Maya's Notebook: A Novel (24 page)

My appearance was an important
part of Brandon Lee
man’s business. I should seem innocent, straightforward, and fresh-faced, like the magnificent-looking girls working in the casinos. That way I’d inspire confidence and blend in with the atmosphere. He liked my hair white and very short, which gave me an almost masculine air. He had me wear an elegant man’s watch with a wide leather strap to cover the tattoo on my wrist, which I refused to have removed by laser, as he intended. In the shops he asked me to model the clothes he chose and was amused by my exaggerated poses. I hadn’t gained any weight, despite the junk food, which was my only nourishment, and the lack of exercise; I didn’t run anymore, as I always had, now that I had Joe Martin or Chino stuck to my heels.

On a couple of occasions Brandon Leeman took me to a suite in a hotel on the Strip, ordered champagne, and then wanted me to slowly undress, while he floated with his white lady and his glass of bourbon, without touching me. I did it shyly at first, but soon I realized it was like getting undressed alone in front of a mirror, because for the boss eroticism was limited to the needle and the glass. He told me many times that I was very lucky to be with him; other girls were exploited and beaten in massage parlors and brothels, never seeing the light of day. Did I know how many hundreds of thousands of sex slaves there were in the United States? Some came from Asia and the Balkans, but lots were American girls grabbed off the street, in subway stations, and at airports, or teenage runaways. They were kept doped and locked up, having to service thirty or more men a day, and if they refused they were given electric shocks; those poor things were invisible, disposable, worthless. There were places that specialized in sadism, where
the clients could torture the girls however they wanted, whip them, rape them, even kill them, if they paid enough. Prostitution was very profitable for organized crime rings, but a meat grinder for the women, who didn’t last long and always ended badly. “That’s for soulless bastards, Laura, and I’m a softhearted guy,” he’d tell me. “Behave yourself, don’t let me down. I’d be sorry to see you end up in that kind of thing.”

Later, when I began to connect apparently unrelated events, I became intrigued by that aspect of Brandon Leeman’s business. I didn’t see him mixed up in prostitution, except selling drugs to women who solicited, but he had mysterious dealings with pimps, which coincided with the disappearance of certain girls among his clientele. On several occasions I saw him with very young girls, recent addicts, lured to the building by his gentle manners and given free samples from the best of his personal reserves; he supplied them on credit for a couple of weeks, and then they wouldn’t come back, just vanished into thin air. Freddy confirmed my suspicions that they ended up being sold to the mafia; thus Brandon Leeman earned a cut without getting his hands too dirty.

The boss’s rules were simple,
and as long as I fulfilled my part of the deal, he fulfilled his. His first condition was that I avoid all contact with my family or anyone from my previous life, which was easy for me; I only missed my grandma, and since I planned to return to California soon, I
could wait. I wasn’t allowed to make new friends either, because the slightest indiscretion could jeopardize the fragile structure of his business, as he put it. On one occasion Chino told him he’d seen me talking to a woman by the gym door. Leeman grabbed me by the throat, forced me to my knees with unexpected strength, because I was taller and in better shape than he was. “Idiot! You stupid bitch!” he said, and slapped me twice across the face, red with rage. That should have set off alarm bells, but I didn’t manage to process what had happened; it was one of those increasingly frequent days when I couldn’t stitch my thoughts together.

After a little while he sent me to get dressed up because we were going to have dinner at a new Italian restaurant; I imagined it was his way of apologizing. I put on my little black dress and gold sandals, but I didn’t try to disguise my split lip or the marks on my cheeks with makeup. The restaurant turned out to be more agreeable than I’d expected: very modern, black glass, steel, and mirrors, no checked tablecloths or waiters disguised as gondoliers. We left our food almost untouched, but drank two bottles of Quintessa 2005, which cost an arm and a leg and helped to smooth things over. Leeman explained that he was under a lot of pressure; he’d been offered an opportunity in a fantastic but dangerous business. I assumed it was something to do with a two-day trip he’d recently taken, without saying where or taking along his associates.

“Now more than ever, a security breach could be fatal, Laura,” he told me.

“I spoke to that woman at the gym for less than five minutes about our yoga class. I don’t even know her name,
I swear, Brandon.”

“Don’t do it again. This time I’m going to forget it, but don’t you dare forget, understand? I need to trust my people, Laura. I get along well with you. You’ve got class—I like that—and you learn fast. We could do a lot of things together.”

“Like what?”

“I’ll tell you when the right moment arrives. You still need to prove yourself.”

That much-heralded moment arrived in September. From June to August I was still wandering around in a fog. No water came out of the pipes in the apartment, and the fridge was empty, but there were always more than enough drugs. I didn’t even notice how high I was all the time; taking two or three pills with vodka or lighting up a joint turned into automatic gestures that my brain didn’t even register. My level of consumption was tiny, compared to the rest of the people around me. I was doing it for fun and could give it up any time I wanted. I wasn’t an addict—that’s what I believed.

I got used to the sensation of floating, to the fog muddling my mind, to the impossibility of finishing a thought or expressing an idea, to seeing the words of the vast vocabulary I’d learned from my Nini vanish like smoke. In my rare glimmers of lucidity I remembered my plan to return to California, but told myself there’d be plenty of time for that. Time. Where did the hours hide away? They slipped through my fingers like salt. I was living in a holding pattern, but there was nothing to wait for, just another day exactly like the previous one, stretched out lethargically in front of the TV with Freddy. My only daytime chore
was to weigh out powders and crystals, count pills and seal plastic bags. That’s how August went.

At dusk I’d liven myself up with a couple of lines of coke and head over to the gym for a dip in the pool. I’d examine myself critically in the rows of mirrors in the changing room, searching for signs of the low life I was leading, but I didn’t see any; nobody would have suspected the perils of my past or the risks of my present. I looked like a student, just as Brandon Leeman wanted me to. Another line of cocaine, a couple of pills, a cup of very black coffee, and I was ready for my night shift. Maybe Brandon Leeman had other distributors in the daytime, but I never saw them. Sometimes he came with me, but as soon as I learned the routine and he knew he could trust me, he sent me out alone with his associates.

I was attracted by the noise, the lights, the colors, and the extravagance of the hotels and casinos, the tension of the gamblers playing the slot machines and at the card tables, the click-clack of the chips, the glasses crowned with orchids and paper parasols. My clients, very different from those in the street, had the brazenness of those who can count on impunity. The traffickers had nothing to fear either, as if there were a tacit accord in that city that they could break the law without facing the consequences. Leeman had arrangements with several police officers, who received their cut and left him in peace. I didn’t know them, and Leeman never told me their names, but I knew how much and when they had to be paid. “They’re a bunch of nasty, insatiable, damned pigs. You’ve really got to be careful with them—they’re capable of anything. They plant evidence to implicate innocent people, steal jewelry and
money on raids, keep half the drugs and weapons they confiscate, and protect each other. They’re corrupt, racist psychopaths. They’re the ones who should be behind bars,” the boss told me. The unhappy wretches who came to the building looking for drugs were prisoners of their addiction, in absolute poverty and irremediable loneliness; they barely survived, were persecuted, beaten, hidden in their underground holes like moles, exposed to the cruel blows of the law. For them there was no impunity, just suffering.

I had more than enough money, alcohol, and pills, all for the asking, but I didn’t have anything else: no family, friendship, or love, not even any sunshine in my life; we lived at night, like rats.

One day Freddy disappeared from
Brandon Leeman’s apartment, and we didn’t know anything about him until Friday, when we happened to run into Officer Arana, who I’d seen only a very few times, though on each occasion he always had some kind words for me. Freddy came up in the conversation, and the officer told us in passing that he’d been found seriously injured. The king of rap had ventured into enemy territory, and a gang beat him up and threw him in a Dumpster, thinking he was dead. Arana added for my
information that the city was divided up in zones controlled by different gangs, and a Latino like Freddy, even though he was half black, couldn’t go picking fights with black kids. “The boy’s got a bunch of arrest warrants pending, but jail would be fatal for him. Freddy needs help,” Arana told us as he left.

It wasn’t advisable for Brandon Leeman to go near Freddy, since the police already had their eye on him, but he went with me to visit him in the hospital. We went up to the fifth floor and wandered down corridors lit with fluorescent lights looking for his room, without anyone noticing us; we were just two more people in the constant coming and going of medical personnel, patients, and relatives, but Leeman crept along the walls, looking over his shoulder, and kept his hand in his pocket, where he carried his pistol. Freddy was in a ward with four beds, all occupied, strapped down and connected to various tubes; his face was swollen, his ribs broken, and one hand so crushed that they’d had to amputate two of his fingers. The kicks had burst one of his kidneys, and his urine in a bag hanging from the side of the bed was the color of rust.

The boss gave me permission to stay with the kid for as many hours a day as I wanted, as long as I carried out my work at night. At first they kept Freddy doped up on morphine and later they started giving him methadone, because in the state he was in he’d never have been able to withstand the withdrawal symptoms, but methadone wasn’t enough. He was desperate, like a trapped animal struggling against the straps on the bedrails. When none of the staff was looking I managed to inject heroin into the tube of his IV, as Brandon Leeman had instructed. “If you don’t do it,
he’ll die. What they’re giving him here is like water for Freddy,” he told me.

In the hospital I got
to know a black nurse, fifty-some years old, voluminous, with a loud, guttural voice that contrasted with the sweetness of her character and her magnificent name: Olympia Pettiford. She’d been on duty when they brought Freddy up from the operating room. “It pains me to see him so skinny and helpless—this child could be my grandson,” she said to me. I hadn’t made friends with anybody since I arrived in Las Vegas, with the exception of Freddy, who at this moment had one foot in the grave, and for once I disobeyed Brandon Leeman’s orders; I needed to talk to someone, and this woman was irresistible. Olympia asked me how I was related to the patient. To keep things simple, I told her I was his sister, and she didn’t seem surprised that a white girl with bleached blond hair, wearing expensive clothes, would be related to a dark-skinned, possibly juvenile delinquent drug addict.

The nurse took advantage of any spare moment to sit beside the boy and pray. “Freddy must accept Jesus in his heart. Jesus will save him,” she assured me. She had her own church on the west side of the city, and she invited me to evening services, but I explained that I worked nights and my boss was very strict. “Then you’ll have to come on Sunday, girl. After the service we Widows for Jesus offer the best breakfast in Nevada.” Widows for Jesus was a tiny but very active group, the backbone of her church. Being
widowed was not considered an indispensable prerequisite for belonging, it was enough to have lost a love in the past. “I, for example, am married at present, but I had two men walk out on me and a third who died, so technically I have been widowed,” Olympia told me.

The social worker assigned to Freddy by Child Protective Services was an underpaid older woman, with more cases on her desk than she could possibly attend to. She was fed up and counting the days until she could retire. Children passed through the services briefly. She placed them in a temporary home, and a short time later they came back, once again beaten up or raped. She came to see Freddy a couple of times and stayed to chat with Olympia, which is how I found out about my friend’s past.

Freddy was fourteen years old,
not twelve, as I’d thought, or sixteen, as he claimed. He’d been born in a Latino neighborhood in New York, of a Dominican mother and unknown father. His mother brought him to Nevada in a dilapidated vehicle belonging to her lover, a Paiute Indian, and an alcoholic like her. They camped here and there, moving if they had gasoline, accumulating traffic tickets and leaving a trail of debts in their wake. They both soon disappeared from Nevada, but someone found seven-month-old Freddy, abandoned in a gas station, malnourished and covered in bruises. He grew up in state homes, passed from hand to hand, never lasting in a foster home, with behavioral and personality problems, but he went to
school and was a good student. At the age of nine he was arrested for armed robbery, spent several months in a reformatory, and then dropped off the radar of both the police and Child Protective Services.

The social worker was supposed to find out how and where Freddy had been living for the last five years, but he pretended to be asleep or refused to answer her questions. He was afraid they’d put him in a rehabilitation program. “I wouldn’t survive a single day, Laura, you can’t imagine what it’s like. No rehabilitation, just punishment.” Brandon Leeman agreed and got ready to prevent it.