Into The Darkness

by Kathy

  As she fumbled for the forgotten words, another voice took up the recitation, " ' . . . we guarantee that in twenty years the emerald will not fall out of the gold ring.

  " 'If the emerald should fall out of the gold ring before— before the end of twenty years, we, Bel-shumu, Bel-----' Damn!

  " 'Bel-ah-iddini and Hatin shall pay an indemnity of ten mina of silver.' "

  "That's it. The first recorded contract between a jeweler and a client. Fifth century B.C. I always wondered why Dan named this little guy after Bel-shumu, instead of one of the other members of the firm."

  "Easier to pronounce," Riley said.

  "Hatin is even easier. Dan said he called him Bel-shumu because he was Bel-shumu." Meg laughed. "It made perfect sense to me at the time. But this character isn't even from the right time period. He's got to be a couple of thousand years older than the signer of the contract."

  "He's also a fake."

  "I suspected he was, but Dan would never admit he'd been taken in. Oh, well; who cares? It's the thought that counts. I'll put him back in the window. Were you cleaning him or something?"

  "Repairing him. He was . . . damaged."

  On closer inspection, Meg could make out the hairline fractures around the neck and one foot. "You did a good job."

  "Thanks."

  His face had closed down again, his eyes opaque and shadowed, his mouth clamped shut. Was he regretting those moments of relaxed, shared enjoyment, or had she asked the wrong question?

  Meg suspected it had been Candy who broke the little icon, out of sheer spite; it had occupied a central position in the show window for years, exemplifying the proud traditions of Dan's profession.

  She restored it to its place, assuming that Riley would return to his; all that affability must have been a terrible strain on him. But when she turned he was still there, and she began to hope that a breakthrough had occurred.

  "I have an an appointment at two o'clock," he said. "I'd like to keep it, but if it's any problem. . . ."

  "Go ahead."

  "You could close early."

  "I could."

  "Okay." He started for the workshop. "Thanks."

  Meg felt ridiculously let down. For a few minutes he had been so pleasant, almost friendly. And only because he had found himself in the position of having to ask a favor.

  "Have you had any luck getting a replacement for Candy?" she demanded.

  "Not yet. I'm working on it."

  "Maybe we ought to take her back."

  That stopped him. He looked at her over his shoulder. "No. I mean—I don't recommend it. But you can do whatever you want."

  "It should be a joint decision. But we need someone."

  "Do whatever you want," Riley repeated. The door closed with a decisive slam.

  It would serve him right if I did, Meg thought furiously. She was certain he had fired Candy not because the girl had insulted her, Meg—why should Riley care what anyone said about her?— but because Candy had backed him into an emotional corner. Amusement wiped the frown from her face as her imagination shaped a picture of the final, passionate encounter: Riley retreating, literally, into a corner, trying to fend off the fluttering hands and puckered lips of a woman half his size. What a joy it would be to see the imperturbable Riley in a situation like that— almost worth the annoyance of having Candy around.

  No; tempting as the idea was, she couldn't do it. She didn't want Candy in the store either, and rehiring her would end forever any hope of establishing a rapport with her prickly partner. Really, Meg thought, it was like trying to work with an emotionally disturbed child—two steps forward, one step back. You had to watch every word, and you never knew when you were going to say the wrong thing. Yet there was that forward step . . . and the hope of finding at the end of the path something that would make the effort worthwhile. What had happened to him to make him so defensive and suspicious? Vietnam? The veterans of that non-war had suffered terribly, not only in the field but after returning home. Attitudes had changed now, but too late for some of the men who carried deep emotional scars. You couldn't batter down the defenses of a man like Riley, you could only try to win his trust. That was all she wanted—not affection or even friendship, just an acknowledgment that he could trust her to deal honorably and fairly with him, as he had trusted Dan.

  And if she were able to place an equal confidence in him, she could leave the store in his hands. What a relief that would be. ... Meg's eyes moved from the glittering contents of the showcase in front of her to the window where Bel-shumu had resumed his responsibilities as guardian angel, then to the case filled with Riley's astonishing creations. Would it be a relief to leave all this, or would she miss it after all? The trouble was she didn't know what she wanted. It wasn't likely that Riley could solve that dilemma for her.

  Frances had packed her a lunch, so she didn't leave the store. Shortly before one Riley emerged from his lair. He was wearing a white shirt and a tie, and carried his suit coat over his arm. His funeral suit. Was it the only one he owned?

  "I'm leaving now," he announced unnecessarily.

  "You look very nice. Have you got a clean handkerchief?"

  Riley blinked. "And cut my nails and washed behind my ears. See you later."

  Meg followed him to the door. After a time she saw a rusty gray pickup emerge from the parking lot next to the store, and recognized Riley at the wheel. He didn't glance in her direction; his profile was as unyielding as one carved in stone, and she found it hard to believe he had actually responded to her feeble joke with one of his own. The words had been familiar, too—a quotation from some book or film? She couldn't remember.

  She waited another fifteen minutes before she went to the door of the shop. It was locked; he must have set the latch before he left. Unthinking habit, or a conscious intent to keep her out? Give him the benefit of a doubt. He must know a locked door wouldn't stop her. She got the heavy bunch of keys from her purse. Dan's keys. Gran had handed them over, without question or comment, when she asked for them.

  In Meg's youth the shop had been a place of mystery and magic. She was seldom allowed to enter it, because there were too many dangerous objects lying around. Tools were kept razor sharp, pots of Shellac bubbled over open flames, soldering irons and kilns offered potential hazards. On the rare occasions when she had been invited into the sanctum Dan had not done any serious work; he said he couldn't keep an eye on her and concentrate at the same time. But he had demonstrated many of the techniques that fascinated a child, filling cloisonne cells with powdered enamel and showing her how they changed after being fired; twisting gold wire into filigree coils fine as hair; setting pearls and turquoise into a ring for her tenth birthday. It was too small for her now, even for her little finger, but she still cherished it.

  The high point of those visits was when Dan took the trays of loose stones from the safe and let her handle them. She wasn't allowed to touch the larger and more valuable gems, each of which lived in its own individual box: Burmese rubies, red as dragon's blood, cabochon sapphires holding stars drowned in their blue depths, Colombian emeralds like squares of sundrenched grass. And the diamonds. Perhaps it was from Dan that she had acquired her disinterest in the blazing blue-white stones the rest of the world prized above all other gems. The colored stones called out to her, struck a responsive chord in some part of her mind. And although she wasn't allowed to play with the expensive stones, the others gave her almost as much pleasure. Semiprecious they might be in terms of value, but they were equally beautiful—the softer, subtler blue of aquamarine and topaz, the rainbow range of garnets. Dan had taught her how to distinguish the greens of tourmaline and emerald and the rare demantoid garnets, and as a special treat he let her play the game that was not a game at all but a method of distinguishing between topazes and the less valuable citrines of identical color. As her fingers fumbled through the stones, jumbled all together in a half-closed bag, they became familiar with the distinctive oily feel of the topaz
es; and on the day when she found them all, with no hesitation and no mistakes, her delight was as great as Dan's.

  Meg pushed the memories away. She had walked out of the shop for the last time when she was eighteen, rejecting its promise and its challenge. She had made no attempt to enter the room since she returned, telling herself it was a good tactical move to give Riley his own place, free of her presence; but there were other reasons, and she was glad now she had waited till she could be alone. It would have been hard to cope with memories and mixed emotions in his silent, critical presence.

  There was no suggestion of Ali Baba's cave here. The room was strictly utilitarian, a windowless, closed box with walls and floors of reinforced concrete. The floor was carpeted, but not for comfort; an unset gemstone that slipped from the jeweler's grip might ricochet off a hard surface and end up anywhere. There were only two doors, the one through which she had entered and a back door opening onto the alley. Fire regulations required that second exit, but it was seldom used, and Dan had done everything possible to make it impregnable from without.

  A walled-in cubicle contained sink and toilet; the only other amenities consisted of a coffeepot and a huge ashtray, once sacred to Dan's horrible cigars, now containing a few cigarette butts. The steam-cleaning machine and the heavy gold-rolling machines, which shaped the wires of precious metal, stood off to one side, other pieces of machinery occupied space on various benches. The jeweler's workbench was of a unique design, admirably adapted to the functions it served. The work surface was sunken, so that stones that slipped from the vise mounted above it wouldn't roll off onto the floor. The most commonly used tools—calipers, files, prong pushers and so on—lay loose on the work surface; others were ranged in neat rows along or atop the ledge that ran around three sides of the bench. The all-purpose power tool, called a flexible shaft, looked like an old-fashioned dentist's drill. A variety of tools, burrs, buffers and polishers, could be plugged into its head.

  As Meg approached the workbench she realized that she had her hands behind her back. Another of Dan's rules—look, but don't touch. A scattering of heavy-based bowls on the ledge to the right of the work surface held bits and pieces of gold wire and some small loose stones. Garnets. Disappointed in her hope of getting a clue as to Riley's latest project, Meg straightened up. If he was working on something, he had put the materials in the safe before he left.

  It was the same heavy old iron structure Meg remembered; she frowned at it, realizing that she didn't know the combination. Perhaps George had a record of it, or Dan had hidden one somewhere. She should have asked Riley. Why not? She had every right to know.

  As she wandered around the room, finding it as impersonal and uninformative as a hotel room, her indignation mounted. If she weren't such a courteous, thoughtful person, she would have demanded entry long before this, and asked Riley to show her what he was working on. He must be involved in some new project, he had hardly been out of the shop since she started coming to the store. Of course, Meg admitted to herself, her presence in the store might be the reason why he had hardly been out of the shop. For all she knew, he spent the time reading girlie magazines or snoozing or snorting coke. Well, not the last; she knew the signs too well to have missed them. The magazines on a shelf at the back all seemed to be copies of The Journal of Gemmology and The Jewellers' Circular. Perhaps Riley kept his copies of Playboy and Hustler in a desk drawer, along with a bottle of bourbon and a stash of pot.

  Abandoning herself to vulgar curiosity, Meg subjected the work surface to a closer inspection. A glimmer of gold filings shone among the scattered tools; that was all, except for some clippings of thread . . . no, not thread, it was too fine, as fine as human hair. Sometimes hair had been used to make seed-pearl jewelry. Few modern jewelers would tackle the finicky process of repairing such pieces; the value of the jewelry wasn't great enough to justify the effort involved. Riley was the sort of craftsman who might, just to see if he could do it, but not with hair this color. It was too dark.

  Her curiosity was now raging. Where did the man keep his personal. . . . She corrected herself: not his personal possessions, she had no right to examine those. It was his professional work that interested her—his designs and sketches. There could be no harm in looking at things like that. . . .

  The desk in one corner had been Dan's—a battered oak structure as massive as a safe. The first drawer she tried resisted her attempt to open it, and she tugged again before it dawned on her that the drawer—and all the others, as she was quick to discover—were locked.

  Meg no longer felt guilty. This precaution had to be aimed at her alone; there could be nothing in the desk worthy of a thief's attention, all valuable materials were supposed to be in the safe. How dare he think I'd snoop behind his back, she thought angrily and illogically, sorting through the keys on Dan's ring.

  One key opened all the drawers. At first Meg couldn't understand why Riley had bothered to lock them; the contents consisted primarily of drawing and sketching materials and the miscellaneous odds and ends that accumulate in all offices. Finally she found what she told herself she was looking for: a portfolio of rough sketches for jewelry. Meg lingered over them, fascinated but still frustrated; he hadn't developed any of them, they were hardly more than jottings of ideas.

  And that was it, except for several folders filled with clippings and photographs. Some were of jewelry, modern and antique, others showed a weird variety of natural and man-made objects, from flowers to computer designs. Meg went quickly through them, intrigued by the hints they offered as to Riley's sources of inspiration. She would never have seen a potential design in a broken stick, but apparently it had suggested something to the designer. She was about to return the folder to the drawer when something she had glimpsed in passing struck a delayed chord of memory. She went back through the folder. The drawing had been reproduced from a page in a book— an old book. The copier had captured the uneven edge of the paper and the curve of the inner side. From the style of the engraving Meg felt certain that it, like the black-and-white copy, had lacked color. That was why it had taken her so long to recognize it. Yet even without the glorious glow of gold and gemstones, there was no doubt in her mind that she was looking at a representation of the necklace she had found in her safe— one of the hidden treasures from Dan's cache.

  The chimes jarred Meg out of her paralysis, and the folder slipped through her fingers, spraying papers across a wide area. That does it, she thought distractedly. I'll never be able to get them back in the same order. He'll know I was snooping. . . . Oh, God, I left the door open!

  She made a dash for the door and was in time to head off the customers, who had started toward the back when they found no one behind the counter. They were a youngish, well-dressed couple in search of engagement and wedding rings. A trifle breathless Meg commended their good taste in preferring the old and unique to the modern and ubiquitous, and showed them what she had in stock. They took forever coming to a decision, and when they had finally made their choice the woman asked to look at bracelets. In the end they bought four rings and a heavy fourteen-carat band bracelet. Meg should have been pleased at the sale and at the interest they showed in other pieces, but as she smiled and chatted and explained she felt like someone entertaining unexpected visitors with a dead body under the sofa. The open door to the shop gaped like a wound, and the desk was in the direct line of sight. Riley hadn't bothered to tell her whether he would be back that afternoon. If he walked in before she could tidy the place up. . . .

  "No, they aren't topazes, they are yellow garnets. No, all garnets aren't red, they come in a variety of colors. Well, there are a number of ways of distinguishing gemstones. The refractive index, for one. Of course. We guarantee everything we sell."

  After a million years or so they left, and Meg dashed for the shop. She had to conceal the evidence of her snooping. Riley's files contained many examples of what he apparently considered intriguing design, but the fact that one of them was
a jewel from Dan's hidden cache opened up new and frightening ramifications. She wanted time to think about them before she confronted him ... or found herself confronted by him.

  This time Meg closed the door before she got to work. She forced herself to take her time; the intercom would warn her if anyone entered the store. After a nerve-racking ten minutes she thought she had restored the clippings to an approximation of their original order. Maybe Riley wouldn't notice the difference. She had closed the drawers and was locking them when the chimes rang again.

  The ensuing sounds warned her what to expect before she opened the door. High-pitched voices and bursts of giggling— the happy widows, Dan had called them, when he wasn't calling them something more insulting. Middle-aged females, out for a day of lunch and shopping. Mostly window-shopping. They seldom bought anything, but they wanted to see everything. They leaned on the counters and got fingerprints all over the glass, and according to Dan they included a high percentage of kleptomaniacs. That accusation was probably even more unfair than the other things Dan had said about them, but it was true that it was harder to keep an eye on the stock when there were half a dozen people in the store, wandering around and asking to look at various pieces. However, it was not the prospect of a nerve-racking half hour with the happy widows that wiped the smile off Meg's face. It was Candy, standing modestly to one side, but wearing a smile that aroused Meg's deepest suspicions. Candy should not have been looking so pleased with herself.

  "What can I do for you?" she asked of no one in particular. Candy's feline smile broadened. "Go ahead with these ladies, Meg. I'm in no hurry."

  Neither were the ladies. After they had expressed horror at the prices and told her their grandmothers (aunts, cousins) had things much nicer than anything in the store, one of them did buy a ring set with a single pearl. Meg compromised on the price only to get them out. The door finally closed on their girlish laughter, and Meg turned to confront Candy.