Exposure Read online

  Diego is standing in the deep shadow of the palms that mark the boundary of the hotel’s private beach. The trees are calmer now; their thick leaves rub together as quietly as fingers. He waits for his phone to bleep and then checks the number that has just tried to call him. Smiling, he picks up his shoes and walks back along the sand, just out of reach of the luminous, turbulent surf.

  Desmerelda gets up to use the bathroom. Returning, she realizes that the storm has passed. The curtains move in time with the sea’s slow breathing. She goes to the window. All is darkness apart from a tattered net of stars and the dim lacework where the waves break onto the beach. She catches a brief scent of something rank — seaweed, perhaps — and turns away.

  Otello is sleeping, facedown, on the bed. She feels that same little stoppage of breath that took hold of her the first time she saw him. Black is a useless word for him. Even in this scarcely lit room, his skin gathers light and transforms it. His cheekbone is shaped by a faint line of indigo. The lamplight on the muscles of his back is both gold and green. The paleness of the upturned palm of his left hand is like a mistake; otherwise his beauty is simply ridiculous. It makes her shudder slightly, and she wraps her arms around herself.

  She is used to getting what she wants, but this is different. She is not in control of this.

  Fear is part — a large part — of the thrill of it. As if she has stepped through a door to find the sky at a new angle and the colors of familiar things different. As if she no longer knows the name of anything. For the first time in her life she wishes she weren’t famous. But she is. They are. Privacy, let alone secrecy, will not be an option. So.

  She picks up the sheet from the floor and drapes it around herself like a cape, then kneels on the bed. The movement brings Otello up through the surface of his sleep. He rolls onto his back and opens his eyes, and as he does so, Desmerelda leans down to him, lifting then releasing the sheet so that it billows, then falls, enclosing them completely. Her face hovers just above his; her eyes have tiny flickers of light in their depths.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “Hey, you.”

  He runs his hand up the outside of her arm.

  “Listen,” she says. “There’s something I want you to do.”

  “Mmm. And what might that be, Señorita Brabanta?”

  “I want you to marry me,” she says.

  UMBERTO DA VENECIA (popularly known as the Duke) is very glad that the private committee room is well soundproofed, because Nestor Brabanta shows no sign of calming down. He won’t sit down, either; he comes back to the table only to bang his fist on it. As chairman of the Rialto board of directors, the Duke has presided over some pretty fiery meetings; he deserves his reputation for soothing diplomacy. But he is beginning to think that the only thing he can do is call the city zoo and get them to send someone over with a tranquilizer gun and the kind of dart that floors a rhino. The other two men present, Ariel Goldmann and Pedro dos Passos, sit staring at their clasped hands like seasick ferry passengers. The mild-mannered Goldmann, apparently appalled by Brabanta’s language, has a face like vanilla pudding. Even so, it is he who tries to interrupt.

  “Nestor. Nestor, please. Drugs? Witchcraft? This is craziness.”

  “You think so? What, you think it’s a myth, that stuff? Listen, I’ve been up North. I’ve seen what those damned Africans are into. I’ve seen normal people turned into animals, Ariel. So don’t shake your head like that! Not unless you’ve got a better explanation.”

  “Look, Otello is a black man from the North, yes, but he’s not, you know, he’s not into that. He’s, well, charming and —”

  The Duke thinks, Oh, God, Ariel.

  And sure enough Brabanta flares like oil lobbed onto a fire.

  “Ah! Charming. You want to think about that word, Ariel? You want to ask yourself exactly what kind of charms persuade a girl who has everything, everything, to marry this, this nigger, two weeks after meeting him? You ever wonder why black magic is called black magic?”

  Pedro dos Passos coughs lightly. “Actually —” he begins, but gets no further because Brabanta comes to the table and puts both hands on it and leans across it; his eyes are hot and moist, and his voice is congested. The Duke wonders if the man might be on the verge of a seizure.

  “My daughter is a star. That’s not sentimentality; it’s a fact. She’s worth millions in her own right. You all know that. And she’s my only child. So she has men hitting on her all the time, okay? Nice men. White men. Rich men. Men from the best families. Maybe she sleeps with some of them — I don’t know. I don’t ask. But marriage is an issue we talk about, me and her. Because I understand the pressure she’s under. And you know what she always says? She says she doesn’t believe in marriage. Which, yes, has something to do with me and her mother. I accept that. I do accept that. Then all of a sudden she’s married to a black she hardly even knows? And you think this is natural? You think something as, as . . . gross as that can be explained in normal terms?”

  At last he sinks into a chair. He lowers his head onto his hand and surreptitiously wipes an eye with a finger. The Duke has never before seen a senator shed a tear, so he waits a couple of seconds.

  “Nestor, you called this meeting. So I assume there is something you want us to do.”

  Without looking up, Brabanta says, “For a start, I want this so-called marriage annulled.”

  The Duke, who is, among other things, Brabanta’s legal adviser, sighs. “As you asked me to, I’ve looked into that. I’m afraid that, despite its hastiness, the, er, ceremony was perfectly legitimate. Unless, of course, Desmerelda was acting under duress. Or indeed drugged or brainwashed or some such thing.”

  “She was! She must have been!”

  “Unfortunately there is no proof of that. Of course, if she were to testify that she was . . . But that seems extremely unlikely.”

  Brabanta thrusts his fists forward and sits up straight. “In that case, I want us to sell the black son of a bitch.”

  Goldmann and dos Passos react as though both their heads have been tugged by the same length of string. Goldmann opens his mouth, but the Duke lifts a hand to silence him.

  “Nestor, my old friend, you know you cannot ask for that. Imagine —”

  “No, you imagine. Imagine what it would be like if you had to watch that bastard play for your club, knowing that after the game he was going to go home and clamber into bed with your daughter. Eh? Could you do that? Could you bear that?”

  The Duke, whose two daughters are plump, plain, and inoffensively married, pretends to give Brabanta’s question serious consideration. “I understand your pain, Nestor. Your outrage. We all do.”

  Dos Passos and Goldmann nod, solemnly and synchronized.

  “But let’s be realistic. We could never persuade the board to sell Otello. Apart from anything else, there would be huge legal and financial problems. And think of the fallout. Think of the effect upon the club. Think about the ridicule in the media. Rialto is bigger than any one of us. It is bigger than all of us. Those are not my words. You yourself said that, three months ago, in this very room.”

  Brabanta turns his head toward the Duke. He has the look of a fatally wounded bull preparing for a last lunge at the matador.

  “Then I’ll resign from the board. I’ll dump my shares on the market.”

  The Duke sits back in his chair. He takes his spectacles off and lays them on the table. He gazes at them for a moment or two. Eventually he says, “Yes, you could do that. To spread the pain around. But in the end, who would be hurt the most? I can tell you who would not be hurt, and that’s Otello. He’s got a contract tighter than a squid’s rectum. You yourself made sure of that.”

  Half an hour later, Ariel Goldmann and Nestor Brabanta descend together in the elevator.

  Goldmann feels he should put his arm around the other man’s shoulders but somehow cannot bring himself to do so.

  “Nestor, please. Try to allow this rage, this bitterness,
to pass. Give it some time. The Duke is right — it’s hurting you more than anyone else. And, you know, the victim who smiles takes something back from the thief.”

  “Christ, Ariel.” Brabanta spits the words. “I can’t stand it when you come on like a goddamn hippie rabbi.”

  Goldmann flinches visibly.

  The elevator doors open onto the VIP parking garage, underground. Brabanta doesn’t get out. Instead, he presses his hand on the button that holds the doors apart. Leans on it, looking sick. “Sorry, Ariel. I shouldn’t have . . .”

  Goldmann at last manages to lay his hand on his colleague’s arm. “It’s okay. Forget it.”

  Brabanta lifts his head. “Tell me this, though,” he says.“How would you feel if one day your little princess presented you with a piccaninny as your first grandchild?”

  IT’S RIALTO’S THIRD home game of the season. Faustino, in his seat at the front of the press section, looks up and over to his right, scanning the faces in the directors’ box. Only five minutes before the teams will emerge from the tunnel, and still no sign of Nestor Brabanta. It looks as if once again the senator will not be watching his son-in-law play. Interesting. Maybe there is something in the rumors. . . . She is there, though, leaning across the vacant seat next to hers to listen to what the Duke is saying. The PA system is blasting out one of her so-called songs that manages to be both frantic and bland at the same time. The San Lorenzo supporters — and a good many home supporters, too — are doing their best to drown it out.

  Faustino adjusts the items on the ledge in front of him: his notebook, the game program, the press briefings. His comment column will not appear until Monday; around him, the hacks who have to file reports for the evening editions fiddle with cell phones plugged into their laptops. Because Faustino does not have these gadgets, the hacks feel slightly superior to him. For the very same reason, Faustino feels superior to them.

  The man to his left, Mateo Campos of El Sol, leans nearer. “Whatcha think, Faustino? Is Dezi’s piece of ass gonna start doing the business on the field as well as off?”

  Dear God, Faustino thinks, the man actually speaks the way he writes.

  In Faustino’s considered opinion, El Sol is the most putrid of sores on the diseased body of the South American press. A filthy rag you might use only to clean up after a dog with a bowel complaint. Campos is its head sportswriter. According to his byline, he is The Man Who Speaks Your Mind. In his darker moments, Faustino fears this might be true.

  “I presume you mean, do I think Otello will play well? The answer is yes. But I don’t suppose anything that actually happens on the field will have any influence on what you choose to write.”

  Campos makes a blubbery hiss with his lips, meant to express contempt. Faustino notices that it leaves little prismatic spangles of spit on the screen of Campos’s laptop.

  The fact is that, in his first five games for Rialto, Otello has scored only once — a deflected volley from a poor defensive clearance. Nor did he score in a bad-tempered friendly international against Colombia. After his first game for his new club, the general view of his performance was summed up in the headline in El Correo: OTELLO FAILS TO IMPRESS. Faustino could not argue with that. But his own view was that Rialto would have to learn how to play with Otello, rather than the other way around. In his column, Faustino had argued that Otello was simply quicker at reading the game than his teammates, and once they had learned how to give their new striker the kind of service he needed, Rialto might well be unbeatable. And, so far, his fellow commentators had tended to agree with him. Faustino had been gratified when the highly respected Milton Acuña, appearing on Sportsview, had said that Rialto “needed to raise their game to Otello’s standard.”

  But then El Sol had broken ranks. The smutty rag had been obsessed, predictably, with the “sensational” marriage of Desmerelda Brabanta and Otello. As had all the “celebrity” trash mags. The snatched photos of the couple, the “interviews” with their “close friends,” the “astrological analyses” of their compatibility, the snide innuendos about her father’s supposed “shock” and “fury”: all these — and worse — were no more than you’d expect. The subtext of these stories was, of course, that the americana daughter of a political millionaire had bedded and married a dumb black soccer player and thus turned the world on its head and doesn’t it make you sick?

  After a month the distinction between El Sol’s so-called news pages and the sports pages had become blurred. You didn’t have to be an expert in linguistics to spot the real meaning of the words. Mateo Campos kicked off with the headline DIM OUTLOOK FOR RIALTO? followed by ANOTHER DARK AFTERNOON FOR RIALTO and OTELLO: FIFTY MILLION POURED INTO A BLACK HOLE? The previous Sunday, El Sol’s lurid weekend supplement had a piece (by Campos) dominated by a grainy paparazzi shot of a topless Desmerelda taken on a beach two years back. The caption read: IS THIS WHY OTELLO CAN’T KEEP HIS EYE ON THE BALL? (Grudgingly, Faustino has to admire the use of the protective question mark in these headlines. And if he were honest with himself — which he is, sometimes — he would have to admit that his own thoughts have occasionally strayed into the same dingy and juicy territory. He had, after all, been there at the very moment when the famous couple met. He had seen the hero’s knees go weak and the tiny sunrises in her eyes. He had even been tempted to write it up: a surefire — but tasteful — eyewitness piece called something like WHEN DEZI MET OTELLO. But no, no. Paul Faustino has his principles. And he doesn’t need the money.)

  So far, the other papers — even the down-market ones — have refused to follow El Sol’s lead. They have not turned on Otello like dogs in a pack. Not yet. They don’t dare to, because although Otello’s honeymoon with Desmerelda has ended, his honeymoon with the fans is still full of hope and passion. But theirs is a love that feeds on goals, and they are getting hungry. Faustino is surprised by how anxious he is for those goals to come. And how fearful he is that they won’t. He fidgets in his seat, moving as far from Mateo Campos as he can. Then the teams come onto the field.

  The roar swells like a delayed bomb, and his own chest fills in response. These are the good moments when he feels as clean as a child, bathed in what he loves. Red and yellow and blue and white waves of rising bodies, clouds of glitter litter, competing blares of horns, drumming that summons up lost tribal faiths. Red and blue flares. The animal smell of something ridiculously important. For Faustino, there is nothing quite like this. Nothing that brings him closer to joy. As always, he wants to laugh.

  Otello is last in the line of Rialto players to emerge, and the home crowd delays its climactic roar until he appears. And as before, Faustino thinks that this is a mistake on Otello’s part. Or maybe self-indulgence.

  It’s a lousy game. As halftime approaches, the frustrated Rialto supporters maintain a ferocious chorus of whistles and jeers. Then, in the forty-third minute, Otello scores. It is a goal he manufactures single-handedly and out of nothing. He robs an over-casual San Lorenzo midfielder of the ball and evades another en route to the goal. At the eighteen-yard line, he seems to be blocked off and is forced along the edge of the box, tracked by two defenders, who cut him off from the goal. He seems to be going nowhere and has no support. The shot is therefore completely unexpected. Otello hits it on the run with the outside of his right foot; the San Lorenzo keeper, unsighted by his own players, can only turn his head to watch the ball strike the inside of his post and bulge the back of the net.

  There is a silence as long as the beat of a slow heart, and then the stadium erupts. Faustino knows this because he looks across at Mateo Campos, who is typing the words The stadium erupted when . . .

  He taps Campos on the shoulder. “If I were you,” he says, “I would call that ‘doing the business.’”

  Campos scowls, concentrating on his tiny keyboard.

  “Actually,” Faustino says, “if I really were you, I’d probably say that ‘Dezi’s darky got lucky with an opportunistic shot.’ Want to know how to spell opportunistic?
”

  In the second half, Otello, again without support, wins three corners. Rialto’s second goal comes from the last of these. Roderigo’s kick is poor — short and too close to the near post — but Otello comes to it and wins the ball. Hustled and jostled, with his back to the goal, he somehow slides a diagonal pass to Enrique, who scores with a joyous first shot.

  This assist and the earlier goal are the only telling contributions that Otello makes to the game. By the end of it, Faustino reckons, the striker must have covered six miles, harrying, going back to collect or tackle, running into space, switching from left field to right and back again. Yet the good touches he gets on the ball probably number less than a dozen. As Otello leaves the field, he turns and applauds the Rialto supporters, who howl his name appreciatively. There is, Faustino thinks, something ironic in the player’s gesture; his face, slick with sweat, wears an expression that suggests stubbornness, not triumph.

  When the press box has thinned out, Faustino moves to the end of his row and sits below a NO SMOKING sign. He lights a cigarette and watches the crowd eddy and swirl toward the exits.

  There are, he reflects, many subtle ways in which players can make a colleague look inept. There is the perfectly accurate but slightly under-hit or over-hit pass. There are the driven passes that are at groin height when they arrive. You can try to ensure that you play the ball to the victim’s weaker side, which is especially effective when he is a striker with his back to the goal and a defender is breathing down his neck. Springing the offside trap against your own man is also very good. Otello is exceedingly skilled at timing his muscular runs past or through the defensive back line. Sometimes he likes to disconcert defenses by deliberately wandering offside, only to step back into an onside position a second before the through pass is played, then turning and accelerating onto the ball.

  Everyone knows these things about him, of course. Teams who like to play a flat back four — such as San Lorenzo, this afternoon — watch him with hawkish nervousness. As do assistant referees; their little flags quiver eagerly whenever he looks poised to break. And so the Rialto players use this against him. All it takes is a slight, almost imperceptible, hesitation — as if, for example, you might be correcting your balance — before the through ball is played. Just enough time, a split second, for Otello to move a pace, half a pace, offside. And up goes the flag, and the referee’s whistle is just one of ten thousand derisive noises. It happened no fewer than eleven times during the San Lorenzo game, prompting Mateo Campos to turn, smirking, to Faustino. “Whaddya say, Maestro? Still reckon he’s got — what was it you said? — ‘exquisite timing’? Or maybe he keeps that for Dezi Brabanta now, eh?”