Glass House (2 page)

Anthony stood quickly and stepped away,
moving toward the mine’s screening and clearance rooms. The truck
would be tracked, and the rough would be plucked from the hidden
carrier off the grounds. But that was someone else’s
responsibility, and he was glad of it.

In the changing room inside, Dikembé
undressed and passed his clothes to a screener who wore the
sparkling white of a cleanroom garment. The screener disappeared
down a hallway off the main room.

Anthony headed to the showers, tiptoeing
hurriedly on the cold tiles of the hallway. Most of the men were
already gone. The procedures required to get out of the facility
and to the buses were rote for them, and they had hurried through
them to get home.

While Anthony showered, two more men in
cleanroom garments watched, their arms crossed, their expressions
bored. Neither budged as he moved to the drying room, toweled off,
and passed the towel to yet another person. Still naked, Dikembé
walked down the long hall that separated the shower rooms from the
dressing area. A wall cutout ran the length of it, with staffers
posted at regular positions.

Sometimes mine employees made it through the
hallway without being singled out, and sometimes they didn’t.
Anthony Dikembé wasn’t lucky today.

The screener at the end extended a
white-clad arm and signaled him to step out. When he did, finding a
bench at the hallway’s end, two more screeners descended, equipment
in hand.

Anthony sat as still as he could manage. He
breathed slowly, his hands pressed against the bench so any
nervousness wouldn’t be noticed. He fixed his sight on a point on
the floor, trying to look complacent while he worked to keep his
eyes from jumping between the two men.

They checked inside his ears with lighted
magnifiers. They lifted his tongue. They tapped his teeth with a
dental probe. They palpated the tender areas of his body, feeling
for anything he might have hidden in his scalp, his armpits, his
groin.

The screeners checked between his fingers
and toes and in his navel. When they told him to stand, Anthony
rose, then immediately turned and bent, his hands flat on the bench
he had been sitting on. One of the screeners clicked on a handheld
light and looked for any signs of irritation around his rectum
before pushing a gloved finger in, feeling for stones, and pulling
it out when none were found.

Anthony moved on after that. Among those
chosen for the extra examination, some at that point again would be
able to step out and get on their way. Those people would be
done.

Not him. Not today.

Laurentian owned four standard and two
backscatter X-ray scanners, and the gesture toward another door
meant imaging. There was a time when standard X-ray images were
regularly taken at diamond mines, but the cancer rates started to
escalate, and the radioactive screens were stepped back. Then De
Beers came up with a low-dose radiographic machine, and X-rays were
in vogue again. Now an employee could count on a body X-ray, either
backscatter or standard, anywhere from four to six times a
year.

This was one of those times for him.

Anthony pressed his chest against the screen
and lifted his arms to grasp two handles mounted on the wall at
shoulder level. A woman he didn’t see said, “Hold,” and the machine
clicked. He waited for it to adjust to a lower angle, heard the
second “Hold,” and relaxed only at the click that followed
that.

Examination of the pictures took only
seconds. The screeners waved him on.

He put his clothes on in the outer locker
room. Each morning the bus dropped him and the other miners at the
entrance just beyond that room. They would change, pour into the
mine, do their work, and leave at the end of the day, filing
through the company-operated screens.

At the end of any examinations, the
screeners would pass back the clothes the miners took off at the
beginning. By that time the clothes were hand-examined and
bombarded by ultraviolet light. Short-waved light like that
fluoresces any diamonds in the clothing, making them stand out like
flares.

Laurentian looked in every place, and in
every way, they could.

Anthony turned toward the exit. He’d get on
the bus and head to the company-owned apartments, sleep through the
night and into the morning, then return mid-day tomorrow.

He was almost out the door when he was
stopped.

“Mr. Dikembé?”

The man at the door wore a company uniform.
An administrative uniform. His name was neatly stitched onto a
Laurentian Mines patch sewn over his heart.

“You’re Anthony Dikembé?”

Anthony looked puzzled. He knew seven
languages. He was raised with Setswana, a Sotho language of
northwestern South Africa. He learned three others –
Afrikaans, English, and Dutch – growing up. And he’d picked up
French and Hebrew while he was getting his Masters at Columbia in
New York, then learned most of the elements of Fanagalo, the
southern African, pidgin language of the mines, while working at
Laurentian.

But he looked puzzled anyway.

“Sir?” he said. He tried to sound uncertain,
to match the look on his face.

“This way please.” The man held a clipboard
of his own. He’d been taking notes, and he extended the pen he was
using to point down another hallway.

“Yes, sir,” Anthony said, for no reason
other than that’s what he should say.

They made it fifty feet or so before the man
pointed down another hall. Another distance, then another point.
Then at least two more times after that, until Anthony wasn’t sure
himself where he was anymore.

The man stopped him at a door Anthony had
never seen. It was steel, with thick, riveted edges that were
broken only by a one-foot-square panel that could be slid open at
the bottom. And it was heavy. He could tell that with a look.

The man knocked but no response came. He
twisted a lever, opened the door, and ushered Anthony inside.

The room was stark and bare. There were no
windows, and the little light that was there was yellow and faded,
as though its color had fought and lost against a greater darkness
in this place. The door Anthony just passed through was the sole
exit he saw. The only things in the room were a man, a bolted-down
chair on which that man sat in the center of the space, and a hose
that ended at the man’s feet. A trickle of water was draining from
the hose and across a beaten, wood floor.

The man stood up as Anthony came in. “Hello,
Mr. Dikembé,” he said. He was smoking a bitter-smelling cigarette,
and wisps of the foul smoke wafted from his mouth with each word.
“Have a seat.”

Rough

Megan

Megan Davis dug into the gap in the front
seat of the decades-old Chrysler she was driving, searching for the
card key that would lift the gate for the building’s parking
garage. Same as every morning.

As she pushed one hand under the Chrysler’s
front seatback, Megan held the steering wheel and a balanced cup of
designer coffee in the other hand. A print of pale lipstick marked
the cup’s white cap.

She’d purchased the coffee at a Starbucks a
block farther down Massachusetts Street, waiting in a seemingly
unmoving line for the privilege of paying five bucks for something
that’d cost a dollar at a diner. The town’s main street was changed
from what it used to be, re-shaped by the franchising that was
taking over America. Where Massachusetts once was small shops, a
theater, and a soda fountain or two, Megan could pass American
Eagle and Urban Outfitters and The Buckle and a dozen other places
that were staffed by fresh faces who beamed at the sight of any
customer. Eight or ten restaurants, gleaming with wood and glass,
were packed with college students at night and business people
during the day.

The building that housed the law firm where
Megan worked was a small and shining bank, in the small and shining
town of Lawrence, Kansas. The city was a vastly different place
from the Lawrence of a few years before. Or even a year before.

Megan Davis’s hometown had changed so much
recently that she hadn’t recognized it when she returned to it.
She’d been gone for twelve months, a year in which she’d
disappeared from everyone who knew her from her life before.

And now she was back. For what, thirteen
weeks or so? Three months already?

A car horn honked behind her. Megan glanced
in the mirror and considered a gesture, but she found the
card – crammed all the way back – and she pulled that out
instead.

She juggled coffee and steering wheel, card
in her teeth, as she rolled the window down. She palmed the card
key against the trigger panel for the garage, and the gate arm
rose.

Megan angled the Chrysler’s nose between the
concrete barriers on the ramp. The car was an Imperial Southampton
from the late 1950s – she didn’t know exactly what year and
didn’t particularly care. It was pale yellow and wide, low-backed
but high-finned, with a visible spare tire mount centered on the
trunk and a pushbutton automatic shifter on the dash, to the left
of the wheel.

Megan felt a hundred years old driving the
Chrysler, but the car was a classic. That’s what she’d always been
told anyway, and she supposed it probably was true. Ben had known
his cars, no question about that. The Chrysler was his baby, and
she’d believed what he said. But she also knew it was a car she
didn’t pick and didn’t want so much now. Not anymore.

Megan found a spot and parked. She shut the
engine off and sat, one hand still holding the coffee, the other
resting on the wheel. She studied herself in the rearview.

She had taken a year in which she was, quite
bluntly, gone from work and from Lawrence and from everything she
knew. She’d been back at work for the three months since then, but
even after that time, it didn’t seem the same. Right now, sitting
in the Southampton, she assumed it never would.

The last year and a half had cost her. Her
hair was trim and pretty, cut short and bluntly. It shone in
whatever light fell on it, and its color was dark chestnut wherever
the gray hadn’t touched it. The blue eyes were pretty as well,
despite the somber depth that swallowed her so much of the time.
Pretty but lined. Even with enough time for her to have gotten
“over it,” to use a friend’s words, the lines around her eyes had
deepened.

Still, she was attractive, and at
thirty-four, men seemed to notice her. Which would be nice, if she
had any interest in return.

Megan wasn’t much for therapy, but a
psychiatrist had suggested breathing exercises as a way to calm
herself. She still tried them now and again, but the advice came
months ago – fifteen
months
since she last sat on the
three hundred dollar an hour couch, she realized.

That was far too long a time to be sticking
with things that hadn’t helped all that much, but when she felt her
chest start to constrict and her blood start to rush, she breathed
deeply anyway, held it, and blew the breath out smoothly and
slowly.

She pulled at the door handle and stepped
from the car.

_______________

Megan passed the office receptionist with a
nod, then got two nods herself on the fifty-foot walk to her
office, both from attorneys looking busy. She gave them right back
in return.

The truth was that she didn’t know either
person, just as she didn’t know many of the people in the office.
Not really, anyway.

That’s what happens when you leave a place
for months. You go away for a little while, but the little while
turns out to be a longer while. And when you’re gone and paying
attention to other things, the world shows its alarming tendency to
keep moving right along without you.

Turning a corner and starting to shrug her
briefcase off her shoulder and into her hand, Megan stepped into
her office. For the first time that day, she saw a face that
was
familiar.

Jeremy Waldoch was sitting in her chair and
talking on her phone when she came in. He was facing the door and
should have seen her, but he didn’t react in any way.

A man Megan didn’t know, a large one at
that, stood just inside the door. He plainly did notice her
arrival. Arms crossed, he smiled flatly, in a neutral reaction to
her presence.

Megan ignored him, turning her attention to
Waldoch. He was big himself, broad and tall both, but not heavy. He
was built like a triangle, narrow at the waist and wide at the top,
with his body seemingly hemmed in only by the tailoring of a suit
so impossibly expensive that Megan couldn’t imagine how much it
cost.

She hadn’t seen Waldoch in almost two years,
but he hadn’t changed a bit. His eyes were variously soft brown or
moss green depending on the light. They hid under a deep, heavy
brow, and his Roman nose slid down toward a small mouth that was
perpetually pursed with narrow lips. His hair was dirty blond and
poorly cut, shaggy even.

As Megan watched, puzzling over the presence
of this man in her office – these
men
, she
amended – Waldoch raised a hand toward her as a late
acknowledgment. She noticed what was in that hand then, and it
stopped her short before she could manage a comment.

He held a picture in a simple department
store frame that Megan recalled buying for $2.99, marked down.
Waldoch’s thumb was centered on the glass.

The picture was of Megan and Ben, freshly
married and honeymooning on a beach in South Carolina. The thumb
blocked the image of a boat that was waiting to take the couple on
a beach tour.

He’d been waiting, Megan realized. He came
here and was let in, and he’d kept himself busy by conducting a
little business on the phone while going idly through her
things.