On the television, the face of the first woman in the Special Selections appeared. “We call her Acantha,” said Tim. “Twenty-six. She meets all the criteria of an exciting partner, beautiful and ideally proportioned.”
She was a lovely brunette who looked younger than twenty-six. Her eyes were wide, as if she was surprised to find herself before a camera for the purpose of being submitted for the approval of one kind of degenerate or another.
A second face appeared, that of a young blonde, and the docent guiding us through this museum of the lost said, “We call this one Bambi, because somehow she seems fawnlike. Isn’t she adorable? Twenty-two, slender as a schoolgirl but ample where it matters.”
A similarity between the first two was immediately apparent: Neither possessed a hard or vampish quality; both were graced by a tender innocence that made them seem heartbreakingly vulnerable. How satisfying it would be for a sadist to reduce such a fragile flower to a condition of terrified submission.
Face by face, my judgment of the Oasis became more fierce. It was not just a repugnant enterprise, but detestable, sickening, a slickly packaged libidinous Bedlam.
With the third face—“We call this one Camilla”—the Oasis qualified as an abomination that justified the killing of Bodie Emmerich as quickly as he could be found. “She’s twenty-eight, but not at all long in the tooth,” said Soul Timothy, whose soul had been purged from him long ago. “In fact, many think she’s our most attractive Special. A work of art even if a Moujik. You might be interested in pursuing with her the intense pleasure that a recent visitor enjoyed—preparing her first with Rohypnol, so that she is profoundly unconscious throughout the affair, limp as the dead but warm, unaware of what unique desires are being fulfilled with her, leaving that knowledge only to the lucky one who feels unrestrained in the enjoyment of her.”
The face before me was that of Annie Piper, the girl from Mater Misericordi? who read stories to us when I was a child, stories by others but also stories she’d written. Annie, the primary caretaker of the orphanage dog, Rafael. Annie, whose soft voice was musical, enchanting. Annie, who had gone away to college on a scholarship and later disappeared without a trace. Her face was so fair and radiated such kindness that we younger foundlings were sure that angels must resemble her.
Nine years had passed since she left the orphanage, eight since she had disappeared, though on the TV screen she looked as if time had not touched her. However, her smile wasn’t the Piper smile that I well remembered, not the inverted arc that was the curve of love itself, but stiff and formal, perhaps formed in answer to a threat. The misery in her eyes welled unmistakable, and about her hung an air of the sorrow of one whose soul is yet intact and who offers her suffering for the intention of others. Her chin was lifted in an expression of what I took to be defiance, what little contempt she could get away with in her current circumstances.
She had not willingly reduced herself to the status of a sex toy for the entertainment of those who felt their high self-regard was vindicated when they proved they could inflict humiliation and pain on others without consequence. She was not the type who would have left college to trail after an intellectually vapid guru who oozed perverse platitudes as if they were the wisdom of the ages distilled to inebriating truths. She had gone missing because she had been abducted. “Special Selections” identified those captives with whom visitors harboring extreme desires—and Emmerich no less—could satisfy their inner beast without any serious risk of criminal prosecution. But the term possessed a shadow meaning, suggesting that the women and men offered here hadn’t come willingly to the Oasis, had instead been selected—identified, stalked, and uprooted from their lives—by agents of Emmerich who, like trained pigs on a truffle hunt, sought the most tender among the young and beautiful to serve them up for the delectation of those with enough power and wealth to convince themselves that they were the most sophisticated sophisticates in history.
I had not thought myself capable of an anger as sharp as the icy wrath that cut through me at the sight of Annie’s face on that TV screen. Litton Ormond’s death had little angered me because the depth and breadth of my depression had been a sodden blanket that smothered other emotions. Litton had been dead when I heard of the shooting at Bellini’s, already beyond rescue. Annie was here, now, in need of being saved. Vindictive, violent emotion ripped through me, flensing away all caution. Anger became rage as Tim blathered on. Before I quite knew what was happening, I was beyond prudence and discretion, having rucked up my loose shirttail to draw the Glock from my holster. I pointed the gun at Soul Timothy.