Glass House (26 page)

She stood and brushed the lap of her dress
flat. “Can I get you some coffee?” she asked politely. “Or
something else to drink?”

The
Fate of Arthur Ariacht

It was the smell that did it. Arthur Ariacht
was lost in deafness, lost in blackness, lost in an encompassing
gray darkness that folded over him after Rupert and his men took
him from the bedroom. But the smell was bringing some things back
to him. Old images. Ones that were missing for years, tucked away
and forgotten.

Ariacht had two good friends as a boy.
Jantar Kalam was Indian, a heredity that labeled him “coloured” in
South Africa almost sixty years ago. And Manto Skosana was Sotho,
which meant he was even less, being nothing more than black.

At the time, Ariacht was too young to
understand why he might be permitted such friends, in a country
where being white meant everything and associating with non-whites
meant suspicion and danger. And now he was long past the point
where he could recall any reasons that were told to him. He’d only
suspected in later years that his growing up in the northwest, a
wilderness when he was a child, removed him somewhat from his
society’s strictures.

He didn’t know that for certain, though. It
was only a guess, and beyond it he just knew that his best memories
from growing up included those two boys, regardless of whether it
was acceptable or not.

This smell, a scent of water, the ocean, and
blood, made him think of that. It brought him a memory of a day at
the sea’s edge, where the three boys had hidden themselves in a
favorite spot. They came there to do what boys do – throw
rocks at the water, catch crabs and pull off their legs, swear with
the bad words they knew and teach each other new ones, and study a
well-worn girlie magazine, filled with pictures of curvaceous and
semi-naked women who were draped with flimsy linens and concealed
here and there by well-placed hands and pillows and vases.

One of the women was especially beautiful.
Triggered by the smell of salty ocean water and whatever lingered
with it, Ariacht, as he fought to come back, could remember that
woman and her pictures as though she were standing before him,
alive and dimensional instead of on magazine pages that were
decades old and lost to time.

She was Indian. Like the woman he’d been
with when Rupert came and took him away. And like Jantar, Ariacht’s
friend, who took great pride and more than a little glee in
pointing out that the white Afrikaner boy was enraptured and made
mouth-agape numb by no more than pictures of a coloured woman.

Jantar was right, and Ariacht had never lost
that. Since that day, and perhaps because of it, he always had a
soft spot for the color of the skin and hair and eyes of Indian
women, the contrast between his pale tones and their darker ones,
the sounds of their voices, the way they moved and smelled. Those
things stayed with him as much as the rest of the events of the
day.

He could still recall what came after
Jantar’s laugh and renewed ribbing. A rock fell down beside them,
tumbling from a few feet above and bouncing once, twice, toward a
plunk!
in the water below. The three of them watched, the
magazine in the hands of Ariacht, who sat in the middle, and their
heads followed that stone in its slow motion arc, until it dropped
from view and ended in a splash they didn’t see. Then they turned
to find what dislodged it.

Arthur’s father was a miner, a man huge in
body and face, with great squares for his forehead and jaw,
cheekbones, shoulders – all of him looked as though he were
built by stacking up boxes until the builder couldn’t reach any
higher. He was wearing dusty coveralls and a rolled-sleeve, cotton
shirt, dirty with his work. He stood cross-armed, large and with
corded muscles visible in uncovered forearms and roped tendons
standing out in his neck.

“
Vertrek
,” he said. He tipped his
head back, over his shoulder. “
Gou maak
.”

Leave. Hurry about it.

He was looking at them all, but none of them
doubted that he was speaking only to his son. Arthur said nothing
in return. He didn’t dare. He stood and dropped the magazine on the
ground where he stood between his friends, the pages closing over
the beautiful Indian woman. He stepped past his father, and he
didn’t look back.

He didn’t learn what happened for a month.
Jantar had left the hospital two weeks before by then, but he came
nowhere near the Ariachts. Not Arthur, not any of them. Not ever
again. Arthur’s father had broken Jantar’s arm and one of his
shoulders. He’d ruptured an ear drum for good measure.

It was mild compared to what happened to
Manto. They’d tried to put the boy back together at the local
hospital, the same one where Jantar was admitted. There were three
surgeries altogether, none of them particularly skilled. They
stitched up the sites of internal bleeding. They removed his
spleen. They struggled to repair his liver. They failed.

The boy died within forty-eight hours, and
no one – not one person – came to speak to Arthur’s
father, let alone punish him for killing the boy. It was rural
South Africa, at a time when white Afrikaners were never guilty in
the deaths of black children.

That smell – water and ocean and
blood – brought that defining moment back to him. And it also
brought him, struggling, to a shred of consciousness in the room,
where the same dank odor was settling into his nose and at last
taking him to a point where he could find something
recognizable.

Ariacht straightened, felt his head throb at
the movement and the squinting open of his eyes, and stopped for a
pause to regain what little control he was finding he had. He
straightened some more and found the bonds at his hands.

His hands were in front of him, between his
legs, but he couldn’t lift them. When he tried, cords bit his
wrists. His wrists were tied, to each other and to something on the
floor. To his own chair, perhaps.

His head filled with light again, and he
winced at it. He waited for it to fade to a bearable level once
more, and when it did, he opted to stay in the half-slump where his
movement had left him. He hovered that way, hunched slightly
forward and listing to one side.

Ariacht opened his eyes more and found some
light, some real light and not just the kind that came from the
flares of pain in his head. It was tinted red on the left side,
where his eyelashes were glued together. When he painfully edged
his tongue to his lips, he could taste the blood on that side of
his face.

“
Goeiemôre
,
Voorsitter
Ariacht.”

Ariacht stopped. His tongue hung at the
corner of his mouth, as though clamped there, and his eyes, only
one of them working even passably well, searched the haze that
seemed to surround him.

“What?” the same voice said. “You don’t
think it’s such a good morning?”

It was Rupert, hidden somewhere in the room,
and he was giving a pause in which he apparently was reconsidering
the assessment himself.

“Well, perhaps you can’t see it quite yet,”
he said, “but I’ll assure you it’s a brilliant one anyway. Divine.
Light. Wonderful. Some other superlative adjective, if you
choose.”

“Painful,” Ariacht said. His voice was a
croak more than a voice. He tried to sit straight and wasn’t sure
he was succeeding.

“Your fault, I’m afraid,” Rupert replied.
“Very much, entirely your fault, with all your lack of reason about
business and what-not.”

Ariacht heard the scratch of a match. He
smelled the stink of sulfur. He heard Rupert draw on a cigarette
and felt the air from the man waving the match flame out.

“Tribute was owed, and you did not pay it,”
Rupert was going on. “There are consequences from that, and you
knew them, no?”

“I knew your consequences, but I owed
nothing. And so I paid nothing.”

“Without a doubt.”

Rupert emerged from behind Ariacht. He
stepped around, the Rothman between his freckled lips and a damp
cloth swallowed by one meaty hand. His mouth clenched at the
cigarette as he bent, carefully and like a mother, to wipe the dirt
and blood from Ariacht’s face.

Ariacht flinched at the gesture, his eyes
clamping shut as the bright light of pain returned in his head. But
his position was submission, and he had nowhere to go. He suffered
the further pain of the mine superintendent, wiping his face
clean.

When it was done, Rupert squatted before
him. He reached a hand out, and he lifted Ariacht’s face with a
finger under the chin.

The eye was still bleeding, the view still
red, but he could open it now. He could open both of them.

Rupert pulled the cigarette from his lips.
“But you did owe the money. No question about it.”

Ariacht didn’t have the strength to fight.
He’d let Rupert wipe his face, he’d let Rupert lift his head, and
he would let Rupert say whatever he wanted to say.

“Your claim,” was all he managed.

“The only claim that matters.” Rupert
smiled. “But look at the things we’ve had to do without your paying
the money. Your shipment? Lost to us and sold off, I’m afraid. Your
reputation and family? Destroyed. Or soon to be, when the scandal
of your dalliances breaks. And your company?”

Rupert left it there. He waited, watching as
Ariacht worked to get his own head up this time. He waited until
full clarity found a way to come back into the man’s eyes.

“What do you mean?” Ariacht said. “What of
my company?”

Rupert chuckled. “And here I thought you’d
ask of your reputation and family first. But I suppose true colors
always show.”

He stood. He reached to his back pocket. He
pulled out a collection of paper, regular sheets, three or four in
all, stapled at one corner and folded as if to be mailed. He held
it up, and Ariacht squinted at the words.

“I can’t read it,” he finally said.

“I’m sure you couldn’t when you signed it,
either.”

There was nothing in Ariacht’s face for that
moment. No surprise. No pain. No loss. Only the same sort of blank
emptiness that filled his most recent time.

“What is it?”

“A sales contract. You’ve sold the Ariacht
mine to Laurentian.”

A tear appeared then. It started in
Ariacht’s wounded eye, forming in the inside corner, filling and
spreading before finally sliding quickly down. It dragged blood
with it.

“You’ve no right. I didn’t sign
any –”

“You did, actually,” Rupert interrupted.
“It’s signed by you, properly witnessed, properly sealed. Properly
filed, by later today. Everything in its place.”

“No one will believe such a thing.”

“Why? Because you’ll claim it didn’t happen?
I don’t think so.” Rupert leaned close. “Peter’s pence,
Voorsitter
,” he said. “Peter’s pence.”

A door opened behind them. “Mr. Saifee,”
Rupert said without looking away from Ariacht. “We’ve been waiting
for you.”

Allen Saifee came into the room. Anyone
seeing him would have noticed the puzzlement on his face and the
caution in his stride. He studied the place, side to side,
searching for anyone and anything but only finding Rupert, Ariacht,
and the chair in the otherwise empty space.

“Boss?” he said uncertainly.

“You know Arthur Ariacht?” Rupert gestured
to the bound man like they’d all run into each other at a party,
where he was introducing two of his mutual friends to each
other.

Saifee stared at Ariacht, tied to the chair
in front of him. He looked to Rupert, and he nodded.

“A surprise to find him here, I see,” Rupert
said.

“Yeah,” Saifee said before amending it
quickly. “No. I mean yeah. I didn’t know we’d managed it.”

“We did.” Rupert sounded proud. “That and
more.” He held the papers up, and Saifee nodded in a look that
would have suggested he knew what they contained, if only his
expression showed the same. “But Mr. Ariacht unfortunately won’t be
staying with us much longer.”

Ariacht didn’t move, but Saifee turned to
Rupert in time to see the superintendent drop the cigarette to the
ground and grind it out with the toe of a boot. Rupert nodded at
the pistol holstered at Saifee’s hip. “He’s yours,” he said.

“Boss?”

“He’s yours, Mr. Saifee,” Rupert repeated.
“Your responsibility. If you wish, anyway.”

Saifee looked again from one man to the
other. His hand reached to the pistol but only rested there. His
gaze had landed on Ariacht’s face, bleeding and cast down, staring
at nothing but his own lap.

Saifee was shaking his head before the words
came out. “No, boss,” he said. “I can’t take that from you. You
should do this – it’s your baby. You should get this.”

Rupert gave a quick appraising look at the
new man in the room. He smiled in an ambiguous way. The smile
disappeared.

“Fine.” His hand reached to Saifee’s waist,
slipping the holster catch open and lifting the semi-automatic.

Saifee’s head jerked to Rupert, his own hand
moving to the holster but finding it empty, any words he had to say
getting lost in the sound of shots.

There were five of them. Two rapid ones in
succession, one in each foot, bound to the chair legs. A shot in
the side. Another in the wrists, tied together between his legs. A
final one in his forehead. Ariacht was knocked back but then
slumped forward.

“Peter’s pence,” Rupert said. He let the gun
swing around his finger on its trigger guard. Barrel impotent and
up, it hung there as he held it out to Saifee, who took it. The
roar of the shots still rang in the closed-off space, the smoke
from them floating higher in the air. Rupert left the room.

Leaving Claire

They hadn’t taken the coffee. They hadn’t
taken anything else to drink, either.