by J. A. Kerley
“Hunh-unh, Ryder, nice try, but it’s grabbing at straws. Homeland Security’s got their paws on the case and they’re keeping it.”
“It was just a thought, Doc. Thanks for setting me straight.”
A pause. “Between you and me and the fencepost, Ryder, I wish it could have worked. Rayles sent his team to interview me.”
“And?”
“It was the B team, C maybe. A bunch of trainees getting their feet wet. I don’t even think Rayles is running it, I think he delegated it to his briefcase-toter, Pinkle or whatever. I wish you guys were running this thing.”
I thanked her again. I considered throwing the phone into the wall, but realized that was not only stupid but expensive. So I kicked a magazine across the room, emptied half my glass and lay back on the couch, glaring at the ceiling again. Gershwin leaned against the marble counter separating the kitchen and great room.
“I’ve never seen you in a shitty mood,” he said. “It’s depressing.”
“Then you’ve got two choices, Ziggy: leave for happier climes or stay here and be depressed with me.”
He nodded toward my glass. “Any more of that rum around?”
20
Chaku Morales walked into the main room of the club. Three women in various stages of undress cavorted on a stage above a long glass-topped bar, one performing improbable gymnastics on a gleaming pole. Morales’s massive head rotated as if on gimbals, an outsized robot set on Search. He saw Orzibel near the alley door, signing an invoice for a liquor salesman. When the salesman departed, Morales walked to Orzibel and nodded at the ceiling, meaning upstairs.
“Mama Cho is here. Pissed.”
Orzibel followed the behemoth to his office and stepped inside to see Leala, her eyes wet and terrified. But there was something else in them … anger? Beside Leala was Cho. She wore a pink and kimono-shaped blouse over a floor-length blue sheath, the skirt slit to mid-thigh. The woman jabbed a two-inch red nail at Leala.
“I want a new girl,” she said, her voice like a saw cutting tin.
“What’s wrong?”
“She’s worthless, cry, not work. Customers lose mood. I demand a new girl and one thousand dollars.”
“Why the grand?”
“For time and lost money. I got business to run, can’t make money when I deal with stupid problems. Plus I lose three customers.”
“I want to go home,” Leala said.
Orzibel backhanded her face and dragged her screaming across the carpet to Chaku. “Take the bitch to the basement and I’ll deal with her later.”
Amili entered the room. “I can’t work with all the noise,” she said. “What is the problem?”
Cho rolled her eyes. “I have to repeat myself?”
“One of the new girls …” Orzibel said. “Leala. She’s fucking up.”
“No handjob,” Cho explained, pumping the air with her fist. “Just cry.”
Orzibel looked at Amili. “Mama wants a new one, which is cool. She wants a grand for her trouble, which isn’t.”
“Who cares what you think is cool?” Cho spat. “I make barely enough to stay open, two hundred a day a girl. I need them work all the time …” she rolled her fists in her eye sockets, “not cry.”
“Two hundred a day a girl?” Amili asked.
“Times are tough. Everyone doing the handjob to the internet.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Mama,” Amili said quietly. “Maybe you heard how I got started.”
Cho’s eyes narrowed. “What do I care?”
“You’re working them twelve hours a day, sixteen when a big convention’s in the city. You’re taking all of their income and most of their tips and don’t deny it. I figure you’re clearing two hundred an hour, not a day. The two hundred a day is what you report to the IRS. How am I doing?”
“You know nothing, missy. You think you some big deal because you fuck your way up the stairs. So what … me too.”
Amili stared evenly at Cho. “We’ll replace the product by tonight. No money back because it’s all part of the business. We share risk.”
“Girl cries, it wrecks the dream,” Cho screeched. “Johns never come back. Your lousy girl cost me permanent business and money.”
“Spare me, Mama,” Orzibel said. “You make more money than the Saigon McDonald’s.”
Cho shrugged. “OK then, I get girls somewhere else.”
Amili shook her head. “Not an option, Mama. We supply your girls. You wanted an exclusive contract and you got it.”
Cho’s eyes tightened into slits. “Fuck contract. Girls are everywhere.”
“Mama—”
“Talk is finished.” She walked to the door, Chaku in the way. Cho said, “Move it, stinking buffalo man.”
Morales looked to Orzibel, who nodded and Morales stepped aside. As she passed, Mama Cho pulled a twenty from her purse and jammed it into Chaku’s shirt pocket.
“Buy some hair for your ugly head,” she said, a cruel smile on her lips. “Fag boys should be pretty.”
Orzibel followed Amili to her office to check the terms of Cho’s contract: eighteen girls a year, monthly payments, three months left to run.
“What will we do with Cho, Orlando?” Amili said. “If she breaks the contract, others will doubt our resolve.”
“We? You won’t do anything, Amili, I will handle it. I handle all the dirty work very effectively, no? Perhaps it is why you did not snitch about my, uh, time with little Leala.” He stepped closer and put his hand on Amili’s hip. “And maybe you find me … interesting.”
Amili put her hand over his and moved it away. “As I have said too many times, Orlando, we work together. Finding you interesting or otherwise is not a choice.”
Orzibel studied Amili. “How often does the Jefé come to you, Amili? Enough to quench your fires?”
Amili sighed. “Is there a reason you are entering my private life, Orlando? Tonight, with the problems of Cho?”
Orzibel shrugged and gave up. “Cho will be handled. The problem is Leala … something in her nature. She weeps, she sniffles. Then, from nowhere, she fights back. Even after training Leala struck out at Madame Cho.”
“Who wouldn’t?”
“We’re not making fighting dogs, Amili, we’re creating animals trained to do tricks. If they have the strength to bite, they have the strength to bolt, which puts us all in danger.”
Amili thought a moment. “Have Miguel Tolandoro give Leala’s mother three hundred dollars and tell her Leala has sent it. We’ll set up a call to Leala. Mama praises little Leala for her hard work, whatever. Maybe some head-patting will put the girl on the path.”
“Your ways are too complicated for me, Amili. I say we have Mama call as Miguel is breaking her fingers.”
“Who has been in Leala’s shoes, Orlando?”
Orzibel’s eyes flashed with anger. “While you were wearing those shoes, Amili Zelaya, who was running this business?”
“I am not diminishing your experience, Orlando. But I think Leala needs to hear her mama enjoys the money. Leila can then justify her work to herself.”
Orzibel stared. “Justify?”
“It makes it easier when there is a justification,” Amili said. “Only then can you believe in tomorrow.”
Orlando Orzibel left the office, pulling the door at his back and muttering the word justificación. He was tiring of I know this because I’ve been there bullshit. It was he who had done everything, including being imprisoned at the age of twenty-four for cutting a man’s throat.
Orzibel had been running a street-corner prostitution ring in one of the toughest neighborhoods in Miami, his victim a rival who had stolen three of Orzibel’s best money-makers. The man had lived, but Orzibel had taken a lesson from the experience.
Cut deeper.
In the span of fourteen months in the Okeechobee Correctional Institute Orzibel had killed two men and slashed pieces from others. The first one died after only one week, a hulking mayaté cakero who mistook Or
zibel’s handsome features and shining teeth for weakness. Growing up in gangs in Liberty City, Orzibel knew a dozen others in the institution, one passing him a shank, a steel bed slat with one end filed to wicked sharpness, the other wrapped with electrician’s tape.
The mayaté and an ally came at Orzibel in a storeroom. Orzibel’s blade removed a thumb from the ally before going after the main attacker. Orzibel had made sure the mayaté spent his last minutes in incredible pain – removal of the testes does that – ensuring that others kept their distance.
Then, after three years, release from prison. He’d worked in the clean world for several months, hating every aspect, but smiling for the social workers and parole assholes. Then, like a test, a real job: the man he’d come to know as El Jefé – the Chief – had a product slated for a special, one-time kind of work, but the product had been compromised by a lowly coyote. Orzibel was charged with punishing the coyote. He had devised a spectacular demonstration, even publicizing it within a certain culture.
The coyote’s remains had gone into the then secret hole in the field and Orzibel had been elevated to his current position: running the ground operations of the enterprise. That, and enforcement, such as handling the punishment of the gordo accountant.
But just like that, Amili Zelaya had told him – Orlando Orzibel – to pat little Leala on the head and shake a finger at her: Be good, Leala. It pleases your mother. The woman knew how to wrap El Jefé around her perfect little fingers, but she knew nothing of taming girls who tried to resist.
Fuck Amili Zelaya and this lapse into softness, Orzibel thought. He would have Miguel pay a different kind of visit to the mother.
21
Yolanda was gone.
Her face still stinging from Orzibel’s slaps, Leala stared at an empty bed, its sheets unchanged and stained with her friend’s blood and urine. After the upstairs confrontation with Cho, Leala had been carried to the basement by the bald monster. He’d unlocked the mesh door and thrust her back into the warren of filthy halls and rooms. Leala had come to Yolanda’s room to check on her friend. But she had disappeared.
Leala heard Yolanda’s terrified voice echo in her head. They said I would soon go elsewhere to do … the work.
Thinking she heard the door open at the top of the steps, Leala froze, fearing Orzibel was coming down to continue beating her for resisting the filthy, sinful work at Cho’s enterprise. But it was just another of the rats who skulked between basement drains, its feet skittering over a Tostitos bag tossed to the garbage dump of the floor.
Leala crept back to her room and lay atop the mattress, praying she would not hear the hard click of Orzibel’s boots as he came down the steps to slap her face. Or worse.
Footsteps? She would hear them, right? It occurred to Leala that whenever Orzibel or the bald monster or the dangerous-looking men were in the basement, their appearance was almost always telegraphed by the thumping of feet down the steps and the clanging of the grated door.
But several times Leala had noticed something interesting: A person would appear or disappear without a stair-step or gate-opening sound. She had even discussed it with Yolanda. They had been talking and suddenly the gangster men were in the basement and throwing bottles of water into the room. How had the pair missed hearing the footfalls on the wood? The rattle of the gate?
Unless …
There was another way into the basement.
Amili entered the day’s accounting into the laptop and locked it in the safe, the day over. She checked her watch, a vintage Piaget and a constant reminder of him. A few months back they’d risen from his downtown apartment bed to go to dinner, do some shopping in the Design District, then return for a second session in the bed. While outside a jewelry store he’d noted her eyes lingering on the watch and bought it without even asking the price. When she’d protested the expense, he laughed and said be quiet or he’d buy her two of them.
Amili never told him she was studying the watch because she found it so stupidly gaudy. Though it was crusted with shining stones and special metals, inside was a machine that performed no better than a four-hundred-peso Timex. She wore it because he expected to see it on her wrist.
And she’d almost had two of the ridiculous things!
When Amili first arrived in the States, she had spent three days in the basement of the club. Orzibel had been in Honduras at the time, a meeting with Tolandoro. Amili had been rented by a now-dead sadist named Dimitri Bachinkl, who owned four massage parlors near Biscayne Boulevard. Once in Bachinkl’s hands, Amili lived in a filthy bedroom with three other parlor attendants whose ten-hour shifts consisted mainly of servicing a bleary procession of penises.
Amili had resisted at first, feeling betrayed by the universe, her face implacably sullen. Ordered by Bachinkl to smile and laugh and “Do like God made woman to do,” she remained obdurate until receiving a savage beating. “Use your beauty, little fool,” Bachinkl had screamed, the cattle prod stinging like a fifty-thousand-volt hornet. “Use what God has given you and it will make the world easier.”
Afterwards he had taken her to his stinking bed, blunting her mind with drugs as he raped her through the night. Barely able to move in the morning, Amili decided to try an experiment in the small laboratory of the massage parlor: Was Bachinkl lying? Or could the pain and brutality be reduced by heeding the Russian’s words?
The next day Amili began showing her bright and even teeth in smiles and teasing pouts. She bounced her hips when she walked. She rubbed the scented oils slowly through her palms before her hands went to the customer. She swiftly learned men’s rhythms, the quickening of breath, the rise of hips to her shifting strokes. She learned the words to whisper and discovered how men sought praise for the thick fullness of their fluid, even if it was only a flimsy drizzle across Amili’s knuckles.
Within three weeks, Amili was the most-requested masseuse at the parlor, yet the success of her experiment proved her undoing. Customers wanted only Amili. While this brought business to the parlor, it pulled business from the other masseuses, who jumped her one night, butane lighters in hand.
“Bitch, we are going to burn some ugly into you.”
Amili had escaped into the street with only her hair singed, running desperately into the night. Bachinkl had called Orzibel, who found Amili in the bushes of a Catholic church and dragged her to the basement of the club. Fearful she might have contacted the authorities, Orzibel blindfolded Amili, injected scopolomine and chained her to a bed, asking harsh questions as his knife pricked at the skin beneath her eyes. During the interrogation, Orzibel paused for whispered conversations with another man, his deferential tone indicating that whoever he was talking to was a boss or the boss.
After an hour, Orzibel was convinced Amili had contacted no one. The men left, but paused to talk outside her closed door. Still blindfolded and bound, Amili had lain still as stone, listening.
“It’s stealing all my time,” the unknown man said. “It’s all I do.”
“Better something is stealing your time than someone stealing your money, Jefé,” Orzibel had replied. “Is there no one you know … from your other life?”
A laugh without humor. “I can’t just pull someone from the accounting department.”
“Pay them highly.”
“I paid the conejo more than he was worth, but it didn’t stop him from skimming. God knows how much that bastard stole, but enough to buy a Series M BMW. Red as a fire engine. What does a three-hundred-pound bald-headed Jew need with a red Beamer?”
“Forget him, Jefé. He’s forever in the hole in the world. And the fat pig had a very bad day before he got there.”
“FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!”
“Easy, Jefé. It’s not worth endangering your health with anger.”
“I need someone to keep the books, Orlando! And to stay quiet.”
Perhaps it was the injection or that she felt there was nothing in her life to lose. But Amili had felt her voice well up in her lungs a
nd burst into the air. “I am good with the numbers,” she had yelled into the darkness.
All sound died. Seconds ticked past and Amili felt sweat break out on her forehead. Would she be killed for eavesdropping? Amili heard a door open.
“What did you say?” asked the unknown man.
“I was training to be a contador, an accountant. Let me do the job.”
“You are only a peasant girl,” the voice said quietly. “From a village made of mud.”
Amili drew every bit of courage to her voice. “How does that mean I cannot have the facility with the numbers?” she demanded. “How can you think so poorly?”
“Caramba,” Orzibel had whispered. “Fearless. Or maybe she has gone mad.”
Footsteps entered the room. “You are a beauty for sure,” the voice said. “And doggone, girl, can you ever handle English.”
“Because I am smart. Give me a test with numbers.”
Not a sound for a full minute. She felt a hand touch her face and resisted the impulse to flinch. “My goodness,” the voice had whispered. “Ain’t you just something in every direction.”
The footsteps retreated in a series of pauses, and Amili knew she was being studied with every pause. The door closed. Minutes later Orzibel returned and his rough behavior had turned to gruff disdain. Amili’s bindings were released, though the door remained locked. Two days later she was taken from the room. Expecting to be put into another parlor or forced to dance at a club, she found herself in a tiny apartment in Little Havana.
“What am I to do here?” she asked.
“I am no longer your keeper,” Orzibel had said, putting five hundred dollars on the kitchen table and departing.
A test, Amili figured. I’m being watched. She wired three hundred dollars home and used another hundred for groceries. She went outside only during the day, staying in the neighborhood and talking to no one. After a week Amili identified two men who seemed always at the edge of her vision.
Amili wondered who her watchers reported to. The answer came in the third week of her freedom. She’d come from the mercado with arms full of tortillas and beans and plantains, dropping them to the floor when a voice said, “Welcome home, Amili Zelaya. Do the accommodations suit you?”