Exposure (4 page)

Because his thoughts are tumbling like leaves in the wind, Otello says, “Thank you, señor. You have given me much to think about.”

Brabanta stubs his cheroot into the ashtray and glances at his watch. “Don’t bother with thinking. Just score us goals. That will straighten everything out. Now, then, have you and Diego received your invitations to the reception in your honor? There are so many people anxious to meet you.”

The lovely dark-skinned girl escorts them out. At the front door, she looks up at his face as though she is about to speak. Ask for his autograph or something. But she doesn’t.

On the way back to the city, Diego says, “Can you believe that two multimillionaires like him and Goldmann make chickenshit ten-dollar bets?”

I
T DID NOT
take Bush long to find his sister. She was in the second place he looked.

He walked fast, because in the dark speed was safer than caution. The
Rataneros
didn’t usually operate after nightfall. Their prey knew the territory better than they did, and many carried knives. But there were other dangers, so Bush walked fast, ignoring greetings from the shadows and skirting small gatherings of people in the pools of light from street lamps.

Five hundred yards north of La Prensa, there was a building that long ago had been a cinema. Someone once told him it had been the first cinema in the city, and that when it opened, the movies they showed were black-and-white and soundless. Sometimes the screen would be just words, and then a man in a white suit would stand in front of it and read them out in a loud voice. Bush had liked that story. The mystery of reading intrigued him. He would have liked to have been that man in the white suit, speaking in a bold voice the words that others couldn’t read. But good jobs like that had gone.

The cinema was a shell now; it was used as a flea market. The space where there had been plush seats was occupied by stalls selling things that had been sold many times before. And one or two sold fruit that wasn’t too fresh, or fried rissoles and coffee. Sometimes bits of plasterwork — a moldy rosebud, a cherub’s wing tip — would fall from the once-ornate ceiling onto the plastic awnings below.

Even though it was late, there was still activity in the market, shadowy business conducted in the light of gas or kerosene lamps. The place never really closed, since for many of the traders, their stalls were also their homes; they slept on mats beneath the counters.

Bush went past the entrance and turned into the alleyway that ran the length of the building. This was a reasonably good place for kids to hang out. It had a roof that was more or less intact, a boon on very hot or wet days. It was strewn with flattened cartons and ripped sacks that you could sit or sleep on. The scavenging was not the best, but there was usually something that could be shared. Now and again there might be a job or an errand worth a few centavos. And the market’s customers, being poor themselves, were generous. Most important, it was not too difficult a place to flee from. At the back of the market, the alleyway ended in a low wall, easily shinnied over, and beyond that was a maze of narrow ways and small houses with interconnecting yards. Once over the wall, you had a good chance of shaking off the Ratcatchers or other predators.

The alley was busy tonight. Temporary encampments had been built: two upturned wooden pallets with a ragged tarpaulin for a roof, a chained-up handcart walled around with cardboard. Small territories had been established: a square yard or two of blanket or matting; sheets of cardboard in the lee of the big wheeled rubbish bins.

Some kids felt safest clustered where faint light spilled from the side doors of the building. Others, for whatever reason, sought the deeper shadows. Bush picked his way through the dark melee from which random details emerged: pairs of knees and feet made pale by dust, a small child’s face suddenly illuminated by the flare of a cigarette lighter, two little girls trying to feed pellets of bread to a thin kitten.

Toward the far end of the alley, the night’s entertainment was in full swing. A tall skinny kid was doing freestyle with a peeling and under-inflated ball. A boy who looked the same age as Bush was crouched over a battered boom box that emitted reggae-flavored techno at a cautious volume. He was nursing a joint that wreathed smoke around his head. Three other boys, already high on something, performed an unstable dance that resembled slow-motion martial arts. They had an audience, and Bianca was a member of it. She was with a bunch of similar-aged girls hunkered down on the steps of a boarded-up doorway. They were holding each other, wrapped around each other, in a way that made Bush’s heart feel solitary. Their hair, their smiles, their talk, their bare legs. He stopped in a patch of unoccupied darkness and watched them. Also checking out the boys who were watching them. There were none that gave him special concern, just younger kids testing their bravado by calling out the dirty taunts that pass for flirting at that age. He approached the doorway. One of the girls, seeing him, nudged Bianca. Another hid something she was smoking behind her back.

Bianca looked up at Bush and smiled. As always, her beauty filled him with dread.

“Hi, Bush,” she said. “I’m late, aren’t I? I’m sorry, man. We were . . . you know.”

The smoking girl giggled. Another pouted up at him resentfully. Bush hardly noticed them.

“You ready to go?”

“Sure,” she said, and stood up. There was nothing in either her voice or her manner to suggest that she knew she had troubled him.

On the street, watchful as they walked, he said, “What’s in the bag?”

It was a plastic shopping bag with
PRADA
printed on it.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, “I forgot. Found a pair of flip-flops maybe your size. Look like nearly new. Wanna check them out?”

“Where’d you find them?”

She shrugged. “They was like lyin’ outside some place.”

“You stole them.”

“No, man. I watch them for like ten minutes an’ no one come near them. An’ I thought, Poor little homeless flip-flops, you’d be happier on Bush’s feet ’stead of lyin’ there, so I pick them up. Got two oranges in there as well, look mostly all right. An’ a magazine.”

After a while he said, “You shouldna gone out without Felicia. Shouldna snuck out on her. I told you about a hundred times.”

She put her arm through his and leaned in on him and said, “Bro, it’s not like I snuck, you know? I tried to wake her up ’cause I was lonely and everythin’. Man, you should try bein’ with Felicia every day, know what I mean?”

“She’s supposed to look after you,” he said. “An’ you’re supposed to look after her.”

She smiled up at him. “Felicia? Wha’s to look after?”

Back in the shed, they ate the food that Fidel had left them, using the three spoons he had given them. They each took a spoonful of the rice and beans at the same time and didn’t take another until they were all ready. It was a careful ritual that, Bush felt, kept the unruliness of the world at bay, briefly. Only one of Bianca’s two oranges was edible. They ate sitting cross-legged on the dirt floor around the uncertain light of a candle. Bush told them about his day, about the cars he had cleaned and about the man who had kicked his ass and about the man he liked who was called Maestro. He did not say anything about the
Rataneros
or his flight along the Avenida Buendía.

There was not much noise from the bar tonight, but at one point they heard the door slam and approaching footsteps. Bush blew out the candle, and they waited in the darkness until the man had finished emptying his bladder against the shed wall and gone back to the bar. The smell of urine was strong for a while, but they were used to it.

When the candle had been relit, Bianca fetched the magazine from her bag and carefully tore out a picture of Desmerelda Brabanta and added it to the collection of similar pictures that adorned the wall above her corner of the bed. Then she knelt and studied it. She swayed her body, clicked her fingers softly, and sang in a tuneless whisper:

“‘Take me up, take me up higher, baby.

  Take me ’way from ever’thin

  That ever brought me down.’”

Felicia sighed and lowered her head onto her folded arms.

“Thing is,” Bianca said, “what makes her so cool is, she ain’ nothin’ special, know what I mean? Like she’s not super-beautiful. Not got so great a voice, compared with some. But she made it.”

Without lifting her head, Felicia said, “Yeah,’cause she’s a rich bitch got a mega-rich daddy made it all happen for her, girl. Jesus.”

Like the way they ate, this was a ritual. Bush wearily resigned himself to it. He knew what Bianca would say next.

“Shit, Felicia, what is your problem? Why you always say that? Desmerelda might just the same have come from nowhere, you know? If she had, like, the dream, or, or, what is it?”

“Ambition,” Bush said flatly.

“Right. That’s what you gotta have. Plus the looks to start with. Which some of us has got.” Bianca turned to Bush and pulled her hair back from her face. “Tell me the truth, bro. Is she that much prettier than me? She got lighter skin, but not much. I figure I got my hair done up like she got it, I’d look a bit like her. What d’you think?”

She took her right hand from her hair and put the tip of one finger in her mouth. She narrowed her eyes, as if contemplating something wonderfully wicked. She looked, Bush thought, without knowing the words, vulnerable and fragile and innocent. Also lewd, pornographic. He imagined other people — boys, men — looking at her like this; he imagined her, for a shocking millisecond, naked. He wanted to hold her, make her small, make her tiny, and fold her safely away inside himself somewhere. He also wanted to slap her.

He managed a smile. “That Brabanta chick, she saw you, she’d wanna curl up and die. That’s the truth.”

Felicia watched his eyes, reading what was in them.

Bush waited until the girls were asleep, which was difficult because he was very tired and dreams were offering themselves to him. Then he went to the corner of the shed that was behind the angle of the door when it opened and lifted up a piece of broken concrete. Under it was a square tin can that had once contained cooking oil. He had buried it there two years earlier. It contained all the money that he’d earned and hadn’t needed to spend. He knew precisely how much was there and tried not to acknowledge how little it was. He added his day’s takings to the stash and pulled out the other thing that he kept in the can: a small sheaf of paper rolled into a cylinder. He took it to the mat he slept on and sat cross-legged. He unrolled it and held it so that the light from the last of the candle fell on it.

In 1984 a nearsighted university professor named Emmanuel Fuentes was badly injured when he was struck by a car that he thought was stationary but wasn’t. He spent his convalescence writing a textbook on marine biology, his private passion. The book found a publisher and was printed at the press on Trinidad, in the Triangle. In those days, color printing was done by running the same pages through the presses four times, once for each of the four colors of ink. Things often went wrong. If the pages weren’t lined up exactly, the yellow or the blue might shift out of register. This is what happened to part of Professor Fuentes’s book, and a whole run of spoiled pages was chucked into the shed at the back of the press. Many years later, Fidel and Nina added them to the bonfire during their clear-out. They hadn’t liked burning books, or even parts of books, but what could they do?

A number of pages from the book on marine biology had escaped Fidel and Nina’s attention, and these were what Bush was looking at by the light of his candle. They were from Professor Fuentes’s chapter on the regrowth of limbs by crabs and starfish. The words meant nothing to Bush, of course, but he was fascinated by the illustrations. Their off-register colors made them look sort of three-dimensional. In his favorite sequence, a crab slowly sprouted a new leg to replace one that had been lost or maybe bitten off. The new leg began as a bud that looked like soft glass, then became a slender tendril as frail as a plant’s. In the next two pictures it developed segments and a tender, tiny claw. Finally the new leg was complete: smaller than the others still, but strong and serviceable. Bush had never seen the sea, and he had no particular feelings about crabs. Nor could he have found the words to explain why he was so interested in the badly printed pictures. Why he found them reassuring, why it was his nightly ritual to examine them.

Bianca stirred in her sleep and muttered something. He went to the girls’ bed and kissed her, leaning over Felicia. He had no way of knowing that Felicia was wide awake behind her closed eyelids and that she was clasping her hands together, fighting the desire to reach up and caress his unhappy face.

T
HE LIMOUSINES SWOOSH
to a halt on the gravel, pearled with black raindrops. Big men with big umbrellas greet them, open their doors, sneak peeks down cleavages, expertly assess the price of suits and shoes. Up the curvaceous staircase — careful on those high heels — and then the guests are soaked in the brilliance and warmth of Nestor Brabanta’s house.

The lighting is perfect; it picks out the pearls and diamanté on the gowns without attracting attention to any slight imperfections of the skin. (The summer has been hot and long, tough on those obliged to conduct their business on yachts or at beach houses out on the islands.) Women kiss the air beside each other’s ears; men, slightly less mindful of makeup, kiss the cheeks of friends and enemies alike.

Champagne? Yes, why not? And one or two of those little seafood kabobs. Mmm, gorgeous. Who’s here? Is that Martha Goldmann? Yes. My God, what is that she’s talking to, with the dress cut so deep at the back that you can see half the derrière? Laughing, now. Must be someone. A soap actress or something, or someone’s daughter.

There are two sets of doors that open onto the drawing room. Do a sort of slalom: kiss kiss, swerve, hello, swerve, smile, hello, kiss kiss, swerve; and there is Nestor. Over against the fireplace. He looks so solemn, so serious, so cool, that you almost forget it’s entirely absurd to
have
a fireplace. It’s filled with flame-colored orchids. Remember to tell him you find that witty. Now, where’s the fifty-million guest of honor?

Over there. That has to be him. Holding court at the far end of the room. Lord, he’s black, though. Blacker than most of the staff. Good-looking, one has to admit. And already feeling very much at home, to judge by the body language. And it would be his body that does the talking, naturally. . . .

Otello is not, in fact, feeling comfortable. It seems to him that despite Brabanta’s promise, there are not many people who want to meet him. To look at him, yes; to touch him, yes; to put a hand briefly on his shoulder, his back, his upper arm. Rather like gamblers at a racetrack, reaching out to touch the horse they have bet on when it is led into the paddock. One of Nestor Brabanta’s famous horses. He feels that these people would like to strip him down to his underwear so as to assess his physical condition more carefully. To check on their investment.

Their movements have a pattern. There is also a script. The older men approach him directly, with a brusque heartiness. They put their cigars into their mouths and shake his hand and take their cigars out of their mouths again.

RICH OLDER MAN:
Vincente da Souza. Amoco Steel. An honor to meet you, Otello.

OTELLO:
Thank you, señor.

RICH OLDER MAN
[
glancing around the room conspiratorially
]: You know, for a while I thought we might not get you. I said to the board, “What’s the matter with you people? Here’s the greatest striker in the whole damn world, and you’re quibbling over a couple of million? Goddamn,” I said, “let’s go out and get this guy!” And of course they saw sense. Great times ahead, Otello!
Great
times ahead. This is my wife, Theresa.

OTELLO:
Señora. [
They shake hands awkwardly because she offers only the tips of her fingers.
]

RICH OLDER MAN:
Theresa is more of a tennis person than a soccer person. What can you do, eh? [
He looks off to the side.
] Hey, Pedro! Come over here and shake the hand of a genuine hero for once in your life. Pedro, this is the great Otello. Otello, Pedro dos Passos, vice president, Astral. [
RICH OLDER MAN
and
THERESA
exit stage right.
]

The younger ones are less direct. They circle him like elegant animals pretending to hunt; they do not need to hunt. They watch him out of the corners of their eyes. The girls are amazing; the boys have gringo names.

“Hi, Otello?
Excellent.
You were great in the final. We all watched it. We should have been playing polo, you know, but we canceled. We got some serious grief for that, let me tell you. I’m Ricky Zamora; this is Estrella. So, uh, I guess all this must be pretty weird for you. Champagne? Estrella, grab the man some of that champagne. No? Ah, right. You’re in training. That’s cool.”

(Training has nothing to do with it. In truth, Otello could murder a drink, something a good deal stronger than champagne. But he is fairly sure that it wouldn’t do for a fifty-million-dollar purchase to be seen knocking back rum.)

They are skilled at party behavior, these people. They know how to drift away when they have lost interest and make it look as though it’s you that’s moved, not them. They talk about him when they are not quite out of earshot. The boys say something; the girls either giggle or toss their beautiful heads dismissively.

Otello begins to wonder if there will be any other black guests. It bothers him that the question has even occurred to him; he is not used to thinking this way. Brabanta’s words have unsettled him. He watches the doors to see if any other Rialto players have been invited. It seems not. Not even Jaco Roderigo. Otello is puzzled by this. And worried, too.

He would like to have a word with his agent about it, but Diego is working, as always. He is over there with Brabanta, shaking hands with the people who come to pay homage to their host. Diego does not assert himself. He waits patiently to be introduced and then proffers his hand. He accompanies the handshake with a little lowering of the head: a bow, yet not a bow. It’s like saying, “I’m going through the motions of respect, señor, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that I don’t matter.” Diego never interrupts but has the weird skill of taking control of conversations. These fat cats come to talk to Brabanta and soon find themselves delighted to be talking to Señor Mendosa instead. As do their wives or girlfriends or whatever they are. Watching from across the room, Otello is reassured; he is fortunate to have someone so skillful on his side. He will leave Diego to press the flesh, work the room. To be an honest pimp, that most ancient of trades.

Otello realizes that for the moment no one is approaching or stalking him, so he takes the opportunity to get some air. The French doors onto the garden are just behind him, and wide open.

The rain has stopped, and because light pollution does not affect this exclusive district, the sky swarms with stars. Gazing up at them, Otello feels at home for an instant, even though the constellations are not quite in their usual places. He is standing on a terrace surrounded by a stone balustrade. Ahead of him the shrubbery is strewn with tiny electric lights that mimic the sky. Steps go down to a lawn, where someone is talking. It’s a monologue, so whoever it is, he’s talking into a phone.

“Yeah. No. No, of course I’m not. Fruit juice. Carmen, listen . . . Yeah, okay, but if you wanted that sort of information, you should have wangled an invite for that airhead, what’s-her-name, does the gossip column. Okay,
society
column, pardon me. Yep, he’s here. No, with his wife. Yep, he’s here too. I don’t know, Carmen, I’m a
sports
writer. Yeah, yeah. Okay, I’ll ask. Well, he looks like a fish out of water, the poor bastard. And I know how he feels. No, of course I won’t. Trust me. Well, hey, thanks a bunch.”

“Hi, Paul.”

Faustino jumps like a startled deer. Turning, he sees a black man in a pale linen suit. The guy is standing on the bottom step down from the patio, and that, along with the height advantage he has anyway, makes him look like a giant. Which, in Faustino’s eyes, he is.

“Otello?”

“Yeah. Otherwise known as ‘poor bastard’ and ‘fish out of water.’”

“Hey, I’m sorry. I —”

Otello lets out a reassuring laugh. “S’okay, Paul. You’re wrong about me being poor and my parents not being married, but the fish out of water thing was about right. How you doing?”

He comes down the last step and puts out his hand. Faustino, who is trying to manage a large gin and tonic and a cigarette as well as his cell phone, is forced to do some clumsy juggling before he can take it.

“I was talking to my boss,” he says, as if that were the right sort of answer.

“She’s not here?”

“Lord, no. The editor of the country’s leading independent newspaper seen schmoozing with members of the government? That wouldn’t do at all. So I’m supposed to be her eyes and ears tonight. Check out who’s patting whose political ass. Who’s slipping off to a back room for a chat with someone he’s not supposed to talk to, that kind of thing. Also, and most importantly, who Desmerelda Brabanta is with and what she’s wearing.”

“Right,” Otello says. “She’s expected, is she?”

“She’s already here, apparently, although no one’s seen her yet. But at least you’re not the only big attraction tonight, my friend.”

“Thank God for that.”

“Amen.”

A slightly awkward pause.

Then Otello says, “Listen, Paul, uh, thanks for the good things you’ve written about me recently.”

“Not at all. I owed you. Diego Mendosa gives me the exclusive; I’m nice to you in the paper. It’s called professional integrity. Otherwise known as ‘You scratch my back, I scratch yours.’”

Otello smiles. “Yeah, if you say so. But it makes a change from all the manure the northern papers are dumping on me.”

“I’m surprised you bother to read them.”

Otello shrugs. “Diego tells me I shouldn’t, but you know . . . You see the picture last week of my Rialto shirt with the number twenty-three and
JUDAS
on the back?”

“Yeah. Very witty, I thought. Listen, uh . . . I’m not trying to sneak another interview here, but do you mind my asking if all this stuff is getting to you? I mean, you must have been expecting it, but does it depress you? You’ve been keeping a pretty low profile since that brawl they called a press conference.”

“I’m fine,” Otello says. “I come from a long line of people used to putting up with a lot worse. I’m not talking to the media because I’ll do my answering on the field. Meanwhile, I’m just resting up and settling in.”

Faustino nods, recognizing the touch of steel in the other man’s voice. He flicks his cigarette away into the darkness of Nestor Brabanta’s garden. “I guess we should return to the cream of society,” he says. “I’ve got some spying to do.”

Just as they reach the doors, the sound inside the room dips slightly, then increases, like trees surprised by a gust of wind.

“Aha,” Faustino murmurs, “I think La Brabanta may have made her entrance.”

Peering into the throng, Otello catches only a glimpse of her as she makes her way through admirers toward her father. He sees white and gold.

Nestor Brabanta takes both his daughter’s hands in his own while she kisses him. There is a light scattering of sentimental applause from the onlookers. The expression on Brabanta’s face is one of such simple adoration that he looks, for a second, foolish.

Desmerelda kisses a few of the guests closest by, then her father says, “Darling, I don’t think you’ve met Diego Mendosa, Otello’s agent.”

“Hi.”

“Delighted to meet you, señorita.”

They shake hands. His fingers are long and slender, but strong. She has met a great many agents, and he doesn’t look like one. He looks like someone who should
have
an agent. He resembles that American actor, Phoenix somebody, is it? He has a smile that doesn’t seem to expect one in return. And calm, serious eyes.

Brabanta says, mock-sadly, “I am rather afraid that Diego might be immune to your charms, Desmerelda.”

She thinks,
Oh, is he gay?

“Diego is not impressed by celebrity. He once told me that it would make no difference to him if I were the father of an alligator.”

She pouts ironically. “Are you in the habit of doing business with the fathers of alligators, Señor Mendosa?”

“Of course. But your father is being slightly mischievous, I think. I suspect he was a little disappointed that I didn’t talk about you when we first met. And no one could blame him for that. I thought you were extremely good in that Channel Nine interview two nights ago, by the way.”

She is, he thinks, even more beautiful in the flesh than on TV. Smaller, of course, but then everybody is. Presumably the hair — all carefully tumbled swirls the color of honey — and the light skin are inherited from her American mother. The eyes are extraordinary, mesmeric; he doubts that there is a word in any language for their color. She’s wearing a white broderie jacket and trousers cut like jeans but made of black silk. Not a scrap of jewelry, which in the present company is almost as shocking as nudity.

“Thank you,” she says. “I’m afraid I snapped at the guy once or twice.”

“I think we could maybe drop the alligator references now, señorita,” Diego says, straight-faced.

She laughs. It’s an honest and unrehearsed laugh, the kind you might hear on the street in a rough part of town. Then she glances at her father; it seems she expects him to disapprove. Which is interesting, and Diego makes a mental note of it. But Nestor Brabanta’s attention has been claimed by a plump woman in an unsuitable turquoise dress, so Desmerelda says, “And where is your client, our guest of honor?”