Life or Death (18 page)

Audie drove through the gates of the farm. The limo kicked up dust that widened and settled on the dark green leaves of orange trees. Workers were spraying and weeding, moving between the rows. A quarter of a mile on they passed a cluster of rudimentary houses, built from wood scraps, chicken wire, stones and sheets of crumpled iron. Washing hung from a makeshift line. A toddler was getting her hair shampooed in a tin bath. The big-hipped mother looked up, brushing hair from her forehead with a soapy hand.

‘Did you fuck her?’ asked Urban.

‘No.’

‘She said you didn’t even try.’

‘I felt sorry for her.’

Urban considered this. ‘That’s an expensive conscience you have.’

They pulled up outside a whitewashed hacienda-style farmhouse. Audie carried bags of cash into the house – money to pay wages to farm workers or to placate union officials or to corrupt politicians or pay off customs officers. From where Audie stood, Urban seemed to have tapped the artery of venality that existed in San Diego. He knew what wheels to oil, palms to grease and fundaments to lube.

‘Moral outrage is a fickle beast,’ Urban explained. ‘That’s why you can’t always rely on tittie bars and lap dances to pay the bills. You need to diversify. Remember that.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Audie deposited the cash on a polished maple desk and turned his back while Urban lifted a painting from the wall and spun through the numbers on a combination lock.

‘I want you to take Belita shopping,’ Urban said. ‘Help her buy some classy clothes. Work stuff.’

‘She cleans your house.’

‘I’m promoting her. One of my couriers got beaten and robbed yesterday. Maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe he organised the whole shakedown. From now on Belita is going to do the money run.’

‘Why her?’

‘Nobody is going to suspect a pretty young woman might be carrying that much cash.’

‘And what if somebody does?’

‘You’re going to look after her.’

Audie stuttered and started again. ‘I don’t understand why you want me.’

‘She trusts you. So do I.’

Urban peeled off eight hundred-dollar bills from a bundle of cash. ‘I want you to buy her some nice things – some of those fancy business suits you see women wearing, but no trousers, OK? I like her in skirts.’

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow. Take her to Rodeo Drive. Show her where the film stars live. I’d take her myself but I’m busy…’ He paused before adding, ‘and she’s still pissed at me for the poker night.’

Audie picked Belita up after breakfast. She wore the same dress as the first time they’d met, covered with a light loose-weave cardigan. She kept her arms folded and sat demurely in the front passenger seat, her knees together, and a soft cloth bag on her lap.

Rather than drive the limo or the Cherokee, Audie borrowed Urban’s Mustang convertible in case Belita wanted him to drive with the top down. He pointed out landmarks and commented on the weather, occasionally sneaking glances at Belita. Her hair was held back in a tortoiseshell clasp and her skin looked like it had been cast in bronze and polished with a soft cloth. He began speaking Spanish to her, but she wanted to practise her English.

‘You’re from Mexico?’

‘No.’

‘Where?’

‘El Salvador.’

‘Down that way, isn’t it?’

She stared at him. He felt stupid. He started again. ‘You don’t look very…’

‘What?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘My father was born in Barcelona,’ she explained. ‘He came to El Salvador as a merchant seaman in his twenties. My mother was from Argentina. They fell in love.’

Audie drove north on the San Diego Freeway, hugging the coast for the first sixty-five miles – ocean to the left, mountains to the right. After San Clemente they turned inland, staying on the I-5 into downtown Los Angeles. Midweek, midsummer, and Rodeo Drive was full of tourists and out-of-towners and wealthy locals. There were liveried doormen at the hotels and tux-clad bouncers at the restaurants and every sign was clean and bright, as though it had been manufactured at some sterile plant in Silicon Valley.

During the drive, Audie had asked questions, but Belita didn’t seem interested in talking about herself. It was as though she didn’t want to be reminded of who she was or where she’d come from. So Audie talked about himself – how he went to college to study engineering but dropped out after two years and came to California.

‘Why don’t you ever go with the girls?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘The girls at the bar, they think you are … I don’t know the word.
Una marica.
’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘They think you like the dick.’

‘They think I’m
gay
?’

She laughs.

‘What’s so funny?’

’The expression … your face.’ Audie felt foolish and didn’t say anything. In truth, he had no idea what to say. He had never heard anything so ridiculous. They drove in silence. He was seething, but soon he found himself snatching glances at her again, drinking her up, sipping the details, committing them to memory.

Audie thought she was a strange creature, like a wild animal hesitating on the edge of a clearing, unsure whether to emerge into the open. There was a haunting, almost magical sadness about her that seemed to empty the world; a sense that pain was a completion of her beauty and the only way to appreciate perfection was to recognise its impossibility; to see the flaws.

She pointed out the designer shops with familiar names like Armani, Gucci, Cartier, Tiffany and Coco Chanel. She spoke a sort of schoolbook English, testing each phrase as she strung the words together. Sometimes she asked if she had said something correctly.

He parked the Mustang and they walked along Rodeo Drive, past boutiques, courtiers, car showrooms, restaurants and champagne bars. In the space of a block Audie counted three Lamborghinis, two Ferraris and a Bugatti coupé.

‘Where are the movie stars?’ she asked.

‘Who did you want to see?’

‘Johnny Depp.’

‘I don’t think he lives in Los Angeles.’

‘How about Antonio Banderas?’

‘Is he from El Salvador?’

‘No.’

She looked into the store windows where emaciated assistants were dressed in black, demonstrating an air of practised indifference.

‘Where are all the clothes?’ she asked.

‘They only display a few at a time.’

‘Why?’

‘It makes them seem more exclusive.’

Belita paused to look at one particular dress.

‘Do you want to try it on?’ he asked.

‘How much is it?’

‘You have to ask.’

‘Why?’

‘You just do.’

She kept walking. It was the same at every store. She would look in the window or through the doors without ever venturing inside. They spent an hour walking the same three blocks, up and back. Belita didn’t want to stop for a drink or coffee or something to eat. She didn’t want to stay. Audie drove her along Santa Monica Boulevard past the Beverly Hills Police Station towards West Hollywood. They saw the Chinese Theatre and the Walk of Fame, which was crowded with Japanese tour groups following brightly coloured umbrellas and taking photographs with living statues of Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jackson and Batman.

Belita seemed to relax. She let Audie buy her some ice cream. She told him to wait while she went into a souvenir shop. Through the window, he saw her buying a T-shirt with a stencilled photograph of the Hollywood sign.

‘It’s too small for you,’ he said, looking into her bag.

‘It’s a present,’ she replied, taking it back.

‘We still haven’t bought you any clothes.’

‘Take me to a mall.’

He drove her to a soulless concrete shopping plaza ringed by acres of parked cars and dotted with palm trees that looked fake but were probably real. Belita made Audie sit on a plastic seat outside the changing room. Going back and forth, she modelled for him, skirts and jackets, asking his opinion. He nodded each time, thinking she could have worn a burlap sack and looked beautiful. That’s one of the things that Audie had never understood about women. So many of them felt they needed to get all dolled up in tight skirts and high heels, looking elegant as champagne flutes, when in reality they looked just as good in a T-shirt and faded pair of jeans.

Belita chose carefully. Audie paid. Afterwards he made her sit down at a restaurant with proper linen on the tables. He found himself feeling unaccountably happy in a way that he could not remember being for a long time. They spoke in Spanish and he watched the way the light played in her eyes and could not conceive of a more beautiful woman. He pictured them sitting at a little seafront café somewhere in El Salvador with the palms shifting above them and the sea a vivid blue, like those pictures you see in travel brochures.

‘What did you want to be when you were little?’ he asked her.

‘Happy.’

‘I wanted to be a fireman.’

‘Why?’

‘When I was thirteen I saw these firefighters pull three people from a burning building. Only one of the victims survived but I remember seeing those firefighters emerge from the smoke covered in soot and dust. They looked like statues. Memorials.’

‘You wanted to be a statue?’

‘I wanted to be a hero.’

‘I thought you wanted to be an engineer.’

‘That came later. I liked the idea of building bridges and skyscrapers – things that would outlive me.’

‘You could have planted a tree,’ she said.

‘That’s not the same.’

‘Where I come from people are more interested in growing food than building monuments.’

Late afternoon, they battled the traffic on the journey home. The sun had dipped, painting a pathway across the ocean, arrow-straight, golden. But a storm somewhere had whipped up the waves, which were breaking on sandbanks offshore, spouting foam and mist.

‘I want to walk on the beach,’ she said.

‘It’s getting dark.’

‘Please.’

He took the next exit onto the Old Pacific Highway and drove along a dirt track beneath the golden cliffs, pulling up in front of a deserted lifeguard tower. Belita left her sandals in the car. She ran across the stretch of sand, the sun shining through the thin fabric of her dress, accentuating every curve.

Audie had trouble pulling off his boots. He rolled up his jeans. He found her paddling in the whitewash, pulling the hem of her dress higher on her thighs to stop it getting splashed.

‘Salt water is a great healer,’ she said. ‘When I was a girl I had surgery on my foot. My father took me to the ocean and I sat in a rock pool every day and my foot got better. I remember going to sleep to the sound of the waves. That’s why I love the sea. Mother Ocean remembers me.’

Audie didn’t know what to say.

‘I’m going to swim,’ she said, running back up the beach and unfastening her dress, pushing it down over her hips, dropping it onto the sand.

‘What about your clothes?’

‘I have new ones.’

She waded into the water in her underwear, gasping at the cold. She looked over a shoulder, a gesture he would never get over, a moment fixed in his mind – the perfection of her skin, the music in her laughter; her eyes brown in places that brown could only dream of reaching. And he knew at that precise moment that he would always yearn for Belita, whether they spent their lives together or if they parted that evening and he never saw her again.

She dived beneath a wave. He lost sight of her. Time passed. He waded deeper, calling her name. She still hadn’t surfaced. He tore off his shirt and threw it behind him. Going deeper. Frantic. His feet slipped and he went under. The cold closed around him.

He saw her just before a wave crashed over him, forcing him under, spinning his body. He could no longer tell up or down. He hit his head on something hard. Spun. Kicked for the surface. Another wave pushed him under. He swallowed water, thrashing blindly.

Arms circled his waist. Words were whispered in his ear. ‘Be calm.’

She pulled him backward until his feet found the bottom. He spluttered and coughed and felt like he’d swallowed a wave. Belita grabbed his face in her hands and Audie wiped his eyes and returned her stare, looking at her intently, engulfed by a strange, unsettling intimacy.

‘Why didn’t you tell me you couldn’t swim?’ she asked.

‘I thought you were drowning.’

Belita’s underwear clung to her the way it did when he first saw her at Urban’s house. ‘Why do you keep trying to save me?’

Audie knew the answer, but was frightened of the question.

27

Valdez has phoned Sandy four times since breakfast, reassuring her that everything was okay and Audie Palmer would be caught soon. Their conversations were short, tense, remote and sown with unspoken accusations and rebuttals. He wonders when their marriage became defined by the gaps and silences in between the words.

In the early days it had been different. He met Sandy in difficult circumstances. She was wearing a medical gown and sitting on the edge of a hospital bed, sobbing into the shoulder of a rape counsellor. Her clothes had been sent to the lab and her parents were bringing her fresh ones from home. Sandy was only seventeen and she’d been raped by a wide-receiver at an end-of-season party for her school football team.

Her parents were religious and law-abiding. Good people. But they wouldn’t see their daughter raped all over again by a ‘scumbag defence attorney’, so the boy was never charged.

Valdez stayed in touch with the family and five years later he bumped into Sandy at a bar in Magnolia. They started dating and got engaged and married on her twenty-third birthday. In truth the two of them didn’t have much in common. She loved fashion and music and holidays in Europe. He preferred football and Nascars and hunting. He liked their sex to be serious, almost earnest, while she liked to laugh and tickle and be playful. He wanted her to be modest, well-presented and charming, while she wanted him to sometimes flip her over, plant her feet and take her from behind.

Sandy thought it was because of the rape that she couldn’t get pregnant. Somehow her ovaries had been seeded with something noxious, which meant nothing could grow in her garden; or maybe it was God’s punishment for her being promiscuous. She hadn’t been a virgin when she went to the party. She hadn’t been a virgin since she was fifteen. If only she’d waited … If only she’d been pure …