Beautiful girls die all the time. They die, often, simply because they are beautiful. Or because they stop being beautiful. But they do not die unraped, wearing clothes they cannot own, in possession of an improbable amount of money, in places where they should not be.
He had insisted on a full postmortem. On the day she died, Bianca had eaten well. An analysis of her stomach contents had revealed chicken and vegetables; a high sugar content suggested the ingestion of cakes or sweets as well as soft drinks. Logic insisted that she had not paid for any of it; a hundred dollars was a round sum. Also, she had consumed much of it early in the day. The Ramirez couple gave the three kids food on a regular basis, but had not done so on the morning she disappeared. The Sisters of Mercy had immediately, and with great distress, identified Bianca from the photographs. They could not remember if she’d come to the kitchen on the morning in question; it was always something of a melee, anyway. But they never served anything as ambitious as fried chicken. Nemiso had put his already overworked sergeant and a second plainclothes officer onto the streets of the Triangle for two days. They had met, of course, with very little cooperation. The kind of kids who might have known Bianca scarpered on sight. Two people thought they might have seen her, or someone dressed like her, on the night she was killed, but both were vague and deeply unreliable.
Nemiso had, reluctantly, dismissed Ramirez as a suspect. Men can fake grief, but there could be no reasonable doubt that he had been in his bar on the night the girl died. The captain’s suspicions had been aroused again when Ramirez called him to suggest they check out the fashion sweatshop in the building next door, on the grounds that the Turkish guy, Oguz, might have manufactured the clothes that Bianca had been wearing. But the cheap fakes that Oguz produced had nothing to do with anything, and Nemiso was now almost one hundred percent sure that Ramirez hadn’t been trying that classic culprit’s tactic of volunteering help.
All of which left him nowhere. No, actually: it left him in a perfectly familiar place in which people who didn’t matter a damn, people adrift, got found dead, and what you did was fill in a form, if that, and file it under O for Oblivion.
On a day when his car was in for servicing, Paul Faustino took the subway to work. He was reading the trash in El Correo about the game against Uruguay when the train stopped at Independencia. He looked up from his newspaper and saw Bianca glowering at him from a poster on the station wall. She was wearing some sort of gym outfit and flexing the muscles in her slender arms. It was immensely baffling and shocking, and Faustino wondered for a moment if he were hallucinating, if he were ill. He got to his feet, but the influx of passengers prevented him from reaching the doors before they closed.
He left the train at the next stop and fought his way through to the southbound platform, intending to return to Independencia, but there was no need. She was there on the wall across the track, the second in a sequence of four kids wearing sort of posh grungy clothes in gray and cream. Hers were the ones she’d died in. The meaningless word Paff! ran along the bottom of the poster, one letter for each model. A huge exclamation mark filled the fifth panel in the sequence.
He returned to the northbound platform and tried to call Nola Levy but couldn’t get a signal. There was another Paff! poster at the next stop; Bianca wasn’t on it. But she was there again, twice, in posters alongside the escalator that carried Faustino up to the street. He gazed at her as he rose past her and she sank away behind him. He always felt off balance on escalators, but now he experienced something like full-blown vertigo.
He hurried, almost ran, toward La Nación, then backtracked to a news kiosk. He picked at random three glossy teen magazines and paid without bothering to wait for the change. Bianca, in a swimsuit, occupied a quarter of a double-page spread in the first one he opened.
In his office he typed the ridiculous word into a search engine and clicked on the first of the three results. He was astonished when his monitor melted into Otello and Desmerelda Brabanta standing amid a mob of shabbily dressed kids who all raised their arms and yelled, “Paff!” in one voice. The word then filled the screen and jittered through several lurid colors, finally becoming graffiti on a grimy wall. Then, in speeded-up footage, a hooded teenager added the legend REAL KOOL KLOTHES FOR KIDZ in spray paint and raised his fist in a goalscorer’s gesture. This was followed by a fast sequence of stills of rather moody-looking but very well-dressed teenagers accompanied by rap music. Bianca appeared three times. Curving around the top left of the screen the words Check us out appeared, written in designer scrawl, with an arrow pointing to a vertical row of tabs. The last was labeled About Paff! and Faustino clicked on it. He discovered that Paff! was a Brand-New Breakthrough Fashion Concept devised by Desmerelda Brabanta and her husband, the great Otello. There were further pictures of the radiant couple. The Contact us tab got Faustino an e-mail template; there was no postal address or phone number.
He picked up the phone and asked Marta to put him through to Nola Levy’s office. Voicemail. He found her cell-phone number and got voicemail. Damn! Then he ran the Paff! website again. It was Bianca, surely. Even though it couldn’t be. He riffled through the magazines. Multiple Paff! ads were in every one; the girl who had to be Bianca featured in most of them.
It made no sense at all.
He sat staring at nothing for almost a minute, then opened his desk drawer and took out the plastic box he kept business cards in. He found the one Nemiso had given him and called the number that the policeman had underlined.
At an intersection on the Avenida Buendía, there’s a fifty-foot-high electronic billboard — one of those that change their image every thirty seconds or so. Bush never looks up at it. Why would he? He’s never going to buy the new four-wheel-drive BMW or fly to Rio de Janeiro or see the new Spider-Man movie. Besides, looking up is a bad idea. You look forward and backward and from side to side, because those are the directions that trouble comes from. Looking up makes you vulnerable.
In fact, Bush wasn’t really paying attention to anything much. He was just making his legs go, trying not to think. Carrying the big black bucket. It was good that he didn’t look up, because if he had, he’d have seen a gigantic picture of his dead sister wearing a tight little crop top and looking so sassy you’d think she owned the world.
Captain Nemiso sat staring at his computer screen while holding the phone against his ear. Eventually he said, “Yes. I think so. No, I . . . Okay, Paul. I will, of course. Thank you. Good-bye.”
Detective Maria Navarro knocked on the door and came in before he could tell her to.
“Sir? Um, you’ll think I’ve lost my marbles, but on the way in I thought I saw —”
Nemiso held his hand up. “I know. Come and sit here.”
Navarro did as she was told. Nemiso leaned over her and clicked on the mouse. “Now, watch this carefully while I go and find Sergeant Torres,” he said.
Faustino took the elevator down to the lobby and, after the slightest hesitation, went out through the revolving doors. At the patio’s low parapet, he looked right then left. Bush trudged up from the garage lugging his bucket. Faustino watched him. There was nothing to be read in the boy’s movements. Faustino felt he was observing the life of a remote and deeply submarine creature. When Bush took up his station at the curbside, Faustino, with Rubén’s assistance, retreated into the building.
Otello and Desmerelda have been quarrelling. No, bickering. Having a conversation from which love has absented itself.
The famously physical Uruguayan defense had beaten him up for an hour and a half. He’d been deliberately fouled several times in the penalty box. Only one of the decisions had gone his way, and he’d scored from the spot in the sixty-second minute. It had been the only goal in an ugly game played to an unceasing cacophony of whistles and derisive air horns. He’d returned to the marina penthouse in a dour mood. Desmerelda had smelled alcohol on his breath. She’d not been at the Estadio Nacional; the baby is heavy in her now, and sitting in o
ne position for long periods is difficult. More to the point, she no longer wants to be engulfed by those battering waves of sound, the dreadful human roars. Illogically or not, she imagines them penetrating her womb, instilling their savagery in her unborn boy. She had started to watch the game on television, but had fallen asleep after only ten minutes or so. When she’d carelessly admitted this, he’d grunted that she hadn’t missed anything. In fact, he’d felt hurt, felt she had taken another step away from him.
During the night the baby had been restless, pressing Desmerelda’s bladder. She’d pictured him struggling against his cramped anchorage inside her body. Her sleeplessness had driven Otello, once again, to one of the guest bedrooms.
Now, in the morning, he is out of sorts. His bruises have flowered. He is anxious about his sore Achilles tendon. He wants to make an appointment with the Rialto physical therapist. Now. He doesn’t want to do the midday event at Beckers. Apart from anything else, he ought not to be putting weight on the foot.
“We’ve got to do it,” Desmerelda says. “It’s been set up for weeks. The people at Beckers have spent most of the night filling a whole floor with Paff! stuff. The posters are up, the website went live at six this morning, and we’ve got all the magazines coming. This is a really big day for us. For me.”
“Yeah, well.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, ‘Yeah, well’?”
“Look, Dezi, this whole thing, it’s . . . well, you’re central to it. You and Dario and what’s-her-name . . .”
“I take it you mean Harumi.”
“Yeah. And I haven’t had a great deal to do with it, have I? It’s you that everybody will want to talk to.”
“Oh, no. No, no. If you think that I’m doing this without you, forget it. What, stand there in front of everybody, seven months’ pregnant with your baby, surrounded by these fantastic shirts with your face all over them, and you’re not there? How’s that going to look? How’s that going to make me look? Does the word stupid come to mind, by any chance?”
“Look —”
“No, you look. If you’re not there today, it’s going to suggest very strongly that you’re not committed. And that is going to be very bad news for our product.”
She’s right, of course. So he says nothing.
“Do you happen to know how much money is invested in Paff!?”
“Well —”
“No, you don’t. I do. It’s a lot. So, Capitano, if I can lug Raúl down to Beckers, you can manage it with a sore heel.”
Raúl. That’s one thing they have agreed on at least. The baby’s name.
Detective Sergeant Martín Torres swiveled away from the monitor and said, “It’s her. I’d bet my pension on it.” He tapped a finger on the magazines that Navarro had gone out and bought. “These are her too. But it’s crazy.”
“Yes,” Nemiso said. “There’s also this.”
He dropped a small brown envelope onto the desk. The self-adhesive label on the front was printed with his name and rank and the address of the CCB. Inside, there was a postcard, the kind you can buy in any number, anywhere — plain, the space for the address marked out in lines, the space for the stamp an empty rectangle. A picture of the soccer star Otello, cut from a magazine, had been glued to one side. Glued to the other, a three-word newspaper clipping:
OTELLO LOVES CHILDREN
Below it, in penciled capitals:
AND PICTURES OF THEM. ONE DAY HE’LL GO TOO FAR.
It had been delivered three weeks ago. He’d sent it to forensics, out of habit. There had been no prints, no DNA traces, nothing. At the time, busy with other matters, he’d given it no further thought. There had been no reason for him to connect it with the Bianca case.
Torres studied it before passing it to Navarro. “It’s something and nothing,” he said.
“True,” Nemiso said. “But let’s stay with the something. Because we’ve got nothing else. Until now, this case was as cold as the girl.”
Torres nodded. He thought, but didn’t say, that it was the kind of case that would go cold. Another dead street kid. But for some reason his boss had a hornet in his shorts about this one. Which meant trouble.
Nemiso said, “I believe Otello and his wife live at the marina complex. Ever wanted to see how the other half lives, Martín?”
DIEGO WAS WIRED. It was all he could do to contain himself. He kept going over everything. It was like watching the ball bouncing along the roulette wheel, knowing that it would settle where you wanted it to, all the bets were in, it would drop where you knew it would drop. Thrilling, actually. Unbearably thrilling. But it was in slow motion.
“Patience,” he told himself daily.
“Patience,” he told the ever-patient Emilia.
DIEGO is dressing for the Beckers event when his phone rings. It is 10:21 a.m.
DIEGO: Hi, Capitano.
OTELLO: Listen, Diego. We have a problem.
DIEGO: It’s not Dezi, is it?
OTELLO: No. The police are here.
DIEGO: The police? What do they want?
OTELLO: They want me to go downtown with them. Now, if you can believe that.
DIEGO: I don’t understand.
OTELLO: Me neither. They’re also taking my computer away. I don’t even know if they can do that. Can they do that?
DIEGO: Uh . . .
OTELLO: Wait. Hang on.
[It seems that OTELLO has turned away from the phone to talk to somebody. DIEGO waits, in an agony of exultation.]
OTELLO: Diego? Listen, that lawyer we used to sort out that business with Michael. Perlman, was it? You got her number?
DIEGO: I can find it, yeah. But —
OTELLO: Call her. Now. Tell her to get down to . . . Wait a minute.
[Again DIEGO strains to hear what the poor fool is saying to someone else.]
OTELLO: Yeah. The Central Criminal Bureau — Special Investigations Unit. Ask — no, don’t ask — insist on speaking to a Captain Nemiso.
DIEGO [indulging himself]: How do you spell that? No, never mind. Capitano, what the hell is all this about? Haven’t you explained that you and Dezi have to —
OTELLO: Diego, I gotta go. Get Perlman, okay? Right now. I’ll call you back soon as I can.
Diego slides open the glass doors to the balcony that runs the length of his apartment. The sky is an unsullied blue. He inhales, deeply, the light breeze. When his nerves have settled, he goes to his CD rack and selects a recording of waltzes by Richard Strauss. He cranks up the volume and, when the lush and jaunty music swells, goes out onto the balcony and dances. He is wearing a shirt the color of the sky, a silvery tie, and black socks. Trouserless, gazing with rapt attention into the eyes of his invisible partner, he dances.
When the waltz is over, he goes back inside, stabs the music off, and calls Consuela Perlman’s office. He gets her secretary and leaves a message. Then he puts on his second-best suit.
10:56 a.m. The offices of El Sol. Mateo Campos is grubbing through the pages of a celebrity magazine called Rich when his phone rings.
“Yeah.”
Eleven seconds later he says, “Yeah?”
Then he says, “I don’ suppose you wanna give me your name? I didn’ think so. This is bullshit, right?”
But the line has gone dead. Campos thumbs the recall buttons.
10:57 a.m. A phone booth in the lobby of TFN, the city center train terminal. Diego is pleased when the phone rings, but ignores it. He has a small notebook in his hand. When the ringing stops, he puts another fifty-cent coin in the slot and dials a second number.
Mano Valdano of El Correo reacts to the call in pretty much the same manner as Mateo Campos. However, because the caller’s voice was sober and articulate despite its coarse northern accent, Valdano summons a junior reporter and a photographer and sends them over to the CCB. Just in case.
10:59 a.m. Mateo Campos uses the little finger of his right hand to dig for earwax, which is something he does only when he is thinking, so the
re’s usually plenty in there. Then he gets up and ambles over to the desk of his colleague Estevan Ponte. He leans down closer to Ponte than Ponte would like.
“Listen, Stevie — I just got a call from someone saying that the cops have hauled Otello down to Central.”
“What?”
“Yeah.”
“What for?”
“The guy didn’t say. But he did say they took sonny boy’s computer away as well.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. You got any way of checkin’ this out? Nine chances out of ten it’s some idiot making a prank call, but I don’ wanna sit here wipin’ egg offa my face if it turns out to be true.”
“Okay. Give me five minutes.”
Ponte is an amiable and cultured man whose specialty is lurid coverage of murders and kidnappings. He has nurtured social and financial relationships with a number of police officers and civilian police employees. He takes his cell phone out into the corridor and calls an admin supervisor at the CCB.
11:03 a.m. Diego is walking back to his car when his phone rings. He checks the caller ID. Desmerelda again. He doesn’t answer this time, either.
11:04 a.m. El Sol. Ponte walks as casually as he can manage to Campos’s desk. Taps Campos on the shoulder.
“It’s true. Come outside.”
Back in the corridor, Ponte says, “Yeah. They brought Otello in just over twenty minutes ago.”
“Christ on a bike.”
“My contact doesn’t know what’s going on, but she says he was logged in by Captain Nemiso. Know the name?”
Campos shakes his head. “Should I?”
“He’s a serious dude. Heads the Special Investigations Unit. So we’re not talking traffic offenses here.”
“What about the computer thing?”
“That’s true too, apparently. And the two usual reasons for confiscating computers are financial naughtiness or —”