Diamonds in the Shadow (28 page)

Broken glass fell off Alake's jacket as she walked. On the carpet of Jared's room, the shards glittered more brightly than rough diamonds would.

Alake was just as shattered as that glass. How could Mopsy be home? American children were always where they were supposed to be. They did not wander. They obeyed the incredible number of rules about where to be when. Mopsy should be safe in school.

Jopsy barked, wanting to get down and celebrate all the fine people in his life.

Alake gripped the puppy tightly. Her fingers hurt, but not from holding her dog.

She had tried never to touch the machinery in this household. These people had machines to brush their teeth and cook their food and clean their floors and write their letters. The only machine Alake had touched in her previous life had been an assault weapon. Her fingers still felt it. Even now, if she touched something cold, like a fork, she would feel the metal where Victor had told her to pull.

Now her soul and her hopes were as cold as her fingers.

Don't ask me to hold the gun, she thought. Don't ask me to do the shooting.

Victor flung the blue containers around. Then he flung Mopsy. “Where are the diamonds?” he shouted.

Mopsy lay crumpled on the floor.

Alake neither moved nor spoke.

But Victor always knew a person's weakness, and he knew this time, too. He said to Mopsy, “Want to know who Alake is? She's a killer. A child soldier. One of mine.”

If only Alake could have denied this.

“She stood there,” said Victor, “and watched while her parents were killed. She murdered her own teachers. She watched while her sister was killed. Then she joined me.”

And that was all true, in a way. And now Mopsy knew the terrible thing Andre and Celestine knew, and she too would avoid Alake and hope not to be contaminated by her.

“Don't be silly,” said Mopsy, in that amazing American way; the absolute refusal to believe people were wicked. Mopsy staggered to her feet.

Victor tried again. “Her name isn't Alake, either. Nobody you took in is really named Amabo. I substituted them for a family I killed when the real Amabos did not cooperate.” He smiled at this memory. He had lost yet another tooth. Alake had seen enough American smiles now to know that Americans were made deeply anxious by bad teeth. She was not surprised that Mopsy seemed more upset by Victor's rotting teeth than by his gun.

Alake had often thought of what she would say when she started to talk. Lovely things. Warm and thankful things. But no. That was not to be. She would speak to survive. She used English, their common language. The loving words she had tried so hard to get out of her mouth for so long had not yet come, but the terrible words came quite easily. “I will get you the diamonds,” she told Victor. “Then you take me and my puppy to New York and leave us there.” Alake did not look at Mopsy. The moments of friendship and kindness were in the past.

Mopsy gasped. She too had expected Alake's first words to be something else.

“You know where the diamonds are?” said Victor.

“I took the diamonds. I came here to get my puppy and then I was going to get the diamonds and leave.”

Victor laughed. “So you were the strong one after all.” He studied her thoughtfully. “This will work. The police are looking for me, but they won't be looking for a father and his daughter and a dog.”

Alake did not ask why the police in America were looking for Victor. She could guess. “The diamonds are not in the house,” she said. “In this house, they snoop.”

“That's what she said,” agreed Victor, aiming his gun at Mopsy.

“I will not give you the diamonds if you hurt her,” said Alake. “We will go in your car. We must drive.”

Victor shrugged and shoved Mopsy down the stairs and out of the house. He and Alake both knew he would just hurt Mopsy after he got the diamonds instead of now.

Alake said, “The puppy might bark. We will leave him in the kitchen.”

“We're not coming back. You want the dog, you bring the dog.”

They climbed into the beautiful car. Alake directed Victor down the hill, through the village and into the bleak marina, full of boats but empty of people.

Jared was exasperated.

Mopsy had promised Jared to keep her cell charged and on. Had she forgotten? Or was she sitting in class, not daring to answer?

“What's this about, anyway, Mattu?” Jared demanded. “Summarize it. One word. Don't run on about torture and warlords. I can't stand it.”

“Diamonds,” said Mattu.

Wind whipped the blue plastic sheets covering hundreds of boats. Flagpole ropes rattled like bad drummers. Mopsy was squashed in the front seat between Victor and Alake. She was so frightened that she was not even having thoughts; she was all fear.

“Here,” said Alake.

Victor stopped the car and got out, dragging Mopsy after him. Alake shut Jopsy in the car. It began to sleet. Mopsy hated sleet. It was like failed, angry snow.

Salt water or not, the harbor was frozen around the edges. The open water was the color of stones and death. The wind was brutal, slicing like knives through Mopsy's lungs.

“There was a fifth refugee on our plane,” said Mattu. “Victor. The diamonds are his.”

Jared felt like some old-fashioned machine, gears slowly moving into place. “And Victor would be … ?”

“The man who spilled the blood that made them blood diamonds.”

Blood like Andre's. From chopping off hands.

Blood diamonds, not conflict diamonds.

I knew there was danger, thought Jared. That's why I told Mopsy to keep her phone with her. What am I, insane? You don't ask an eleven-year-old to handle her own danger!

Jared flipped his cell open and hit 411. “Keep talking,” he ordered Mattu.

“Victor thought a family of four would be less suspicious and we could smuggle his diamonds more easily than he could. Diamonds cast no shadow in X-ray machines, you see, so it is not likely that they will be found unless the person carrying them makes the authorities suspicious.”

“Prospect Hill, Connecticut,” Jared told the automated voice. “River Middle School.”

“We expected to land in New York City,” said Mattu, “and then Victor would take the diamonds and go. We four would find our own housing and jobs. But that did not happen. I thought we were free of him. I thought we had disappeared into this little town. But Victor is here. I saw him.”

“You kept some killer's property in my house, when you knew that killer would show up to claim it?” said Jared. The phone company was willing to make the connection at no charge if he pressed one. Jared pressed one. “Hi, it's Jared Finch. I need to talk to my sister, Martha. She's in Mrs. Jackson's sixth grade.”

Daniel appeared in the hallway, walking toward them with that leisurely, always prepared, exception-to-the-rule manner he had, rather like Tay. Jared grabbed Daniel's arm. Daniel stared at Jared's fingers trespassing on his arm. He gave Jared a warning look. “What do you mean, Mopsy didn't come to school today?” Jared shouted into his phone. What was happening? How could Mopsy not be in school? He disconnected. “Daniel—you drive to school today?” demanded Jared.

“I drive to school every day.”

“I need your car.” Jared hustled Daniel down the hall. Mattu followed, which Jared figured was a good thing, because Jared was going to run him over after he'd made sure Mopsy was safe. “You drive, Daniel,” ordered Jared. “We're in a major hurry.” He dialed his house. Nobody answered.

The blood diamond guy will go to our house, not the middle
school, he thought. He understood a hundred things halfway now. The Amabos had come as refugees but also as screens for a smuggler. They had actually thought that the trees and rocks and curving country roads of Connecticut were shelter from a killer who had only to pick up a phone or open a Web site and find them.

Find
us
, thought Jared.

Mattu began explaining Victor to Daniel, who turned out to be a slow, careful driver. Jared didn't even think Daniel was a teenage boy; he was some old coot who couldn't see thirty feet away. “Faster!” he shouted.
“Go
through the light!”

Daniel came to a full stop, looked both ways and waited for the green.

“Victor will be armed,” said Mattu.

Daniel took his foot off the accelerator. “What do you mean, armed?”

“That's him!” shouted Mattu, pointing at a gleaming black Lexus that was turning off the tiny main street and heading down the marina lane. “Mopsy's with him. And Alake!”

“Are you sure?” asked Jared. How could a refugee end up with a new Lexus? Jared went from completely worried to completely skeptical.

The marina was an unlikely destination for anybody this time of year, let alone an African smuggler, if this even was Victor, and anyway, how could Victor have located Mopsy? As for Alake, she was in school. She'd gotten on the bus
first.
Jared
knew
she was at school. “Step on it!” he said to Daniel, just in case.

Daniel was not a stepping-on-it kind of driver. He was a
creeping-along kind of driver. Plus he was driving with one hand, and with his other hand—actually, with his other thumb—he was dialing 911 on
his
cell phone. “Police,” Daniel said calmly. “Marina Road. An assault in progress.” He said to Mattu, “You better be right. I'm going to be really annoyed if I've cut school and called the police and it isn't about anything.”

Alake walked out onto the breakwater.

Mopsy could not believe it. Alake had refused even to get near that breakwater when they'd been here before.

The rocks were slick with ice. Thick half-frozen water bumped up against them. If Alake lost her balance, she'd slide into deep frigid water under a lid of slush.

Twenty steps out, Alake fell. Mopsy screamed.

The man hit Mopsy. “Shut up.”

Mopsy shut up. My face is broken, she thought. He broke my face.

Alake caught the rim of a rock and did not fall into the water. She crawled on instead of walking. She did not look back at Mopsy or the man.

Was this the Alake who had been inactive to the point of being comatose? Mopsy marveled. Had that same Alake taken the diamonds, put them in a Ziploc bag or something and sneaked down to the waterfront? Had she dropped this bag into one of the holes created where the mortar had crumbled?