Little by little, Javier had dropped everything that wasn’t his obsession for Carlos. It was sick, he knew, but he couldn’t help himself. Carlos drove him to distraction, and he couldn’t make himself stop despite knowing that he was being used. It didn’t take long for Carlos to start asking for increasing sums of money. Sometimes he begged, others he simply demanded it with a semi-veiled threat, saying he’d leave Javier. This was the reason Javier had helped him get a job at his mother’s travel agency. But now he realized that the job was the real reason Carlos had tried to get close to him in the first place—to gain access to Javier’s family.
“I’m not an idiot, you know. I might be younger than you, and in love, and blind to certain things. But I’m not a complete fool.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about. What are you playing at with my mother?”
“I’m not playing at anything. You wouldn’t understand.”
“What is there to understand? That you want to fuck her? I know what I saw at the agency—your little masquerade game, my mother’s ridiculous smile. And I know what both of you are like.”
Carlos gave him a blank look, then adopted a bemused expression and burst out laughing.
“Are you actually jealous of your own mother? That’s kind of sick, don’t you think? I want nothing to do with her. I might act like a tease—after all, the woman is my boss and she’s attractive. But I have no intention whatsoever of seducing her.”
“Is that what you think you did with me? Seduce me?”
Carlos shook his head back and forth. Sometimes it was hard to believe people like Javier still existed at all—so naïve, so convinced that the world revolved around them and their existential anguish, their complexes, and the stupid shit troubling their little heads. Sometimes when they were together he’d gaze at Javier’s flawless skin and feel like he was making love to a marble statue. Other times it was like sinking his hands into a trough of soft, malleable butter.
“Nobody forced you to walk into that bar; you went in because you knew what you’d find. You got into my car of your own free will, and you weren’t exactly raped, were you? If I recall correctly, I told you not to get your hopes up with me. Look, I don’t care if you believe me or not, but I have no desire to sleep with your mother. I need the money and the job, end of story—though you should see her when she’s with me. She laughs, becomes young again, it’s like she lets loose the real Lola hiding inside her.”
“I don’t need you to tell me what my mother is like. You’ve known her for three months; I’ve been with her all my life.”
“You’re wrong. You have no idea what she’s like.”
Carlos forced himself to quash his urge to teach Javier a lesson, the kind of lesson he himself had been taught since he was a little boy. But that wasn’t why he was there. He took out a bindle of coke and tapped it out onto a small mirror he kept in his pocket. After setting up two lines, he took one.
“Look, we haven’t seen much of each other lately, let’s not waste time bickering like some old couple. If you don’t want to see me anymore, just say it. I’ll be out of your life and you’ll never hear another word about me, I swear.”
Javier’s silence made him smile. This kid would stick around, follow Carlos like a puppy until he hung him out to dry. He knew his targets, knew how to pick them. Carlos held the mirror out to Javier so he could do his line. Afterward, Javier fell back onto the bed, eyes glassy and absent. People can tell when they’re headed down the road to perdition but rarely have the strength to stop it. Carlos undid Javier’s fly and kissed his belly button, tickling him with his stubble.
“We’re here now. The past is over and the future doesn’t exist. This moment is all there is. And it’s ours.”
When Javier snorted a second line, his eyes turned watery again. He knew what Carlos was like, knew he should keep the guy from getting close to his mother, knew that he’d destroy the family, hurt them all. He already was hurting Javier, the man was like woodworm—visible only when it’s too late. If only he could speak to his father, tell him everything. If he could just find a way to do it. He had to let his father know that he didn’t blame him for the injury he’d gotten when they jumped off that cliff together when he was a boy, didn’t blame him for the fact that he still limped. What mattered was that they did it, they jumped together. He wanted to tell him that he needed his father to jump with him again, wherever that might be. The two of them, together, again.
But the words, and his thoughts, got stuck in his throat when he felt Carlos’s warm breath on his crotch.
8
The room was unbearably hot, so hot it was physically oppressive. The windowpanes rattled each time a heavy truck passed on the national highway, which was every five minutes. On the far side of the motel was a gas station, where a couple of prostitutes sat in folding canvas chairs. One wasn’t wearing any panties and spread her legs whenever a car pulled in to refuel. The other sat talking on a cell phone and fanning herself with a magazine. Her dress was so tight it was hard to believe she could breathe. Black people don’t get hot, do they, Snowflake? Zinoviev had once asked. “Snowflake” was the name he’d given Siaka the first time he saw him. Back then Siaka had no idea there was such a thing as an albino gorilla. Years later, when he saw one behind the glass at the Barcelona zoo, he felt total empathy for the animal. He, too, earned his living as a circus attraction.
Siaka opened his mouth as if attempting to swallow what little air was being circulated by the fan blades. He lay on the floor in flip-flops and denim shorts, his naked torso shimmering with sweat. Several old scars covered the right side of his body—knife and bullet wounds. He took a sip from his bottle of cold water and let a little of it dribble down his chin.
The first time Siaka was sold, it was for less than three thousand dollars. He was six years old at the time, and the man who sold him was his father, who delivered him to filthy slave quarters where some local warlord, a thirty-year-old Angolan, was rounding up a militia. The man kept him locked in a cardboard-and-sheet-metal shack for a week. Each time the door opened and Siaka saw his mud-stained boots walk in, he cowered like an abused puppy. Beatings, beatings, and more beatings. For no apparent reason. Just to tenderize the meat. Then came the drugs and rapes, the fights he was forced to have against a boy from the other side of the lake, a boy as scared as he was, the two of them facing off in a pen like cocks with deadly spurs. And he fought—oh, did he fight—becoming unhinged when his opponent tried to run from the pen, one arm broken in three places. Siaka crushed his head with a rock that weighed more than he did; he had no idea where the viciousness had come from, the animalistic howl he let out. And then it was over, and the man picked him up and rocked him in his arms, held his bloody hands up to the frenzied horde, and called him “my son.”
Siaka looked at his watch. The train to Paris was departing in three hours. From there he’d fly to Frankfurt. And from there to Africa, where he planned to disappear forever. If Laura’s brother didn’t turn up. He’d made a bet with himself and was sure he was going to win. The lawyer would be a no-show.
The second time he was sold, Siaka was eleven. But by then he was no longer a boy. The boy had died—or that’s what he thought during the years he spent in the jungle and desert, training in camps before the long weeks of transporting arms, ammunition, and drugs like a slave. Killing was easier than dying. But dying was easier than living. He quickly realized that his heart no longer truly beat, and that his fear disappeared if he transferred it to others, to those in the crosshairs of his rifle or under the blade of his machete. Zinoviev had bought him for two boxes of Kalashnikovs, three of ammo, and one of Russian-manufactured hand grenades. He said he liked Siaka’s ferocity and compared him to the fighting dogs he was so fond of. But more than his ferocity, Zinoviev liked his face—so innocent looking, despite it
all—and wiry man-child body. He was going to introduce him to another war, to a place where they used other arms, he said. To Europe. There he’d teach him other skills, talents that his clientele—demanding in their perversions—would appreciate in such a good-looking eleven-year-old boy. Siaka shrugged: One hell is as bad as another. Makes no difference where you burn, he thought. But he was wrong. There’s always a deeper ring that you can sink into. Siaka discovered that.
He approached the window and looked through the dirty glass. Only the hooker with the cell phone was at the gas station now. Still talking on the phone and fanning herself with the magazine. The one with no panties had disappeared, and her chair had become a footrest for her friend, who had taken off her high heels. It made for a sad sight: the woman’s bare feet, shoes cast off in the gravel. And that’s when Siaka saw Gonzalo climb out of his SUV by a gas pump and stand there, like a bewildered little boy, glancing uncertainly from one side of the road to the other, mopping sweat with his handkerchief. The hooker must have said something obscene to him, and he trudged across the street with pitiful footsteps. Maybe Laura had been right after all when she told him that her brother was by far the bravest man she’d ever met.
Five minutes later the two of them stood face-to-face in the room, weighing each other up mistrustfully. Gonzalo cast a furtive glance at the half-packed bag on the bed. He had a laptop case over his shoulder. Siaka’s head moved slowly, examining Gonzalo. He’d been watching him for weeks, but now that the guy was so close he seemed the antithesis of his sister. Everything about him oozed formality. It was like he was walking on tiptoes, wearing a suit that must have been incredibly uncomfortable in this heat, the knot of his tie so tight that not even the top button was visible. His thick glasses gave him a perplexed look. He was orderly, the kind of man who needed things to be taken care of properly, the kind who placed each book back on its shelf, each record in its sleeve, each shirt on its hanger. Each corpse and person in its place. Siaka bet Gonzalo was the sort who organized canned goods by color and label in the pantry, the kind of man who had no vices. He’d never liked people who had no vices, didn’t trust them. Despite Laura’s opinion, Siaka was not impressed.
“Did you look at what’s on the laptop?”
“Some of it…Who are you?”
That’s a hard question to answer, Siaka thought.
“Didn’t you see my name and photo in the files?”
“There are lots of names and photos in the files.”
Too many, Siaka thought. How many like him in the world? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? He was just one more. You’re alive, and you’re young—very young despite everything you’ve been through. You’ll get past this. That was how Laura had convinced him to strap on a microphone and record Zinoviev’s conversations. All it took was a few kind words, a Coke at a seaside café in a small coastal town, and the promise that his life, regardless of the past, was just beginning. That was all he’d needed, one clean look from someone who didn’t classify him as a monster. Never forget one thing, Siaka: You are not defined by what others made you do. They are the aberrations, not you.
“I was cooperating with your sister in her investigation. I was her informant.”
Was that all he’d been? No, he was more than that. Laura had liked him, and Roberto had liked him even more, from the day they first met at a park. What a sight they must have been for the old folks feeding pigeons: a young black man and a little white boy, strolling hand in hand while an attractive white woman watched attentively from the distance. At first Siaka had trouble understanding Roberto when he spoke, but he had no problem interpreting his actions: running after a soccer ball and taking a clumsy shot, having a fit when his mother refused to buy him an ice cream, falling asleep in Siaka’s arms as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He came to love that boy like a brother—just two regular kids, one a scared young boy-soldier, the other a quiet, slightly odd-looking kid. Two angels roaming a world neither could understand, a world of dangers that were clearly discernible in Laura’s fierce eyes. She was there to protect them, to grant them a fictional normality.
“Her informant?”
“The Matryoshka. I was one of them.”
After an enjoyable afternoon with Laura and her son—the three of them pretending to be a normal family—Siaka found going back to the den where Zinoviev hosted his parties a punch in the stomach. It got harder and harder to calm the young Nigerian girls whimpering as he dressed them up like Western whores before handing them over to depraved clients. The girls were little kids, like he had once been, like Roberto still was. Zinoviev no longer had Siaka sleep with clients for the most part. Since he’d turned sixteen, Zinoviev considered him too old for his clientele’s taste. So he became one of his pets, like the dogs that Persian satraps kept in order to appear exotic and sophisticated. Siaka was in charge of moving the girls, making sure everything about them was perfect before they were put on display, sometimes in magnificent salons, others in stinking hovels or factory cellars. Siaka was there for dramatic effect. Spaniards were as enthralled with his kinky hair and flat nose as they were with his height and muscles. A eunuch, guardian of the harem.
“I was there the day Zinoviev killed Roberto. I drove the car to the lake and saw him drown. I was Zinoviev’s right-hand man. His second lieutenant.”
Laura had been patient with him, she’d known how to wait without pressuring him, without making threats that would have sent him into hiding, made him run off with all he knew—and he knew a lot. Everything, in fact: Monsters grow weak once they’ve eaten all of their enemies; they become sloppy and overconfident. A piece of paper full of names gets left on the table, a bankbook full of account numbers and itineraries is found in the sheets after an orgy. Sometimes ogres reveal secrets in the wee hours of the night, when even monsters dream of being kind.
Siaka had hoarded information for years, biding his time, day after day. No one knew more about the Matryoshka than he did, not even the head of the Matryoshka—if indeed the enigmatic leader Zinoviev was so afraid of actually existed. He’d done it unintentionally, acting out of instinct, just as he had the day he was sent—at age eleven—to massacre a village, drugged up to his eyeballs. He made sure everyone saw him butcher corpses, pretending to be the cruelest of them all. I’ll do it, he told Laura one day, out of the blue, while Roberto ran around chasing pigeons that seemed about to be caught, only to fly off at the last minute. I’ll help you catch these fuckers, all of them, starting with Zinoviev. A few weeks later, the boy was dead. Siaka didn’t understand why his death affected him so deeply. Plenty of people had died all around him, he’d seen it happen countless times in his short life and never felt touched. But the kid was different.
“That boy was the closest I had to a real family.” And he’d let Zinoviev kill him. The Russian was dead, and that made the world a little better, made it slightly easier to breathe. But it was poor consolation.
Gonzalo heard voices swirling in his head: his sister, the voice of his childhood, calling to him when he got lost in the forest; his mother, singing in Russian; his father, whose voice he no longer recalled and only invented, telling him that what matters is for children to be proud of their parents. He was terrified, and confused.
“Why are you telling me these things? Why did you send me the laptop? The police are the ones who should be dealing with this.”
Siaka let out a sad, malicious laugh. “I suppose you tried opening the confidential folder.”
Gonzalo nodded. He’d tried twice and had just one more chance.
“That’s the file where your sister kept the Matryoshka’s organizational chart, the names of their leaders all over the world, their sources for laundering the money they earned from illegal activities, the tax havens, banks, companies, as well as a long list of officers, many of them attorneys, prosecutors, judges, and police. Zinoviev was just a henchman. In theory he was in t
he import-export business: sporting equipment. But in reality he was a hit man for the organization. They have a headquarters in Russia and branches all over Europe that Laura had been investigating for years. They’re into all sorts of illegal dealings, but most of their income is from child prostitution. Boys and girls from all over the world, the younger the better—as you know if you’ve seen the files. The police don’t care about closed cases. And with both Laura and Zinoviev dead, their accounts are all squared. You’re a lawyer, you know how it goes.”
Gonzalo shifted uneasily. A lawyer, yes, but an unexceptional one who dealt with civil proceedings and was too squeamish for some things, a lawyer who refused to get involved in these sorts of issues and never understood why his sister had given up everything she had to sink into the depths of such filth.
“What do you want from me?”
“It’s not what I want. It’s what your sister would have wanted.”
A Million Drops Page 16