Black Swan Rising (26 page)

I grabbed a jacket off the coatrack and, remembering last night, a long scarf, which I wrapped around my neck. Then I pushed my feet into a pair of boots left in the hallway and unlocked the door into the gallery, hoping I didn’t look too deranged. It was the first time that I’d gone into the gallery since the burglary, and it wouldn’t do our reputation any good for the proprietor’s daughter to look like an insane bag lady.

Maia was seated behind the reception desk looking lovely and poised as always. She was wearing a short, chocolaty-brown sweater dress, ornate Mexican silver earrings, and thigh-high suede boots in the same fawn shade as her tights. She was smiling politely at the woman hovering over her desk, but inside her head she was yelling,
Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!

I turned to the woman causing this uproar in Maia’s head.
Was she threatening Maia? But the woman hardly looked threatening. She looked, rather, like one of the Long Island matrons to whom I sometimes sold my pendants: expensively coiffed hair brushed the corduroy collar of her quilted Burberry jacket, a Louis Vuitton tote bag—large enough to hold a ten-pound bag of rice—dangled from her arm.

“Is there something I can do to help?” I asked. “I’m the acting manager of the gallery.”

The woman eyed my sweatpants suspiciously and crinkled her brow in confusion. She glanced back at Maia, but when Maia didn’t denounce me as an impostor, she sighed. “I was just explaining to your
gallerina
that there’s a recession going on.”

The screaming in Maia’s head went up a notch. She hated the term
gallerina.

“Oh really?” I said as if I hadn’t read a newspaper in a year.

“
And,
in light of the recession, most businesses are accommodating their clients by . . . well . . . by reducing their prices.”

“Mrs. Birnbach likes the Dufy watercolor,” Maia said helpfully when I continued to stare at the woman. “But she thinks it’s overpriced for the current market.”

“I’ve had my eye on it for some time,” Mrs. Birnbach added. “It would look lovely in our condo in Boca. I just wondered if you could do a little better on the price.”

It wasn’t the first time a client had tried to bargain down a price. Roman usually handled those negotiations—and usually came away ahead. But the idea that this woman with her $800 bag and condo in Boca would use the economic woes of the country to get a deal on a Dufy—a piece of décor to her—made my blood boil.

I opened my mouth to let loose a withering tirade when I heard something. A little-girlish voice saying,
Please don’t yell
at me!
was coming from inside Mrs. Birnbach’s head. I was so surprised that my mouth hung open for a minute, then I snapped it shut. A jumble of images flooded through my brain: a harried-looking man holding up a bill and yelling, a beautiful teenaged girl pointing to an expensive pocketbook, a younger boy with braces . . .
Aaron will go to med school, or maybe law school
. . . a whole life teetering on the edge of collapse. Then why was she here trying to buy a Dufy?

I looked toward the painting in question—a watercolor of a beach scene full of brightly colored umbrellas. Mrs. Birnbach’s gaze followed mine toward the painting. When I turned back to her, I saw in her mind’s eye a beach scene not unlike the one in the painting. It was probably New Jersey or Long Island, but it was as radiant as any beach in the south of France. Children were playing at the edge of the surf, seagulls careened in the bright blue sky, an old man . . .
Papa Rosenfeld
. . . handed a young girl a gleaming pink seashell. I blinked and the vision evaporated like spray from the surf. Focusing back on Mrs. Birnbach, I noticed that her nail polish was the same shade as the seashell her grandfather had given her.

I named a price 30 percent below the asking price for the Dufy.

Maia stared at me. Even Mrs. Birnbach seemed surprised, but she reached for her wallet quickly enough. As I passed her American Express card to Maia, I wondered if I was doing any of us a favor. Her husband was going to be furious with her, Roman was certainly going to wonder why I let the Dufy go for so little, and Maia could justifiably resent my generosity since it obliterated her commission, but for this moment Mrs. Birnbach and I were smiling at each other as if neither of us had a care in the world.

_______

Despite my euphoria, I realized I did have to do something equitable for Maia regarding her lost commission. After Mrs. Birnbach left with her Dufy, I told Maia that she would still get a commission based on the original sale price. Her grateful smile put me at ease, and then I went back upstairs to shower and dress for my noon appointment with Oberon. At the door to my father’s apartment I stopped and listened for any sound—audible or mental—from Jay, but there was nothing. He must still have been asleep. I supposed I should have been thankful that I hadn’t started hearing and seeing people’s dreams.

My apartment was quiet too—no sign of Lol. After she’d chased off Will Hughes last night she’d chattered at me for a few minutes and then flew off, probably to report back to Oberon about my near conversion to vampirism. If she hadn’t interfered, would I already be on my way to becoming a vampire? In the cold light of the morning—a light I’d almost given up—it was hard to believe how close I’d come. I leaned over the bathroom sink and swept my hair off my neck to examine the marks. There were two angry red puncture wounds just above my jugular vein, with a small gash where Will’s teeth had torn my skin when he’d pulled away from me. These marks hadn’t faded as the first ones had—probably because he hadn’t had the time to heal them. The sight of the torn flesh—which I had offered up to him of my own free will—shocked me. Was this really what I wanted? For this man . . . or
creature
. . . to rip my flesh and drain the life out of me?

The body is the sanctuary of the soul
. Roman’s words came back now reprovingly. I blanched to think what my father would think if he could see these marks—these nearly
self
-inflicted
marks! I might as well have torn my own flesh. If I had let Will Hughes drain me of blood, would I have lost my soul?

Did Will Hughes have a soul?

I thought of how I felt when I looked into his eyes, the pull of that silver thread that connected us. What did it connect if not our souls?

After I’d washed the wounds and applied Neosporin to them, I lifted my eyes from my throat to meet my own gaze in the mirror . . . and gasped at what I saw there. A red flame flickered in the center of each iris, swelled and swayed as I held my breath, and then, as I breathed out, expired. My own eyes stared back at me wide with shock, but for a moment I’d had the strangest feeling that someone else had been looking out through them.

The address Oberon had given me turned out to be the National Jewelers Exchange in the Diamond District. Were the fey in the jewelry business? I wondered, wandering the floor of the crowded showroom. I’d always thought it was the Hasidim. Whoever was in the business, they were doing well. The place was busy; no sign of a recession here.

As I walked from booth to booth, though, I noticed something. Although some of the customers were buying—young couples on their lunch breaks picking out engagement rings, office workers selecting Christmas and Hanukkah presents—many more were actually selling. It wasn’t always easy to tell who was who because the sellers often started out by browsing the merchandise, asking to see a watch or ring, and then, as if as an afterthought, pulling out a pouch from their bag or
pocket and asking, casually, if the vendor also
bought
jewelry. As if the signs
WE BUY GOLD AND DIAMONDS
weren’t perfectly visible to the naked eye.

I watched one transaction in which a tired-looking woman in her fifties sold an engagement ring. “From my ex-husband,” she told the vendor, “the schlemiel.”

“Who needs bad memories?” the dealer replied. He was short and bald but for a fringe of white hair, and had a long white beard. His potbelly strained against a shiny black vest. When he smiled at the woman, a gold tooth glinted in the showroom’s fluorescent lights. “Take yourself on a cruise,
bubeleh,
” he said, adjusting his loupe over the two-carat diamond. “You’ll meet a new man who’ll buy you a ring twice as big.”

The woman laughed and years fell away from her face. I hadn’t been focusing on auras today, but I saw hers brighten to a crystal blue under the gentle teasing of the diamond dealer. His aura was pure white. “Maybe I’ll do that,” she said, leaning her elbows on the counter as the jeweler used a caliper to measure the diamond. “What do you think of the Bahamas this time of year?”

“Too cold,” he said, taking the loupe out of his eye. “Aruba’s better.” He wrote something down on a scrap of paper—a number with a lot of zeros—and slid it across the counter. The woman looked back and forth between the number and the ring for a few minutes, measuring the distance between them as if they were two points on a map. Where she came from and where she’d arrived, maybe. I couldn’t hear any words in her head, just numbers.

“That seems like a fair price,” she said at last.

“Of course it’s a fair price, darling! And I’ll
tell you what—I’ll throw in a twenty percent discount for when you meet Mr. Right on that cruise and come back here next year for a new ring.”

The woman smiled and the dealer wrote out a check for her. When she reached for it, he took her hand in his and brought it up to his lips, bowing his head to plant a kiss on her knuckles. His bald scalp gleamed under the fluorescents as brightly as one of his diamonds. Then he pressed the check into her palm, clasping both his hands over hers. “To better times, dearheart.”

As she passed me on her way out, I could hear that her thoughts were still full of numbers: tallies of rent and electricity, food and phone bills. She was trying to figure out how long she could stretch out the money she’d gotten from the ring. There were no plans for a cruise in those calculations.

Oberon came into the showroom as she left. For the first time since I’d met him—had it only been four days?—he looked tired. As he crossed the floor, I noticed that his skin was ashy, as if something had drained out of him when the light sylphs had been drained of their lives.

He nodded to me when he reached me, but he spoke to the white-bearded jeweler behind me. “Hello, Noam. How’s business?”

The dealer shrugged, holding his hands palms up to the sky. “Can’t complain. And if I did, what good would it do, eh? I’m buying more than I’m selling—never a good sign—but at least I’ve got the capital to weather the storm. Others aren’t so lucky.”

“No, others haven’t been lucky at all.” Oberon looked around the showroom, then gestured for me to come closer to the counter. “Noam Erdmann, meet Garet James.”

“Ah, the Watchtower. I thought it might be you.” He took the hand I’d extended to shake in both of his—they were cold
and dry—bowed his head, and touched his lips—also cold and dry—to my knuckles. “It’s an honor to meet you.”

“It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Erdmann.”

“Please, call me Noam.” He lifted his head and smiled at me. The gold tooth winked in the light, but his brown eyes retained a look of melancholy despite the smile. They were surrounded by deeply etched lines that looked like furrows in a dry field. Looking into them, I felt as if I were looking down into a deep well that went into the very bowels of the earth. Although he held my hand lightly, I could feel a current running from his fingers up into my arm, down into my body into the ground, right through the showroom floor and into the bedrock below the building. “
Erdmann?
Doesn’t that mean . . .”

“ ‘A man of the earth,’ ” he said, letting my fingers drop and thumping his barrel-shaped chest with his right hand. “My people have mined the wealth of the earth for millennia.” Then he shrugged. “It’s a living. And speaking of living . . . we’ve all got to eat. Why don’t we get a bite while we talk?” He cocked his thumb toward the mezzanine where a kosher dairy restaurant overlooked the floor. “C’mon. There’s a waitress there who’s sweet on me. She’ll give us extra pickles and coleslaw.”

He winked at me, slid off his stool, and came out from behind his counter. I was surprised to see that the top of his bald head barely came up to my shoulder. He wasn’t any taller than Becky, but he led us across the floor like a prince surveying his kingdom, waving and exchanging pleasantries as he went. Oberon might be king of the fairies, but this was clearly Noam Erdmann’s domain.

“I get the Erdmann part,” I whispered to Oberon as we started up the stairs to the mezzanine, “but his first name . . . Noam sounds a lot like . . .”

“
G-n-o-m-e?
Yes, that’s exactly what he is—an elemental who guards over the treasures and resources of the earth.”

“And what power am I supposed to learn from him?” I asked, looking at the squat little man. Now that I thought of it, all he needed was a pointed cap to look like the statues people put in their gardens.

Oberon turned to me at the top of the stairs. Noam was a few feet ahead of us enthusiastically greeting a buxom waitress with hair dyed the color of a ripe eggplant. “We’re going to ask him to ground you,” he said. “But at this point I’d be happy if you’d learn to choose your company better.” Oberon looked meaningfully at my neck—covered by a turtleneck sweater. Before I could ask him if Lol had told him about last night, he turned away to join Noam at a vinyl-upholstered booth with a view over the showroom. I sat next to Oberon, across from Noam, preferring to look into the jeweler’s sad brown eyes than to endure Oberon’s glowering gaze.