Exposure (21 page)

“I suppose I did.”

“Well, now you know. It’s like work, but worse. Was it okay, though?”

“I think so,” he says, leaving room for doubt. “There were problems with the kids, as we expected. But Bilbao and his people seem happy with the results.”

“Have you seen any of the pictures?”

“No. They’re being pretty cagey. I guess they want to edit and so forth before we all get to look at them. I imagine it might take some time.”

“Yeah. Look, the people here want me to stay overnight. Just for observation.”

“You mean you’re still at the clinic? Dezi, are you sure everything’s all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine, like I said. But the thing is, Otello doesn’t know I’m here. I didn’t call him, because the game kicked off at six thirty, right? And I reckoned the last thing he’d need before going out was me giving him stress. So look, Diego, would you do me a favor? Call him, or maybe text him, after the game’s over, tell him where I am, and not to worry?”

“I’ll do that. Promise.”

“Bless you. And tell him I’ll call him first thing in the morning, before his flight leaves.”

“I’ll do that, Dezi.”

“Thanks. Talk to you tomorrow. And thanks for everything.”

He sits in the dark assessing the possibilities. Otello and Desmerelda’s penthouse will be unoccupied tonight; he knows the five-digit key code that will get him in; he knows the night security guys by name, and they won’t find a visit by him at this hour odd or memorable. They’ll know that Otello is not there, of course; the one at the desk will be watching the game. Will they know that Desmerelda is not at home, either? Maybe not, but maybe isn’t quite good enough. The crucial thing is the CCTV. How long do they keep the tapes before they wipe them? A week? A month? He curses himself; he should have found out.

No, he decides. It’s too risky. But it’s all right. His luck is good. It’s not even luck; the world is on his side. An opportunity will present itself.

The clock on the dashboard says it’s ten minutes to eight. The game has twenty-five, maybe thirty minutes to go. The kids could come out of the basketball court any minute; they must, surely to God.

He calls Otello’s cell, waits for the beep, relays Dezi’s message, spicing it with a little twist of anxiety, just for his own pleasure. Then he switches his phone off and, although it’s a bit risky, drives across the parking lot closer to where the dim lights illuminate the vans. He waits for another fifteen minutes before the kids are brought out. The girl gets into the second van, and when it coughs its way to the gate, he follows it.

Later, much later, he eases himself into his apartment and drinks a large glass of water from the kitchen tap. He will not go to Emilia until his nerves have settled, just in case she is awake. He holds the glass in one hand and checks his phone with the other. Amazing what hands can do. Surgery. Embroidery. Murder. He sniffs the one holding the phone. A slightly stale, musky smell — or is he imagining it?

There’s a message from Otello. “Thanks for the call, Diego. I managed to get through to the clinic, and they say Dezi’s fine and she’ll be able to come home in the morning. I’m going to fly back tonight so I can pick her up. There’s a late plane. I’m in the taxi on the way to the airport right now. You see the game, or did you have something more interesting to do?”

Diego leans against the sink, wondering whether or not to drink some whiskey. And wondering what time a private prenatal clinic might discharge a rich and famous client. Not early, for sure.

He steals into the bedroom. Emilia is asleep. He decides against the Scotch and goes along the corridor to the study and turns his computer on. He slots the little black memory stick into a USB port. When the screen fills with tiny images, he studies them intently for a considerable time. Then he begins to edit.

A
T NINE O’CLOCK
the following morning, Otello is coming out of the shower wearing a bathrobe and toweling his hair when the door buzzer sounds. He groans, so Michael Cass goes through to the hallway and looks at the little screen.

“It’s Diego,” he calls. “Looks like a goddamn florist shop on legs.”

“Hi,” Diego says from behind his extravagant bouquet of white and yellow blooms. He looks flustered and concerned, and there’s orange pollen on his nose.

Cass grins. “I didn’t know you cared.”

Diego looks at him blankly for three seconds, then smiles. “You know I do, Michael. But these aren’t for you. Sorry to disappoint. How is she?”

“Fine, far as we know.”

“She’s not back?”

Otello comes into the room, zipping up his jeans. “No,” he says. “Michael and I are just about to go and get her. Nice flowers, man. Nice thought.”

“Yeah, well,” Diego says. “I figured you wouldn’t’ve had the time to . . . Anyway, she’s okay, is she?”

“She’s great. I talked to her about fifteen minutes ago. Look, uh, we need to get going.”

“Right,” Diego says. “I thought Dezi might be back and settled by now. I’ll be sorry to have missed her.” He looks quite desolate.

So Otello says, “Look, why don’t you wait here? Find something to put the flowers in, load up the coffee machine? I know Dezi will want to see you, anyway. To talk about the photo shoot and stuff. I want to hear about that, too. How long’ll we be, Michael? Forty-five, fifty minutes?”

“Yeah, something like that,” Cass says.

“Ah, I don’t know,” Diego says. “I don’t want to be in the way. Besides, I’ve got meetings from eleven on.”

“Loads of time, man. Do like I say. Stay here. We’ll have a breakfast party. Dezi’ll love it. Tell you what, call that good deli. The number’s on the board in the kitchen. Get them to send some pastries and whatever around. They know what we like.”

“Well, okay. But if Dezi needs to just, you know, rest up when she gets back, I’ll make myself scarce.”

“Sure. Okay, Michael. Ready?”

When they’ve gone, Diego wanders into the bedroom and looks around. He sniffs at some of the jars and bottles on the dressing table. Then he goes into the dressing room and runs his hands through Dezi’s clothes hanging in the closets. He urinates in the en suite bathroom and doesn’t flush the bowl. Then he walks down to the study and sits at the computer. The screen saver is running: a slide show of stills from Desmerelda videos. He takes a pair of latex gloves from one of his jacket pockets and puts them on, then taps the space bar. Out of idle curiosity he reads the first six e-mails in the in-box, then takes the black memory stick from his inside pocket and clicks on
START
.

F
AUSTINO HAD SPENT
two days in Brazil, where work and high humidity had kept him away from his usual temptations. On his return, he’d startled Marta and his colleagues by turning up at the office before nine in the morning. He had a lot of stuff to write up, but a backlog of e-mails and numerous phone calls thwarted his efforts. By lunchtime he was irritable. It would have been sensible to work through the break, but he needed air — by which he meant a cigarette or two. He’d go and sit on the patio, get Bush to fetch him a toasted sandwich and a juice. Besides, it was a beautiful day.

And because it was a beautiful day, the patio was pretty crowded. The benches were all taken, so Faustino propped his backside on the edge of one of the plant troughs. He looked around for the familiar glimpse of the kid’s dreads and smile. After a while he went over to Rubén.

“He ain’t been here since the day you left, Señor Paul.”

Like there was a connection between the two things.

Faustino had just returned to his desk when his phone rang again.

“Yeah.”

“Paul? It’s Marta.”

“Hi, Marta. What’s up?”

“Well. You know that kid, the one from the street, with all the hair?”

Faustino clicked the save icon on his screen. “Yes. What?”

“Paul, he’s down here in reception. Says he wants to talk to you.”

“He’s at the desk?”

“I sent him over to the waiting area. He’s got a girl with him, and a middle-aged guy.”

“What did he say?”

“Just that he wanted to talk to you. Do you want me to tell him you’re busy?”

“No. No, keep him there. I’ll be right down.”

“He shouldn’t be in here, Paul.”

“I know. Just make sure he stays put.”

Faustino stepped out of the elevator and looked across to the waiting area, an arrangement of chairs and sofas partly screened off from the lobby by potted plants in square marble tubs. Bush was perched on one of the sofas, his forearms on his knees, his head lowered so that his face was invisible behind the tumble of dreads. The young girl sitting beside him had a longish, rather lovely, and very somber face. Her arm was against Bush’s back, the fingers resting on his shoulder. The man standing with them wore a baggy cotton suit that had seen better days. As a group, they looked like a couple of kids who’d been nabbed by an undercover store detective and were waiting for the cops to arrive.

Bush raised his head when Faustino came over, but didn’t stand. Nor did the girl. The guy was in his mid-fifties, maybe. Paunchy. His graying hair was pulled back into a short ponytail. A
bandido
-style mustache drooped down to the corners of his mouth. He might have been someone who’d been in a rock band in the seventies, then gone to seed.

“Señor Faustino? My name is Fidel Ramirez.”

Faustino shook the man’s hand, then looked down at Bush. The boy seemed terribly tired. No, worse: stricken.

“Bush? What’s up? What did you want to see me about?”

“I’m sorry, Maestro. I didn’ wanna bother you. It was Felicia’s idea.”

Faustino looked at the girl. “You’re Felicia?”

She nodded.

Faustino said, “Uh, listen, shall we go outside and talk? It can get kind of busy in here.”

Bush and Felicia sat on one of the steel benches, adopting exactly the same positions as before. Fidel sat on the other side of Bush. Faustino didn’t feel right about forming a line of four, so, as earlier, he leaned against the nearest trough, from where he could see their faces. He lit a cigarette and offered one to Ramirez, who shook his head.

“Bianca’s gone missin’,” Bush said, not looking up.

“Bianca?”

“My kid sister.”

“Ah. How long has she been gone?”

“She ain’t been back for three nights. She took off Monday mornin’. Me an’ Felicia an’ Fidel been lookin’ everywhere, man. Everywhere. Jesus.”

He shook his head and inhaled wetly through his nose. Felicia’s fingers tightened on his shoulder. Faustino would have liked to put an arm around the boy also, but thought better of it.

He said, “So, Señor Ramirez, you are a, er, relative?”

“No,” Fidel said. He looked slightly uncomfortable. “I, my wife, Nina, and me, we have a bar. On Trinidad, down in the Triangle. And we, well . . .”

“He give us a place,” Felicia said quietly. “When we didn’ have nowhere to go.”

“I see.”

“Well, it’s not much of a place,” Fidel said hastily. “There’s this shed out back, and . . . Look, Señor Faustino, the thing is, we can’t go to the police about Bianca. For all sorts of reasons. You understand?”

“Yes,” Faustino said. “Yes, I do.”

“Yeah. And Bush says you are a good guy. That he trusts you. And we thought maybe you could help. In some way.”

Bush was jigging his legs up and down, like someone listening to music. “I’m real sorry, Maestro,” he said, still not quite able to look directly at Faustino. “I jus’ run out of other ideas.”

“No, it’s all right. I’m glad you . . . Listen, Bush, how old is Bianca?”

“Thirteen and some. Nearly fourteen. Looks older, though.”

“Right. She ever done this before? Like take off for a day or two?”

“No. Felicia keeps her tight most of the time. When she can.”

Faustino thought about that. “So you don’t think she might’ve, you know, gone off with someone? Of her own accord?” He tried again. “I mean, with a boyfriend or something?”

“No way,” Bush said. But Felicia’s eyes flickered, and Faustino noted it.

Bush lifted his face at last, and Faustino realized why it had taken him so long to do so. The boy’s eyes were wet, and he was ashamed of it.

“I got a real bad feelin’ about this, Maestro. Real bad.”

Faustino stubbed his cigarette out. “Right. Listen. I need to go talk to someone. Wait for me here, okay?” He looked at Fidel, who nodded. “I’ll be right back.”

He strode to the door that wouldn’t open and swore at it. Rubén opened the other one and let him in. Faustino went over to the desk and spoke to Marta above the heads of a couple who were taking an age to fill in the visitors’ book because they couldn’t agree upon what their car registration was.

“Marta? Call Nola Levy for me, would you? And give me the phone if she answers.”

There was only one spare seat in Nola’s office, and because it wasn’t obvious who should sit in it, her guests all stood. Bush recognized her as the woman he’d seen weeping out on the patio a long time ago. She made notes as they spoke. She wrote down their description of Bianca and her clothes.

“Is there anything else? Like, for example, are her ears pierced? Does she wear a bangle, or anything around her neck? Does she have any scars, or a birthmark?”

“No,” Felicia said.

Fidel cleared his throat. “She is very beautiful, señora,” he said unhappily. “That is her main distinguishing feature.”

Nola wrote that down too. Then she said, “Paul, maybe Bush and Felicia might like a Coke or something.”

Faustino looked at her. She tipped her head in the direction of the door. “I’d like a few moments with Señor Ramirez.”

When they were alone, Nola said, “Please sit down, señor. Now, I have some experience when it comes to missing children. I have to say that not many of the stories I could tell you have happy endings.”

“No,” Fidel said. “I would not think so.”

“I would not wish to offer you any false hopes.”

“No.”

Nola gazed at him for a couple of seconds, then said, “You put yourself at risk, harboring these children.”

Fidel shrugged. The shrug meant several things, including
Yeah, but what can you do?

“Okay. So, I need to ask you two questions. The first is, do you have a number I can reach you at?”

Fidel gave her the number of the bar, and Nola wrote it below her notes and drew a rectangle around it.

“The second question is, what can you tell me about Bianca that you didn’t want to say in front of the others?”

Later, when Fidel and the kids had gone, Faustino and Nola lingered on the patio.

“So,” he said. “What do you think?”

Nola drew in a long breath and let it out as a sigh. “Well, the least worst scenario is that she’s gone off with someone. From what Ramirez told me, that’s quite possible. And if that’s the case, she’ll most likely show up when whoever it is has finished with her. Unless that person trades in girls.”

“Yeah,” Faustino said. “It’s not terrifically good news that she’s a beauty, is it? What about Ramirez, anyway? Is he kosher, do you think? He doesn’t exactly look it.”

“My instinct is that he’s okay. But then my track record when it comes to judging men is lousy.”

Faustino was intrigued by this confession but stashed it away silently for future reference.

“I’ve got a contact at the Central Criminal Bureau,” Nola said. “I’ll call him. But if he knows who Bianca is, it’ll mean she’s dead.” She looked at her watch. “I’ve got a piece to finish. If I hear anything, I’ll call you.”

“Please.”

“Paul, I know you care about this boy. But these kids live in a world people like you and me have no access to. I’m sure you want to help, but get yourself ready for the fact that you can’t.”

“Yeah,” Faustino said. “Don’t worry. I’m pretty expert at being useless. But call me, huh?”