Exposure (23 page)

F
AUSTINO WAITED FOR
two days, which was the most he could manage. On the third day he left his office at lunchtime, headed for the underground garage, then thought better of it and hailed a cab. The driver shrugged when Faustino gave him the address; the shrug said, among other things,
Whatever, man.

At the top of the Carrer Jesús, the taxi was held up in the usual traffic chaos. Faustino noticed that they were alongside a bookshop called Bibliófilo. He told the driver to pull over and wait. The shop was a labyrinth meandering over two floors, and the youth manning the counter was the kind of nerd who needs a computer to tell him what he should already know. Such as the meaning of the words
marine zoology.
So Faustino spent the better part of ten minutes finding what he was looking for.

It was dark inside La Prensa after the glare of the street, and it took a second or two for Faustino to see Fidel wiping tables in the far corner, emptying ashtrays into a small plastic bucket. Nina came in from the kitchen, bringing bowls of pork and beans to a couple of workmen wearing luminescent vests. They were the bar’s only customers. Faustino wondered how anyone could make a living out of the place.

Fidel came over and greeted him. He waved his wipe rag in an obscure gesture of apology and said regretfully, “Life goes on.”

“Yeah. How is he?”

Fidel pulled his mouth down at the corners. “He won’t come out. Won’t speak to us. Felicia says he don’t eat the food we take out to them.”

“Would it be okay if I talked to him, do you think?”

“It’s worth a try, I guess.”

Fidel led the way out through the back door and pointed Faustino to the shed. Faustino stood in front of it and looked around the yard at the propped-up facade of the old mansion, the litter blown in from the street, the sleepily watchful trio of feral cats, the patched and streaked wall of Oguz’s factory. He felt, and was, incongruous. A character who had somehow wandered onto the wrong stage set. A well-groomed man in a fresh blue shirt and pale chinos. A man carrying a big and very expensive book which he intended to give to a penniless boy who couldn’t read.

And then, very quickly, before he could take evasive action, he was overwhelmed by an emotion that he knew and dreaded. It was like an implosion, a shrinkage of the soul. He became a displaced person marooned in a world he couldn’t touch or be touched by. There is a moment in Stanley Kubrick’s film
2001
when an astronaut’s lifeline is severed and he drifts, struggling in his space suit for a last breath, into dark and dimensionless infinity. Watching it for the first time (alone in his apartment, fortunately), Faustino had let out a yelp of terror — and recognition. Now he only groaned, quietly, and waited for the hopelessness to pass. When it did, he knocked softly on the shed door. After several seconds, he heard Felicia’s voice.

“Who’s that?”

“Felicia? Bush? It’s me. Paul Faustino. Can I talk to you?” His voice was that of someone seeking sanctuary rather than offering consolation.

He heard a murmured conversation, and then after another long delay, the door scraped open.

“Señor Paul?”

“Felicia, hi. I . . . how are things with you? How is Bush?”

“Not too good,” she said.

Then she smiled at him. It was a complex sort of smile. There was a welcome in it, and perhaps gratitude, as well as hurt. It was, Faustino thought, the kind of smile much older people use. And the girl did seem older. She seemed to have acquired something like — what? Authority, was it?

“Could I talk to him?”

She hesitated, then pulled the door wider. He stepped inside.

There was not much light, and he waited for his eyes to adjust before he dared to move his feet. The hot air contained the odor of human bodies and the autumnal smell of marijuana. There was a wooden pallet strewn with blankets against the far wall, and Bush was on it, folded up. His arms were around his knees. He was all hair and thin black limbs. Above his head was a large patch of lurid color; it took Faustino several squinty seconds to understand that he was looking at torn-out pictures of Desmerelda Brabanta.

Felicia went to sit next to Bush and laid her hand lightly on his shoulder. Faustino realized that he did not understand, could not imagine, their relationship. He had wondered about couples before, many times, but they had been adult couples. Childless men do not, as a rule, spend much time thinking about what kids feel about each other.

He felt clumsy. Clumsily he perched on the edge of the pallet, because he was unhappy standing above them.

“Bush? How you doing, kid?”

The head came up at last. The eyes were yellowish, the lower lip sticky and cracked. He looked poisoned.

“Maestro.”

“Yeah.”

“What you doin’ here, man?”

“I was sent.”

“Uh-huh.”

“By the approximately two hundred people who work at
La Nación.
Who all want to know where you are and how they’re going to keep the place running without you taking care of business. They’re giving Rubén hell, man. Plus, I haven’t got time to keep running down the street for my cigarettes. So I came to find out when we can expect you back.”

The phony humor was pitiful, even to his own ears. Neither Bush nor Felicia said anything. It was intolerable, so Faustino pulled the book out of the plastic bag and placed it on the pallet close to Bush’s feet.

“Also,” he said, “I wanted to give you this.”

It was a coffee-table book called
The Wonders Under the Sea.
It weighed about five pounds, had cost Faustino ninety-five dollars, plus tax, and contained hundreds of photographs and not much text. Some good crab pictures.

Bush gazed at it blankly. He said, “Wha’s gonna happen to her?”

“Sorry?”

“My sister. Wha’s gonna happen to her?”

“Right,” Faustino said. “Well.” He wasn’t up to this at all. “I guess they’ll keep her there. Until, you know, they find out who —”

“They keep her in a freezer, don’ they?”

“I suppose so. Yes. Bush . . .”

“Makes me so sick, thinkin’ about it,” the boy said, lowering his head again, resting it on his knees. “Jus’ so sick.”

Faustino, lost in space, his voice gluey, said, “Come back to work, Bush. Come back to life, man.”

A little later, outside in the yard with Felicia, Faustino lit a cigarette. The flame of his lighter trembled. The girl had her hands in the pockets of her grubby outsize shorts. She looked at the ground; her long black hair hid most of her face. Faustino, out of habit or possibly desperation, wondered what she might look like in other clothes. What kind of a woman she might become, given the chance.

“Fidel says he’s not eating.”

The girl shook her head, just once. “Not yet.”

“He’s smoking dope.”

“Yeah, some. He’ll stop, though.’Cause it make it worse, not better.”

Faustino nodded, exhaling smoke. “Right.”

“Thank you for comin’, Señor Paul,” Felicia said.

It was almost a dismissal.

“He needs to get back to work, Felicia. I know how terrible this all is. No, I don’t know. Sorry. I can only
imagine.
But life goes on, you know? He has to do stuff to take his mind off what happened. Isn’t that right? I mean, you guys have a future. It’s really, really important, right now, to, like, focus on that.”

Crap, and he knew it.

It shriveled him when Felicia looked up at his face and back toward the shed where she lived, somehow, with her wrecked boy. And said, “The future ain’t somethin’ we like to think about too much, Señor Paul.”

Faustino went back into the bar to say his good-byes. The two workmen had gone, and Nina and Fidel were alone.

“We’re brewing coffee,” Fidel said. “A cup for you?”

“Er . . . yes, why not? Thank you.”

The coffee was good. They sat silently for a while, as though listening to the sluggish whoosh of the ceiling fan.

Faustino said, “I know it’s early days, but I told Bush he should come back to his territory. Do you think he will?”

“He needs time to grieve,” Nina said.

“Yes, of course. But grieving isn’t the same thing as brooding. I just think the longer he stays in there, the worse he’ll get.”

He realized he shouldn’t have said it. Nina and Fidel hardly needed him to tell them.

Fidel put his cup down and wiped his mustache with his fingers. “The thing you got to understand, Señor Faustino, is that they are scared. Really scared. For one thing, Felicia still thinks it was the Hernandez Brothers who killed Bianca. She thinks they might kill her too. In case, you know . . .”

Faustino shook his head. “Nemiso’s people are sure it wasn’t them. For what it’s worth, so am I. I mean, she still had money on her. Quite a lot of money. And the way she . . . she died. If it had been a knife, a gun, maybe . . . And she hadn’t been sexually assaulted. It doesn’t sound like the work of a gang to me.”

“That’s logical,” Nina said quietly. “But we’re not dealing with logic here. The fact is that Felicia will be too afraid to go anywhere by herself. And Bush won’t want her to. He’ll fret about leaving her alone.”

“There’s another thing worrying them,” Fidel said. He glanced, uncertain, at his wife. “That’s worrying all of us. Which is, the police know where they are now.”

“Yeah,” Faustino said, “but Nemiso isn’t a Ratcatcher. I also think he’s a decent man. I can’t see him as a threat.”

Fidel shrugged. “Maybe not. But he’s not the only one who knows.”

Faustino swirled the coffee grounds in the bottom of his cup. He had foolishly logged on to a world whose default settings were uncertainty, vulnerability, and dread. It was bleak, alien. He wanted out. To say, “Thanks for the coffee” and go.

“The fact is,” Fidel said, “Bush and Felicia don’t feel safe here anymore. They’re
not
safe here anymore. They need to move on, but they’ve got no place to go. It’s as simple as that.”

Faustino looked up. Fidel’s eyes were fixed on his, and there was perhaps something challenging in his gaze.

Faustino glanced at his watch and stood up. “I have to go, I’m afraid. Thanks for the coffee.”

Nina and Fidel also got to their feet. They shook hands with Faustino.

“I might drop by again, if that’s all right with you.”

Fidel spread his hands hospitably. “It’s a public bar. Well-behaved citizens are always welcome.”

Nina said, “He’ll come back to you. Felicia will make sure he does.”

In less than five minutes, Faustino was cursing himself for not calling for a taxi from the bar. By the time he’d worked his way far enough west to find one, his blue shirt was dark with sweat.

“Do me a favor,” he said to the driver. “Turn the air-conditioning up for a minute, would you?”

“This is as up as it gets,” the man said.

Reclining stickily in the backseat, Faustino closed his eyes and saw again Bush folded up below those glossy and incongruous pictures of Desmerelda Brabanta. He wondered what she would think if she knew. He recalled her standing with him, wearing that silver dress, in the roof garden of the Hotel Real. He groaned softly, remembering how he’d grabbed her, dragged her away from the railing. What was it she’d said, just before that? “If there’s ever anything we can do . . .”

He opened his eyes and stared out the window, dismissing the thought.

But it returned.

C
APTAIN
H
ILARIO
N
EMISO
had been distracted from the Bianca case by several more pressing matters. Since the NCP election victory, he’d been engaged, more or less continuously, in subtle but nasty battles to preserve his authority and his budget. Despite his best efforts, he’d lost two of his trusted staff to Hernán Gallego’s expanded Ministry of Internal Security. Then he’d been put in charge of investigating the abduction of a nephew of a member of the Senate. (It had not gone well; the boy was dead when they got to him, as were the kidnappers. On the upside, the money had been recovered.) Bianca’s murder continued to preoccupy him, however, and not only because Nola Levy persisted in inquiring about it.

Beautiful girls die all the time. They die, often, simply because they are beautiful. Or because they stop being beautiful. But they do not die unraped, wearing clothes they cannot own, in possession of an improbable amount of money, in places where they should not be.

He had insisted on a full postmortem. On the day she died, Bianca had eaten well. An analysis of her stomach contents had revealed chicken and vegetables; a high sugar content suggested the ingestion of cakes or sweets as well as soft drinks. Logic insisted that she had not paid for any of it; a hundred dollars was a round sum. Also, she had consumed much of it early in the day. The Ramirez couple gave the three kids food on a regular basis, but had not done so on the morning she disappeared. The Sisters of Mercy had immediately, and with great distress, identified Bianca from the photographs. They could not remember if she’d come to the kitchen on the morning in question; it was always something of a melee, anyway. But they never served anything as ambitious as fried chicken. Nemiso had put his already overworked sergeant and a second plainclothes officer onto the streets of the Triangle for two days. They had met, of course, with very little cooperation. The kind of kids who might have known Bianca scarpered on sight. Two people thought they might have seen her, or someone dressed like her, on the night she was killed, but both were vague and deeply unreliable.

Nemiso had, reluctantly, dismissed Ramirez as a suspect. Men can fake grief, but there could be no reasonable doubt that he had been in his bar on the night the girl died. The captain’s suspicions had been aroused again when Ramirez called him to suggest they check out the fashion sweatshop in the building next door, on the grounds that the Turkish guy, Oguz, might have manufactured the clothes that Bianca had been wearing. But the cheap fakes that Oguz produced had nothing to do with anything, and Nemiso was now almost one hundred percent sure that Ramirez hadn’t been trying that classic culprit’s tactic of volunteering help.

All of which left him nowhere. No, actually: it left him in a perfectly familiar place in which people who didn’t matter a damn, people adrift, got found dead, and what you did was fill in a form, if that, and file it under O for Oblivion.

On a day when his car was in for servicing, Paul Faustino took the subway to work. He was reading the trash in
El Correo
about the game against Uruguay when the train stopped at Independencia. He looked up from his newspaper and saw Bianca glowering at him from a poster on the station wall. She was wearing some sort of gym outfit and flexing the muscles in her slender arms. It was immensely baffling and shocking, and Faustino wondered for a moment if he were hallucinating, if he were ill. He got to his feet, but the influx of passengers prevented him from reaching the doors before they closed.

He left the train at the next stop and fought his way through to the southbound platform, intending to return to Independencia, but there was no need. She was there on the wall across the track, the second in a sequence of four kids wearing sort of posh grungy clothes in gray and cream. Hers were the ones she’d died in. The meaningless word
Paff!
ran along the bottom of the poster, one letter for each model. A huge exclamation mark filled the fifth panel in the sequence.

He returned to the northbound platform and tried to call Nola Levy but couldn’t get a signal. There was another
Paff!
poster at the next stop; Bianca wasn’t on it. But she was there again, twice, in posters alongside the escalator that carried Faustino up to the street. He gazed at her as he rose past her and she sank away behind him. He always felt off balance on escalators, but now he experienced something like full-blown vertigo.

He hurried, almost ran, toward
La Nación,
then backtracked to a news kiosk. He picked at random three glossy teen magazines and paid without bothering to wait for the change. Bianca, in a swimsuit, occupied a quarter of a double-page spread in the first one he opened.

In his office he typed the ridiculous word into a search engine and clicked on the first of the three results. He was astonished when his monitor melted into Otello and Desmerelda Brabanta standing amid a mob of shabbily dressed kids who all raised their arms and yelled,
“Paff!”
in one voice. The word then filled the screen and jittered through several lurid colors, finally becoming graffiti on a grimy wall. Then, in speeded-up footage, a hooded teenager added the legend
REAL KOOL KLOTHES FOR KIDZ
in spray paint and raised his fist in a goalscorer’s gesture. This was followed by a fast sequence of stills of rather moody-looking but very well-dressed teenagers accompanied by rap music. Bianca appeared three times. Curving around the top left of the screen the words
Check us out
appeared, written in designer scrawl, with an arrow pointing to a vertical row of tabs. The last was labeled
About Paff!
and Faustino clicked on it. He discovered that
Paff!
was a Brand-New Breakthrough Fashion Concept devised by Desmerelda Brabanta and her husband, the great Otello. There were further pictures of the radiant couple. The
Contact us
tab got Faustino an e-mail template; there was no postal address or phone number.

He picked up the phone and asked Marta to put him through to Nola Levy’s office. Voicemail. He found her cell-phone number and got voicemail. Damn! Then he ran the
Paff!
website again. It
was
Bianca, surely. Even though it couldn’t be. He riffled through the magazines. Multiple
Paff!
ads were in every one; the girl who had to be Bianca featured in most of them.

It made no sense at all.

He sat staring at nothing for almost a minute, then opened his desk drawer and took out the plastic box he kept business cards in. He found the one Nemiso had given him and called the number that the policeman had underlined.

At an intersection on the Avenida Buendía, there’s a fifty-foot-high electronic billboard — one of those that change their image every thirty seconds or so. Bush never looks up at it. Why would he? He’s never going to buy the new four-wheel-drive BMW or fly to Rio de Janeiro or see the new Spider-Man movie. Besides, looking up is a bad idea. You look forward and backward and from side to side, because those are the directions that trouble comes from. Looking up makes you vulnerable.

In fact, Bush wasn’t really paying attention to anything much. He was just making his legs go, trying not to think. Carrying the big black bucket. It was good that he didn’t look up, because if he had, he’d have seen a gigantic picture of his dead sister wearing a tight little crop top and looking so sassy you’d think she owned the world.

Captain Nemiso sat staring at his computer screen while holding the phone against his ear. Eventually he said, “Yes. I think so. No, I . . . Okay, Paul. I will, of course. Thank you. Good-bye.”

Detective Maria Navarro knocked on the door and came in before he could tell her to.

“Sir? Um, you’ll think I’ve lost my marbles, but on the way in I thought I saw —”

Nemiso held his hand up. “I know. Come and sit here.”

Navarro did as she was told. Nemiso leaned over her and clicked on the mouse. “Now, watch this carefully while I go and find Sergeant Torres,” he said.

Faustino took the elevator down to the lobby and, after the slightest hesitation, went out through the revolving doors. At the patio’s low parapet, he looked right then left. Bush trudged up from the garage lugging his bucket. Faustino watched him. There was nothing to be read in the boy’s movements. Faustino felt he was observing the life of a remote and deeply submarine creature. When Bush took up his station at the curbside, Faustino, with Rubén’s assistance, retreated into the building.

Otello and Desmerelda have been quarrelling. No, bickering. Having a conversation from which love has absented itself.

The famously physical Uruguayan defense had beaten him up for an hour and a half. He’d been deliberately fouled several times in the penalty box. Only one of the decisions had gone his way, and he’d scored from the spot in the sixty-second minute. It had been the only goal in an ugly game played to an unceasing cacophony of whistles and derisive air horns. He’d returned to the marina penthouse in a dour mood. Desmerelda had smelled alcohol on his breath. She’d not been at the Estadio Nacional; the baby is heavy in her now, and sitting in one position for long periods is difficult. More to the point, she no longer wants to be engulfed by those battering waves of sound, the dreadful human roars. Illogically or not, she imagines them penetrating her womb, instilling their savagery in her unborn boy. She had started to watch the game on television, but had fallen asleep after only ten minutes or so. When she’d carelessly admitted this, he’d grunted that she hadn’t missed anything. In fact, he’d felt hurt, felt she had taken another step away from him.

During the night the baby had been restless, pressing Desmerelda’s bladder. She’d pictured him struggling against his cramped anchorage inside her body. Her sleeplessness had driven Otello, once again, to one of the guest bedrooms.

Now, in the morning, he is out of sorts. His bruises have flowered. He is anxious about his sore Achilles tendon. He wants to make an appointment with the Rialto physical therapist. Now. He doesn’t want to do the midday event at Beckers. Apart from anything else, he ought not to be putting weight on the foot.

“We’ve
got
to do it,” Desmerelda says. “It’s been set up for weeks. The people at Beckers have spent most of the night filling a whole floor with
Paff!
stuff. The posters are up, the website went live at six this morning, and we’ve got all the magazines coming. This is a really big day for us. For me.”

“Yeah, well.”

“What’s that supposed to mean, ‘Yeah, well’?”

“Look, Dezi, this whole thing, it’s . . . well, you’re central to it. You and Dario and what’s-her-name . . .”

“I take it you mean Harumi.”

“Yeah. And I haven’t had a great deal to do with it, have I? It’s you that everybody will want to talk to.”

“Oh, no. No, no. If you think that I’m doing this without you, forget it. What, stand there in front of everybody, seven months’ pregnant with your baby, surrounded by these fantastic shirts with your face all over them, and you’re not
there
? How’s that going to look? How’s that going to make
me
look? Does the word
stupid
come to mind, by any chance?”

“Look —”

“No,
you
look. If you’re not there today, it’s going to suggest very strongly that you’re not committed. And that is going to be very bad news for our product.”

She’s right, of course. So he says nothing.

“Do you happen to know how much money is invested in
Paff!
?”

“Well —”

“No, you don’t. I do. It’s a lot. So, Capitano, if I can lug Raúl down to Beckers, you can manage it with a sore heel.”

Raúl. That’s one thing they have agreed on at least. The baby’s name.

Detective Sergeant Martín Torres swiveled away from the monitor and said, “It’s her. I’d bet my pension on it.” He tapped a finger on the magazines that Navarro had gone out and bought. “These are her too. But it’s crazy.”

“Yes,” Nemiso said. “There’s also this.”

He dropped a small brown envelope onto the desk. The self-adhesive label on the front was printed with his name and rank and the address of the CCB. Inside, there was a postcard, the kind you can buy in any number, anywhere — plain, the space for the address marked out in lines, the space for the stamp an empty rectangle. A picture of the soccer star Otello, cut from a magazine, had been glued to one side. Glued to the other, a three-word newspaper clipping:

OTELLO LOVES CHILDREN

Below it, in penciled capitals:

AND PICTURES OF THEM. ONE DAY HE’LL GO TOO FAR.

It had been delivered three weeks ago. He’d sent it to forensics, out of habit. There had been no prints, no DNA traces, nothing. At the time, busy with other matters, he’d given it no further thought. There had been no reason for him to connect it with the Bianca case.

Torres studied it before passing it to Navarro. “It’s something and nothing,” he said.

“True,” Nemiso said. “But let’s stay with the something. Because we’ve got nothing else. Until now, this case was as cold as the girl.”