Exposure (22 page)

P
OLICE
C
APTAIN
H
ILARIO
Nemiso’s intolerance for unsolved cases was one of the things that distinguished him from his colleagues and made him unpopular. Like his striking appearance, this had a great deal to do with his father.

In the late summer of 1977, a navy patrol vessel on a routine exercise off the southern coast spotted a drifting twelve-foot fishing boat with nobody on board. This was about eight miles out from the isolated village of Salinas. When three sailors in the ship’s inflatable raft went to investigate, they found that the boat’s diesel engine was in good working order and that there was plenty of fuel in its tank. There were also several splashes of blood aft of the boat. When the nets were hauled in, they held a catch of a good many fish and a man’s body. Back in Salinas, the body was quickly identified as that of an immigrant Japanese fisherman named Takashi. He had never learned much Spanish, and now he never would. The boat was named
Hilario,
after Takashi’s son, who was eleven years old at the time. Two police officers came down from Santiago. They conducted a cursory investigation, went away again, and wrote a report that was filed and forgotten.

Takashi’s wife was a handsome woman of mixed African and native blood who had many envious admirers. After the policemen had gone away, she laid her husband’s body in his boat and cremated it on the beach, as was the local custom. When her son was eighteen, he made his way to Santiago and got jobs laboring on building sites and went to night school. When he was twenty-one, he joined the police. He proved to be a very good policeman and was soon recruited to the federal force and sent to the capital. There he won, first, promotion and, second, enemies. He was efficient, introspective, and apparently incorruptible. He did not seem to know where to draw the line. He did not seem to understand the difference between murders that mattered and murders that didn’t. He insisted on conducting investigations beyond the point where they started to have political implications.

This brought him to the attention of Hernán Gallego, who was at that time commissioner of police. Gallego’s intelligent response to the Nemiso problem was to promote him to captain and give him his own department. It was called the Special Investigations Unit and had its own budget. A tried and tested tactic: put someone who’s too good at his job in charge of something, and he’ll become so enmeshed in bureaucracy that he’ll get nothing done.

Astonishingly, it didn’t work. Nemiso somehow did all the paperwork and attended all the interminable interdepartmental meetings while continuing to dig up dirt about disappeared kids and other undesirables. So when Gallego was appointed minister of internal security, one of the first things he did was merge Nemiso’s unit and its budget into the CCB, the Central Criminal Bureau, where there were people who could keep an eye on him and thwart his excessive and inconvenient zeal.

Nola Levy was one of the very few people whom Captain Nemiso respected, and she was one of the very few people who called him by his first name. They’d met when she was still a crime reporter. Her seriousness of purpose, which made her the butt of her fellow reporters’ jokes, impressed him. In time he began to provide her, privately, with information — the kind of information his bosses would have preferred to keep out of the public domain. Sometimes when Nola’s articles caused serious political embarrassment, there would be searches for the source of the leaks, but Nemiso did not come under suspicion. He was considered to be too much of a stickler for the rules, too much of a prig, to do anything underhanded.

Nola and the captain did not often meet face-to-face. When they did, it was usually in a car. On rare occasions, like this one, he visited her apartment after dark.

“Only five young female homicides in the last eight days. Five
recorded
homicides, that is. Three have been positively identified. Either of the other two could be your girl, although I very much hope not.”

He opened the large envelope he was carrying and passed the photographs over to Nola. The second set was of a girl who was beautiful even in death.

“It could be her,” Nola said. “In fact, I have an awful feeling that it is. All that hair, like the boy’s. The clothes aren’t right, though.”

“I think you said that no one actually saw her leave the place she lived in. She might not have been dressed the way the other girl said she was.”

“Maybe. But I rather doubt that she had an extensive wardrobe.”

“No. The timing fits, though. She died five nights ago. Strangulation with a thin ligature. Unusually, no sexual assault.”

“Where was she found?”

“In an alleyway off the Calle Flor.”

“Where’s that?”

“In the Triangle.”

“Ah,” Nola said.

Nemiso looked at his watch. “I think we should show these pictures to the people that know Bianca,” he said.

“What, now?”

“Why not? I’ll drive us over there.”

Nola glanced at her watch. “Okay. I’ll call Ramirez and let him know we’re coming.”

She paused with the phone in her hand. “Hilario? I think it might be a good idea if Paul Faustino came with us.”

Nemiso considered this.

“He knows the boy better than we do,” Nola said. “And if . . .”

“Yes. Very well.”

La Prensa was closed when Faustino, Levy, and Nemiso arrived, but there were beads of light edging the shutters. Fidel let them in, then led them to the table where Nina sat and laid his hand on hers. Faustino made the introductions. When Nemiso displayed the photographs, there was no need for him to ask the question. Nina covered the lower part of her face with her hands, stifling a cry of pain that made Faustino flinch. She closed her eyes, but this did not prevent her tears. Fidel put his arm around her shoulders and gazed at Nemiso with doleful rage in his eyes. After perhaps a minute, Nina straightened up and wiped her face with her hands. She glanced at the photographs again, then pushed them roughly across the tabletop toward Nemiso as though they were works of vicious pornography. The policeman shuffled them together with the closeup of Bianca’s face uppermost.

Ramirez had told the truth,
Faustino thought.
She was — had been — a very beautiful child.

“I have to ask you formally,” Nemiso said. “Is this the girl named Bianca who has been living here under your protection?”

“Yeah,” Fidel said. “It is.” He sounded as though he had a throat full of catarrh.

“Could you tell me her full name?”

“No.”

“You don’t know it?”

“No.” Fidel stood suddenly. “Jesus Christ,” he said fiercely. “Jesus bloody Christ. I knew, I knew . . .” He stopped himself and turned to look at the back door of the bar, working his fingers over his mustache. “Someone’s going to have to tell Bush. And Felicia. Dear God.” He inhaled deeply, as if preparing himself for the task.

Fear took hold of Faustino, too. He cleared his throat, needing to speak but not knowing what words to use.

“No,” Nina said sharply. “Not tonight. Why wake them to . . . to this? Let them be. We’ll tell them in the morning. Together.”

Fidel looked a question at Nemiso, who said, “I think Señora Ramirez is right. But I’m afraid there will have to be a formal identification of Bianca’s body. By the next of kin.”

Fidel looked blank for a moment, then said, “What, you mean Bush? Oh, no, man. That’s too much. It’d kill him.”

“It has to be done, I’m afraid,” Nemiso said.

“So I’ll do it.”

Nemiso shook his head. “No. I’m sorry.”

“That’s shit,” Fidel said. “That’s cruel, man.”

“Yes. And I think, for several reasons, it would be best if we got it over with sooner rather than later. I’ll arrange things for tomorrow afternoon. Say two o’clock? I assume you’ll want to accompany the boy. I’ll send a car to collect you.”

Faustino noticed the look that passed between Fidel and Nina. Later, in Nemiso’s car, he said, “I don’t think it’s such a great idea to send a police car tomorrow. The boy’s going to be badly freaked out. I think it might be better if someone he knows picks him up.”

“You’re volunteering to do this, señor?”

“Yeah,” Faustino said bitterly.

F
AUSTINO AND THE
taxi driver had some difficulty finding the place.

“I don’ get much call to come down here,” the driver said unhappily.

It was close to two o’clock when they pulled up at the bar, and Fidel was standing outside it, scanning the street. It seemed to take him several blank seconds to recognize Faustino when he got out of the cab. Then he managed something that approximated a smile.

“We appreciate you doing this, señor,” he said. “Bush isn’t too good.”

“No,” Faustino said.

“Okay. Well. I’ll get them.” He turned toward the door, then back again. “It’s okay if I come along too?”

“Of course. I’d be grateful for it.”

It was Nina who appeared first. She held the door open, and Felicia led Bush out by the hand. It was hard for Faustino to look at the boy. He was more like a thin old man in disguise, or a victim of some sudden wasting sickness.

“Bush?”

“Maestro,” he said, almost inaudibly, and nodded. And kept nodding, like a doll with a spring for a neck.

Faustino’s breath snagged at the bottom of his throat, and for an awful moment he thought he might moan, or worse. Instead he stepped briskly up to the boy and put his right arm around his shoulders.

“Come on,” he said. Then added stupidly, hopefully, “You’ll be okay.” He held the back door of the cab open and Fidel got in, then Bush, awkwardly.

Felicia said, “I’m comin’ too.”

“Right,” Faustino said. “Good. Thank you.” He got into the front passenger seat.

The driver said, “That everybody?”

Nobody spoke. It was almost unbearable. At the lights on Buendía, the driver jockeyed the cab over into the left-hand lane and said, “You’re that Paul Faustino, right?”

“No,” Faustino said. He’d been wondering if Bush or Felicia had ever been in a car before. He’d been wanting to turn to look at them and been afraid to.

The driver said, “No? Well, you sure look like him. You know the guy I mean?”

The police mortuary did not announce itself. Two of its three stories were underground. Its black glass doors parted automatically. Hilario Nemiso was talking into his cell phone when they opened.

It was difficult to settle upon an order of parade. Bush was the important one, but also the most unreliable. Jittery dread came off him like waves through the conditioned air. So Nemiso led the way down the stairs, with Fidel alongside him. Felicia and Bush followed, then Faustino, who didn’t know if he would block the boy if he tried to flee or run with him up and away from the horror into the hot light of day.

They came down into a corridor that ended at a pair of heavy-looking doors with scratched plastic windows set into them. There was a telephone on the wall, and Nemiso spoke into it. The doors opened, and a woman came out wearing white clothes, a white paper hat, and, appallingly, white rubber boots. She stood clasping her hands in front of her like a weird and solemn usherette.

Nemiso turned to Bush and said gently, “Are you ready?”

The boy gasped, perhaps an attempt at a word, and managed no more than three paces toward the door before his legs gave way. He stumbled sideways and leaned for support on a metal wastebin strapped to the wall. The bin had the words
NONCLINICAL WASTE
on it. Faustino was the first to reach him. He held the boy awkwardly from behind, his hands under the kid’s arms.

“Oh, man, oh shit, man. I can’ do this. I jus’ can’ do this.” The words were snags in Bush’s shallow breathing.

“Okay, okay,” Faustino murmured. He looked around, dismayed that his peripheral vision was blurry and wet. There was a bench against the wall, and he led the boy to it, supporting him.

Nemiso stood with his hands behind his back and his head lowered. Felicia stepped up to him. “I’ll do it,” she said. “You can put me down as her sister if tha’s what you gotta do.”

“Okay,” Nemiso said after a moment. “Thank you.”

Fidel was standing close to Felicia. She reached out and took his hand. It was the first time she’d ever done that, and although Fidel was startled by it, he held on tight. Nemiso nodded to the woman in white. She held the door open and Felicia and Fidel followed Nemiso through it.

It was a big room, but most of it was closed off by gray curtains hung from rails fixed to the ceiling. The cart was gray, too. The white bundle on it looked too small to be Bianca. The white usherette went to the end of it and pulled down the sheet just as far as the chin.

It was a trick. Bianca was asleep. Apart from the grayish pallor to her skin, she looked just like she always did asleep: serious but untroubled.

Fidel groaned like someone disappointed by a joke and turned away. Felicia stared down silently for several seconds, then nodded, spilling her tears. She reached out and stroked Bianca’s left temple with the backs of her fingers. It was shockingly cold.

“You fool girl,” she whispered. “You fool, fool girl.”

Nemiso did not lead Felicia and Fidel back to the corridor. He took them through a door and into a room lined with numbered metal lockers. On a steel-topped table there were zip-sealed clear plastic bags containing items of clothing.

“I’d like you to look at these,” Nemiso said. “These are the clothes Bianca was wearing when she was found.”

Felicia picked up a bag containing a reversible hoodie, cream on the inside, slate-gray and cream stripes on the outside. Even through the plastic she could feel how soft and new it was. She put it down and took up another bag: a pair of gray canvas sneakers with striped gray-and-cream laces.

She looked at Nemiso blankly. “It ain’ her stuff,” she said. “You got things mixed up somehow.”

“No, I promise you. These are what Bianca was wearing. You don’t recognize them? Do you, Señor Ramirez?”

Fidel gingerly picked up a couple of items. “No. Never seen her wearing anything like this. All this stuff looks, like, brand-new. And kinda expensive.”

“Yes. As far as we can establish, it is all new. There are no stains, marks, rips. It seems likely that Bianca was the first person to wear any of it. It’s also strange that there are no manufacturer’s labels.”

Felicia found herself crying again and fiercely wiped her eyes with her hands. “It don’ make no sense,” she said.

Nemiso waited until the girl had collected herself. “Felicia, I have to ask you this. Did Bianca ever steal things?”

“Like what? She ain’ got nothin’. You think she got a whole buncha nice clothes stashed somewhere I don’ know about? No. No way.” She calmed herself a little. “Anyway, are you sayin’ like she went out that day, stole all this stuff from some high-class place uptown? An’ changed into it all, an’ went walkin’ around in it back down the Triangle? Man, tha’s jus’ stupid. Not even Bianca’s crazy enough to do that. There’s people would kill you for this kinda —”

She stopped.

Nemiso nodded. “Yes. But she wasn’t robbed. And there’s also this.” He took from his pocket another plastic bag, smaller than the others, and put it on the table. There was money in it, green and blue bills, folded.

“A hundred dollars,” he said. “It was inside Bianca’s brassiere. Or, I should say, the bikini top she was wearing.”