Exposure

  Like there was a connection between the two things.

  Faustino had just returned to his desk when his phone rang again.

  “Yeah.”

  “Paul? It’s Marta.”

  “Hi, Marta. What’s up?”

  “Well. You know that kid, the one from the street, with all the hair?”

  Faustino clicked the save icon on his screen. “Yes. What?”

  “Paul, he’s down here in reception. Says he wants to talk to you.”

  “He’s at the desk?”

  “I sent him over to the waiting area. He’s got a girl with him, and a middle-aged guy.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Just that he wanted to talk to you. Do you want me to tell him you’re busy?”

  “No. No, keep him there. I’ll be right down.”

  “He shouldn’t be in here, Paul.”

  “I know. Just make sure he stays put.”

  Faustino stepped out of the elevator and looked across to the waiting area, an arrangement of chairs and sofas partly screened off from the lobby by potted plants in square marble tubs. Bush was perched on one of the sofas, his forearms on his knees, his head lowered so that his face was invisible behind the tumble of dreads. The young girl sitting beside him had a longish, rather lovely, and very somber face. Her arm was against Bush’s back, the fingers resting on his shoulder. The man standing with them wore a baggy cotton suit that had seen better days. As a group, they looked like a couple of kids who’d been nabbed by an undercover store detective and were waiting for the cops to arrive.

  Bush raised his head when Faustino came over, but didn’t stand. Nor did the girl. The guy was in his mid-fifties, maybe. Paunchy. His graying hair was pulled back into a short ponytail. A bandido-style mustache drooped down to the corners of his mouth. He might have been someone who’d been in a rock band in the seventies, then gone to seed.

  “Señor Faustino? My name is Fidel Ramirez.”

  Faustino shook the man’s hand, then looked down at Bush. The boy seemed terribly tired. No, worse: stricken.

  “Bush? What’s up? What did you want to see me about?”

  “I’m sorry, Maestro. I didn’ wanna bother you. It was Felicia’s idea.”

  Faustino looked at the girl. “You’re Felicia?”

  She nodded.

  Faustino said, “Uh, listen, shall we go outside and talk? It can get kind of busy in here.”

  Bush and Felicia sat on one of the steel benches, adopting exactly the same positions as before. Fidel sat on the other side of Bush. Faustino didn’t feel right about forming a line of four, so, as earlier, he leaned against the nearest trough, from where he could see their faces. He lit a cigarette and offered one to Ramirez, who shook his head.

  “Bianca’s gone missin’,” Bush said, not looking up.

  “Bianca?”

  “My kid sister.”

  “Ah. How long has she been gone?”

  “She ain’t been back for three nights. She took off Monday mornin’. Me an’ Felicia an’ Fidel been lookin’ everywhere, man. Everywhere. Jesus.”

  He shook his head and inhaled wetly through his nose. Felicia’s fingers tightened on his shoulder. Faustino would have liked to put an arm around the boy also, but thought better of it.

  He said, “So, Señor Ramirez, you are a, er, relative?”

  “No,” Fidel said. He looked slightly uncomfortable. “I, my wife, Nina, and me, we have a bar. On Trinidad, down in the Triangle. And we, well . . .”

  “He give us a place,” Felicia said quietly. “When we didn’ have nowhere to go.”

  “I see.”

  “Well, it’s not much of a place,” Fidel said hastily. “There’s this shed out back, and . . . Look, Señor Faustino, the thing is, we can’t go to the police about Bianca. For all sorts of reasons. You understand?”

  “Yes,” Faustino said. “Yes, I do.”

  “Yeah. And Bush says you are a good guy. That he trusts you. And we thought maybe you could help. In some way.”

  Bush was jigging his legs up and down, like someone listening to music. “I’m real sorry, Maestro,” he said, still not quite able to look directly at Faustino. “I jus’ run out of other ideas.”

  “No, it’s all right. I’m glad you . . . Listen, Bush, how old is Bianca?”

  “Thirteen and some. Nearly fourteen. Looks older, though.”

  “Right. She ever done this before? Like take off for a day or two?”

  “No. Felicia keeps her tight most of the time. When she can.”

  Faustino thought about that. “So you don’t think she might’ve, you know, gone off with someone? Of her own accord?” He tried again. “I mean, with a boyfriend or something?”

  “No way,” Bush said. But Felicia’s eyes flickered, and Faustino noted it.

  Bush lifted his face at last, and Faustino realized why it had taken him so long to do so. The boy’s eyes were wet, and he was ashamed of it.

  “I got a real bad feelin’ about this, Maestro. Real bad.”

  Faustino stubbed his cigarette out. “Right. Listen. I need to go talk to someone. Wait for me here, okay?” He looked at Fidel, who nodded. “I’ll be right back.”

  He strode to the door that wouldn’t open and swore at it. Rubén opened the other one and let him in. Faustino went over to the desk and spoke to Marta above the heads of a couple who were taking an age to fill in the visitors’ book because they couldn’t agree upon what their car registration was.

  “Marta? Call Nola Levy for me, would you? And give me the phone if she answers.”

  There was only one spare seat in Nola’s office, and because it wasn’t obvious who should sit in it, her guests all stood. Bush recognized her as the woman he’d seen weeping out on the patio a long time ago. She made notes as they spoke. She wrote down their description of Bianca and her clothes.

  “Is there anything else? Like, for example, are her ears pierced? Does she wear a bangle, or anything around her neck? Does she have any scars, or a birthmark?”

  “No,” Felicia said.

  Fidel cleared his throat. “She is very beautiful, señora,” he said unhappily. “That is her main distinguishing feature.”

  Nola wrote that down too. Then she said, “Paul, maybe Bush and Felicia might like a Coke or something.”

  Faustino looked at her. She tipped her head in the direction of the door. “I’d like a few moments with Señor Ramirez.”

  When they were alone, Nola said, “Please sit down, señor. Now, I have some experience when it comes to missing children. I have to say that not many of the stories I could tell you have happy endings.”

  “No,” Fidel said. “I would not think so.”

  “I would not wish to offer you any false hopes.”

  “No.”

  Nola gazed at him for a couple of seconds, then said, “You put yourself at risk, harboring these children.”

  Fidel shrugged. The shrug meant several things, including Yeah, but what can you do?

  “Okay. So, I need to ask you two questions. The first is, do you have a number I can reach you at?”

  Fidel gave her the number of the bar, and Nola wrote it below her notes and drew a rectangle around it.

  “The second question is, what can you tell me about Bianca that you didn’t want to say in front of the others?”

  Later, when Fidel and the kids had gone, Faustino and Nola lingered on the patio.

  “So,” he said. “What do you think?”

  Nola drew in a long breath and let it out as a sigh. “Well, the least worst scenario is that she’s gone off with someone. From what Ramirez told me, that’s quite possible. And if that’s the case, she’ll most likely show up when whoever it is has finished with her. Unless that person trades in girls.”

  “Yeah,” Faustino said. “It’s not terrifically good news that she’s a beauty, is it? What about Ramirez, anyway? Is he kosher, do you think? He doesn’t exactly look it.”

  “My instinct is t
hat he’s okay. But then my track record when it comes to judging men is lousy.”

  Faustino was intrigued by this confession but stashed it away silently for future reference.

  “I’ve got a contact at the Central Criminal Bureau,” Nola said. “I’ll call him. But if he knows who Bianca is, it’ll mean she’s dead.” She looked at her watch. “I’ve got a piece to finish. If I hear anything, I’ll call you.”

  “Please.”

  “Paul, I know you care about this boy. But these kids live in a world people like you and me have no access to. I’m sure you want to help, but get yourself ready for the fact that you can’t.”

  “Yeah,” Faustino said. “Don’t worry. I’m pretty expert at being useless. But call me, huh?”

  POLICE CAPTAIN HILARIO Nemiso’s intolerance for unsolved cases was one of the things that distinguished him from his colleagues and made him unpopular. Like his striking appearance, this had a great deal to do with his father.

  In the late summer of 1977, a navy patrol vessel on a routine exercise off the southern coast spotted a drifting twelve-foot fishing boat with nobody on board. This was about eight miles out from the isolated village of Salinas. When three sailors in the ship’s inflatable raft went to investigate, they found that the boat’s diesel engine was in good working order and that there was plenty of fuel in its tank. There were also several splashes of blood aft of the boat. When the nets were hauled in, they held a catch of a good many fish and a man’s body. Back in Salinas, the body was quickly identified as that of an immigrant Japanese fisherman named Takashi. He had never learned much Spanish, and now he never would. The boat was named Hilario, after Takashi’s son, who was eleven years old at the time. Two police officers came down from Santiago. They conducted a cursory investigation, went away again, and wrote a report that was filed and forgotten.

  Takashi’s wife was a handsome woman of mixed African and native blood who had many envious admirers. After the policemen had gone away, she laid her husband’s body in his boat and cremated it on the beach, as was the local custom. When her son was eighteen, he made his way to Santiago and got jobs laboring on building sites and went to night school. When he was twenty-one, he joined the police. He proved to be a very good policeman and was soon recruited to the federal force and sent to the capital. There he won, first, promotion and, second, enemies. He was efficient, introspective, and apparently incorruptible. He did not seem to know where to draw the line. He did not seem to understand the difference between murders that mattered and murders that didn’t. He insisted on conducting investigations beyond the point where they started to have political implications.

  This brought him to the attention of Hernán Gallego, who was at that time commissioner of police. Gallego’s intelligent response to the Nemiso problem was to promote him to captain and give him his own department. It was called the Special Investigations Unit and had its own budget. A tried and tested tactic: put someone who’s too good at his job in charge of something, and he’ll become so enmeshed in bureaucracy that he’ll get nothing done.

  Astonishingly, it didn’t work. Nemiso somehow did all the paperwork and attended all the interminable interdepartmental meetings while continuing to dig up dirt about disappeared kids and other undesirables. So when Gallego was appointed minister of internal security, one of the first things he did was merge Nemiso’s unit and its budget into the CCB, the Central Criminal Bureau, where there were people who could keep an eye on him and thwart his excessive and inconvenient zeal.

  Nola Levy was one of the very few people whom Captain Nemiso respected, and she was one of the very few people who called him by his first name. They’d met when she was still a crime reporter. Her seriousness of purpose, which made her the butt of her fellow reporters’ jokes, impressed him. In time he began to provide her, privately, with information — the kind of information his bosses would have preferred to keep out of the public domain. Sometimes when Nola’s articles caused serious political embarrassment, there would be searches for the source of the leaks, but Nemiso did not come under suspicion. He was considered to be too much of a stickler for the rules, too much of a prig, to do anything underhanded.

  Nola and the captain did not often meet face-to-face. When they did, it was usually in a car. On rare occasions, like this one, he visited her apartment after dark.

  “Only five young female homicides in the last eight days. Five recorded homicides, that is. Three have been positively identified. Either of the other two could be your girl, although I very much hope not.”

  He opened the large envelope he was carrying and passed the photographs over to Nola. The second set was of a girl who was beautiful even in death.

  “It could be her,” Nola said. “In fact, I have an awful feeling that it is. All that hair, like the boy’s. The clothes aren’t right, though.”

  “I think you said that no one actually saw her leave the place she lived in. She might not have been dressed the way the other girl said she was.”

  “Maybe. But I rather doubt that she had an extensive wardrobe.”

  “No. The timing fits, though. She died five nights ago. Strangulation with a thin ligature. Unusually, no sexual assault.”

  “Where was she found?”

  “In an alleyway off the Calle Flor.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “In the Triangle.”

  “Ah,” Nola said.

  Nemiso looked at his watch. “I think we should show these pictures to the people that know Bianca,” he said.

  “What, now?”

  “Why not? I’ll drive us over there.”

  Nola glanced at her watch. “Okay. I’ll call Ramirez and let him know we’re coming.”

  She paused with the phone in her hand. “Hilario? I think it might be a good idea if Paul Faustino came with us.”

  Nemiso considered this.

  “He knows the boy better than we do,” Nola said. “And if . . .”

  “Yes. Very well.”

  La Prensa was closed when Faustino, Levy, and Nemiso arrived, but there were beads of light edging the shutters. Fidel let them in, then led them to the table where Nina sat and laid his hand on hers. Faustino made the introductions. When Nemiso displayed the photographs, there was no need for him to ask the question. Nina covered the lower part of her face with her hands, stifling a cry of pain that made Faustino flinch. She closed her eyes, but this did not prevent her tears. Fidel put his arm around her shoulders and gazed at Nemiso with doleful rage in his eyes. After perhaps a minute, Nina straightened up and wiped her face with her hands. She glanced at the photographs again, then pushed them roughly across the tabletop toward Nemiso as though they were works of vicious pornography. The policeman shuffled them together with the closeup of Bianca’s face uppermost.

  Ramirez had told the truth, Faustino thought. She was — had been — a very beautiful child.

  “I have to ask you formally,” Nemiso said. “Is this the girl named Bianca who has been living here under your protection?”

  “Yeah,” Fidel said. “It is.” He sounded as though he had a throat full of catarrh.

  “Could you tell me her full name?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t know it?”

  “No.” Fidel stood suddenly. “Jesus Christ,” he said fiercely. “Jesus bloody Christ. I knew, I knew . . .” He stopped himself and turned to look at the back door of the bar, working his fingers over his mustache. “Someone’s going to have to tell Bush. And Felicia. Dear God.” He inhaled deeply, as if preparing himself for the task.

  Fear took hold of Faustino, too. He cleared his throat, needing to speak but not knowing what words to use.

  “No,” Nina said sharply. “Not tonight. Why wake them to . . . to this? Let them be. We’ll tell them in the morning. Together.”

  Fidel looked a question at Nemiso, who said, “I think Señora Ramirez is right. But I’m afraid there will have to be a formal identification of Bianca’s body. By the nex
t of kin.”

  Fidel looked blank for a moment, then said, “What, you mean Bush? Oh, no, man. That’s too much. It’d kill him.”

  “It has to be done, I’m afraid,” Nemiso said.

  “So I’ll do it.”

  Nemiso shook his head. “No. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s shit,” Fidel said. “That’s cruel, man.”

  “Yes. And I think, for several reasons, it would be best if we got it over with sooner rather than later. I’ll arrange things for tomorrow afternoon. Say two o’clock? I assume you’ll want to accompany the boy. I’ll send a car to collect you.”

  Faustino noticed the look that passed between Fidel and Nina. Later, in Nemiso’s car, he said, “I don’t think it’s such a great idea to send a police car tomorrow. The boy’s going to be badly freaked out. I think it might be better if someone he knows picks him up.”

  “You’re volunteering to do this, señor?”

  “Yeah,” Faustino said bitterly.

  FAUSTINO AND THE taxi driver had some difficulty finding the place.

  “I don’ get much call to come down here,” the driver said unhappily.

  It was close to two o’clock when they pulled up at the bar, and Fidel was standing outside it, scanning the street. It seemed to take him several blank seconds to recognize Faustino when he got out of the cab. Then he managed something that approximated a smile.

  “We appreciate you doing this, señor,” he said. “Bush isn’t too good.”

  “No,” Faustino said.

  “Okay. Well. I’ll get them.” He turned toward the door, then back again. “It’s okay if I come along too?”

  “Of course. I’d be grateful for it.”

  It was Nina who appeared first. She held the door open, and Felicia led Bush out by the hand. It was hard for Faustino to look at the boy. He was more like a thin old man in disguise, or a victim of some sudden wasting sickness.

  “Bush?”

  “Maestro,” he said, almost inaudibly, and nodded. And kept nodding, like a doll with a spring for a neck.

  Faustino’s breath snagged at the bottom of his throat, and for an awful moment he thought he might moan, or worse. Instead he stepped briskly up to the boy and put his right arm around his shoulders.