Exposure (3 page)

D
ESPITE ITS NAME,
the Triangle was a roughly rectangular section of the old part of the city, narrower at one end than the other. Its eastern and northern limits were formed by a section of the Avenida Buendía, the channel of ceaseless traffic that ran from the Centro out to the northern suburbs. Bush had no idea where it ended, if it ended at all. He had never been north of the Carrer Circular, which crossed Buendía in a jumble of traffic lights and tortuous overpasses. The Triangle’s other long flank was more vague; there, its undisciplined maze of streets washed up against new office buildings and high-rise apartments. The southern side of the Triangle was an interzone of struggling trees and threadbare grass that marked the beginning of the university campus.

The Triangle was a district in limbo. It was almost a slum, but not quite. It was scheduled for redevelopment, but not yet. It was old, but not in a way that attracted gringo tourists. The twisted streets had names, but there were no signs that announced them, because only the locals used them. On a street known as Trinidad, there was a bar called La Prensa. The Press. Many years ago it had been one. Books and leaflets, fliers and posters, local newsletters, and — believe it or not — church magazines had been printed there. And also, for a brief intoxicated month or two, thirty years ago, revolutionary pamphlets that preached freedom and democracy, sometimes illustrated by pictures of angry and attractive young women clearly not wearing brassieres. One of the printing presses, an ancient litho machine with fancy cast-iron legs, was a feature of the bar.

Next to La Prensa was a building that would look like an old colonial house if you drove past it in the dark. In fact, only the facade, punctuated by empty windows and adorned by opportunistic plants, remained. If, as Bush and the girls did every day, you went through the gap where its front door had been, you would discover that this wall was propped up by huge timbers grown gray with age.

Behind it, at the back of a cat-haunted yard that had once been a garden, was a lean-to, a ramshackle tumbledown shed with splitting wooden walls, a small window with white paper pasted on the cracked glass, and a rusty tin roof. It had once been a store for the press. Great spools of paper half the height of a man had been kept in there; so had the wooden pallets that tubs of ink had been brought in on. And failures: blurred or unsold books, bad test runs, uncollected christening cards, election posters with the wrong name under the photograph, advertising brochures with the wrong phone number, pamphlets with a section printed upside down. When Fidel and Nina Ramirez had bought the press and turned it into a bar, they’d cleared out most of this stuff and burned it in the yard. At the time, they’d probably imagined they would use the shed for something or other. Not as a home for feral kids, of course. There hadn’t been so many of those in the neighborhood back then.

The fourth side of the yard was the wall of a building that had been many things but for about a year now had been a place where women worked sewing machines. They made cheap clothes with expensive labels sewn into them. The business, which had no name, was owned by a man of Turkish origin called Señor Oguz. Señor Oguz had been antsy about the kids in the shed, about them using the tap in the yard, and about the boy with all the hair filching rags from his wastebins. The Child Protection Order made it a criminal act to provide street kids with shelter or food or anything else (including rags, probably) on the grounds that it “encouraged homelessness and destitution.” But Fidel had spoken to Señor Oguz over a free cold beer and chilled him out. During the same conversation, he had also mentioned, helpfully, that Señor Oguz was misspelling the word
DIESEL
on his phony labels.

Felicia sat in the shed while the last of the daylight leeched away. She was not afraid of the dark. All the same, she would have liked the companionship of a candle flame. There were still several stumps in the plastic bag stashed in the corner, but she was unwilling to light one until Bush got back. The bed she shared with Bianca was a wooden pallet covered with blankets, and she sat on it cross-legged, fighting to control her anxiety. This was always the worst part of the day, waiting for Bush. She used fragments of pop songs and her small repertoire of good memories to ward off bad imaginings of what might have happened to him. And Bianca.

Sometimes she fantasized about a life without Bianca in it. These dream stories were not wrapped in a twinkling mist of happiness. They were not like Bianca’s ridiculous fantasies of celebrity. They were modest. One of her favorites was that she and Bush would take over the bar from Fidel and Nina and, like them, grow old but stay in love. Another was that she and Bush would live in a house. The house moved from place to place, although she had no idea what other places there might be. But it always had real furniture like in the shop windows. And a bedroom and a bed with white sheets. In which she would lie with Bush. Alone with Bush. Sometimes there would be open windows and pale drifting curtains and sometimes the sound of the sea, which was a blue sound. But all these fantasies needed a prologue, a prologue in which Bianca disappeared. She could not — would not — allow herself to picture how this might happen. Because Bush loved his sister, and therefore she, Felicia, had to love her too.

Bianca. Mother of God, where
was
she?

Felicia was, she believed, fourteen years old. And that was a very bad age to be. It made her a victim twice over. It forced choices upon her: choices that involved the way she looked and what she wore. Choices that she could not make for herself.

If the Ratcatchers caught her, it was unlikely that she could pass for over sixteen. She had no papers, of course, and she was slightly built. They would take her, and although she did not believe all the stories about what happened next, she did not want to be taken.

But she was becoming a woman. Her breasts were undeniable, and boys — and men with wolf eyes — had started to look at her. She didn’t want to be forced into an alleyway and —

Felicia should not have let herself fall asleep in the afternoon and allowed Bianca to slip away. If she was not back before Bush, he would go searching for her. He would go away into the night.

For the last six months, Felicia had worn a pair of loose Bermuda shorts that Nina had given her. They were much too big; she fastened them around her waist with a length of string. But they made her legs look thinner and less shapely, which was good. She had two T-shirts that she wore in rotation: one on, the other washed under the tap in the yard and dried on the roof of the shed. Both had gotten smaller. She walked slightly stooped with her arms crossed over her chest, so that maybe the boys and the wolf men would not notice her. Trying to look like a child. Praying that she would not turn a corner into the arms of the Ratcatchers and have to become older. To have to stare the bastards in the eye and stick her chest out and say, “Yeah, I’m nearly seventeen, and these are the only clothes I got, so what?”

Bianca was crazy. Bianca was younger, at least a year younger, but thought she could pass for sixteen because she was beautiful. Which she was. Wild hair like her brother’s, but full of light. Blue, sometimes. The same big eyes that could melt you and make you foolish. She asked for nothing: she stole. Denied it, of course. Bush told her time after time, “Beg, scrounge, but never steal. They’ll get you if you steal.” And then Bianca had come back with a white bra and a pair of panties. Told Bush she’d found them on a piece of cardboard the shape of a body without arms and legs thrown into a yard behind a shop on Santa Josefina. And he’d believed her. So now she went out with them on, the bra hoicking her chest up, a lacy strap showing beneath the one black T-shirt she owned. Practically
asking
to be taken among the trash cans in some dirty dark alley and —

Where
are
you, Bianca? Come back to the shed alive and let’s light a candle. Fidel has left food for us.

Bush was leaving the subway at San Antonio, the stop for the Triangle. He’d stood inconspicuously by the single door at the end of the car, hiding the bucket behind his legs. He came out from underground, unchallenged, into a bustling street separated from the sky by scrawls of neon. On Trinidad he did what he always did: walked past the wrecked house, past the bar, and leaned against a wall until the street seemed safe. Then he went swiftly through the dark hole of the old doorway and picked his way across the yard. There was no light showing through the rickety walls of the shed, and he did not know whether that was a good or a bad thing.

“Bianca? Felicia?”

The door was dragged back on its lopsided hinges just before he reached it.

“Bush?”

“Yeah, it’s me. It’s cool.”

He was close to her in the almost dark, and she wanted more than anything to take hold of him and for him to say her name again.

He said, “Where’s Bianca?”

“Hey, Bush. You okay? How was it today?”

“Kinda rough. Where’s Bianca?”

“I dunno.”

“Aw, man. What you mean, you dunno? Shit, Felicia.”

“I fell asleep. When I woke up, she was gone. I’m real sorry, Bush. I thought she was asleep an’ all.”

She felt him move past her, then heard him rustling in the bag. The flash of a lighter. His face came back toward her, up-lit by the stub of candle in his hand.

Hurriedly she said, “You hungry? Fidel left us food. Rice ’n’ beans with some sausage in it. I been keepin’ it. I haven’t had any of it.”

“How long you think she been gone?”

Felicia shrugged, and instantly regretted it. Bush’s eyes narrowed into slits of reflected flame.

“Can’t’ve been more’n two hours, Bush. I woke up ’bout an hour back, an’ I wasn’ asleep that long.”

He hung his head. His face was hidden from her by the draggled mop of his hair.

She said, “You look real tired, man. C’mon, have some food. Sit. Hey, I got most a big Pepsi I found at the bus stop. Wan’ some?”

“I’m gonna have to go look for her. Jesus, Felicia. I don’ need this, you know?”

She knew. And she could no longer stand so close to him with the distance between them feeling so huge. She went and sat on the bed.

He said, “What you do today? You go for breakfast down at the Sisters of Mercy?”

“Yeah. We got soup an’ bread an’ —”

“Felicia, I don’ give a shit what you
ate.
You see anyone down there? Like that Hernandez Brothers gang?”

“They was there, yeah.”

“Bianca talk to them?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

This was the conversation she feared and hated, that was like a bad dream you shook off and then it came back. The one they had all the time instead of the one she wanted them to have, about being in a white bed with the sea breathing in the windows. This one was like having nails hammered into you.

“Yeah. I dunno. A little bit, not for long. They always hit on her, man, you know? An’ she goes for it. What you expect me to do? She goes to
them,
Bush, an’ that’s the truth. I go to get her away, an’ I get all kinds of shit from them
an’
her. You know what I’m sayin’?”

And she knew that yes, he did know what she was saying. She knew also that he didn’t want to hear it, and that hearing it from her diminished the chances of him ever loving her. She wanted to confess to him the terrible visions that swelled in her when she was alone. Bianca bringing that gang back, them looming into their sanctuary when Bush was not there and when Fidel and Nina were busy. Shutting the door. Drinking, smoking. The terrible sick Hernandez boy. Giggling, then rape. Later giving birth in mess and pain and desperate ignorance.

“Any of them touch her?” Bush asked.

“Not ’specially.” She could not look at him.

He came closer and set the candle down on the floor. “Okay. I’ll just go an’ check some places.”

“You wan’ me to come with you?”

“No.”

“Bush? Have somethin to eat firs’. She’ll most likely be back any minute, anyway.”

“I’m okay. You wanna eat, go ahead. Fidel leave any bread with that?”

She shook her head. “No, not today.”

“All right.”

Then he was gone. Before she could ask him about the blood on his leg. Without him asking her about her day. Not that there was any need to ask. He knew what her day had been like. It had been like all the others.

“O
KAY
,” O
TELLO SAYS
, “it’s a nice car. I’m impressed. Now, would you mind slowing down? Like to the speed of sound, or something?”

Diego Mendosa smiles, his face a dim red in the dashboard lights.

“What’s the matter, Capitano? Don’t you trust me?”

Capitano.
Diego has taken to calling him that. Otello has gotten used to it.

“I trust you. Problem is, we don’t have the road to ourselves. And I’ve got no reason to trust anyone else on it not to do something stupid.”

“True,” Diego says, and eases the Maserati to a mere thirty over the speed limit.

The city thins out; now and again there are dark spaces along the highway where there might be trees.

Otello relaxes a little. “So tell me about this Nestor Brabanta.”

“
Senator
Nestor Brabanta,” Diego corrects him. “He likes to be addressed as
Senator.
Power behind the throne at Rialto, even though he’s officially just another member of the board of directors. He was never there when we were negotiating, but every now and again someone would go out to make a call, and I’m pretty damn sure it was him they were calling. Like, Real Madrid was closing it, then the Duke, da Venecia, went out to use his phone, and suddenly
zap!
No more Real. That was Brabanta; I’d bet my life on it. And seeing as how you really,
really
didn’t want to go to Spain, especially after the riots and so forth in Espirito, that makes him one of the good guys, as far as I’m concerned. No, it makes him
the
good guy. I think da Venecia was all set to go with Real. So we
like
Senator Brabanta. Okay?”

Diego gestures with his head toward a housing project, lit dull amber by the streetlights, its roofs supporting a skeletal jungle of antennas and satellite dishes. “If you were to ask the people over there who Nestor Brabanta was, they wouldn’t say, ‘Yeah, the politician, the guy who owns two of the five biggest businesses in the state.’ They’d say, ‘Brabanta? Anything to do with Desmerelda Brabanta?’”

“Will she be there this evening?”

Diego flashes a grin at him. “
Down,
tiger. Nope, she won’t. She’s in the States. Visiting her mother.”

He looks into the mirrors, shifts down, makes a cut across two lanes, and takes an unmarked exit off the highway. At the lights at the bottom of the ramp he says, “I don’t like to blow my own horn, as you know, but I think I did okay the first time I met Nestor. This was back in May. We talked for a while, then we took a coffee break, and he said, ‘Señor Mendosa, you are a very unusual person.’ ‘Am I?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We have been together for more than an hour, and you have not once mentioned my daughter.’ And I said, you know, all innocence, ‘Your daughter, señor?’ And he said, ‘Yes. Please don’t pretend you don’t know that Desmerelda Brabanta is my daughter. It is extremely rare for me to have a conversation with a young man who doesn’t have a keen interest in her.’ So I looked him in the eye and said, ‘With all due respect, señor, I would not care if you were the father of an alligator or all the stars of heaven. I wear my heart on my sleeve. I do business. Glamour isn’t something I concern myself with. If it so happens that you introduce me to your famous daughter, I will of course be honored. But that has nothing to do with what we are discussing here today. I can assure you that neither my client nor myself is interested in associating with celebrity. Otello has no need to, and I have no desire to.’”

“You cheeky SOB, Diego. What did he say to that?”

“He laughed and patted me on the shoulder. That’s when I knew we’d get what we wanted. And we did, Capitano, did we not?”

“I guess we did,” Otello says.

When they arrive at Brabanta’s suburban hacienda, Otello at last realizes that, even off the field, he is playing in another league.

In the North, he lived for the past two years in a walled and gated estate of just four houses, one of the others occupied by Espirito’s keeper and his wife. A cheerfully casual guard at the entry, a fountain — usually dry — at the center, parking for ten cars. Safe from trouble, but not far from the people or the stadium.

This is a different kind of thing altogether. The remote-controlled gates to the drive are almost hidden by trees of a variety Otello has not seen before. The guards — two of them — are neither cheerful nor casual, and wear fat little machine guns over their shoulders. They know who the arrivals are but check them over anyway, as well as the car, talking all the while into phones plugged into their ears. The drive curves around a lawn bigger than most practice fields.

A beautiful dark-skinned maid opens the vast glass door to the house and shows them into the presence of Señor Brabanta. He leads them down a corridor lined with paintings and into a conservatory full of the heady night scent of jasmine. When they are seated, the beautiful maid brings in a tray of tea, soft drinks, and cakes. She takes a good look at Otello, but it isn’t the kind of look he is used to. There is something like a warning in it.

When she has gone, Brabanta says, without preamble, “That free kick you scored on. The one in the semifinal. When it was lined up, you had a discussion with Santillana. I’d very much like to know what you said to each other. Some of my friends think that Santillana wanted to play it indirect. Emilio Pearson had slipped around the right of the Mexican defensive wall. It looked to most of us like you were going for a set piece, something you had all practiced. The Mexicans thought so, too. Their eyes were all over the place. Their line was pulled out of shape.”

Otello, nonplussed, shifts in his seat. He’d been thinking that a beer would be nice.

Diego says, “I had no idea you were such a close observer of the game, Senator.”

Brabanta smiles. “Ah. Perhaps you thought I was one of those politicians who gets involved in soccer to persuade the voters that he has the common touch. Or so that he can be photographed with famous players. I regret to say that many of my associates share that view of me. Actually, I am a fan, a serious one.”

He turns his attention back to Otello.

“I will confess something to you. One of the reasons I was so eager to sign you is that I wanted to do what I am doing now. To talk soccer with you. To get it from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. I hope you will indulge me in this from time to time.”

Diego clears his throat as though he is about to say something, but Brabanta cuts him off. “So, was that free kick meant to be something you had rehearsed? And did you ignore Santillana and go for the shot?”

“Uh, no. What Santillana said to me was, ‘I still think those cleats of yours look like a pair of ladies’ slippers.’ I had a bit of trouble keeping a straight face, but we were always going for the shot.”

Brabanta lets out a gleeful exclamation and clicks his fingers. “I knew it! Excellent! That’s ten dollars Ariel Goldmann owes me.”

It is not possible, of course, to talk meaningfully about playing soccer. To use words to convey what it is like trying to overcome the sullen outrage you feel when you have been persistently fouled off the ball throughout an entire game. Or the fierce moment of elation when you know that you will score. Or what it takes to find running within yourself when you have no running left. That is not the sort of thing sports reporters want to hear, anyway. Maybe not what their audiences want to hear, either. They are comfortable with clichés, banalities, sound bites — phrases that stumble and go sprawling in sight of the goal. The kind of half-sentences that Otello, like most of his colleagues, utters. After all, it would be disturbing to the proper order of things, it would be
too much,
if the physically gifted could also talk.

Nestor Brabanta, however, is not content with the usual platitudes. He has extraordinary recall. Either that, or he has closely studied recordings of the Copa América games in advance of this visit. Otello’s responses to his questions frequently seem to disappoint him.

“Yes, but
why
did you do that?”

And: “Yes, but was it
your
decision to bring Ramón up into the attack?”

And: “Did you realize that at the time . . . ?”

And so on.

It is very uncomfortable for Otello. Apart from anything else, there are no satisfactory answers to such questions. How can a player, even an articulate one, explain to a layman the complex relationship between thought and instinct? Between practice and improvisation? Between what you know you can do and what the immense voice of the crowd tells you it wants? How is it possible to explain to one of life’s winners what losing feels like?

But Otello slowly comes to realize that there is a correct way to answer Brabanta’s questions, which is to give the man the opportunity, the reason, to say, “Ah, yes. I thought so.” Rich men and barroom soccer bores have this in common: they need to be right, to have superior opinions.

All the same, there is something about Brabanta’s manner that is . . . disturbing. The man is in charge, they are talking in his space, he is on the board, he is rich — the fifty million had very likely come out of one of his bank accounts, painlessly — and he is an aristocrat. A southern white aristo. But it’s like talking to a geek. The man sits there wearing clothes that cost twice the average annual national wage. At least. In a house that probably has a staff of thirty people, minimum. And yet it’s a bit like talking to, yes, some eager, geeky kid in the academy who’s studied game videos and wants answers to questions about offside incidents that you can’t even remember. That same thirsty hero worship. It is . . . inappropriate.

Otello leans back in the rattan chair, sips the iced guava juice. It would be nice if his agent would take the initiative, change the subject, get him off the hook. But Diego shows no sign of doing so. In fact, he seems to have eased his chair farther away from the lamplight. From beyond the open doors comes the summery chirp of a cell phone, then a murmured conversation that fades into the distance. Men out there in the darkness. Insincerely, Brabanta asks permission to light a cheroot, and Otello gives it with a small gesture of his hand. This is a mistake, and if Otello had spotted the hard glitter in the other man’s eye, he might have realized it.

“Preseason training begins in two weeks, if I remember rightly?”

“Correct, señor.”

“May I speak frankly, Otello? On the understanding that nothing I say goes beyond this room?”

Otello shrugs. “Sure.”

“Good.” Brabanta studies the drift of his smoke as if it contains the words he needs. “You will get some shit.”

“Señor?”

“There was a faction on the Rialto board that was against signing you. It was not about money. I made sure of that. No, it was more a, well,
cultural
matter. Or, to be more accurate, there were members of the board who were concerned about the, shall we say, social cohesion of the team. Understand?”

Otello’s face makes it plain that he does not.

“Very well, then. I will be blunt. There were those who thought that selling Luis Montano as part of the deal was a bad idea. He was having a dry spell, had not scored in his last eight matches. But he was popular with the squad.”

Otello says, “Yeah. Luis is a really nice kid. And a good player. He will be great one day. They will love him up in Espirito.”

“He is very bitter about the way he has been treated.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“And he is not black,” Brabanta says.

“What? Pardon, señor?”

“The Rialto squad, first and second teams, contains only four black players.
Contained,
I should say. We sold a white player to offset the cost of a fifth. There are people, players included, who are less than happy about that.”

Otello is too taken aback to say anything. He glances at Diego’s shadowed face, which is expressionless.

Brabanta says, “How do you feel about Roderigo being club captain, when you are
his
captain on the national side?”

“Ah, I have absolutely no problem with that. I get along very well with Jaco. I don’t —”

The senator lifts a hand, almost apologetically. “Please. We agreed to be candid with each other. So I would be failing in my duty if I did not inform you of certain . . . undercurrents at Rialto. I asked you about Roderigo because he is a close friend of Montano’s. And because there has always been a, let us say,
jocular
tension between our white players and their black colleagues. On the field, these matters are of no consequence. Off the field . . . well, you know. But what I want you to understand is this: I believe absolutely that individual ability transcends race. You are a great player. Your color is irrelevant. I — sorry,
we
— have never spent so much money on a player. I think that speaks for itself.”

Brabanta shows his teeth in what is more or less a smile. He leans forward and puts his hand on Otello’s forearm — the first and last time he will touch his purchase. “Personally,” he says, “I have no time for racism. A primitive emotion. But, as I said, you will experience some hostility. From the team, from some sections of the crowd. Perhaps even from our esteemed manager, who was not altogether convinced that we should spend our entire transfer budget on you. But I am absolutely sure that you will rise above such matters. That you will settle in. Find your place.”