Chapter 15 The Auction

The auction took place in a chamber three blocks from the first one, a vaulted space beneath the old freight depot, and Sarah came to it through the tunnels with a borrowed camera and a face the Curator had never seen. Getting in had taken three days. Okafor had a contact from his undercover years, a man named Marsh who ran security for the buyers. Marsh owed Okafor a favor and asked no questions, but he had rules: no phones, no jewelry, no marked bills. Guests came masked, spoke only when spoken to, and bid with paddles that the house provided. The house did not tolerate curiosity. "Curiosity is how people get drained," Marsh said, handing Sarah a mask. "Keep your eyes on the merchandise and your mouth shut, and you'll walk out with everything you came in with." Sarah turned the mask over in her hands. It was plain black, featureless, and it made her feel less like a detective and more like a ghost. In the van outside the depot, Okafor had taped the camera into a hollowed-out copy of the city charter, the kind of book no one at an auction would think to open. "If it goes wrong," he had said, "drop the book and walk. The camera is not worth your life." "The memories in that room are worth it," she had answered. "So is the woman selling them." The room was lit like a theater. Rows of folding chairs faced a raised platform, and on the platform stood a lectern of dark wood. Buyers filled the seats, masked and hooded, their faces hidden, their money visible. Sarah took a seat near the back and counted them. Twenty-three. Twenty-three people willing to stand in a room and bid on other people's lives. The auctioneer was a thin man in a gray suit. He did not introduce himself. He began without ceremony. "Lot one," he said. "The memory of a dying father's last words. Taken from a terminal patient at Mercy Hospital. Preserved in full. Bidding opens at fifty thousand." A paddle went up. Then another. The bidding moved fast, practiced, as if this were any other market and the goods were any other goods. Sarah kept her hands still and her eyes moving, memorizing the shapes of the buyers, the way they held their paddles, the shoes beneath the masks. Lot seven was a memory from a crime scene in 2009. A warehouse fire, a witness who had seen a man enter and never come out. The auctioneer described the contents the way a wine merchant described a vintage: "Clear recall of a face. No contamination. The subject has never been questioned." The bidding for that one was slow, and the winner was a man in the front row whose mask covered everything but his hands. Hands. Sarah looked at those hands and knew them. She had shaken them at a promotion ceremony, had watched them pin a medal to a young officer's chest. Assistant Chief Tom Brandt, dressed like a customer, buying the memory of a witness who could have cleared a man's name or buried it, depending on who got there first. Lot eleven brought a hush. "The memory of a soldier's last phone call home," the auctioneer said. "Taken from a hospice patient last spring. His daughter never heard it. Bidding opens at twenty thousand." The bidding was vicious. Someone in the second row paid a fortune to own a dead man's good-bye. Sarah watched the paddle go up and thought about all the phones that never rang, all the voices that never got to say what they needed to say. She had attended too many funerals where someone stood at the podium and apologized for the words left unsaid. This was the same grief, but worse, because someone had bought the words and locked them away where the daughter would never find them. Her hand tightened on the camera. Sarah raised the camera and took the photograph. The flash was off. The shutter was silent. But the man beside her turned his head at exactly the wrong moment and saw the lens, and his eyes went wide behind his mask. He stood, reached for her, and Okafor moved. It was beautiful, in its way. Okafor came up from the row behind as if he had been shoved, arms flailing, and knocked a tray of glasses off a side table. The crash was enormous. Masks turned, paddles dropped, and in the confusion Sarah was out of her chair and into the shadows at the edge of the room before the man who had seen her could decide what he had seen. She pressed herself against the wall and watched the auctioneer try to restore order. And then the door at the far end of the platform opened, and the room went quiet. The woman who stepped through was silver-haired, surgical scrubs under a long coat, a mask over her mouth. She moved to the lectern with the calm of a surgeon entering an operating theater. The buyers did not look at her. They looked away, the way people look away from something they do not want to admit is watching them. The Curator did not speak. She set a hand on the lectern, surveyed the room once, and then her eyes stopped on the shadows where Sarah stood. Sarah held perfectly still. The room was dim. The shadows were deep. But for one long second she was certain the woman saw her, saw through the dark to the camera in her hand and the badge in her pocket, and was simply deciding what to do about it. Then the Curator looked away and said, in a voice like cool water: "Continue." The bidding resumed. Sarah moved out of the shadows, down a service corridor, and into the tunnel that led back to the surface. Okafor met her at the grate. "That was close," he said. "That was her," Sarah said. "The Curator. I've seen her face now. Silver hair, surgical scrubs, a mask. And I've seen her buyers." She looked at him. "Assistant Chief Brandt just bought a memory that could decide a murder case." Okafor was quiet. Then he said, "So we can't take this to the department. Not any of it." "No." Sarah pulled the camera strap over her head. "We take it to the people the department answers to, or we take it to the press, or we take it to hell, but we do not take it to the third floor." She turned the camera over in her hands. "And we follow the courier. The man with the limp who carried the cylinders out. He knows where the memories go when they're sold." "Then we follow him," Okafor said. "And we find out who owns the warehouse at the end of the road." Sarah checked the camera, counted the shots she had taken, and thought about the twenty-three masked faces in the room, the twenty-three people who had sat in the dark and paid for other people's lives. "We don't just find out," she said. "We make sure every one of them spends the rest of their lives explaining what they were doing in that room." Somewhere below them, in the vaulted chamber, the auctioneer was calling lot twelve, and Sarah Chen was already thinking about what came next. ---