Exposure Read online

  Faustino had studied the kid while fumbling with the damn cellophane wrapping on the cigarettes. The Rasta hair, the longish Spanish face, the wide Indian cheekbones, the African coloring, the narrow nose from God knows where — Arabia, maybe — the good teeth. Some flecks of green in the eyes. Not tall; skinny but well muscled. The genes that had produced him had tumbled through the centuries like balls in the lotto machine and come up with a winning number. He was a good-looking boy. But someone else had walked off with the money and all the luck.

  “How old are you, Bush?”

  Another shrug. “Seventeen?”

  Well, yeah. Any street kid who could get away with it would say that. Because the dreaded Child Protection Order didn’t apply to anyone over sixteen. He might have been fourteen, fifteen — who knows?

  But for whatever reason, Faustino thereafter bought his Presidentes via the kid. Add the change together, and over a week it came to about a dollar twenty. Enough for two chicken chili fajitas if you got them from one of the places down by the bus station.

  The way Bush combined his two businesses impressed Faustino. The kid had eyes in the back of his head. Come the lunch break, he’d be cleaning the gunk and insects off a windshield while somehow monitoring the Nación staff who came out onto the patio for a bit of sun or a smoke or to say stuff they couldn’t get away with in the terrible open-plan Big Brother offices they worked in. And if Maya from advertising just couldn’t hack her low-fat diet for one more minute, somehow Bush would know it and catch her eye, and in no time at all he’d have covered the four blocks to and from the deli and be delivering her a toasted ham and cheese. Fantastic, baby. Keep the change. Twenty centavos. When the cold-drinks machine in the lobby broke down, which was at least once a month, he would be on a roll. Ten centavos per Coke, average, on a crate of twelve.

  Faustino also admired the way Bush respected Rubén, the way he allowed the doorman to maintain his authority. When Rubén was watching the trees and the steps on the right-hand side of the patio, Bush would do business from behind the trees on the left. And when Rubén was strolling down the left-hand side of the patio, Bush would do business from behind the trees on the right. This spared kindly Rubén the embarrassment of evicting a street kid from the sacred patio, upon which the street kid should not have been allowed to trespass in the first place. It also meant that Bush’s customers appreciated Rubén’s way of doing things, and that was good for Rubén. Because after all, doormen, like street kids, were not exactly irreplaceable.

  So now Faustino was not displeased to be interrupted in his contemplation of secretaries’ legs by Bush’s wide white grin.

  “Hey, Bush. How’re you doing? Good day? Bad day?”

  The kid rocked his right hand horizontally. “So-so. You know a big shave-head guy drives a Porsche, a black one?”

  “Nope, can’t say I do. Why?”

  “He kicked my ass an’ spilled half a my water. I thought if you knew him, you might do him a bad turn.”

  “I’ll look out for him.”

  “Thank you, Maestro. Anything you’d like from the kiosk?”

  From the way he said it, you’d think the kiosk was a limitless trove of rare delights.

  “I’m fine right now,” Faustino said. He stood and stubbed out the cigarette in one of the concrete troughs, checked his watch. Because the Nación building was perched on one of the city’s five hills, it had more than its fair share of sky, and already, at the horizon, where the petrified forest of high-rises dissolved into vagueness, that sky had taken on a peculiar tan color. In less than half an hour the traffic, already thickening, would be a crawling, honking nightmare. Time to go. He descended to the sidewalk and Bush kept pace with him as he walked to the parking garage entrance.

  “So, is Otello gonna sign for Rialto, or what?”

  Faustino tapped the side of his nose. “You’ll have to wait till tomorrow’s paper comes out.”

  Bush rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Hmm. Remind me, Maestro, how much a copy cost?”

  “Forty-five.”

  The boy shook his head and let out his breath to express sad incredulity. Faustino grinned and found a fifty in his pocket. He flipped it into the air. Bush twirled and caught it behind his back. When he raised his hand, the coin had vanished. Faustino slapped his palm against the boy’s.

  “Ciao, Bush. Watch your step.”

  “And you, Maestro. See ya.”

  Faustino was still smiling as he went down the gloomily lit ramp. There was no way the kid could read, but what the hell.

  THE PLACE BUSH slept in but didn’t call home was only two miles (and a world away) from the offices of La Nación, but on this particular evening it took him well over an hour to reach it. Getting through the business district was never much of a problem. You hardly ever saw cops on foot there, and the gangs didn’t come that far west, as a rule. Things got trickier farther downtown. His shortest route was past the bus station, but he avoided it like the plague. It was a Mecca for crackheads, hustlers, and whores, and therefore a honeypot for cops. Plus, at least once every couple of weeks the feared Child Protection Force — otherwise known as the Rataneros, Ratcatchers — swept through it. There was an election looming, and the government would want to boast that they’d cleaned up the streets. So Bush gave the bus station a wide berth. He had several routes that made longish detours around it, and he used a different one every trip. The bucket and the squeegee marked him as someone who might be carrying cash, someone worth looking out for. In the past couple of months, he’d been mugged three times, despite his caution. Each time, he’d handed over the few centavos he kept in his pocket, and his attackers had failed to find the rest of the meager takings hidden in his waistband. But on the second occasion he’d been given a beating just for the pleasure of it, and it had left him with a painful bubbling inside his right ear that had lasted a week.

  Now, on a narrow street between the vast blank side wall of the Church of All Saints and the back of a row of small shops, he heard from behind him a faint squeal of brakes, followed by the harsh popping of a motor. Turning, he saw a scooter with two guys on it, hustlers, both wearing bandido bandannas. For two long seconds he watched them watching him. Then the scooter snarled toward him, and he began to run, his head frantically mapping possible escape routes. He would be okay if he could get to the Carrer Jesús and across the one-way traffic. But that was too far to outrun a scooter. It was already within twenty yards of him. Just ahead, he saw a cat, alarmed by the commotion, leap from an overflowing trash can. Bush grabbed the rim of the can with his free hand and swung it into the middle of the street. The echoing snarl of the scooter paused, revved again. A yelled obscenity. More revving.

  He ran on. The street made a turn beyond the end of the church wall, and there Bush found deliverance: a red-and-yellow barrier, a wheelbarrow, a couple of bags of cement, a wooden pallet. Two men relaying paving stones, another one supervising. All three looked up as Bush hurtled into view, and yelled curses at him when he vaulted the barrier and slapped a single footprint into their patch of wet cement. Their cries turned into a violent altercation when the scooter screeched sideways into the barrier, but by then Bush was gone.

  On the far side of Jesús, where the flower sellers were already accosting early-evening strollers, Bush found a quiet space on the sidewalk and sat down on his upended bucket. Traffic noise surged and ebbed. Nearby, a street musician with one leg played mournful tangos on the accordion, leaning on a crutch.

  Bush’s breathing steadied eventually. He was desperately thirsty, as well as hungry. It had not been a good day, but his late bonus, Maestro’s fifty centavos, would get him an ice-cold zumo. There was a place just down the street that did guava ones thick enough to be both food and drink. But he was worried about time, which was to say, he was worried about Bianca and Felicia. Well, about Bianca, anyway. In the end he bought the zumo and drank it too quickly, so that it made his throat ache and filled his chest with cold pebbles as
it went down.

  His flight had taken him off course, and now he would have to zigzag westward through the maze of little cafés and workshops of the artisan quarter. That was okay, because it was still busy at this time. And once he was on the other side, he’d hit the Avenida Buendía, and from there, if he jogged, he’d be home in fifteen minutes or so.

  He hadn’t thought about the cops.

  He emerged from an alley onto Buendía, walked thirty yards, and there they were. A cruiser and a big van blocking off half the street. Ratcatchers and ordinary cops working in pairs. They already had two older kids wearing baseball caps spread against a wall and were feeling them over. A smashed-looking girl — she couldn’t have been more than twelve — was being dragged toward the back of the van, her thin legs giving way every time she tried to kick the cop that had her by the hair and one wrist. An old woman with a foxy little dog under her arm was yelling abuse at the police; a man leaned in the doorway of a barbershop with his hands in his pockets, laughing at her. Bush took in all this in less than two seconds, then a sort of uh-oh feeling made him turn. Sure enough, the sidewalk was cut off in the opposite direction too; a cop saw him and pointed him out to his colleague.

  “Hey, you, Rasta kid! Don’t you damn well move! Yeah, you!”

  He couldn’t go back the way he’d come; they were already nearer the alley than he was. He put his bucket down, dropped his shoulders, and raised his open hands in a gesture of unconditional surrender. The cops’ approach slowed to a saunter. The older one grinned.

  Bush grabbed the bucket and was across the sidewalk in two long strides. It was separated from the four lanes of almost solid traffic by a high curb not much wider than his foot. He ran along it toward the police van, leaning inward slightly, away from the suction of the vehicles that roared past only inches from him. The cops behind him were yelling at the ones ahead, but Bush figured that they’d be muffled by the blare of the traffic. He teetered past the front of the van and shit! — there was another cop, turning toward him, mouth open, arm going up. Nothing to do but raise his own arm, too skinny to be much use as a battering ram, but, praise be to God, it struck the cop’s shoulder and spun him away, and Bush was past and still running along the low parapet. A huge truck shoved air at him that felt solid as a wall, and he lost his balance. For a moment that was like a scream, he nearly fell the wrong way, knowing that he would die if he did so. But his body did a trick that had nothing to do with him, and he toppled away from the traffic and went down. He felt the palm of his free hand tear, then he was rolling over. He was back on his feet and running again before he felt the hot tickle of blood on his leg.

  There was a subway station up ahead of him, and if he could reach it, he had a chance of disappearing among the rush-hour bodies. He looked back, expecting to see violently angry men in dark-blue uniforms close behind him. Instead, he saw ordinary people carrying shopping bags and briefcases and talking into cell phones. Some of these people glanced at him with condescending interest. He slowed, and immediately felt the pain in his leg. At the entrance to the subway, he took shelter beyond the stall of a newspaper seller and squatted, dragging in breath. His mouth tasted like dirty coins.

  He checked himself over, starting with his money. It was all still there. A little under two dollars. His hand was scraped raw from the base of the thumb to the base of the little finger, and it burned. He picked little bits of grit out of the wound with the longest nail on his left hand. It would have been nice to pour cold water on it. In fact, imagining it was almost as good as doing it. The leg was okay. The blood was already drying. It looked like a shiny brown spiderweb.

  The light had switched from natural to electric. The day had gone. He had to get home. It was extremely important that he was not late, because of the girls. He was about five subway stops from the Triangle. If he could beg an unexpired day ticket, he could still be home in quarter of an hour. Actually, in his head, he did not use the word home. He used the word there.

  He went down the steps and picked a spot where he would only gently interrupt the flow of travelers. He used his sad smile.

  “Finished with your ticket, señora? Señor? Finished with your ticket, señora?”

  DESPITE ITS NAME, the Triangle was a roughly rectangular section of the old part of the city, narrower at one end than the other. Its eastern and northern limits were formed by a section of the Avenida Buendía, the channel of ceaseless traffic that ran from the Centro out to the northern suburbs. Bush had no idea where it ended, if it ended at all. He had never been north of the Carrer Circular, which crossed Buendía in a jumble of traffic lights and tortuous overpasses. The Triangle’s other long flank was more vague; there, its undisciplined maze of streets washed up against new office buildings and high-rise apartments. The southern side of the Triangle was an interzone of struggling trees and threadbare grass that marked the beginning of the university campus.

  The Triangle was a district in limbo. It was almost a slum, but not quite. It was scheduled for redevelopment, but not yet. It was old, but not in a way that attracted gringo tourists. The twisted streets had names, but there were no signs that announced them, because only the locals used them. On a street known as Trinidad, there was a bar called La Prensa. The Press. Many years ago it had been one. Books and leaflets, fliers and posters, local newsletters, and — believe it or not — church magazines had been printed there. And also, for a brief intoxicated month or two, thirty years ago, revolutionary pamphlets that preached freedom and democracy, sometimes illustrated by pictures of angry and attractive young women clearly not wearing brassieres. One of the printing presses, an ancient litho machine with fancy cast-iron legs, was a feature of the bar.

  Next to La Prensa was a building that would look like an old colonial house if you drove past it in the dark. In fact, only the facade, punctuated by empty windows and adorned by opportunistic plants, remained. If, as Bush and the girls did every day, you went through the gap where its front door had been, you would discover that this wall was propped up by huge timbers grown gray with age.

  Behind it, at the back of a cat-haunted yard that had once been a garden, was a lean-to, a ramshackle tumbledown shed with splitting wooden walls, a small window with white paper pasted on the cracked glass, and a rusty tin roof. It had once been a store for the press. Great spools of paper half the height of a man had been kept in there; so had the wooden pallets that tubs of ink had been brought in on. And failures: blurred or unsold books, bad test runs, uncollected christening cards, election posters with the wrong name under the photograph, advertising brochures with the wrong phone number, pamphlets with a section printed upside down. When Fidel and Nina Ramirez had bought the press and turned it into a bar, they’d cleared out most of this stuff and burned it in the yard. At the time, they’d probably imagined they would use the shed for something or other. Not as a home for feral kids, of course. There hadn’t been so many of those in the neighborhood back then.

  The fourth side of the yard was the wall of a building that had been many things but for about a year now had been a place where women worked sewing machines. They made cheap clothes with expensive labels sewn into them. The business, which had no name, was owned by a man of Turkish origin called Señor Oguz. Señor Oguz had been antsy about the kids in the shed, about them using the tap in the yard, and about the boy with all the hair filching rags from his wastebins. The Child Protection Order made it a criminal act to provide street kids with shelter or food or anything else (including rags, probably) on the grounds that it “encouraged homelessness and destitution.” But Fidel had spoken to Señor Oguz over a free cold beer and chilled him out. During the same conversation, he had also mentioned, helpfully, that Señor Oguz was misspelling the word DIESEL on his phony labels.

  Felicia sat in the shed while the last of the daylight leeched away. She was not afraid of the dark. All the same, she would have liked the companionship of a candle flame. There were still several stumps in the plastic bag sta
shed in the corner, but she was unwilling to light one until Bush got back. The bed she shared with Bianca was a wooden pallet covered with blankets, and she sat on it cross-legged, fighting to control her anxiety. This was always the worst part of the day, waiting for Bush. She used fragments of pop songs and her small repertoire of good memories to ward off bad imaginings of what might have happened to him. And Bianca.

  Sometimes she fantasized about a life without Bianca in it. These dream stories were not wrapped in a twinkling mist of happiness. They were not like Bianca’s ridiculous fantasies of celebrity. They were modest. One of her favorites was that she and Bush would take over the bar from Fidel and Nina and, like them, grow old but stay in love. Another was that she and Bush would live in a house. The house moved from place to place, although she had no idea what other places there might be. But it always had real furniture like in the shop windows. And a bedroom and a bed with white sheets. In which she would lie with Bush. Alone with Bush. Sometimes there would be open windows and pale drifting curtains and sometimes the sound of the sea, which was a blue sound. But all these fantasies needed a prologue, a prologue in which Bianca disappeared. She could not — would not — allow herself to picture how this might happen. Because Bush loved his sister, and therefore she, Felicia, had to love her too.

  Bianca. Mother of God, where was she?

  Felicia was, she believed, fourteen years old. And that was a very bad age to be. It made her a victim twice over. It forced choices upon her: choices that involved the way she looked and what she wore. Choices that she could not make for herself.

  If the Ratcatchers caught her, it was unlikely that she could pass for over sixteen. She had no papers, of course, and she was slightly built. They would take her, and although she did not believe all the stories about what happened next, she did not want to be taken.