Exposure Page 6

  She ignores the hand and stands on tiptoe to kiss him on both cheeks. Then she kisses him full on the mouth. It is so wonderful that it seems to last about a year, a year in which the rest of the world goes missing.

  When the clocks go back to normal and the world returns, she says, “Who is ‘we’?”

  She knows the question is so crude that she might as well have stripped her clothes off and stood naked in front of him.

  “What?”

  “You said, ‘We’re going to Cypress.’ I was wondering who ‘we’ is.”

  “Ah, right. ‘We’ is me and Diego and Michael.”

  “Michael?”

  “Michael Cass. He’s, well, he’s my . . . minder.”

  “Minder? As in bodyguard?”

  “I guess. He’s good at throwing paparazzi into the sea.”

  She nods approvingly. “That is a good skill to have.”

  Later, Desmerelda stands with her father at the front of the house while their guests wait for their cars to be brought around. As Brabanta is bidding farewell to a clutch of politicians, Diego comes down the steps and touches her lightly on the arm. She turns, and he thanks her for the hospitality. Instead of shaking the hand she offers him, he lifts it to his mouth and kisses it.

  “There is no one,” he murmurs.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Otello has no girlfriend, no secret wife, no mistress, no boyfriend.”

  For a moment or two, caught off-guard, she can only stare at him. Then she gathers herself. “Ah. That’s a shame, don’t you think?”

  His smile is no more than a flicker. “Not necessarily,” he says.

  Diego eases his apartment door shut and slips off his shoes before padding along to the bedroom. His consideration is unneeded, as it turns out; Emilia is awake, waiting for him. He is glad. He is a little excited and needs to talk. The curtains are not closed, and beyond the glass the night seems upside down. The sky is a blank, its darkness tinged with dirty orange like a stained concrete floor. Below it, the constellation of city lights glitters and shifts.

  “Yes,” Diego says, gazing out. “I’d say that it went very well, Emilia. Very well indeed.”

  He unknots his bow tie and tosses it on the floor. He undoes the top button of his white shirt and turns to her. He takes his jacket off and holds it in front of him by its shoulders.

  “Otello is the bull, you see? And I play him like a matador.”

  He shakes the jacket, rippling it.

  “The big black bull is very powerful, of course. But very stupid and dreadfully nearsighted. He sees only the cape, and when he charges it, I execute an elegant valenca.”

  He holds the jacket out from the left side of his body, then sweeps it backward, twirling on tiptoe, his back straight.

  “The bull’s horns pass within inches but do not touch me. The stink of him is strong in my nostrils. He lumbers past, baffled by the disappearance of his enemy. He turns back, grunting and drooling. Now I go down on one knee, as if in submission, holding the cape out with one hand, so. He charges again and . . .”

  Diego, in a slow elegant gesture like a stage courtier’s, wafts the jacket behind him.

  “He misses me again. And so we do this dance of death and he never really sees who his partner is. It would be sad if it weren’t so beautiful. And tonight, Emilia, no less a person than Desmerelda Brabanta handed me the cape.”

  He reads a question in her eyes.

  “No, I’m not drunk, my love. Absolutely not. I sipped one glass of champagne all evening. I was, after all, on duty. Keeping a sharp eye on my client’s interests. Especially his new one.”

  MICHAEL CASS TRUDGES across the swept white sand of the private beach to where Otello lies on a lounger. Cass is wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, sunglasses, and a nine-millimeter automatic pistol in a shoulder holster, incongruous under the unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt. Otello looks up when his bodyguard’s big shadow falls across him.

  “Your tan’s coming along nicely,” Cass says, and to please him, Otello chuckles. Cass, whose grandparents were German or maybe Swiss, is blond and liberally coated with sunblock, despite which his fuzzy knees are blushed like peaches.

  “What’s hap’nin’?”

  “Nothing much,” Cass says. He perches on the lounger alongside Otello’s and squints at the horizon. “I was just talking to the old guy does the gardens, you know? He says there’s a storm brewing.”

  The sky is cloudless, a vast blue umbrella with the sun burning a hole in its center.

  “No way,” Otello says.

  “That’s what I said. And he says, ‘See that little old island over there? When the water runs kinda milky behind it, there’s a storm coming. Any boats out when that happens, they come back real quick.’”

  Otello lifts his head. The nameless island is a greenish-gray stain at the foot of the sky. On their first day at the Blue Horizon, he’d asked the hotel manager about it, wondering if it was possible to go out there. The manager had looked at him a little strangely and said, “Why?” And yes, there is now a faint stream of whiteness beyond it, like low-lying smoke.

  “What’s Diego up to?”

  Cass shrugs. “I dunno. He’s out on his balcony, doing stuff on his laptop.”

  “Working,” Otello says.

  “Or cruising porn sites.”

  “Hey.”

  “Only kidding.”

  Now Otello turns onto his side, supporting himself on his elbow. He studies Michael’s profile. “Listen, are you guys okay? I know Diego was against you coming down South with me, but I thought that was all sorted out. You don’t still have issues, do you?”

  Cass puts his forearms on his knees and stares at the sand between his feet. “Nah, not really. We’re cool.”

  “Good. ’Cause I need him. Honest agents aren’t that easy to come by, you know? You don’t have to like him, Michael, but you do have to work with him.”

  “No problem,” Michael says, keeping his eyes down. “He’s okay.”

  “Yeah. He’s okay. Like, the hustling he did, getting this together. Keeping the lid on where we were going. Persuading the hotel to be ‘closed for refurbishment.’ Arranging the security.”

  “Yep. Guess so.”

  “Which means,” Otello says, “you’ve got it nice and easy, right? Three days in this tropical paradise so far and no reporters disguised as waiters, no guys hanging out of trees with cameras, none of that stuff. Remember that time back home when we went out to Santa Louisa, how on the first morning we got to the beach and there were, what, five boats full of photographers, and you had to borrow an outboard and have, like, a small naval battle to get rid of them?”

  Michael Cass smiles at the memory. “Yeah, I kind of enjoyed that.”

  After a while he says, “Listen, I’m going back up there to sit in the shade. You want me to fetch you anything while I’m on my feet?”

  An hour later, the thatch on the sun shelters begins to rustle and softly hiss. Otello sits up and sees that the horizon now looks slightly pixillated, like an over-enlarged photograph. A couple of guys from the hotel appear and begin gathering up the loungers.

  “Big wind comin’, Señor Otello,” one of them says. “Maybe you wanna go up on the terrace. Soon the sand gonna whip, take the skin off you.”

  By the time Otello has been up to his suite, showered and dressed, and gone down to the bar, Cypress Island has undergone a change. The sea is moving fast and lumpish past the swirling beach, and the palms are swinging their ragged heads. The sun flickers behind veils of racing cloud.

  Sitting just inside the half-closed doors of the terrace, Otello and Michael Cass turn their heads when Diego speaks from behind them.

  “I logged on to the coast guard website. Checked out the weather pattern. This is the edge of a hurricane on its way to beat the Caribbean up. It looks like a damn great tadpole on the map, and this is just the tickle of its tail.”

  “Fairly decent sort of a tickle,” Cass observes
as a plastic beer crate tumbles through a flower bed.

  “Yep,” Diego says. “At a guess, I’d say that tonight’s beach barbecue is a nonstarter.” He leans forward, a hand on the back of each chair. “How about a game of cards? Black Maria, say a dollar a point? Okay, okay. Fifty cents a point. Jeez, you tight-fisted northerners. Beer?”

  Otello is almost fifty dollars up, Michael about twenty, and Diego is therefore well down. It interests Otello that someone so cautious about everything else is inclined to bet unwisely on a hand of cards. It is reassuring, in a way.

  The lamps have come on, and Michael is dealing when Diego says, “My God, did you ever see a sunset that color?”

  Beyond the glass the sky is a livid green behind sallow streamers of cloud. It is so unlikely, it might be painted scenery for the last act of a melodrama. Front of stage, the beach is dissolving into sand devils, miniature whirlwinds that set off in pursuit of the gray running sea.

  A waiter enters. “Happens this time of year,” he says. “She’ll blow over real quick. Two, three hours, maybe. Tomorrow you won’t believe it happened. All will be calm again.” He smiles. “It refreshes the sea.”

  A minute or two later, the card players are again distracted when their waiter and the barman and the assistant manager go to the windows and argumentatively share a pair of binoculars. Otello gets up and wanders over to them.

  “What’s the excitement?”

  “A boat,” the assistant manager says. “Not the ferry. The ferry don’t put out in this weather. Got to be some crazy americano. They don’t think anything got the right to stop them doing what they wanna do.”

  The barman has the binoculars now. “There she is,” he says. “Wow, look at her buck. Jus’ north of the island. Man, I bet they losin’ their lunch.”

  “Mind if I look?” Otello asks, and the barman passes him the binoculars. Otello fiddles with the focus and finds the boat, a ghostly wedge that comes and goes between walls of water. A launch of some sort. The sort that rich people sit on to drink cocktails.

  “Where’s it heading?”

  The assistant manager says, “Well, if it’s got any sense, it’ll come here and wait out the weather.” Struck by a thought, he looks at Otello. “You expecting someone, señor?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Like I thought, some dumb gringo. What time would you like dinner?”

  The star, the agent, and the bodyguard are at a table in the softly lit restaurant when a subdued clamor occurs in the lobby. Cass, who is facing that way, looks up and freezes with a forkful of steak en route to his open mouth.

  Desmerelda Brabanta stands in the doorway. Her hands are deep in the pockets of a yellow waterproof jacket that is far too big for her and conceals whatever other clothes she is wearing, if any. Her long legs are bare and wet, and the canvas sneakers on her feet are soaked a dark shade of blue. Her saturated hair is golden serpents; her eyes are brighter than anything else in the room. She looks like something timeless that the sea has treasured while waiting for the human who deserves her. At her back, several members of the hotel staff cluster, smiling and uncertain like film extras who have not been told what to do.

  Otello and Cass get to their feet. Diego lays his knife and fork neatly parallel on his plate and remains sitting. He has seen Desmerelda, but now his eyes are fixed upon the remains of the crayfish he was eating, almost as though they might reveal the reason for this spectacular intrusion. But he is smiling.

  Desmerelda is the one who breaks the silence.

  “Lord,” she says, speaking exclusively to Otello, “that was a rough ride. I need to get out of these wet clothes. Do you think you might have something that would fit me?”

  SHORTLY BEFORE ELEVEN o’clock, the phone on Nestor Brabanta’s bedside table rings. He has already taken his sleeping tablets, but because calls that come through to his private number at this time of night are unusual, he answers it.

  The voice in his ear is coarse and slightly muffled; he thinks he detects a northern accent. At first he assumes it is a long-distance call on a poor connection.

  VOICE: Are your doors locked?

  BRABANTA: I beg your pardon?

  VOICE: You are being robbed, Senator.

  BRABANTA: Who is this?

  VOICE: Someone who keeps a closer eye on your belongings than you do, Senator. As I say, you are being robbed as we speak. Your heart is being broken, and you do not know it.

  BRABANTA: Who the hell is this? How did you get this number? What are you talking about?

  VOICE: One of your horses has been stolen, Senator. Your most valuable horse. Your beautiful golden filly. And right now she is with a big black brute of a stallion.

  BRABANTA: You are a lunatic. I’m hanging up now.

  VOICE: Do you know where your daughter is, Señor Brabanta?

  [BRABANTA sits up and swings his legs over the side of the bed. His drug-induced sleepiness is dispelled by something that feels like a shower of ice. He has sometimes imagined, dreaded, a call like this. The kidnap call.]

  BRABANTA: Who is this? What do you want?

  The line has gone dead.

  Brabanta presses the last-call redial buttons, but, as he expected, a robotic voice tells him that the caller withheld his number. He dials Desmerelda’s apartment and gets the answering machine, as usual. He waits, dry-mouthed and impatient, for the beep.

  “Darling? Are you there? Pick up the phone. Desmerelda, please pick up the phone. Okay, listen, darling — call me back the instant you hear this. I’m going to try your cell.”

  He cannot remember the number and curses himself. He goes to where his dressing gown is draped over a chair and finds his own phone in the pocket. He scrolls down the list of names and when DES appears on the display, stabs CALL.

  “Hi. I can’t take your call at the moment, but —”

  Brabanta swears and cuts her message off. Five seconds later, he tries again and waits.

  “Desmerelda. It’s Papa. Call me back now. Right now. I don’t care what time it is. This is serious.”

  He drops the phone onto the bed and clasps his hands together because they are shaking. It occurs to him that he is one of the best-connected men in the city, and he can’t think whom he can talk to. After a while he takes up the phone again and calls Desmerelda’s so-called personal assistant. He listens to the ringtone for what seems an eternity, and then she answers.

  “Hello?”

  “Ramona, this is Nestor Brabanta.”

  “Señor. Hello. Just a second, I . . .”

  There is a little patch of silence; she has put her hand over the mouthpiece. Then he hears her clear her throat.

  “Señor, how can I —”

  “Ramona, do you know where my daughter is?”

  “Um . . . no, I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “Why not? Dammit, girl, aren’t you supposed to know? Isn’t that what you’re paid for?”

  “Well, I . . . Señor, is there a problem?”

  Brabanta’s bedside phone rings.

  He says to Ramona, “I’ll call you back.”

  BRABANTA: Desmerelda?

  VOICE: I wouldn’t bother waiting up if I were you, Senator. I don’t think she’ll be calling you back tonight. I imagine that Daddy is the last thing on her mind right now.

  BRABANTA: Listen, whoever you are. If you do anything . . . if any harm comes to my daughter, I’ll find you and kill you. I promise you that. [A pause. He hears what might be wind or surf, or perhaps just electronic slush.] How much do you want?

  VOICE: Oh, no. No, no, Senator. Money can’t get back what you’ve lost. You think you can put a price on your reputation? Your honor? Your family name?

  BRABANTA: What the hell are you talking about? Listen, if this is a hoax or —

  VOICE: I just want to put you in the picture.

  BRABANTA: What picture?

  VOICE: King Kong.

  BRABANTA: What?

  VOICE: King Kong. The movie. You’ve seen
it? Of course you have. And I know the bit you remember best. It’s where that dirty great gorilla picks up the half-naked blonde in his paw. Right?

  BRABANTA: What is this crap? Tell me where my daughter is, damn you!

  VOICE: I just did. But you’re not listening. I’m wasting my time. Good night, Senator.

  BRABANTA: Wait! Okay. Please. I’m listening.

  VOICE: That’s better. Where was I? Oh, yes. The pale vulnerable girl in that big black fist. What did you think, Senator, when you saw that? What do men like you and I think when we see that?

  BRABANTA: I don’t know.

  VOICE: Yes, you do. We imagine our wives in that situation. Or our daughters. Wriggling and squealing. Hmm? Don’t we?

  BRABANTA [hoarsely]: Who are you?

  VOICE: Mind you, that King Kong is a real superstar. I read somewhere that he cost a cool fifty million. And right now your daughter must be thinking he was worth every cent. Probably thinks it’s the best present her daddy ever bought her.

  [Click and hum.]

  Brabanta sits holding the phone. After a while it starts to feel slimy, probably because his hand is sweaty. He drops it. Something like a knuckly claw is closing around his heart, and for a terrible moment he loses control of his breathing. He tells himself that there is no damn way he’s going to have a coronary until this thing is sorted out, so he puts on his dressing gown and makes his way downstairs to his study, clutching the banister all the way. He goes to his desk and looks up Diego Mendosa’s number. He calls it, waits for the answering message to end, and says, “This is Nestor. Senator Brabanta. I need to know where Otello is. Call me.”