Exposure (5 page)

“Over by the garden doors,” Diego tells her, not needing to look. “I think he may have been having a quiet word with Paul Faustino, of
La Nación.
Do you know him?”

She shakes her head.

“Please. Come. I’ll introduce you to them both.”

Faustino sees their approach. “Here we go,” he murmurs.

Diego performs the introductions. There is the kind of small talk you would expect. After a while Faustino gets the feeling that he is unwanted, so he slips out of their orbit and sets off on an eavesdropping tour of the room.

Desmerelda, like her father, is interested in soccer and well informed. She asks Otello serious questions about his exploits on the field. About the social implications of his move to the South. She is serious, not flirtatious or frivolous.

Otello is hesitant and awkward when he responds to her. Although he is angry with himself for doing so, he speaks the glib understatements that soccer players are supposed to speak.

This is because the poor fool has fallen in love. Cupid has got him, not with the usual sniper’s arrow but with a cruise missile, a smart weapon locked on to the victim’s soul, where it explodes. There is collateral damage far from the point of impact. To the eyes, which want to focus on Desmerelda’s but skitter all over the place; to the hands, which wander into his pockets and then out again and clasp each other behind his back; to his knees, which have gone slack. Also, of course, to the tongue. If he’d incurred this amount of damage on the field, he’d have been stretchered off. He half wishes he could be. He needs treatment. So he is almost relieved, as well as dismayed, when her father comes to retrieve her.

Smiling with his mouth but not his eyes, Brabanta says, “Desmerelda, my darling, you must not monopolize our star guest. Besides, I’d like you to come into the dining room and inspect the buffet before I ask the guests to go through. You have a much better eye for detail than I do.”

“Of course, Papa. Excuse me, Otello. Duty calls.”

He doesn’t know what to say, so he ducks his head in a miniature bow. And gazes after her as she threads her way through the room with her father’s protective arm across her back. When at last he looks away, he meets Diego’s solemn gaze.

“What?”

“She’s no slouch,” Diego says. “But then neither are you, Capitano.”

After the wandering balancing act of eating light food from heavy plates, Otello finds himself penned in at the end of a sofa by an earnest young man who wants to explain the government’s policy toward the social problems in the North. He believes in Free Market Forces and Wealth Creation, which he pronounces with capital letters. Because the young man clearly knows very little about the North and Otello doesn’t know the first thing about economics, the conversation is going nowhere. In addition, Otello is feverishly preoccupied with Desmerelda Brabanta. So he is unable to say anything and sits there nodding like a bull bothered by flies. Then he feels something settle along his back and hears a voice from above and behind him.

“Antonio, for the love of God, stop being so boring.”

Otello turns his head. She has perched on the arm of the sofa. The thing that is in soft contact with his back is her thigh.

“Antonio,” she says, “is one of my father’s disciples. One day he will be minister of economic affairs. Won’t you, Antonio? But unfortunately he knows nothing about the important things in life, such as music or soccer.”

She stands and then comes around to face them both. “Shove off, Antonio. I need to get this guy’s opinion of Rialto’s chances in the Copa Libertadores.”

Antonio gets to his feet, wearing a smile that is meant to look good-natured, and sidles off.

Otello and Desmerelda are left islanded on the sofa.

He says, “We will lose to River Plata of Argentina in the semifinal.”

“Ah. So you are clairvoyant, as well as everything else?”

“No. But Rialto —
we
— are the fourth, maybe third, best club in South America. So we deserve to reach the semis. But who knows?”

“Yeah, who knows. Let’s hope you get more than you deserve.”

Otello senses that she means something else by this, although he cannot, or dares not, work out what it is. But he manages to hold her gaze, which is good. In the end she is the one who looks away, taking a sip from her glass.

“You seem a bit edgy,” she says. “Is it because you’re worried I’m going to ask if you like my music?”

Since the acrimonious breakup of Kaleidoscope, Desmerelda has made two solo albums of lightweight pop and disinfected hip-hop that no self-respecting person over the age of sixteen would be caught dead listening to. And which millions of pubescent girls listen to constantly. Knowing that sooner or later he would be bound to meet her, Otello had downloaded a few tracks onto his iPod and played them when he was alone. The only thing he can think to say about them is that they are perfect, for what they are. Which is true but not what he needs to say to her. But he is saved from saying anything, because once again Nestor Brabanta comes to his unwelcome rescue.

The senator materializes behind the sofa and stoops to murmur in Desmerelda’s ear. She nods seriously, her face expressionless. But when she turns to Otello, she flares her eyes at him and silently mouths a curse.

“You’ll have to excuse me. Seems there’s been a bit of a catfight among the staff. One of the girls is in tears. Papa wants me to go and restore order. Apparently I’m good at that sort of thing.”

She reaches across him to put her glass down on a low table. He inhales her scent as deeply as he can.

“Desmerelda,” Brabanta says testily.

Otello turns and looks up at him. The senator doesn’t meet his eye; he stands with his hand out toward his daughter. She takes it and he leads her away.

When she returns, Otello has gone. And so has her drink. She looks around the room, trying not to make it obvious. The crowd has thinned a bit, but nevertheless she cannot see him. Then Diego Mendosa catches her eye and with a tiny gesture of his head points her toward the terrace.

There are several people out there, smoking, talking loudly, laughing, but Otello is alone at the far end. He has his back to her and is gazing at the stars. Her wineglass, now full again, is standing on the balustrade next to his hand.

“It’s crap,” she says when she is close to him.

He turns. “What is?”

“My music. But it’s very high-quality crap. That’s what you were going to say, isn’t it? Or were you going to lie to me?” She picks the glass up and leans her back against the balustrade.

“Uh, I was going to lie to you.”

“Well, don’t. You don’t have to. I haven’t got any illusions about what I do. Any of it.”

She drinks. He can think of nothing to say. These Brabantas disturb and baffle him.

“So tell me,” she says now, “what are your plans? What do soccer superstars do between seasons? Apart from win the Copa América, of course.”

“Well, training starts in a week, so I’m going to grab a vacation. Five days of doing nothing, just chilling out.”

“Sounds good. And where are you doing all this nothing?”

He glances away from her, and she reads the confusion in his face.

“Oh, right. Top-secret location. Yeah, I suppose it would be. You don’t have to tell me. You
shouldn’t
tell me. It’s a well-known fact that I’m a notorious gossip.”

“We’re going to the Bay Islands. Cypress, to be exact.”

Well,
she thinks,
he trusts me, then.
She also thinks,
We?
The word is huge in her head, but she pushes it aside. For the moment.

What she says is, “Cypress? Oh, fantastic. It’s beautiful. Really. We shot the beach scenes for the ‘Take Me Up’ video there. You ever see that? Go on, you can lie if you like.”

“Sure I saw it. The one with all the planes in it?”

“No. That was a different one. You’re terrible at this, aren’t you?”

“Looks like it.”

“It does. I bet you’ll be staying at the Blue Horizon. Yeah? That’s a great place. It’s where I stayed when we were filming. You’ll love it. I can just imagine you there.”

She
is
imagining him there.

Otello, however, is not paying attention. She turns her head and sees Diego Mendosa standing in the doorway giving Otello a look which means
Time to come back in here and say good-bye to Important People, Guest of Honor.
She realizes that she and Otello are now alone on the terrace.

“I think you need to go,” she says.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

The fact that they have made no further arrangements with each other looms between them.

He says, “Look, I —”

“No, let’s not do the cell-phone-number stuff. It won’t be necessary.”

Why not?
he thinks.
Why the hell not?

“It’s been great talking to you,” he manages to say, and holds out his hand.

She ignores the hand and stands on tiptoe to kiss him on both cheeks. Then she kisses him full on the mouth. It is so wonderful that it seems to last about a year, a year in which the rest of the world goes missing.

When the clocks go back to normal and the world returns, she says, “Who is ‘we’?”

She knows the question is so crude that she might as well have stripped her clothes off and stood naked in front of him.

“What?”

“You said, ‘
We’re
going to Cypress.’ I was wondering who ‘we’ is.”

“Ah, right. ‘We’ is me and Diego and Michael.”

“Michael?”

“Michael Cass. He’s, well, he’s my . . . minder.”

“Minder? As in bodyguard?”

“I guess. He’s good at throwing paparazzi into the sea.”

She nods approvingly. “That is a good skill to have.”

Later, Desmerelda stands with her father at the front of the house while their guests wait for their cars to be brought around. As Brabanta is bidding farewell to a clutch of politicians, Diego comes down the steps and touches her lightly on the arm. She turns, and he thanks her for the hospitality. Instead of shaking the hand she offers him, he lifts it to his mouth and kisses it.

“There is no one,” he murmurs.

“Excuse me?”

“Otello has no girlfriend, no secret wife, no mistress, no boyfriend.”

For a moment or two, caught off-guard, she can only stare at him. Then she gathers herself. “Ah. That’s a shame, don’t you think?”

His smile is no more than a flicker. “Not necessarily,” he says.

Diego eases his apartment door shut and slips off his shoes before padding along to the bedroom. His consideration is unneeded, as it turns out; Emilia is awake, waiting for him. He is glad. He is a little excited and needs to talk. The curtains are not closed, and beyond the glass the night seems upside down. The sky is a blank, its darkness tinged with dirty orange like a stained concrete floor. Below it, the constellation of city lights glitters and shifts.

“Yes,” Diego says, gazing out. “I’d say that it went very well, Emilia. Very well indeed.”

He unknots his bow tie and tosses it on the floor. He undoes the top button of his white shirt and turns to her. He takes his jacket off and holds it in front of him by its shoulders.

“Otello is the bull, you see? And I play him like a matador.”

He shakes the jacket, rippling it.

“The big black bull is very powerful, of course. But very stupid and dreadfully nearsighted. He sees only the cape, and when he charges it, I execute an elegant
valenca.
”

He holds the jacket out from the left side of his body, then sweeps it backward, twirling on tiptoe, his back straight.

“The bull’s horns pass within inches but do not touch me. The stink of him is strong in my nostrils. He lumbers past, baffled by the disappearance of his enemy. He turns back, grunting and drooling. Now I go down on one knee, as if in submission, holding the cape out with one hand, so. He charges again and . . .”

Diego, in a slow elegant gesture like a stage courtier’s, wafts the jacket behind him.

“He misses me again. And so we do this dance of death and he never really sees who his partner is. It would be sad if it weren’t so beautiful. And tonight, Emilia, no less a person than Desmerelda Brabanta handed me the cape.”

He reads a question in her eyes.

“No, I’m not drunk, my love. Absolutely not. I sipped one glass of champagne all evening. I was, after all, on duty. Keeping a sharp eye on my client’s interests. Especially his new one.”

M
ICHAEL
C
ASS TRUDGES
across the swept white sand of the private beach to where Otello lies on a lounger. Cass is wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, sunglasses, and a nine-millimeter automatic pistol in a shoulder holster, incongruous under the unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt. Otello looks up when his bodyguard’s big shadow falls across him.

“Your tan’s coming along nicely,” Cass says, and to please him, Otello chuckles. Cass, whose grandparents were German or maybe Swiss, is blond and liberally coated with sunblock, despite which his fuzzy knees are blushed like peaches.

“What’s hap’nin’?”

“Nothing much,” Cass says. He perches on the lounger alongside Otello’s and squints at the horizon. “I was just talking to the old guy does the gardens, you know? He says there’s a storm brewing.”

The sky is cloudless, a vast blue umbrella with the sun burning a hole in its center.

“No way,” Otello says.

“That’s what I said. And he says, ‘See that little old island over there? When the water runs kinda milky behind it, there’s a storm coming. Any boats out when that happens, they come back real quick.’”

Otello lifts his head. The nameless island is a greenish-gray stain at the foot of the sky. On their first day at the Blue Horizon, he’d asked the hotel manager about it, wondering if it was possible to go out there. The manager had looked at him a little strangely and said, “Why?” And yes, there is now a faint stream of whiteness beyond it, like low-lying smoke.

“What’s Diego up to?”

Cass shrugs. “I dunno. He’s out on his balcony, doing stuff on his laptop.”

“Working,” Otello says.

“Or cruising porn sites.”

“Hey.”

“Only kidding.”

Now Otello turns onto his side, supporting himself on his elbow. He studies Michael’s profile. “Listen, are you guys okay? I know Diego was against you coming down South with me, but I thought that was all sorted out. You don’t still have issues, do you?”

Cass puts his forearms on his knees and stares at the sand between his feet. “Nah, not really. We’re cool.”

“Good. ’Cause I need him. Honest agents aren’t that easy to come by, you know? You don’t have to like him, Michael, but you do have to work with him.”

“No problem,” Michael says, keeping his eyes down. “He’s okay.”

“Yeah. He’s okay. Like, the hustling he did, getting this together. Keeping the lid on where we were going. Persuading the hotel to be ‘closed for refurbishment.’ Arranging the security.”

“Yep. Guess so.”

“Which means,” Otello says, “you’ve got it nice and easy, right? Three days in this tropical paradise so far and no reporters disguised as waiters, no guys hanging out of trees with cameras, none of that stuff. Remember that time back home when we went out to Santa Louisa, how on the first morning we got to the beach and there were, what, five boats full of photographers, and you had to borrow an outboard and have, like, a small naval battle to get rid of them?”

Michael Cass smiles at the memory. “Yeah, I kind of enjoyed that.”

After a while he says, “Listen, I’m going back up there to sit in the shade. You want me to fetch you anything while I’m on my feet?”

An hour later, the thatch on the sun shelters begins to rustle and softly hiss. Otello sits up and sees that the horizon now looks slightly pixillated, like an over-enlarged photograph. A couple of guys from the hotel appear and begin gathering up the loungers.

“Big wind comin’, Señor Otello,” one of them says. “Maybe you wanna go up on the terrace. Soon the sand gonna whip, take the skin off you.”

By the time Otello has been up to his suite, showered and dressed, and gone down to the bar, Cypress Island has undergone a change. The sea is moving fast and lumpish past the swirling beach, and the palms are swinging their ragged heads. The sun flickers behind veils of racing cloud.

Sitting just inside the half-closed doors of the terrace, Otello and Michael Cass turn their heads when Diego speaks from behind them.

“I logged on to the coast guard website. Checked out the weather pattern. This is the edge of a hurricane on its way to beat the Caribbean up. It looks like a damn great tadpole on the map, and this is just the tickle of its tail.”

“Fairly decent sort of a tickle,” Cass observes as a plastic beer crate tumbles through a flower bed.

“Yep,” Diego says. “At a guess, I’d say that tonight’s beach barbecue is a nonstarter.” He leans forward, a hand on the back of each chair. “How about a game of cards? Black Maria, say a dollar a point? Okay, okay. Fifty cents a point. Jeez, you tight-fisted northerners. Beer?”

Otello is almost fifty dollars up, Michael about twenty, and Diego is therefore well down. It interests Otello that someone so cautious about everything else is inclined to bet unwisely on a hand of cards. It is reassuring, in a way.

The lamps have come on, and Michael is dealing when Diego says, “My God, did you ever see a sunset that color?”

Beyond the glass the sky is a livid green behind sallow streamers of cloud. It is so unlikely, it might be painted scenery for the last act of a melodrama. Front of stage, the beach is dissolving into sand devils, miniature whirlwinds that set off in pursuit of the gray running sea.

A waiter enters. “Happens this time of year,” he says. “She’ll blow over real quick. Two, three hours, maybe. Tomorrow you won’t believe it happened. All will be calm again.” He smiles. “It refreshes the sea.”

A minute or two later, the card players are again distracted when their waiter and the barman and the assistant manager go to the windows and argumentatively share a pair of binoculars. Otello gets up and wanders over to them.

“What’s the excitement?”

“A boat,” the assistant manager says. “Not the ferry. The ferry don’t put out in this weather. Got to be some crazy
americano.
They don’t think anything got the right to stop them doing what they wanna do.”

The barman has the binoculars now. “There she is,” he says. “Wow, look at her buck. Jus’ north of the island. Man, I bet they losin’ their lunch.”

“Mind if I look?” Otello asks, and the barman passes him the binoculars. Otello fiddles with the focus and finds the boat, a ghostly wedge that comes and goes between walls of water. A launch of some sort. The sort that rich people sit on to drink cocktails.

“Where’s it heading?”

The assistant manager says, “Well, if it’s got any sense, it’ll come here and wait out the weather.” Struck by a thought, he looks at Otello. “You expecting someone, señor?”

“No.”

“Good. Like I thought, some dumb gringo. What time would you like dinner?”

The star, the agent, and the bodyguard are at a table in the softly lit restaurant when a subdued clamor occurs in the lobby. Cass, who is facing that way, looks up and freezes with a forkful of steak en route to his open mouth.

Desmerelda Brabanta stands in the doorway. Her hands are deep in the pockets of a yellow waterproof jacket that is far too big for her and conceals whatever other clothes she is wearing, if any. Her long legs are bare and wet, and the canvas sneakers on her feet are soaked a dark shade of blue. Her saturated hair is golden serpents; her eyes are brighter than anything else in the room. She looks like something timeless that the sea has treasured while waiting for the human who deserves her. At her back, several members of the hotel staff cluster, smiling and uncertain like film extras who have not been told what to do.

Otello and Cass get to their feet. Diego lays his knife and fork neatly parallel on his plate and remains sitting. He has seen Desmerelda, but now his eyes are fixed upon the remains of the crayfish he was eating, almost as though they might reveal the reason for this spectacular intrusion. But he is smiling.

Desmerelda is the one who breaks the silence.

“Lord,” she says, speaking exclusively to Otello, “that was a rough ride. I need to get out of these wet clothes. Do you think you might have something that would fit me?”