“Hey. Hey! Lucky. Get the phone. It might be someone.”
Lucky Lampadusa was not as quick getting across the room as he might have been because his left leg, from just below the knee to down under his heel, was in a plaster cast. Also, he’d just started eating a bean fritter and he couldn’t think where to put it down.
“Yeah,” he said thickly. “Swiff. How can I help ya?” He listened for a moment or two, swallowing. “Yeah. He is, but he’s on the other line. Okay. Hold on.” He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s some guy.”
“Well, Lucky, that’s really informative. So it’s not the goddamn kangaroo that usually calls this time of day, huh?”
“No, it’s some guy.”
Juicy sighed and flipped the magazine onto the desk. “Okay. Gimme. And listen — don’t eat when you’re on the phone. It creates a bad impression. Hello. Yeah, this is he. Aaah, yeah. I do remember. Quite some time ago, though, huh? What? Sorry, the line’s bad. Yeah, that’s better.”
He was silent for a long time. Then he said, “Well, it’s not our usual line of business. No, that’s not what I’m saying. Just that . . . No, that’s really fair. Plus expenses, right. Yeah, we can do it that way. No, what I meant was, how do we know what kinda kids we’re looking for? I see. And this guy will be with us all the time? Okay. Wait a second.”
Juicy tugged a pen from his shirt pocket and wrote a name and a phone number on the cover of Rich.
“And you want me to contact him, yeah? And I say, like, uh . . . Okay. No problem. All right. I’ll have to check a couple of things out, you know? Talk to people. Sure we do. Absolutely. You have called the right people, without doubt. What? That was my assistant, Lucky. Okay. Thanks for calling. We appreciate your business.”
Juicy dropped the phone onto its cradle. Then he commenced to rock himself back and forth on the expensive orthopedic chair that he’d reclaimed, with the aid of a baseball bat, from a clairvoyant who’d failed to see his debts building up.
Lucky, who’d propped his plastered leg back up on the narrow window ledge, watched him, eating the rest of the fritter. After a while he said, “Juicy, ’scuse me, I don’ wanna do more stuff with kids. I heard you say kids. Sorry. I couldn’ help hearin’.”
“Who asked you?” Juicy said. He nodded toward the phone. “That was, possibly, the voice of an angel. That was maybe someone with the answer to all my problems. He spoke sums of money into my ear that no one’s mentioned to me for some considerable time. He might just be the one who prevents us from suffering the ultimate embarrassment: the indignity of being repossessors who get their stuff repossessed. So shuddup and let me think.”
Lucky shuddup. He listened to the rumble and honk of the highway.
Juicy did not believe for a second that this proposed roundup had anything to do with the fashion business. Street kids as models? Yeah, right. And the moon’s a pickled egg. This “photographer’s assistant” who was tagging along to do the selecting — well, Juicy had to admit it was an original thing to call a pimp. None of this bothered him at all, of course. No, the only problem was the usual one – how to get close to the brats in the first place. Like the guy on the phone imagined you just walk up to a bunch of kids and say, “Hey, any of you wanna be fashion models?” and they say, “Sure, señor, thank you very much” and get in the car? They’d be gone quicker’n cockroaches when the light goes on, leave you standing there with a knife wound in your leg to stop you from chasing them. No, the only way was to recruit some street-level help. Cheap help.
Juicy said, “Lucky, refresh my memory here. What was the name of that gang you used to hang with? The Hermanos Brothers, something like that?”
“Hernandez. The Hernandez Brothers. Juicy —”
“Yeah. Hernandez. You reckon you know where we might find them, have a quiet conversation?”
“I dunno.”
Juicy swung the chair around and regarded his assistant gravely. “You know, I sometimes ask myself if there mightn’t be a better way to waste my hard-earned dollars than employing some hop-along with a bad habit of saying ‘I dunno’ every time I ask a simple question. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Yeah,” Lucky said, sullen.
“So?”
Lucky wiped his nose with the back of his forefinger and said, “You know them sisters, give out breakfast, weekdays?”
“What sisters?”
“Them nuns. Sisters a Mercy.”
“Ah, yes. Bless their souls.”
“The Brothers sometimes go down there, see what’s goin’ on.”
Juicy nodded. “Excellent, Lucky. I’m glad I managed to coax that out of you.” He swiveled back around and picked up his magazine. “One of these days we might have to get up early and see if we can get you some of that godly coffee.”
NONE OF THE Hernandez Brothers were brothers, and only two of them were named Hernandez: Segundo, who for perfectly good reasons was better known as Slice, and his cousin Angel, who looked like Death’s apprentice. The gang had a fluctuating membership but a strict hierarchy; at just fifteen and sixteen respectively, Slice and Angel were not the oldest, but no one questioned their leadership. No one who liked having an ear on either side of his head, anyway. Their home territory was a zemo (a zone of special economic measures, in government-speak; in truth, a slum) that tumbled down a ravine just west of the Circular. (It provided a startling introduction to the capital, viewed through the vast yellow arches of McDonald’s, if you happened to be driving in from the airport.) Several times a week, though, the crew would descend on the city, freeloading rides on the subway, vaulting the ticket gates with impunity, occupying a hastily vacated car. One of their favorite entertainments was to hang upside down from the handrails as the train came into a station so that waiting passengers would be presented with a nightmare vision of ragged, grinning, humanoid bats.
Like other gangs, the Hernandez Brothers from time to time lost members through what you might call natural wastage. Unlike other gangs, they did not lose members to the Rataneros. There were dark mutterings about why this might be. It was rumored that they had a thing going with the Ratcatchers, trading tip-offs for protection or money, or both.
On a morning that already smelled of sweat, the crew arrived at the shelter where the Sisters of Mercy set up their breakfast kitchen. They had too much dignity to get in line for the food; they boosted it off the other kids and made a big play of tossing most of it away uneaten, proclaiming their disgust at its quality.
They were hunkered down in the shade of a wall when an eleven-year-old called Chili took his cigarette from his mouth and said, “Hey, Slice. Look what the cat dragged in.”
Slice switched his eyes away from the Bianca chick and her sister or whatever she was. The crew watched while Lucky Lampadusa made his awkward progress across the street, but most looked away, like he wasn’t there, when he came to a halt in front of them. He was a big slab of a boy with dark patches under the arms and across the front of his yellow T-shirt. The cast on his leg was dirty, and frayed where the toes poked out.
“Slice. Angel. Guys.”
“Well, look here,” Slice said eventually. “Lucky Lampadusa. Don’ tell me you in need of a free breakfast. You fall on hard times again?”
“Uh-uh. I’m all right.”
“No, you ain’t,” Angel said, without opening his burned-out eyes. “Who bust ya leg for ya?”
“No one.”
“Yeah? Ya do it yaself? Maybe you was in the hammock with ya sister and tried it standin’ up?”
Chili coughed, having tried to smoke and laugh at the same time.
Lucky shifted his weight back onto his good leg and said, “Listen, I got a proposition for ya.”
Angel opened his eyes. Lucky couldn’t look at him. God, that gray shine on his skin, like the belly of a dead fish.
“You got a proposition for us,” Slice said.
“Well, not me, Slice. The man I work for.”
“
That’d be that repo man, huh, Lucky? Wha’s he call himself?”
“Name’s Montoya. People call him Juicy.”
Angel said, “Why d’they call him Juicy, Lucky?”
“I dunno.” Lucky stood there while the crew grinned at him. Then he said, “He’ll pay.”
“He’ll pay for what?”
“Talent-spotting,” Lucky said.
THE SO-CALLED photographer’s PA sat looking around the bar, taking in the old printing press, the posters from the June Uprising thirty years back, the framed yellowed newspaper pictures showing student revolutionaries at barricades. One of them, apparently, was of the old lady who cooked the bar’s budget lunches, back when she was a looker and not afraid to show it. Juicy Montoya would bet that when he was again with his own kind, the so-called PA would describe the place as “funky.” He was a white guy, which came as no surprise. What did come as a surprise, though, was that he was youngish and clean-looking, with plenty of blond hair, like a Yankee rock star or something. And nice clothes. All of which was a problem.
“Look, er, Marco. The thing is, there’s no way someone like you can just walk into the areas we’re going to, you know? You’d stand out like . . .” Juicy’s talent for simile was not up to the challenge. “Plus, you’ve got that expensive camera hanging around your neck. It’s like I couldn’t guarantee your safety.”
The camera was a Nikon digital with manual override and a telescopic lens like the mouth of a rocket launcher. For the previous two hours Juicy and Lucky had nervously guarded the guy while he took “location shots,” mostly of the scuzziest places he could find. Like walls sprayed with gang tags, shop fronts closed up with steel sheeting, alleyways hung with washing like sad festival banners, the wrecked housefront next to the bar they were sitting in. Maybe this deal wasn’t what Juicy’d thought it was. Maybe it was something weirder.
“I see,” Marco said. “This would seem to be a serious difficulty. I suppose I could change my clothes.”
Yeah, Juicy thought. Plus maybe live on the street for six months and acquire a crack habit. He said, “I don’t think that would do it, to be honest.”
“Well, Señor Montoya, we do need to find a way around this. We have less than a week before the shoot. I’ve got to have a gallery of kids together by the end of Thursday at the latest.”
“Absolutely. Absolutely. What I think is, we take the pictures from the car.”
Marco slumped like someone hit by a sniper.
“No, listen, Marco,” Juicy said. “It’s taken a while for my assistant and me to set this up. What you got to understand is that the kind of kids you’re looking for are leery little bastards. They don’t trust anybody, and they got good reason not to. So what Luciano and me have done is make diplomatic contact, right, with certain influential kids we know. That is our area of expertise. Local knowledge. This crew, our contacts, will assemble the kind of kids you’re looking for at three points. One here in the Triangle, two down in Castillo. But the thing is, see, these have to be public places. Places where the kids can scatter if they get spooked. And they’re going to be extremely edgy. You and me get out of the car, they’re ninety-nine percent certain to think we’re cops — or something worse.”
“I honestly don’t see why,” Marco said. “They’ll know what this is all about, won’t they? We’re going to give them cards explaining what we want them to do, where to be, what they’ll get paid, and everything.”
Lucky seemed to be having some trouble swallowing his Pepsi.
Juicy regarded his beer solemnly for several seconds before saying, “There probably won’t be many of ’em can read.”
Marco stared at him, then said, “I see.”
“Hardly any, I’d say.”
Marco’s cheeks pinkened. “So what exactly is the point of the cards in the first place?”
Juicy had the answer to that one. “The point of the cards is, Lucky gives them to the ones you pick. So when they turn up to be collected, they got the cards, and you can be sure they’re the right ones.”
Marco thought about it. “What if they trade them or something?”
Hmm, Juicy thought. The gringo’s not quite as dumb as he looks. He smiled and said, “To some extent, my friend, we are always in the hands of God. Now, Marco, explain to me the problem with taking the pictures from the car. How we can make it easier for you. Another drink?”
A while later, Marco said, “Is there a toilet in this place?”
“There’s a cabinetto out back,” Juicy said. “If someone’s already in it, use the yard. Most people do.”
Marco went out and found the cabinetto locked. He turned away from it and liked the back view of the housefront he had already photographed. The big old timbers holding up the crumbling facade. He could imagine a nice sequence, using both views. Ironic. He took several shots of it, and a couple of the slumping shed with the papered window at the back of the yard. And then, because his bladder couldn’t wait, he urinated against it.
Felicia came back with the coffee seller’s cigarettes and Bianca was gone. It almost didn’t matter, she was so used to it, until she tried to get out of the market and realized she was being tracked and surrounded by half the Hernandez gang. Not the deathly one, though, or Slice.
“Hey, girl. How ya doin’?” The stoned boy with the pockmarked face.
“Hey, c’mon, sister. We ain’t got nothin’ against you.”
“Not yet, anyways.”
Their voices like fingers all over her. She turned back.
Three streets away a querulous bunch of kids was being marshaled by Lucky and a couple of the crew. Slice stopped a little way short of it and penned Bianca up against the wall with his arms.
“Here’s the deal,” he said. “See him with the plaster thing on his leg? Yeah? In a minute he gonna take you roun’ the corner an’ you gonna stand where he tell you. Then a guy inna car’s gonna take your picture. Tha’s all you gotta do, right? An’ don’ try an’ take off or nothin’.’Cause if you do, I’m gonna be trouble to you.”
“What guy?”
“Don’ matter what guy. Jus’ some guy wanna take your picture. You jus’ look at him nice.”
“Okay.”
Slice smiled, bringing his face closer to hers. “No. Look at him real nice, know what I mean?” The fingers of his right hand slid down her arm and onto her hip, where they pressed and urged.
“Yeah,” he said. “Like that. Look at him like that.”
It was weird, Marco thought, shooting the kids mustered against the wall. Like, how come no one was walking down the street?
“That one,” he said to Lucky, who was leaning against the wing of the car. “The one in the blue T-shirt. And the boy three along, with the short dreads.” He took his eye away from the viewfinder, said, “Wow,” and put it back again. “Her. No, her. The one near the end with all the hair.”
He held the button down, taking maybe ten, fifteen shots of her.
She could see that he was gold-haired and beautiful, and he was the first man ever to take her picture. She leaned back against the dirty wall and closed her eyes and parted her lips and lifted her hair up with both hands just like Desmerelda in her favorite photo. When she came out of it, the big boy with his leg in a cast was giving her a blue piece of card with writing on it.
“Wha’s this?”
Lucky started explaining, but then Slice was back close to her.
“Don’ worry ’bout it, Lucky. I’ll make sure she’s there.”
BIANCA WAITED UNTIL Bush eased out the door, then another five minutes: an agony of waiting. For the first time in her life, it mattered hugely what time it was, and it was a bitch that she had no way of knowing.
She gentled out of the bed and was halfway out the door when Felicia, goddamn her, murmured, “Bianca?”
“S’all right. I just gotta go pee.”
Then she was in the yard, no one there. She dug out the folded-up piece of card from her bra and, clutching it tig
ht, slipped through the ruined wall and onto the street. The morning was joyous with light and promise. She began to run.
The music filling Diego’s Maserati is the opening to Oklahoma! When his phone rings, he swears softly and kills the stereo.
“Hi, Diego.”
“Dezi. Everything all right?”
“No, not really. Listen, I don’t think I can make it.”
“What? What’s the matter? Wait, let me pull over. Stay on the phone.”
He hassles his way onto the forecourt of a shopping mall two blocks down from the Plaza de la Republica.
“What’s the problem?”
“I had a very bad night. Baby’s doing very strange things. I feel hellish.”
“Christ, Dezi. I mean, how bad is it? Do you want me to come over?”
“No. I’ve called Michael. He’s going to take me to the clinic.”
“Right.”
“So look, I’m probably not going to make it to the shoot. Or maybe I could come later on, if everything is okay.”
He lifts his glad eyes to the sky and takes a calculated risk. “Forget it,” he says. “We’ll cancel the shoot.”
“No. No way, Diego. Not after all we’ve been through, setting it up. Look, call my cell this afternoon, yeah? Tell me how it’s going.”
“I’ll call, of course I will. But how will I know how it’s going? You’re the expert in this kind of stuff, Dezi. Without you there, I dunno . . .”
“It’ll be fine. They’re all top people.”
“Well, yes. I guess so. But I still —”
“Listen, I gotta go. Michael’s just buzzed the door.”
“Okay. Take care of yourself, you hear me?”
Halted at the next set of lights, Diego sees that the office buildings to his left are in deep shade, while those to his right flash gold diagonals of sunlight. The narrow sky above the glass canyon is a virginal blue. He clicks the stereo back on, and after a while begins to sing along, in a murmur at first, then letting it swell. “‘Oh, what a beautiful mornin’ . . .’”
Slice helped her onto the bus — well, it was like a van with seats in it — with a hand on her backside. Bianca didn’t know any of the other kids who piled on, but she was too high to worry about that. It pulled away.