Exposure (27 page)

O
TELLO WAKES UP
on the couch with a mouth that tastes of rats’ bedding. His watch tells him that it’s just before ten. It takes him a while to work out whether it’s day or night. Day. He gets to his feet, wincing slightly at the fiery little twinge that runs up the back of his ankle, and limps to the small window at the far end of the L-shaped living room. He eases the curtain open a little, just enough for a one-eyed view over the young trees to the security fence. The daylight sticks a dagger into his hangover. The mob is still there, of course. Smaller than before, perhaps? Maybe not.

He treks to the master bedroom. There’s a travel bag on the bed. Desmerelda is in the bathroom, taking toiletries from the cabinet and dropping them into a cosmetics case. She has to stand on tiptoe to reach the top shelf; her big belly rests on the basin. Otello finds this both slightly grotesque and very poignant. Her stretched calves are lovely.

“What are you doing?”

Without looking at him, and calmly, she says, “I’ve had enough. I thought this would be over by now.” She straightens, one hand supporting the baby. “But there doesn’t seem to be any end to it, does there? I’m sorry, d’you want to use the bathroom?”

She goes through to the bedroom. Otello empties his bladder and brushes his teeth. The buzz of the electric toothbrush vibrates to the top of his skull.

She is applying her makeup. Carefully and slowly, as if getting ready to face the cameras. He leans against the door frame, looking at her reflection.

“What are you doing?” (Didn’t he just say that?)

She jiggles the mascara brush in its tube. “I’m going down to the villa.”

“You can’t.”

She does the upper lashes of her left eye.

“Dezi.”

“Yes, I can. I have to. I feel poisoned. I want to be outdoors. In daylight. In the garden.” She says this one lash at a time.

“It’ll be the same there — you know that. They’ll be there as well.”

“Farther away. A mile away. Outside the gates. They won’t be able to get to me.”

He presses his fingers into his forehead. There seem to be thousands of tiny knots beneath the skin.

“Dezi, the baby is due in eight weeks.”

“Seven.”

“Okay, seven. You told me you weren’t supposed to fly.”

“Michael’s driving me down.”

“
What?
Dezi, it’s
nine hours
by car. You can’t do that. And, and, what, you think Michael can just come and collect you, like it’s a normal day? They’re still all out there, you know.”

“Michael’s bringing the Hummer. He says if they don’t get out of the way, he’ll run them over.”

She turns her attention to her right eye.

“Dezi, this is stupid. Crazy. I’m going to call Michael, tell him to forget it.”

She lowers her hands and looks at him in the mirror. “No,” she says. “You’re not going to do that.”

The expression on her face hasn’t changed, but somehow everything else has. It’s like the very air is full of cracks that he can see another picture through.

He sits on the edge of the bed, not looking at her.

“All right,” he says after a while. She has moved on to lipstick. “I’ll come with you.”

She kisses her lips together, checks them, and laboriously, hefting the baby, turns to face him.

“No.”

“What?”

“I’m going without you. That’s the whole point. I need to be away from all this. And
this
”— she makes a loose gesture toward the world waiting outside —“is all about
you.
I’ve done nothing. I haven’t hidden pictures of girls on my computer. I haven’t been dragged off by the police to answer questions about the murder of a child. I’m
having
a child. I refuse, I absolutely refuse, to be a victim anymore. I’ve been humiliated for the first time in my life because of you. Made to look a fool because of you.
Imprisoned
for the first time in my life because of you. So what I need to do, what I’m going to do, is go to the one place where I feel, where I can . . . not be part of all this. Understand? I need time to get ready for Raúl. If you come with me, you’ll bring all of this shit with you and I won’t be able to do it.”

He gapes at her. His mouth is actually slack. He looks like a baffled boy on the verge of rage or tears.

She says, “I need some space, Otello. And I need you to stay here, to protect me, to put an end to all this. Can you do that?”

“I dunno. I don’t understand what’s going on. I need you, Dezi. Don’t leave me.”

She says, “Do you love me?”

It’s tears.

“Yes,” he says. “You know I do.”

“Then let me go. Just for a while.”

He nods, eventually. “I didn’t do anything,” he says.

She stands and walks around the huge distance of the bed and holds her hands out to him. “Yes, you did. You made me happy. You got me pregnant. Come on. Get up.”

He does, somehow, and she leads him out to the huge swathes of curtain that separate them from the world, and before he can stop her, she presses the switch that opens them. They draw apart and the gray day outside is instantly spangled with flashes of light from walkways and balconies and boat decks. She slides the glass doors open and steps out onto the balcony, pulling him after her. Voices call, yell, their names. Cameras flash like a restless constellation of stars. At the rail she stops and turns to face him.

“Kiss me,” she says, reaching her right arm over his shoulder and pulling his face down to hers. “Come on, kiss me.”

He does. It is awkward-looking because of Raúl being between them. He has to stoop over and down to her. Their lips, their mouths, meet. Howls and whoops rise from below. The daylight is obliterated by camera light. A million front pages are born at that instant. They will show Otello and Dezi’s parting kiss. They will show Desmerelda looking normally fabulous and her husband wearing a creased white T-shirt and pale gray boxer shorts. They will show her perfectly manicured left hand giving the world the finger.

After she and Michael have gone, Otello sits for a while. His thoughts are like a child pursued down an alleyway, seeking escape but finding only walls, barriers. The conclusion he comes to in the end is that he is hungry, so he goes to the freezer and takes out a pizza and puts it into the microwave. The oven pings while he is sitting at the breakfast table, startling him. He cuts half the pizza into neat wedges and eats two of them. Then he goes to the fridge and takes out a bottle of white wine. After three glasses he loses interest in the pizza and idly picks bits from the top of it. Shrimp. Artichoke. He finishes the wine.

Later, he wakes up on their bed. His phone is going off. Then it stops. He stares at the ceiling for a while, then swings his legs off the bed and walks a little unsteadily into the dressing room. He pulls open a drawer and scoops up handfuls of her underwear and spills the silky garments over his face like water.

He calls her. Her phone is off.

When Michael Cass plowed through the storm of light and noise outside the security gates, he left a good deal of confusion in his wake. Despite the smoked glass of the vehicle’s windows, it was possible to make out that there was only one passenger in the back, and that it was Desmerelda Brabanta. Or was it?

“Maybe it’s a decoy, man.”

“Nah.”

“Could be.”

“Otello was down on the floor between the seats. I bet ya.”

The paparazzi army divides. Several cars and half a dozen motorcycles set off in pursuit of the huge and sinister vehicle.

Cass makes a dummy run north through the suburbs rather than east toward the coast. He drives steadily, mindful of Desmerelda’s condition, and soon his pursuers are clustered close behind him. He chooses busy single-lane streets, minimizing the opportunities for the paparazzi to come alongside.

Otello pours another shot of rum into his Coke and calls Diego’s home number, then his cell. He gets the answering service on both. He can’t think of a message, so he hangs up.

Desmerelda pulls herself upright. “Michael?”

“Yeah,” Cass says. “I know.”

They’re on Buendía now, still heading north. He has been changing lanes randomly and varying his speed, but he cannot prevent the hunt from drawing level from time to time. Now, again, he catches camera flash in the corner of his eye.

Desmerelda’s voice is slightly high-pitched, but not panicky. “Can we go any faster?”

“I don’t think that’s gonna help. You might want to consider lying across the seats.”

“I can’t do that. I’m the wrong shape.”

“Yeah, I s’pose you are. Bear with me, Dezi. I’m gonna pull off the road in a bit and see if I can reason with these guys.”

He sees the place he has been looking for: a cheap and cheerful café popular with long-distance drivers, its frontage hung with a string of blue and red lightbulbs. There are a few cars and pickups out front, but Cass eases the Hummer down the wide, potholed track to where the big trucks park. The paparazzi follow, hanging back, uncertain. Cass drives at walking speed until he finds a space between two huge trailers and pulls into it and stops. He turns the engine off and reaches across to take something out of the glove compartment.

“This shouldn’t take a minute,” he says.

He gets out and locks the doors. The pursuers have halted in a ragged formation behind the row of trucks, their motors idling. Cass strolls toward them between the towering trailers. He holds the ice pick up behind his right forearm, out of sight. The nearest car is a green Honda with two men in it. He stoops as if to speak to the driver. Then he displays the ice pick briefly before driving it into the wall of the Honda’s front tire. When he pulls it out, there is a very satisfactory hiss. The driver starts to open his door, yelling, “You son of —”

Cass steps back and slams the door shut with the sole of his foot. Then he stabs the rear tire and proceeds to the next car, a Ford. The fat man behind the wheel gets a good look at the ice pick, fumbles the car into reverse, and hurriedly backs off. He slams into a motorbike, toppling it. The motorbike driver starts to yell something about his leg and his camera but Cass can’t quite make out what it is because the man is wearing one of those helmets that cover the whole head. Cass gives the front wheel of the Ford the ice pick treatment and straightens up.

The remaining car and the bikes are attempting to maneuver themselves away from him in the space between the lines of trucks. They’re not doing very well because they are watching him rather than each other. Cass strolls closer to them and puts his left fist on his hip, holding his jacket open so that the gun in his shoulder holster is clearly visible. He stays where he is until they have sorted themselves out and sped away.

Ten minutes later Cass takes the next exit off Buendía, crosses the bridge over it, and returns onto the southbound lane. At the Carrer Circular he gets onto the East Coast Highway. The low sky has taken on a threatening purplish intensity, but far ahead of them the cloud ends in an almost perfectly straight line above a realm of golden light.

Cass grins happily. “Well, it looks like we’re heading in the right direction.”

Desmerelda doesn’t answer. He glances over his shoulder and sees that she is asleep.

L
ATE IN THE
afternoon, the concierge is having a sneaky beer with his brother-in-law, Sal, who is in maintenance, when the phone buzzes. The light on the switchboard tells him the call is from the penthouse.

“Hey,” he says, pointing a finger upward. “It’s him.” He picks up the handset. “Señor.”

He listens, frowning. “Which ones, señor? Okay, sure. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes?”

He hangs up. “Guess what? The man wants the newspapers. All of them.”

Sal pulls his mouth down at the corners. “I wouldn’t, if it was me.”

“Nor me,” the concierge says. “No way.” He takes his car keys out of the desk drawer and holds them out. “You wanna go? He tips well, usually.”

The man’s hair is dripping onto the collar of his overalls and the edges of the newspapers are wet, so Otello supposes it must be raining. He hands over a twenty-dollar bill and takes the bundle awkwardly because he forgot to put his rum and Coke down before answering the door.

When he has spread the papers out on the floor, scores of Otellos look up at him. He does not recognize them all. He backs away, refills his glass, takes a long swig from it to steady himself. Then he gets onto his hands and knees and crawls among the newspaper pages, examining them.

Here he is on a flight of steps, his hand raised as if to deflect something thrown at his head.

Here he is with Dezi. He has never seen this picture before. She looks somber. She’s wearing dark glasses and a big hat. Dezi is elsewhere on the floor, too. Pregnant in most of the pictures. Dezi again. And again.

Here he is with his arms around Bianca Diaz and another young girl. What? No, it’s not her. She’s over there, and over there, and here. This is another girl. Years ago, an orphanage in Espirito, was it? Maybe.

Here he is laughing with someone . . . My God, it’s Nestor Brabanta.

But in most of the pictures he looks insane. Wild, ferocious, eyes wide or tight shut, teeth exposed, howling, his clenched fists in front of his face. Primitive. Murderous. In close-up.

Otello is so mesmerized, so appalled, by these images that it takes him several seconds to understand that he is looking at himself celebrating goals. For some reason he finds this funny, and giggles. His giggling swells into full-blown laughter, and soon his eyes and nasal passages are wet. Tears fall onto the newsprint, blurring it. When the fit passes, he wipes his face on the hem of his T-shirt and tips more rum into his glass, spilling a little when he hiccups.

He returns to the papers and tries to read.

What’s the story? His eyes slide from page to page. Nothing joins up; nothing makes sense. It’s just people saying stuff, making stuff up.

There
is
no story. Of course there isn’t! He could have told them that! He told
her
that. But she wouldn’t listen.

BIANCA A NATURAL, SAYS HER PHOTOGRAPHER

Bianca Diaz, the murdered teenager linked to Otello, could have gone on to be a supermodel, according to top fashion lensman David Bilbao.

“It’s a tragedy,” he said. “She was one of those faces that the camera loves. I was so shocked when

OTELLO HAS DAMAGED
RIALTO’S REPUTATION, SAYS

Says who? The headline runs onto the next page. But he cannot find the next page. He swivels around on his knees, looking for it among the scattered and crumpled sheets of paper. He is distracted by the photograph of his wife in Michael’s arms.

How far will they have gotten? He looks at his watch, but it’s not there.

OTELLO MYSTERY BOOSTS SALES OF PAFF!

SHAKESPEARE TIGHT-LIPPED ON THE OTELLO AFFAIR

CHILD PORN A BILLION-DOLLAR BIZ

Picture of the Duke, da Venecia, in
La Nación.
What’s he got to say, then?

The Rialto chairman, Umberto da Venecia, yesterday yielded to mounting pressure and made his first public comment on the increasingly wild speculation surrounding the club’s star player, Otello. On Monday the international striker was questioned by police investigating the murder of a teenage girl, triggering massive media interest.

“I will not comment on the case itself,” da Venecia said, “except to point out that Otello has not been charged with any crime, and therefore there is no question of his having been suspended from the team, despite such allegations in the press. Otello continues to have our full support.”

Blah blah . . .

On the subject of their top goalscorer being dropped for their next game, da Venecia said, “Otello is injured. It is as simple as that. If he were fit, he would be playing.”

Otello reads these words twice, squinting. They were slithery, coming and going in and out of focus. Some were clearer than others.
Murder. Crime. Suspended. Support.

He gets upright on his knees. Yesterday, an hour ago, he couldn’t have. Not without hurting, the hot wire burning up to his calf.

Yes! A drink.
Salud!

He wants to tell her that it doesn’t hurt anymore. That none of it does. That he’s read it all, that it’s nothing, that it’s full of absolutely nothing. Some sort of joke. We took it too seriously.

That’s it, exactly:
we took it all too seriously.

It strikes him as a major insight.
We took it all too seriously.
So important. Terrible that he hadn’t thought of it earlier. She wouldn’t have gone.

He uses the arm of the sofa to lever himself to his feet. Where’s the phone? He pictures her, answering. Him speaking the words that are as bright as neon. Her listening, then saying, “Michael, I was wrong. It’s all okay. Turn the car around. Take me home.”

At the third attempt he clicks on her number. Gets her lovely voice saying, “Hi. Sorry, but I can’t take your call at the moment. Leave me a message.”