“How did you find him?”
“It wasn’t easy. He’s not exactly listed in the phone book. Nor are any of the companies he’s legally associated with in his name. Also, I couldn’t just sit around and hunt for him. I had to start over. See, when I started working for him, I made sure I had money stashed all over the place that couldn’t be easily tracked back to me. So when I got out, I had seed money. Started over. Started small. Made sure my record was buried as deep as it could go, made sure I kept myself out of the light, bought up companies via dummy corporations and turned them over, one by one, small ones, building up capital. And the whole time I was looking for Caleb, on the side, sort of. Eventually I started hearing little rumors. Mostly about a kind of escort service for the super rich. Not really an escort service though, I discovered, as much as a kind of matchmaking program. Nothing illegal about it, on the surface. You weren’t buying a match, you were paying for a service. And that service could be a date for an event, a long-term companion, or if you were serious, a potential bride. It was wildly, prohibitively expensive, super secret, super exclusive. ‘The first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club’ sort of thing.” He glances at me. “That’s another movie reference that went straight over your head. Whatever. The undertone of the whole thing is that you were for all intents and purposes buying the girls. Not outright, and they weren’t sex workers. You couldn’t initiate sex during contracted events, that sort of thing. It was the kind of thing you didn’t talk about, so it was hard to find out much because no one would talk about it.” He eyes me speculatively. “And then as I got closer to the actual service, to the real Indigo Ring, I started hearing about another layer, an even more exclusive service that was even more hush-hush. You.”
“Indigo Ring?”
“That’s what it’s called. The Indigo Ring, capital I, capital R. That’s not what he calls it, I don’t think, but that’s the name for it among the people I could actually get to talk about it. I tracked down a guy who’d married one of Caleb’s girls. He was a forty-five-year-old multimillionaire, not really sure how he made his fortune. He was awkward and lonely and difficult, one of those work-all-night-and-all-day-for-a-week-straight sorts. His wife was twenty-nine, beautiful, voluptuous, smart, a real knockout. But apparently she was also an ex-drug addict and former sex worker; this is what she told me herself. She ended up in Caleb’s program somehow, got clean, worked her way through the program. I don’t know how she met Caleb, and she was squirrelly about what she meant by ‘program,’ wouldn’t answer me directly.” He shrugs. “She seemed grateful for Caleb, and also seemed to really love Brian, her husband. He helped her get a college degree of some kind. Apparently she was actually pretty intelligent, but the way she’d grown up had precluded her from really pursuing any academic interests. Once she went through Caleb’s mysterious program and got off the drugs, she was able to get a GED and explore what interested her. And Brian is a computer geek, developed a software program or something, I really don’t remember. But he sent her to school, and she got a degree. I don’t remember what, economics or politics, or social work, maybe? Something along those lines. It was kind of cool, to be honest. I mean, they were two totally different people from wildly different backgrounds. He was white-bread, from a well-to-do upper-middle-class suburban family, grew up in Connecticut, and she was a Latina girl from Queens who’d spent most of her youth hooked on drugs and turning tricks. But they met through Caleb and for all that I could see legitimately fell in love. It was weird.”
I think back to Rachel. “I know one of the girls in the program right now. When I ran away from Caleb the first time, I hid in her apartment. The girls in the program live in the tower, sequestered in these apartments. They’re all like that girl, the Latina who married the rich computer guy. Drug addicts and prostitutes living dead-end lives, and Caleb finds them and puts them through his program. It’s basically just getting off drugs, getting educated, learning how to function in normal society, how to be a good escort, basically. A companion, a Bride.”
“So they’re really not prostitutes?”
I shake my head. “According to Rachel, no. If there is sex, it’s always their choice. Of course that’s expected if they become a Bride, or a long-term companion, but it’s not part of the contract, explicitly. The client is not allowed to proposition the girls, and no money directly exchanges hands between the client and the girls. The client pays Indigo Services, who takes their cut, and then pays the girls.”
“So they’re basically contractors.”
“I suppose so.” There’s so much more to this, so many layers, and I don’t know how to put it all into words.