Maya's Notebook: A Novel (20 page)

A little while later, a stranger woke me up, touching my shoulder. “Can I take you home, sleeping beauty?” he asked me, sounding like a horse whisperer. He was short, very skinny, with a stooped back, a hare’s face, and greasy straw-colored hair. “Home?” I repeated, disconcerted. He held out his hand, smiling with stained teeth, and told me his name: Brandon Leeman.

On that first encounter, Brandon Leeman was dressed entirely in khaki, a shirt and pants with several pockets and rubber-soled shoes. He had the calming air of a park ranger. The long sleeves covered tattoos with martial art themes and needle marks, which I wouldn’t see until later. Leeman had served two terms in prison, and the police in several states were still looking for him, but in Las Vegas he felt safe, and he’d turned it into his temporary hideout. He was a thief, a heroin dealer and user. Nothing distinguished him from others like him in that city. He was armed out of precaution and habit, not because he was prone to violence, and when necessary he could count on two thugs, Joe Martin, from Kansas, and Chino, a guy from the Philippines, covered in smallpox scars, who he’d met in prison. Leeman was thirty-eight years old, but he looked fifty. That Thursday he’d just come out of the sauna, one of the few pleasures he allowed himself, not out of austerity but having arrived at a state of total indifference toward everything except his white lady, his snow, his queen, his brown sugar. He’d just shot up and felt fresh and dynamic as he began
his nightly round.

From his vehicle, a gloomy-looking van, Leeman had seen me dozing on the bench. As he told me later, he trusted his instinct to judge people, very useful in his line of work, and I struck him as a diamond in the rough. He went around the block, drove past me again slowly and confirmed his first impression. He thought I was about fifteen, too young for his purposes, but he was in no position to be too demanding, because he’d been looking for someone like me for months. He stopped a short way down the block and got out of the car, ordering his henchmen to make themselves scarce until he called them and approached the bus stop.

“I haven’t eaten yet. There’s a McDonald’s three blocks from here. Would you like to come with me? I’ll buy you dinner,” he offered.

I analyzed the situation quickly. My recent experience with Fedgewick had left me wary, but this loser dressed up as an explorer didn’t seem like anything to be scared of. “Shall we go?” he insisted. I followed him a little doubtfully, but when we turned the corner and the McDonald’s sign appeared in the distance I couldn’t resist the temptation; I was hungry. We chatted along the way, and I ended up telling him I’d just arrived in the city, that I was just passing through and was going to return to California as soon as I could call my grandmother and get her to send me some money.

“I’d lend you my cell to call her, but the battery needs charging,” Leeman said.

“Thanks, but I can’t call her till tomorrow. My grandma’s not home tonight.”

In the McDonald’s there were
a few customers and three employees, a black teenage girl with fake nails and two Latino guys, one of them with a Virgin of Guadalupe T-shirt. The smell of grease revived my appetite, and soon a double hamburger with fries partially restored my self-confidence, the strength to my legs, and my clarity of mind. Calling my Nini no longer seemed so urgent.

“Las Vegas looks pretty fun,” I commented with my mouth full.

“Sin City, they call it. You haven’t told me your name,” said Leeman, without having tasted his food.

“Sarah Laredo,” I improvised, unwilling to tell my name to a stranger.

“What happened to your hand?” he asked me, pointing to my swollen wrist.

“I fell.”

“Tell me about yourself, Sarah. You haven’t run away from home, have you?”

“Of course not!” I said, choking on a french fry. “I’ve just graduated from high school, and before starting college I wanted to check out Las Vegas, but I lost my wallet, that’s why I have to call my grandma.”

“I see. Now that you’re here, you should see Las Vegas—it’s a Disney World for adults. Did you know it’s the fastest-growing city in the States? Everybody wants to come and live here. Don’t change your plans because of a minor inconvenience. Stay a while. Look, Sarah, if the money order from your grandmother takes a while to arrive, I can lend you a little money.”

“Why? You don’t even know me,” I responded guardedly.

“Because I’m a good guy. How old are you?”

“Going on nineteen.”

“You look younger.”

“So it seems.”

At that moment two police officers came into the McDonald’s, one young, with dark mirrored glasses, even though it was nighttime, and wrestler’s muscles straining at the seams of his uniform, and the other about forty-five, without anything worth noticing in his appearance. While the younger one gave their order to the girl with the fake nails, the other came over to say hello to Brandon Leeman, who introduced us: his friend, Officer Arana, and I was his niece from Arizona, here visiting for a few days. The cop looked me over with an inquisitive expression in his blue eyes; he had an open face, with a quick smile, and skin the color of bricks from the desert sun. “Take care of your niece, Leeman. In this city a decent girl can easily get lost,” he said and went to sit at another table with his partner.

“If you want, I can give you a summer job, until you start college in September,” Brandon Leeman offered.

A blaze of intuition warned me against such generosity, but I had the whole night ahead of me and no obligation to give an immediate answer to this plucked bird. I thought he must be one of those rehabilitated alcoholics who go around saving souls, another Mike O’Kelly, but without any of the Irishman’s charisma. We’ll see how things play out, I decided. In the washroom I washed up as best I could, checked that I wasn’t bleeding anymore, changed into the clean clothes I had in my backpack, brushed my
teeth, and, refreshed, got ready to see Las Vegas with my new friend.

When I came out of
the washroom, I saw Brandon Leeman talking on his cell phone. Hadn’t he told me the battery was dead? Whatever. I must have misunderstood. We walked back to his car, where two suspicious-looking guys were waiting. “Joe Martin and Chino, my partners,” said Leeman, by way of introduction. Chino got behind the wheel, the other beside him, Leeman and I in the back seat. As we drove away, I started to get worried; we were heading into a seedy-looking part of town, with uninhabited or really run-down houses, garbage, groups of young people lounging around in doorways, a couple of homeless guys in filthy sleeping bags beside their shopping carts crammed full of junk.

“Don’t worry, you’re safe with me. Everybody knows me around here,” Leeman reassured me, guessing that I was getting ready to make a run for it. “There are better neighborhoods, but this one’s discreet, and I have my business here.”

“What kind of business?” I asked.

“You’ll see.”

We stopped in front of a decrepit three-story building, the windows broken, the walls covered in graffiti. Leeman and I got out of the van, and his partners drove around the block to the building’s parking lot. It was too late to back out; resigned to following Leeman, I tried not to appear dis
trustful, which might provoke an unfortunate reaction on his part. He led me to a side door—the main entrance was boarded up—and we found ourselves in a barely lit foyer in a state of absolute neglect, with dim bulbs hanging from bare wires. He explained that the building was originally a hotel and then it had been divided up into apartments, but it was badly run, an explanation that fell somewhat short of the visible reality.

We went up two flights of a dirty, smelly stairway, and on each floor I glimpsed several doors twisted off their hinges, and cavernous rooms. We didn’t meet anybody on the way up, but I heard voices and laughter and saw motionless human shadows in those open rooms. Later I found out that in the two lower floors, addicts got together to snort, shoot up, fuck, deal, and die, but nobody went up to the third floor without permission. The last flight of stairs was closed with a gate, which Leeman opened by remote control, and we came to a relatively clean hallway, in comparison to the pigsty of the lower floors. He unlocked a metal door, and we entered an apartment with boarded-up windows, illuminated by bulbs on the ceiling and the blue glare of a screen. An air conditioner kept the temperature at a bearable level; it smelled of paint thinner and mint. There was a three-cushion sofa in good shape, a couple of battered mattresses on the floor, a long table, some chairs, and an enormous modern television, in front of which a boy who looked about twelve was lying on the floor, eating popcorn.

“You locked me in, you bastard!” the kid said without taking his eyes off the screen.

“So?” replied Brandon Leeman.

“If there’d been a fucking fire I would’ve been cooked like a hot dog!”

“Why would there be a fire? This is Freddy, future king of rap,” he introduced the boy to me. “Freddy, say hi to this girl. She’s going to be working with me.”

Freddy didn’t look up. I walked around the strange dwelling, where there wasn’t much furniture, but old computers and other office equipment were piled up in all the rooms. There were several inexplicable butane blowtorches in the kitchen, which looked like it had never been used for cooking, and boxes and bundles all along the hallway.

The apartment was connected to
another on the same floor by a big open hole in the wall that looked as if it had been made with sledgehammers. “My office is in here, and I sleep over there,” Brandon Leeman explained. We ducked through the hole and came into a room identical to the other one, but without furniture, also with air conditioning, the windows boarded up and several locks on the door that led outside. “As you can see, I have no family,” said my host, with an exaggerated gesture at the empty space. In one of the rooms there was a wide unmade bed, a pile of crates and a suitcase in one corner, and another top-of-the-line TV. In the bedroom next to it, smaller and just as dirty as the rest of the place, I saw a narrow bed, a chest of drawers, and two nightstands painted white, like a little girl’s room.

“If you stay, this will be your room,” Brandon Leeman told me.

“Why are the windows blocked up?”

“Out of precaution—I don’t like busybodies. I’ll explain what your job would be. I need a smart-looking girl to go into top-class hotels and casinos. Someone like you, who doesn’t arouse suspicion.”

“Hotels?”

“It’s not what you’re imagining. I can’t compete with the prostitution mafias. That’s a brutal business, and there are more hookers and pimps here than there are clients. No, none of that—you’ll just make deliveries where I tell you.”

“What kind of deliveries?”

“Drugs. Classy people appreciate room service.”

“That’s really dangerous!”

“No. The staff of the hotels take their cut and look the other way—it’s in their interest for their guests to get a good impression. The only problem could be an undercover agent from the vice squad, but none have ever shown up, I promise. It’s really easy, and you’ll have more money than you know what to do with.”

“As long as I sleep with you?”

“Oh, no! It’s been a long time since I stopped thinking about that and you should see how it’s simplified my life.” Brandon Leeman laughed sincerely. “I have to go out. Try to get some rest, we can start tomorrow.”

“You’ve been really kind to me, and I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but actually I’m not going to be of use to you. I—”

“You can decide later,” he interrupted. “Nobody is forced to work for me. If you want to leave tomorrow, you have every right, but for the moment you’re better off here than on the street, aren’t you?”

I sat down on the bed, with my backpack on my knees. I had an aftertaste of grease and onions in my mouth, the hamburger was sitting in my stomach like a rock, my muscles ached, and my bones felt soft, I was wiped out. I remembered the strain of my run to escape from the academy, the violence of the night in the motel, the hours traveling in the truck, dazed by the residues of the drug still in my system, and realized I needed to get my strength back.

“If you prefer, you can come with me, to get to know my patch, but I warn you it’ll be a long night,” Leeman offered.

I couldn’t stay there alone. I accompanied him until four in the morning around hotels and casinos on the Strip, where he delivered little bags to various people, doormen, parking lot attendants, young women and men who looked like tourists, who waited for him in the darkness. Chino stayed behind the wheel, Joe Martin was the lookout, and Brandon Leeman made the deliveries; none of the three entered the establishments because they had records or were under observation, having been operating in the same zone for too long. “It’s not advisable for me to do this work personally, but it’s not convenient for me to use intermediaries either—they charge a disproportionate commission and they’re not very reliable,” Leeman explained. I understood the advantage to this guy in hiring me, because I showed my face and ran the risks, but didn’t receive a commission. What was my salary going to be? I didn’t dare ask him. At the end of the run, we went back to the dilapidated building, where Freddy, the boy I’d seen before, was sleeping on one of the mattresses.

Brandon Leeman was always up front with me. I can’t claim that he misled me about what kind of business and
lifestyle he was offering. I stayed with him knowing exactly what I was doing.

Manuel sees me writing in
my notebook with the concentration of a notary, but never asks me what I’m writing. His lack of interest contrasts with my curiosity. I want to know more about him: his past, his love affairs, his nightmares, I want to know what he feels for Blanca Schnake. He never tells me anything; whereas I tell him almost everything, because he is a good listener and doesn’t give me any unsolicited advice. He could teach my grandmother a thing or two about these virtues. I still haven’t told him about the disgraceful night with Roy Fedgewick, but I think I might at some point. It’s the kind of secret that ends up festering in your mind if you keep it. I don’t feel guilty about that, the guilt belongs to the rapist, but I am embarrassed.