More pressing, more sickening, was the question that Faustino needed and feared the answer to: did the boy himself know yet? If he did, or when he did, would he keep quiet?
And what in God’s name was wrong with the elevators tonight? He jabbed his thumb against the down button again.
One thing was certain. Bush would have to stay away from La Nación. For everybody’s sake. At least until this Otello nonsense had blown over.
The elevator pinged its arrival, and by the time it had descended to the lobby, Faustino had made up his mind. He’d go over to the Triangle tonight. Talk to the boy, persuade him — pay him, if necessary — to stay there, lie low. He checked his watch. Ten past seven. The kid should be back there by now.
He wasn’t. He was sitting halfway down the patio steps in lamplight.
“Bush?”
The boy turned his head and looked up at him. He was holding a copy of El Sol that he’d gotten from somewhere. The kiosk, maybe, or a trash can. His sister’s picture, and Otello’s, on the front page. Bush’s face was full of mute yet dreadful questions, and Faustino’s heart stumbled.
“Wha’s this mean, Maestro?”
“Nothing,” Faustino said.
Bush stared at him. He held the paper up. “It’s Bianca,” he said. “How come they got pictures of her?”
Voices descended from above and behind them. Faustino grabbed the paper from the boy and took his arm. “Come with me, Bush. Come on.”
Faustino half led, half dragged the boy to the ramp into the parking garage.
“It’s Bianca,” the boy repeated. “I don’ unnerstan’.”
Faustino unlocked the car and opened the passenger door. “Get in.”
Bush gaped at him.
“Christ, Bush. Get in. I’m taking you home.”
It was all being recorded by the CCTV cameras. Paul Faustino bundling a boy into his car. Leaning across him, apparently fumbling with the seat belt.
He parked on the street where the car could be seen from the yard through the doorway of the ruined house. The door of the shed scraped open as he and Bush approached it; he could not see Felicia’s face but heard her murmur, “Bush?”
“Yeah,” Faustino said quietly. “And me, Felicia. Paul. Let us in, please.”
She had not lit a candle. It was intensely dark inside.
“Wha’s happenin’? Bush, wha’s up?”
“Bianca,” the boy said, and then some other words that were muffled. The two kids might have embraced; Faustino couldn’t tell.
“Listen,” he said. “I’ll be back in a couple of minutes, okay?”
He headed blindly for the back door of the bar, then thought better of it and went out onto the street. Voices, laughter, and elderly rock music spilled out of La Prensa’s open door. There were ten or so customers inside, none of them the kind of person Faustino would have cared to get into an argument with. They looked him up and down as he entered, then went back to their drinks and conversations. Fidel stared at him, paused in the act of pouring rum into a couple of shot glasses. On a shelf behind the counter there was a TV set with the sound off. To Faustino’s horror, it showed Bianca’s face. As he watched, the camera pulled back to reveal that it was a photo in a magazine held by a reporter. Faustino glanced around the room. As far as he could tell, no one was paying any attention to the Eight O’Clock News.
Fidel said, “Evening, señor. You’ll be wanting the restroom, huh? It’s out the back.”
“Right,” Faustino said.
“Come, I’ll show you. Nina? You wanna look after the bar a second?”
Out in the dark, they spoke in low voices.
“Jesus, Fidel.”
“Yeah.”
“You saw the papers?”
“A guy came in lunchtime with that El Sol rag. I damn near had a heart attack when I saw the front page. I can’t get my head around this Otello thing.”
“Don’t bother trying. Look who’s running the story.”
“Yeah. But he had her picture on his computer, is that right?”
Faustino shrugged. “So they say. I dunno. But right now I’m more concerned with Bush and Felicia. I brought him back just now. He’s in shock, I guess. I tried to explain things to him, but I don’t think he took it in.”
“For some reason that don’t surprise me.”
“No. But what worries me most is that he’ll get identified. Tracked down by El Sol or some other dog pack. I tried to tell him he needs to stay off the street. Lie low for a while. I don’t know if he got the message. Look, Fidel, could you and Nina . . .”
Fidel had turned his head away. “That your car outside?”
“Uh . . . yes.”
“Nice. I wouldn’t leave it there too long, if I was you.”
Faustino ground his cigarette out with his foot. He felt sorrowful rather than angry. “Okay, Fidel. Okay.”
“Listen, man,” Fidel said, relenting. “I appreciate your concern. You’re trying to help. But you’re out of your depth. You see all this as a problem.”
“Well, isn’t it, for Chrissake?”
“No. A problem is a thing that can be solved. A thing with a solution. There are no solutions for kids like Bush. For them, solutions are undreamed-of luxuries.”
“I don’t understand what that means.”
“No. Of course you don’t. Okay. I told you this before, but I’ll tell you again. Nina and me, we gave shelter to three kids. Now we got two. One down, two to go. This was never a place of safety. Shelter, maybe, but not safety. Kids like these, they’re never safe. That’s not a problem, man; it’s the goddamn reality. And there’s no solution to reality.”
Fidel detected a slight rise in volume from the bar and tipped his head toward it.
“Bianca was a face, you understand? Probably, by now, a lot of street kids will’ve seen her on the front of the papers, posters, whatever. Older people too. Some of them might know, or have some idea, where she lived. They’ll know Felicia. They’ll know Bush. And for an amount of money you’d no doubt consider pathetic, they’ll say anything to anyone who asks. Now, what was it you wanted me and Nina to do?”
“Nothing,” Faustino said. “I’m sorry.”
“Forget it,” Fidel said. “You’re okay, Faustino. But I gotta go.”
Faustino stood in the darkness for a lonely minute. Then he went over to the shed and tapped on the door.
“Felicia? It’s me.”
She let him in.
“I can’t see anything,” he said.
A match flared. It lit up the shed for a ghastly second and then became the tiny flame of a candle that reflected in the eyes of the children and, he presumed, his own.
“Bush, Felicia. Listen, do you trust me?”
After a slight hesitation that disappointed him, Felicia said, “Yes.”
“Good. Okay, then. I want you to get in my car and come with me. Now. Is there anything you need to bring with you?”
Felicia said, “Where you wanna take us to, Señor Paul?”
“Somewhere safe. Where no one will know where you are.”
Their eyes guttered at him.
“We’re going to my place,” Faustino said disbelievingly.
THE CURTAINS OF the penthouse remain drawn. It is now almost a day and a half since Desmerelda and Otello have seen daylight. They do not watch television. They eat snacks from the refrigerator.
They have started to find it convenient not to be near each other. When Desmerelda takes or makes calls on her cell phone, she goes into another room. She seeks refuge in sleep a lot of the time, her hands cupped protectively over her baby. She showers frequently. Despite the coolness of the air-conditioning, she often feels hot and unclean. Once or twice she has had to suppress a mad desire to go out onto the balcony and display her swollen womb to the pitiless cameras.
Otello is beginning to feel that physical heaviness, the lethargy, that tends to overcome him when he doesn’t train. His Achilles is still slightly swollen
and sore. When he sits for any length of time, he rests it on a bag filled with ice cubes. Tresor has texted — texted! — him to say that because of the injury and 4 other obvios resons he will not be playing on Wednesday against Gimnasia. He has, in fact, played his last game for Rialto, although he does not know this yet. He is full of sullen rage because his wife does not believe what he says about the file hidden on his computer. Because there is no way she can believe him. The situation is insane; it’s driving him crazy. It’s like coming home and finding your living room occupied by a vast boulder or something. It doesn’t make sense. And because it doesn’t make sense, you can’t do anything about it. He’d searched desperately for an explanation. Any explanation, other than the only one.
“Okay,” he’d said, going into the bedroom this morning. Or last night or whenever it was. “That party we had here, what was it, three weeks ago? Remember? There were people here I hardly knew. One of them coulda done it. Like for a joke, maybe.”
“Joke,” she’d said flatly, then looked at him. “You think anybody hates you that much?”
He’d slumped against the door frame. Wanting so much to lie down with her.
“Dezi. It’s got to be something like that. Got to be. I mean, who else? Michael? Diego?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“So who, then?”
She’d shrugged. As if she’d lost interest. It had nearly killed him, that shrug. She’d done it several times since.
So he has given up pleading his case. He is alone with her, and with her he is alone. His marriage, he thinks, is in the early stages of eclipse; the shadow has already taken its first bite. He drinks Coke, topping it up with white rum, hoping to kill the worm eating him from the inside.
Diego calls frequently. He tells them, reluctantly, what the papers and TV are saying.
OTELLO: What about Shakespeare?
DIEGO: Well . . .
OTELLO: What?
DIEGO: Isabel is calling a strategy meeting tomorrow, apparently. I haven’t been able to actually talk to her. Hey, I have to tell you this. Tell Dezi too. The sales of Paff! have gone through the roof. Like the man said, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, eh, Capitano?
Indeed, there is not. “Bianca” outfits, fitted with tiny yellow commemorative ribbons, are really hot. It’s a struggle to keep up with demand. Thus, fashion becomes an extra ingredient in the spicy stew of celebrity and politics and crime that feeds the sharks.
Faustino had shown Bush and Felicia around his apartment. It was ridiculous, the number of times he’d apologized for things.
“There’s just the one spare bedroom. Is that okay with you guys? Or maybe you could sleep on the couch in the living room, Bush?”
“That’s okay, Señor Paul,” Felicia’d said, and he hadn’t known what she’d meant.
They’d been so numb yet at the same time jittery, staring at the framed photos on the walls, the books, the stuff left lying around unhidden so anybody could steal it. He’d shown them the bathroom, the fridge, how to work the stove, the electric kettle, the remote for the TV, and they’d gazed at it all like it was life after death. He’d demonstrated the shower for them, getting the sleeve of his shirt soaked in the process.
Now he took chicken fajitas from the freezer and heated them in the microwave, showing them how to do it. But they watched his face, not what he was doing. They ate cautiously at first, then ravenously. It made him heartsick to watch them. He slid the food from his own plate onto theirs, got a beer from the fridge, and sat smoking and drinking until they had finished.
Later he said, “Look, tomorrow, I’ve got to go to work. I want you to stay right here, okay? I haven’t got a spare key, so if you go out you won’t be able to get back in again. Understand? So stay here. Use anything you want. Don’t answer the phone. I’ll try not to be back late.”
Sometime in the night Faustino awoke from a familiar dream in which he entered a room empty of anything other than menace and, when he tried to leave, discovered that the door had shrunk to the size of a cat door. His mouth felt like it had been gagged with a tramp’s sock.
He headed for the kitchen. The lamp he’d left burning in the passageway showed him that Bush had gone from the living-room couch. Alarmed, Faustino went to the spare bedroom. The door was wide open, and there was enough light for him to see that Bush was huddled on the bed with Felicia, his arms clasping her. The girl’s eyes were open, but she didn’t speak.
In the kitchen Faustino gazed at his reflection in the window. “What are you doing?” he asked it. “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?”
IN AN IMMIGRATION interview room at the airport, it took Nemiso less than two minutes to get Juicy Montoya’s name out of a sunburned and very frightened Marco Duarte.
The CCB computer coughed up a good deal of information about, and several unflattering photographs of, José Maria “Juicy” Montoya. He’d last appeared before the Third District Court eighteen months previously, when he’d been acquitted of extortion because the prosecution witnesses had failed to appear. The court record included his place of residence, which turned out to be three rooms in a building that might have been posh once but had forgotten when. The apartment showed all the signs of a sorry life and a hasty departure. At the bottom of an otherwise empty wardrobe there lay a soiled and crumpled shirt. Torres found a business card in its breast pocket.
“‘J. M. Montoya,’” he read out. “‘Swift Financial Reclamation Services. 9 Castana.’”
Nemiso put down the plaster model of Christ the Redeemer that had stood on top of the TV set. The words GENUINE SOUVENIR OF RIO were hand-painted on the base. “Where’s that?”
“The Triangle.”
“Ah,” Nemiso said. “Call Navarro and tell her to meet us there. And to bring some uniformed men.”
The doors were locked and the steel roller blind lowered when they got there. Two officers used a battering ram to open the place up. The top drawer of Montoya’s desk had been pulled out and emptied. The newspaper in the waste bin was the previous day’s edition of El Correo. An old-fashioned safe, olive green, stood against one wall. Nemiso tugged experimentally at its door, and it swung open to reveal a half-empty bottle of rum and two cans of beer. At the back of the bottom shelf, a single ten-dollar bill.
Torres said, “I’d say our guy made a spur-of-the-moment decision to go on vacation. Probably just after he saw this morning’s papers.”
“Yes,” Nemiso said wearily. “Okay, you know what to do. Airports, train stations, bus stations. Find out if Montoya owns a car. Whether he does or not, check rental car places. Start with the budget ones.”
He tried to inject some briskness, some urgency, into it; but he had the very strong feeling that he had been misdirected. That he’d been piloted into a tributary that would dwindle to nothing in the middle of nowhere.
Down at the marina, a group of freelance paparazzi decide that the cruiser they’ve rented isn’t in prime position. One of them knows boats. He jump-starts the engine and backs away from the floating jetty. Others see what he’s doing and with varying degrees of success try to do likewise. The resulting jockeying for position incurs damages that will total three million dollars.
Two streets from the subway at Independencia, there’s an Italian-style café bar frequented, late afternoon, by commuters. It’s a place where you can take the edge off the day before making the homeward trek to the suburbs. The kind of place where two well-dressed men drinking coffee at a corner table will not attract unwelcome attention.
“Otello and Desmerelda Brabanta were in entirely legitimate possession of CD images of the children modeling their clothes,” Nemiso said. “Bilbao’s office sent them two complimentary copies of the disk. Detective Navarro saw them almost as soon as she went into the study. My problem is that Otello had apparently installed an edited version of that disk onto his hard drive, and labeled it in a misleading way. Forty-four out of the fifty images in that file are of
the murdered child Bianca Diaz. In most of them she’s modeling bikinis.”
“Right,” Faustino said.
“And when our technical people went through Otello’s laptop, they discovered that he’d apparently visited a number of porn sites.”
Faustino dawdled his spoon in his coffee and said, “Child porn?”
“No.”
“So, our national hero has feet of clay. He does the sad normal thing that millions of other men do. Disappointing, perhaps, but not, as far as I’m aware, illegal.”
“How well do you know him, Paul?”
“I’ve interviewed him a few times. Met him and Desmerelda socially once or twice. More to the point, I’ve watched him play. Lots of times. There’s an honesty in him. Maybe that will sound strange to you. Or possibly pretentious. But the idea that he could kill a child is absurd.”
Nemiso said, “Ten years ago, I convicted a man who’d sexually abused, then murdered, several elderly women. He was one of the most charming and articulate men I’ve ever met. And very honest. It took me a long time to believe what I knew about him.”
“You know as well as I do that Otello didn’t kill Bianca Diaz,” Faustino said.
Nemiso turned to watch an animated discussion at the bar. Without looking at Faustino, he said, “On the night she was murdered, Otello had played an away game against Esparta. He flew back later that night. CCTV cameras at the airport confirm that Michael Cass met him. Otello claims he booked that flight because his wife had been taken to the hospital and he wanted to visit her first thing in the morning. Cass dropped him off at the marina apartment just before midnight. Bianca was probably killed sometime between ten o’clock and four the following morning. Otello has no alibi for much of that time. The security cameras at the marina are wiped every three weeks, so we cannot establish that Otello didn’t go out.”
Faustino signaled for two more coffees. “Okay,” he said. “There was opportunity. What about motive?”