“Well, well,” Stern said, his wings folded and his head bent over one of the glass cases.
“They’re not truly precious gems,” Mama Diamond said. “No real diamonds here. Just desert rocks, minerals, oxides, carbonates, silicates from all over the world.”
“I know what I’m looking for.”
“Red beryls and morganite; almandine, pyrope, and other garnets…” Mama Diamond rattled it off, on automatic; she knew her spiel from years of practice and ease. But peering up at the dragon, she contemplated a new mystery. For while it was clear even in this dimness that these radiant stones were what Stern had been looking for, they were clearly not what he valued nor cared about. She had seen that covetous look in enough customers’ eyes, the craving, the can’t-live-without-it-whatever-the-price, to know it when she saw it. And when she didn’t.
This is merely a means to an end for him. A currency.
But to buy what?
“Chrysoberyl in three varieties,” Mama was continuing. “That’s a cat’s-eye you’re looking at….”
“Yes. Now bring me some bags.”
“Bags?”
“Sacks, suitcases-whatever you have.”
Mama Diamond felt heartsick. She had spent years accumulating this inventory. Trading it, selling it judiciously, increasing its net worth. She had always depended on the slow equilibrium of acquisition and exchange, never drawing down the true deep inventory faster than it could be replaced and upgraded.
And since the Change the shop had been a great comfort to her, though of course there was no money it in anymore-and what was money worth these days, anyhow? She cherished these stones. And they protected her, or so Mama Diamond had come to believe. Since the Change there had been strange characters on the street at night now and again, many clearly intent on doing harm. They never stopped, of course; there was no reason for anyone, anything, to linger in Burnt Stick. But down the long hot summer and cooling autumn they looted, sometimes they vandalized. They had broken windows and emptied shelves at the 7-Eleven, the grocery, various houses. Mama Diamond had more food stockpiled in her basement than any of those places. But the half-human vandals had never broken in. Mama Diamond thought somehow the stones might be responsible. Bright, shiny, repellent to darker creatures. Except, apparently, this dragon.
“You taking my stock?” she asked Ely Stern.
“You’re really very quick for a woman of your years.”
“Maybe it’s not for sale.” She didn’t mean the words to tremble so. She couldn’t help it.
“Maybe I’m not buying. Maybe I’m bartering”
“What have you got to trade?”
“Your life. If I’m feeling kind.”
This cool and absolutely convincing threat was too much for Mama Diamond. Her courage evaporated. Her knees buckled and she sat down right there on the floor of the Stone and Bone.
“Take what you have to,” she wheezed. “You can get your own damn bags.”
Then she passed out, or so it seemed. A few memories of that fading day (and evening, as it lingered on) remained. She remembered, or had dreamed, that the dragon looked on, huge and imperious, as huddled bunches of small gray men-or rather, hideous parodies of men, with stooped shoulders, pinpoint teeth and milky white eyes-carried out the gleaming stones of her inventory (the days of her life measured in peridot and tourmaline) in plastic grocery store sacks, in old luggage, in yellowed pillowcases, to the creaking Burnt Stick train depot and the impossible black train.
An impossible train in more than one fashion. It had arrived from the north, facing south, toward the Hanna mines. But now it was turned the other direction, though there were no sidings here, no rail turntable closer than a hundred miles away. It was as if the train had simply inverted itself, switched back for front.
Or maybe that was just part of the dream.
When she came fully awake, the moon was out, a thin sliver hanging over the Medicine Bow Range, and she was lying on her back on the platform, and the train was gone. That was good, the absence of the train, as if an abscessed tooth had been pulled.
The bad news-well, one small part of it-was that she ached in every bone and muscle. The night had turned bitterly cold. She should have been in bed with a fire crackling in the woodstove. Here she was instead, stretched out on these old unyielding boards, the night wind riding up her coattail.
She moved against the pain as if against an invisible weight, a whole ocean of pain bearing down on her in one inexorable wave. She flexed finger joints, elbows, then bent at the waist and sat up, an act that made the town spin on the pivot of her head.
She gained her feet at last.
The walk home was excruciating-worse, because she knew what she would find at the end of it. Her shop, stripped; her inventory, stolen; all that glittering magic lost and departed.
The bones-literally-would still be there. But so much gone, ripped away, amputated.
Her bed would be waiting, at least. Her bed, and the woodstove.
What she did not expect was the large man in a ragged trench coat squatting on her steps, an oil lamp lit beside him.
Mama Diamond thought: What fresh hell-?
But there was not much menace in this stranger, not as Mama Diamond sensed it. Power, yes. Great strength, yes, and great restraint.
The man stood up. He was a black man, and he spoke with the faintest trace of a soft accent. He had probably tried in his growing years to lose it, to cloak himself in the anonymity of Anyplace, America. But Mama’s ears were sharp, and she caught the lilt she had heard in voices long ago, in her travels South, in the sultry, primordial places of the Louisiana bayou.
“I’m a federal agent,” he said. “My name is Larry Shango, and I believe you’ve been robbed.”
THREE
That night, she had the dream again. The one with the third blind man, the one who could see. It perplexed her, she didn’t know how that could be so, but he told her not to worry, she’d know when they met. And in that telling, at least, she came to a partial knowing, that somehow his name was Blindman, and that it was not his eyes that were blind.
In the dream, they sat in a park, the two of them, the wind scattering the dry leaves like frightened children, and she could look across the street to the strange house, the one that was shrouded in night, lights shining within, yet a bright daylit sky above.
With that odd split consciousness of dreamer and dream, she realized she had seen this image before somewhere-in a book? — that it was a painting, and there was a name associated with it that at first she could not summon to mind. Yet she also knew that name had once been the Blindman’s heart.
Magritte…
As if sensing her thought, the third blind man smiled, large even teeth dazzling against his young dark face, the old dark eyes. “The heart broken was Goldman’s,” he said.
She knew she should remember who the gold man was, too, but her mind felt muted as it so often did nowadays, as if pale fingers had brushed against her lips and stifled the answer.
A rumble sounded in the azure sky, rolling in from the west, and she smelled a sharp tang in the air, like fresh sheets off a clothesline, and she knew a storm was coming.
“Time to get you home,” the third blind man said.
There was a crackling and snapping in the sky like insane angry blue lightning. It swirled down at her faster than thought, seized her like the jaws of a big dog that was all the world. It tore at her and shook her and worried her as if she were a small dead thing, and it screamed and she screamed, too.