugation to the predator Emmerich must be coincidence. But no. Two girls from Mater Misericordiæ condemned to this living hell couldn’t merely be attributed to the Fates indulging in a sick and dirty joke. If human treachery wasn’t to blame, then the Nihilim were. The orphanage that had been a haven for some had been a stalking ground for others.
From beyond the milling Specials, Bridget saw me holding Keiko. Although neither of us was gifted with telepathy, her shocked and compassionate expression told me that she knew the general shape of the extraordinary and dreadful discovery that had just been thrust on me and Keiko.
Emmerich’s death didn’t mean that our escape was a less urgent matter than if the creep had been alive. At any moment, the soul children would rise. Addicted to pleasure by habit and most likely also by drugs that Emmerich included in their diet, they would be greedy for all the sensation that they had to wait for nightfall to experience. Shattered by the discovery that their guru and sole means of support was dead, a lot of them—if not all—would seek the one pleasure still offered: vengeance.
Sparky, Panthea, and Winston led the freed prisoners out of that deepest level of the Oasis. They climbed the stairs toward the communal floor that included the orgy chambers and the private rooms in which residents of the hive even now prepared to swarm. Bridget and I followed.
In the gold-and-crystal vestibule, over the shuffling of feet, I heard a wretched sobbing issuing from the open door to Emmerich’s apartment. Having found his master lying lifeless in red silk, Tim staggered forth. His brow and one cheek glistened with blood from the scalp wound that I had inflicted. His face, which he’d thought handsome, was wrenched now into an ugly expression that might have been part grief but that largely conveyed the shock and fear of catastrophic change. The billions of dollars that had been used to instill and feed Timothy’s addiction and his years of idleness would now go to estate taxes and otherwise be locked away in trusts for the delectation of attorneys and to pay off the lawsuits that would make it into court in a decade or so. Convicted of whatever crimes he might have committed against the Specials, if in fact he ever participated in their abuse, he would find the accommodations of prison far less comfortable than those of the Oasis.
