Exposure (20 page)

B
IANCA WAITED UNTIL
Bush eased out the door, then another five minutes: an agony of waiting. For the first time in her life, it mattered hugely what time it was, and it was a bitch that she had no way of knowing.

She gentled out of the bed and was halfway out the door when Felicia, goddamn her, murmured, “Bianca?”

“S’all right. I just gotta go pee.”

Then she was in the yard, no one there. She dug out the folded-up piece of card from her bra and, clutching it tight, slipped through the ruined wall and onto the street. The morning was joyous with light and promise. She began to run.

The music filling Diego’s Maserati is the opening to
Oklahoma!
When his phone rings, he swears softly and kills the stereo.

“Hi, Diego.”

“Dezi. Everything all right?”

“No, not really. Listen, I don’t think I can make it.”

“What? What’s the matter? Wait, let me pull over. Stay on the phone.”

He hassles his way onto the forecourt of a shopping mall two blocks down from the Plaza de la Republica.

“What’s the problem?”

“I had a very bad night. Baby’s doing very strange things. I feel hellish.”

“Christ, Dezi. I mean, how bad is it? Do you want me to come over?”

“No. I’ve called Michael. He’s going to take me to the clinic.”

“Right.”

“So look, I’m probably not going to make it to the shoot. Or maybe I could come later on, if everything is okay.”

He lifts his glad eyes to the sky and takes a calculated risk. “Forget it,” he says. “We’ll cancel the shoot.”

“No. No way, Diego. Not after all we’ve been through, setting it up. Look, call my cell this afternoon, yeah? Tell me how it’s going.”

“I’ll call, of course I will. But how will I know how it’s going? You’re the expert in this kind of stuff, Dezi. Without you there, I dunno . . .”

“It’ll be fine. They’re all top people.”

“Well, yes. I guess so. But I still —”

“Listen, I gotta go. Michael’s just buzzed the door.”

“Okay. Take care of yourself, you hear me?”

Halted at the next set of lights, Diego sees that the office buildings to his left are in deep shade, while those to his right flash gold diagonals of sunlight. The narrow sky above the glass canyon is a virginal blue. He clicks the stereo back on, and after a while begins to sing along, in a murmur at first, then letting it swell. “‘Oh, what a beautiful mornin’ . . .’”

Slice helped her onto the bus — well, it was like a van with seats in it — with a hand on her backside. Bianca didn’t know any of the other kids who piled on, but she was too high to worry about that. It pulled away.

At the corner, she saw Angel standing there. He looked at her with his dead eyes and grinned his ratty teeth.

It’s impressive, Diego has to admit. It’s an old basketball court out in the suburbs, but you’d hardly know it. One end is screened with huge blown-up photographs: shuttered-up shop fronts, graffiti-sprayed walls, the windowless facade of a colonial-era house. Props, too: the wreck of an ancient Chevrolet, a skeleton in carnival costume, soccer balls, Caribbean-style steel drums. A few yards in front of all this, two camera tripods, lamps, light reflectors, aluminum stepladders. In the center of the court is a low tower of scaffolding with spotlights attached to its bars; at the top of it a girl in dungarees is talking urgently into her headset.

At the far end, a second big screen is a beach scene done cartoon-style in graffiti spray paint. On the floor, a carefully vandalized beach chair beneath a wickerwork parasol bathed in electric sunlight. Another collection of photographic apparatus, and a group of people having animated discussions around a tall, thin man with long black hair, whom Diego recognizes as the photographer, David Bilbao. A blond young man who looks like a gringo spots Diego and breaks away from the group.

“You must be Señor Mendosa,” he says, holding out his hand. “Marco, David’s assistant.”

“Diego,” Diego says. “Hi.”

Marco peers behind Diego as though someone might be concealed there. “I thought Desmerelda Brabanta would be with you.”

“Er, no. I’m sorry to say that she is unwell. I think it’s unlikely she will be able to join us.”

The effect of this news on Marco is remarkable. It is as though someone has informed him that his entire family has died in a plane crash.

“Oh, my God,” he moans from behind his long fingers. “That’s all we need.”

Diego is concerned. “Why? Are you having problems?”

Marco directs a haunted look over toward the beach set, then takes Diego by the arm and leads him to the front row of the spectator seats. They sit. Diego sees that on the other side of the court, close to the gap in the seating that must lead to the locker rooms, Dario Puig and Harumi are inspecting wheeled racks of clothes sheathed in plastic. Their staff is all wearing black ninja-style outfits with
REKI
on the back printed in acid green.

“Well,” Marco says, after taking a deep breath. “Let’s just say that things thus far haven’t gone
entirely
smoothly. First off, only about half the kids turned up at the collection points. And some of those weren’t the ones we were expecting. They were — how can I put this politely? — little urchins. One of them managed to smuggle a knife past the security. As a result, one of the boys we want to use now has a wound in his arm. But, thank
God,
David saw it positively. The bandage we put on the kid will look nice, he thinks. We may have to touch the blood up a little, but that’s fine.”

“Good,” Diego says. “But you’ve got enough kids? Don’t tell me we’re going to have to round up some more.”

“No. There are fifteen that David likes, which is plenty. More than enough, if you ask me. The ones David didn’t pick didn’t take it too well. The girls were particularly dreadful. Still, we managed to get them all back on the buses with their thirty dollars in their sticky little fists. Let’s hope they spend it wisely.”

Diego blinks at this, but manages to keep his face straight.

“Anyway, they’ve gone,” Marco says. “The others are down in the changing rooms. We went out and got some buckets from a twenty-four-hour fried chicken place, and that seems to be keeping them quiet. Then there are the technical problems. But I won’t bore you with those.”

“Thank you,” Diego says appreciatively. “I like the sets, by the way. The backdrops.”

Marco brightens. In fact, he blushes slightly.

Noting it, Diego says, “Your idea, by any chance?”

“Yes, actually. I’m rather pleased with the beach one; it was quite problematic. For obvious reasons, we couldn’t take these . . . children on actual location, down to the coast. Can you
imagine
? And there was absolutely
no way
we were going to fake it, with a truckload of white sand and hokey plastic palm trees. So I came up with the graffiti idea. We have these lovely rough-looking kids in gorgeous shorts and bikinis and so forth, and we shoot them up against a dream, a
fantasy,
of a beach that’s been sprayed on a wall in a slum. It’s ironic, you see. It sort of ties in with Dario and Harumi’s concept. The contradictions involved in being a teenager, all of that.”

Diego nods thoughtfully; Marco waits expectantly.

“Excellent,” Diego says. “Perfect, in fact. Well done.”

Two hours later, and Diego has come to the conclusion that fashion shoots must be among the most tedious things ever devised. Golf is thrilling by comparison. He has removed himself to a high place in the banked seats beyond the reach of the lights and sits brooding, calculating. The business is going to last well into the evening, he now realizes. It will make things difficult for him, perhaps. During one of the intense fusses that punctuate the actual photography, he sees Marco head off toward the bathroom and intercepts him on the way back.

“Marco, excuse me. Look, I have to go and see to a couple of things. I probably won’t be able to get back until late afternoon. What I was wondering is, would I be able to look at the shots you’ve taken by then? Señora Brabanta is expecting me to report back to her on how things have gone, and, well . . .”

Marco considers this with immense seriousness, trying not to dwell on Diego’s beautifully lustrous eyes.

“Well,” he says at last, “what I could do is download the digitals onto disk. We’d be doing that anyway, obviously. So you could have a little peek at them on my laptop.”

“That would be great, Marco. Thank you.”

“But we’d have to be
very
discreet. David would murder me twice if he found out I’d let you look at unedited stuff. He’s an absolute perfectionist.”

“I understand that,” Diego says solemnly. He pats Marco affectionately on the upper arm as a token of his appreciation.

The thrill of it all, the strangeness of joy, is almost scary. It is as though her heart has risen to a higher place in her body; it beats at the base of her throat, so that she has to breathe in quick, light gasps. But she is not scared. She is so happy, so very happy that she has been found at last. It was surprising that in the mirror she could not see the aura made of starlight that must certainly surround her. A young man, serious as a priest and wearing white latex gloves, had teased out her hair using the long handle of a steel comb. She had been expecting makeup, the full works: eyes, lips, everything. Instead he had only brushed her cheekbones and the tip of her nose with a powder that didn’t show. It was a little bit disappointing. Still, the brush was the softest thing she had ever been touched by. She’d closed her eyes, lifting her face to it.

Now she is taken to a space behind some curtains, and two kind of creepy but smiling girls all in black dress her in such beautiful new clothes, clothes no one has ever worn before, knee-length shorts, tight to her skin, but soft, soft as cream and the color of cream, and like a long hoodie in the same color but with these thin dark stripes running all down it. It is
so
cool, she feels like she can fly, and they tell her she can keep them for always (because what else can they do with them after kids like her have worn them, but that’s not something she hears them say), then they take her out into the bright colored lights that look like they’re shining through rain and she hopes it isn’t because she’s crying, and then all the people look at her and some clap — yes, they
clap
— and smile at her, and it’s like something wonderful unfolds inside her and spreads and whispers,
Yes, it’s you. It’s you at last.

And they take pictures, lots, not just one, saying, “That’s lovely, Bianca. Just like that. But don’t smile, okay? Try not to smile. Maybe think about something sad.”

And that is the only hard thing, trying not to smile. To remember something sad.

“This one’s a honey,” David Bilbao murmurs, switching cameras. “You did well finding her. How old is she? Any idea?”

Marco shrugs modestly. “None at all. Kids like these, they could be anything.”

Bilbao turns away and calls over to the stands. “Harumi? Harumi, I’d like to see this girl in some other things, okay? Some of the sweatshirts, maybe. Or the soccer jerseys.”

Then he says to the woman standing next to him with the clipboard, “Put her down for the swimwear, too, please.”

They shoot her again late in the afternoon. On the beach chair, webbed by the shadow of the umbrella, pretending to read a magazine. Then with her hands on her hips, a volleyball between her feet. Then standing with her back to the camera, looking over her shoulder as if someone unwelcome has just walked onto her private spray-painted beach.

Marco is fretful. “She’s
posing.
It doesn’t seem to matter what we say to her, for God’s sake.”

Peering through the viewfinder, Bilbao says, “Don’t worry about it. We’ve got some good ones when she’s not ready. Besides, I think the posing is kind of charming. Precisely because she’s not good at it. There’s a rather touching awkwardness about it. I’m inclined to think we should use some of those.”

“Well, okay. But isn’t some of it a bit, you know . . .”

“Obvious? Lewd?”

“Yes, quite frankly.”

“It’s all in the eye of the beholder, Marco. All in the eye of the beholder.”

Diego sits outside the light, looking down at the beautiful half-naked child drenched in light. Absolutely focused on her.

And when, later, alone in the now empty office behind the ticket booth, he copies Marco’s disks onto a memory stick, he makes sure they include all the pictures of her.

From his car, he tries ringing Desmerelda again. This time she answers.

“Hi, Diego.” She sounds tired.

“Dezi. I’ve been so worried about you. I tried to call but —”

“Yeah, I know. I had to turn my phone off.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. My blood pressure went way up, and baby chose that moment to change position. It’s normal, apparently. So, how was the shoot?”

“In my wildest dreams I couldn’t have imagined anything more boring.”

She laughs. “Well, I guess you’re a virgin when it comes to this kind of thing. Did you expect it to be fun?”