“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 distrustful, 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 stra
in 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.
Yesterday Manuel found me absorbed in front of his computer reading about the Caravan of Death, an army unit that in October 1973, a month after the military coup, traveled all over Chile from north to south murdering political prisoners. The group was under the command of someone called Arellano Stark, a general who chose prisoners at random, had them summarily shot, and then blew their bodies up with dynamite, an efficient method of imposing terror on the civilian population and on indecisive soldiers. Manuel never talks about that era, but seeing my interest, he lent me a book about that sinister caravan, written a few years ago by Patricia Verdugo, a brave journalist who investigated those events. “I don’t know if you’ll understand it, Maya. You’re so young and from so far away,” he said. “Don’t underestimate me, compañero,” I answered. He was startled, because nobody uses that term these days, which was in vogue when Allende was president and then banned by the dictatorship. I found that out from a Web site.
Thirty-six years have gone by since the military coup, and for the last twenty this country has had democratic governments, but there are still scars and, in some cases, open wounds. People don’t talk about the dictatorship much. Those who suffered it try to forget it, and for young people it’s ancient history, but I can find as much information as I want. There are lots of Web pages and books, articles, documentaries, and photographs, which I’ve seen in the Castro bookstore, where Manuel buys his books. That period is studied in universities and has been analyzed from the most varied angles, but in society it’s bad taste to talk about it. Chileans are still divided. The father of Michelle Bachelet, the current president, an air force brigadier, died at the hands of his own comrades-in-arms because he didn’t want to join the uprising. Then she and her mother were arrested, tortured, and sent into exile, but she never talks about that either. According to Blanca Schnake, that piece of Chilean history is mud at the bottom of a lake, and it mustn’t be stirred up or it’ll cloud the water.
The only person I can talk to about this is Liliana Treviño, the nurse, who wants to help me investigate. She offered to accompany me to visit Father Luciano Lyon, who has written essays and articles on the dictatorship’s repression. Our plan is to go and see him without Manuel, so we’ll be able to talk openly.
Silence. This Guaitecas cypress house has the longest silences. It’s taken me four months to adapt to Manuel’s introverted personality. My presence must be a nuisance to this solitary man, especially in a house without doors, where privacy depends on good manners. He’s nice to me in his own way: on the one hand he ignores me or answers in monosyllables, and on the other he hangs my towels by the stove to warm up when he thinks I’m going to have a shower, brings me my glass of hot milk in bed, takes care of me. The other day he lost his temper for the first time since I met him, because I went out with two fishermen to set their nets, and we got caught by some bad weather, rain and a choppy sea, and got back really late, soaked to the skin. Manuel was waiting for us on the wharf with Fahkeen and one of the carabineros, Laurencio Cárcamo, who had already been in radio contact with the Isla Grande to request they send out a navy ship to look for us. “What am I going to tell your grandma if you drown?” Manuel shouted furiously at me, as soon as I stepped on dry land. “Calm down, man. I can take care of myself,” I told him. “Of course, that’s why you’re here!’ Cause you take such good care of yourself!”
Laurencio Cárcamo was kind enough to drive us home. In the jeep, I took Manuel’s hand and explained that we’d gone out after checking that the weather forecast was good and with the permission of the captain of the port; no one was expecting that sudden storm. In a matter of minutes, the sky and the sea both turned brownish gray and we had to pull in the nets. We were lost for a couple of hours, because it got dark and we lost our bearings. There was no cell phone signal, so I couldn’t let him know; it was just an inconvenience, we weren’t in danger, the boat was well made and the fishermen know these waters. Manuel didn’t deign to answer or look at me, but he didn’t pull his hand away either.
Eduvigis had made us salmon with baked potatoes, a blessing for me, as I was very hungry, and in the shared routine of sitting down together at the table, his bad mood evaporated. After eating we settled down on the worn-out sofa, him to read and me to write in my journal, with our big mugs of sweet and creamy coffee with condensed milk. Rain, wind, the tree branches scratching on the windowpane, wood burning in the stove, purring cats, that’s my music now. The house closed up, embracing us together with the animals.
It was the early hours of the morning by the time I returned with Brandon Leeman from my first excursion around the casinos of the Strip. I was collapsing from exhaustion, but before going to bed I had to pose in front of a camera; they needed a photo to get my new identity started. Leeman had guessed that I wasn’t actually called Sarah Laredo, but my real name didn’t matter to him. Finally I was able to go to my room, where I lay down on the bed without sheets, with my clothes and shoes on, disgusted by the mattress, which I imagined had been used by people with less than stringent standards of hygiene. I didn’t wake up until ten. The bathroom was as repugnant as the bed, but I took a shower anyway, shivering, because there was no hot water, and the air conditioner blasted out Siberian drafts. I got dressed in the same clothes as the day before, thinking I should find somewhere to wash the few bits of clothing I had in my backpack, and then I peeked through the hole in the wall at the other apartment, the “office,” where there was no one to be seen. It was dark, only a tiny bit of light finding its way in between the planks across the windows, but I found the switch and turned on the overhead bulbs. In the fridge there was nothing but small packages sealed with tape, a half-empty bottle of ketchup, and several out-of-date yogurts with green mold starting to grow on them. I went through the rest of the rooms,
dirtier than the other apartment, not daring to touch anything, and discovered empty bottles, syringes, needles, rubber bands, pipes, burned glass tubes, trails of blood. Then I understood what the butane torches in the kitchen were used for and confirmed that I was in a den of drug addicts and dealers. The most sensible thing would be to get out of there as soon as possible.
The metal door was unlocked, and there was nobody in the hallway either; I was alone on the floor, but I couldn’t leave because the electric gate in the stairwell was locked. I went over the apartment from top to bottom again, cursing my nerves, and didn’t find the remote control for the lock or a telephone to call for help. I began to tug on the planks across one of the windows in desperation, trying to remember what floor I was on, but they were nailed down securely, and I couldn’t even manage to loosen any of them. I was about to start screaming when I heard voices and the creaking of the electric gate on the stairs, and a moment later Brandon Leeman came in with his two associates and the boy, Freddy. “Do you like Chinese food?” Leeman asked me as a greeting. On the verge of panic, I couldn’t speak, but only Freddy noticed my agitation. “I don’t like it when they lock me in either,” he said, with a friendly wink. Brandon Leeman explained that it was a security measure—nobody should enter the apartment in his absence—but if I stayed I’d get my own remote control.
His bodyguards—or associates, as they preferred to be called—and the boy settled down in front of the television to eat with chopsticks, straight from the cartons. Brandon Leeman shut himself in one of the rooms to shout at someone on his cell phone for a long time and then announced that he was going to lie down and disappeared through the hole into the other apartment. Soon Joe Martin and Chino left. I was left alone with Freddy, and we spent the hottest hours of the afternoon watching TV and playing cards. Freddy did a perfect imitation of his idol, Michael Jackson, for me.
At about five Brandon Leeman reappeared, and a little while later the Filipino guy brought a driver’s license belonging to a certain Laura Barron, twenty-two years old, from Arizona, with my photograph.