Exposure (26 page)

Fidel detected a slight rise in volume from the bar and tipped his head toward it.

“Bianca was a face, you understand? Probably, by now, a lot of street kids will’ve seen her on the front of the papers, posters, whatever. Older people too. Some of them might know, or have some idea, where she lived. They’ll know Felicia. They’ll know Bush. And for an amount of money you’d no doubt consider pathetic, they’ll say anything to anyone who asks. Now, what was it you wanted me and Nina to do?”

“Nothing,” Faustino said. “I’m sorry.”

“Forget it,” Fidel said. “You’re okay, Faustino. But I gotta go.”

Faustino stood in the darkness for a lonely minute. Then he went over to the shed and tapped on the door.

“Felicia? It’s me.”

She let him in.

“I can’t see anything,” he said.

A match flared. It lit up the shed for a ghastly second and then became the tiny flame of a candle that reflected in the eyes of the children and, he presumed, his own.

“Bush, Felicia. Listen, do you trust me?”

After a slight hesitation that disappointed him, Felicia said, “Yes.”

“Good. Okay, then. I want you to get in my car and come with me. Now. Is there anything you need to bring with you?”

Felicia said, “Where you wanna take us to, Señor Paul?”

“Somewhere safe. Where no one will know where you are.”

Their eyes guttered at him.

“We’re going to my place,” Faustino said disbelievingly.

T
HE CURTAINS OF
the penthouse remain drawn. It is now almost a day and a half since Desmerelda and Otello have seen daylight. They do not watch television. They eat snacks from the refrigerator.

They have started to find it convenient not to be near each other. When Desmerelda takes or makes calls on her cell phone, she goes into another room. She seeks refuge in sleep a lot of the time, her hands cupped protectively over her baby. She showers frequently. Despite the coolness of the air-conditioning, she often feels hot and unclean. Once or twice she has had to suppress a mad desire to go out onto the balcony and display her swollen womb to the pitiless cameras.

Otello is beginning to feel that physical heaviness, the lethargy, that tends to overcome him when he doesn’t train. His Achilles is still slightly swollen and sore. When he sits for any length of time, he rests it on a bag filled with ice cubes. Tresor has texted —
texted!
— him to say that because of the injury
and 4 other obvios resons
he will not be playing on Wednesday against Gimnasia. He has, in fact, played his last game for Rialto, although he does not know this yet. He is full of sullen rage because his wife does not believe what he says about the file hidden on his computer. Because there is no way she
can
believe him. The situation is insane; it’s driving him crazy. It’s like coming home and finding your living room occupied by a vast boulder or something. It doesn’t make sense. And because it doesn’t make sense, you can’t do anything about it. He’d searched desperately for an explanation. Any explanation, other than the only one.

“Okay,” he’d said, going into the bedroom this morning. Or last night or whenever it was. “That party we had here, what was it, three weeks ago? Remember? There were people here I hardly knew. One of them coulda done it. Like for a joke, maybe.”

“Joke,” she’d said flatly, then looked at him. “You think anybody hates you that much?”

He’d slumped against the door frame. Wanting so much to lie down with her.

“Dezi. It’s got to be something like that. Got to be. I mean, who else? Michael? Diego?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“So who, then?”

She’d shrugged. As if she’d lost interest. It had nearly killed him, that shrug. She’d done it several times since.

So he has given up pleading his case. He is alone with her, and with her he is alone. His marriage, he thinks, is in the early stages of eclipse; the shadow has already taken its first bite. He drinks Coke, topping it up with white rum, hoping to kill the worm eating him from the inside.

Diego calls frequently. He tells them, reluctantly, what the papers and TV are saying.

OTELLO:
What about Shakespeare?

DIEGO:
Well . . .

OTELLO:
What?

DIEGO:
Isabel is calling a strategy meeting tomorrow, apparently. I haven’t been able to actually talk to her. Hey, I have to tell you this. Tell Dezi too. The sales of
Paff!
have gone through the roof. Like the man said, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, eh, Capitano?

Indeed, there is not. “Bianca” outfits, fitted with tiny yellow commemorative ribbons, are really hot. It’s a struggle to keep up with demand. Thus, fashion becomes an extra ingredient in the spicy stew of celebrity and politics and crime that feeds the sharks.

Faustino had shown Bush and Felicia around his apartment. It was ridiculous, the number of times he’d apologized for things.

“There’s just the one spare bedroom. Is that okay with you guys? Or maybe you could sleep on the couch in the living room, Bush?”

“That’s okay, Señor Paul,” Felicia’d said, and he hadn’t known what she’d meant.

They’d been so numb yet at the same time jittery, staring at the framed photos on the walls, the books, the stuff left lying around unhidden so anybody could steal it. He’d shown them the bathroom, the fridge, how to work the stove, the electric kettle, the remote for the TV, and they’d gazed at it all like it was life after death. He’d demonstrated the shower for them, getting the sleeve of his shirt soaked in the process.

Now he took chicken fajitas from the freezer and heated them in the microwave, showing them how to do it. But they watched his face, not what he was doing. They ate cautiously at first, then ravenously. It made him heartsick to watch them. He slid the food from his own plate onto theirs, got a beer from the fridge, and sat smoking and drinking until they had finished.

Later he said, “Look, tomorrow, I’ve got to go to work. I want you to stay right here, okay? I haven’t got a spare key, so if you go out you won’t be able to get back in again. Understand? So stay here. Use anything you want. Don’t answer the phone. I’ll try not to be back late.”

Sometime in the night Faustino awoke from a familiar dream in which he entered a room empty of anything other than menace and, when he tried to leave, discovered that the door had shrunk to the size of a cat door. His mouth felt like it had been gagged with a tramp’s sock.

He headed for the kitchen. The lamp he’d left burning in the passageway showed him that Bush had gone from the living-room couch. Alarmed, Faustino went to the spare bedroom. The door was wide open, and there was enough light for him to see that Bush was huddled on the bed with Felicia, his arms clasping her. The girl’s eyes were open, but she didn’t speak.

In the kitchen Faustino gazed at his reflection in the window. “What are you doing?” he asked it. “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?”

I
N AN IMMIGRATION
interview room at the airport, it took Nemiso less than two minutes to get Juicy Montoya’s name out of a sunburned and very frightened Marco Duarte.

The CCB computer coughed up a good deal of information about, and several unflattering photographs of, José Maria “Juicy” Montoya. He’d last appeared before the Third District Court eighteen months previously, when he’d been acquitted of extortion because the prosecution witnesses had failed to appear. The court record included his place of residence, which turned out to be three rooms in a building that might have been posh once but had forgotten when. The apartment showed all the signs of a sorry life and a hasty departure. At the bottom of an otherwise empty wardrobe there lay a soiled and crumpled shirt. Torres found a business card in its breast pocket.

“‘J. M. Montoya,’” he read out. “‘Swift Financial Reclamation Services. 9 Castana.’”

Nemiso put down the plaster model of Christ the Redeemer that had stood on top of the TV set. The words
GENUINE SOUVENIR OF RIO
were hand-painted on the base. “Where’s that?”

“The Triangle.”

“Ah,” Nemiso said. “Call Navarro and tell her to meet us there. And to bring some uniformed men.”

The doors were locked and the steel roller blind lowered when they got there. Two officers used a battering ram to open the place up. The top drawer of Montoya’s desk had been pulled out and emptied. The newspaper in the waste bin was the previous day’s edition of
El Correo.
An old-fashioned safe, olive green, stood against one wall. Nemiso tugged experimentally at its door, and it swung open to reveal a half-empty bottle of rum and two cans of beer. At the back of the bottom shelf, a single ten-dollar bill.

Torres said, “I’d say our guy made a spur-of-the-moment decision to go on vacation. Probably just after he saw this morning’s papers.”

“Yes,” Nemiso said wearily. “Okay, you know what to do. Airports, train stations, bus stations. Find out if Montoya owns a car. Whether he does or not, check rental car places. Start with the budget ones.”

He tried to inject some briskness, some urgency, into it; but he had the very strong feeling that he had been misdirected. That he’d been piloted into a tributary that would dwindle to nothing in the middle of nowhere.

Down at the marina, a group of freelance paparazzi decide that the cruiser they’ve rented isn’t in prime position. One of them knows boats. He jump-starts the engine and backs away from the floating jetty. Others see what he’s doing and with varying degrees of success try to do likewise. The resulting jockeying for position incurs damages that will total three million dollars.

Two streets from the subway at Independencia, there’s an Italian-style café bar frequented, late afternoon, by commuters. It’s a place where you can take the edge off the day before making the homeward trek to the suburbs. The kind of place where two well-dressed men drinking coffee at a corner table will not attract unwelcome attention.

“Otello and Desmerelda Brabanta were in entirely legitimate possession of CD images of the children modeling their clothes,” Nemiso said. “Bilbao’s office sent them two complimentary copies of the disk. Detective Navarro saw them almost as soon as she went into the study. My problem is that Otello had apparently installed an edited version of that disk onto his hard drive, and labeled it in a misleading way. Forty-four out of the fifty images in that file are of the murdered child Bianca Diaz. In most of them she’s modeling bikinis.”

“Right,” Faustino said.

“And when our technical people went through Otello’s laptop, they discovered that he’d apparently visited a number of porn sites.”

Faustino dawdled his spoon in his coffee and said, “Child porn?”

“No.”

“So, our national hero has feet of clay. He does the sad normal thing that millions of other men do. Disappointing, perhaps, but not, as far as I’m aware, illegal.”

“How well do you know him, Paul?”

“I’ve interviewed him a few times. Met him and Desmerelda socially once or twice. More to the point, I’ve watched him play. Lots of times. There’s an honesty in him. Maybe that will sound strange to you. Or possibly pretentious. But the idea that he could kill a child is absurd.”

Nemiso said, “Ten years ago, I convicted a man who’d sexually abused, then murdered, several elderly women. He was one of the most charming and articulate men I’ve ever met. And very honest. It took me a long time to believe what I knew about him.”

“You know as well as I do that Otello didn’t kill Bianca Diaz,” Faustino said.

Nemiso turned to watch an animated discussion at the bar. Without looking at Faustino, he said, “On the night she was murdered, Otello had played an away game against Esparta. He flew back later that night. CCTV cameras at the airport confirm that Michael Cass met him. Otello claims he booked that flight because his wife had been taken to the hospital and he wanted to visit her first thing in the morning. Cass dropped him off at the marina apartment just before midnight. Bianca was probably killed sometime between ten o’clock and four the following morning. Otello has no alibi for much of that time. The security cameras at the marina are wiped every three weeks, so we cannot establish that Otello didn’t go out.”

Faustino signaled for two more coffees. “Okay,” he said. “There was opportunity. What about motive?”

“Yes, well,” Nemiso said. “My cynical sergeant, Torres, suggests blackmail. That Bianca knew Otello, had had relations with him.”

“You believe that?”

“No. Nor does Torres, really. But he’s a Metropoli supporter.”

The coffees came.

“It’s not just ridiculous, Hilario. It’s a setup.”

“Who would want to damage such a man?”

“Loads of people. Nutcases. Envious people. People who want to bring down heroes. But maybe it’s not about him at all. Maybe it’s about a different kind of captain altogether.”

Nemiso lowered his cup silently onto its saucer and leaned back in his seat.

Faustino dropped sugar lumps into his espresso. While watching his fingers do it, he said, “I hope you’ll forgive me, Hilario, but I’ve done a bit of research on you. And I’ve talked to Nola. It seems to me that there are certain people, certain politicians in particular, who’d be more than happy to see you embarrassing yourself. To see you getting involved in a scandal and coming out covered in stink rather than glory.”

He looked up into Nemiso’s disconcerting gaze. “But then I am, as anyone will tell you, a dyed-in-the-wool cynic.”

Nemiso smiled, eventually. “Yes, I’ve heard that said about you. I’ve also heard that you have taken Bush and Felicia into, let’s say, protective custody.”

“Is that illegal?”

Nemiso shrugged. “Probably not. But is it wise?”

As soon as he’d opened the door and put the lights on, he smelled them. They were where he’d left them, on the bed in the spare room, their knees up against their chests, their feet in the folds of the rucked-up sheet.

He said, “You had anything to eat?”

“We’re fine, Maestro.”

Faustino nodded and sighed at the same time. He went through to the kitchen and checked the fridge, which was exactly as he had left it. He went back to them. “Are you hungry?”

Felicia looked up at him and said, “A bit. But we don’ know what to do.”

“Right,” Faustino said, and went through to the living room and called his usual takeout place. Then, needing a pee, he went to the bathroom. There was a turd resting at the bottom of the toilet bowl. “Dear God,” he murmured, and pushed the chrome button on the toilet. The face in the mirror said,
They can’t stay here. You know that.

After washing his hands thoroughly, he went back to the kitchen and poured two glasses of orange juice. He sat on the end of the bed while the kids drank greedily.

“Right, team, listen up,” he said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. Felicia, you’re going to come out with me. I’ve ordered some food for us all, and right next to where we pick it up, there’s a store that sells clothes and stuff. We’re going to do a little shopping, okay?”

She gazed at him silently.

“Then, when we get back, you guys are going to take a shower and put on some clean clothes. Then we’ll eat. Maybe see if there’s a half-decent movie on TV. How’s that sound to you?”

He recognized and despised the jocular, no-nonsense tone of his own voice. It was exactly the tone his father had used when proposing some manly expedition to his disappointing son.

Bush said, “I’m not comin’ too?”

“No. I think it’s best you stay here.”

The kids exchanged glances.

“Okay,” Bush said. “You’re in charge, Maestro.”