Later, when I began to connect apparently unrelated events, I became intrigued by that aspect of Brandon Leeman’s business. I didn’t see him mixed up in prostitution, except selling drugs to women who solicited, but he had mysterious dealings with pimps, which coincided with the disappearance of certain girls among his clientele. On several occasions I saw him with very young girls, recent addicts, lured to the building by his gentle manners and given free samples from the best of his personal reserves; he supplied them on credit for a couple of weeks, and then they wouldn’t come back, just vanished into thin air. Freddy confirmed my suspicions that they ended up being sold to the mafia; thus Brandon Leeman earned a cut without getting his hands too dirty.
The boss’s rules were simple, and as long as I fulfilled my part of the deal, he fulfilled his. His first condition was that I avoid all contact with my family or anyone from my previous life, which was easy for me; I only missed my grandma, and since I planned to return to California soon, I could wait. I wasn’t allowed to make new friends either, because the slightest indiscretion could jeopardize the fragile structure of his business, as he put it. On one occasion Chino told him he’d seen me talking to a woman by the gym door. Leeman grabbed me by the throat, forced me to my knees with unexpected strength, because I was taller and in better shape than he was. “Idiot! You stupid bitch!” he said, and slapped me twice across the face, red with rage. That should have set off alarm bells, but I didn’t manage to process what had happened; it was one of those increasingly frequent days when I couldn’t stitch my thoughts together.
After a little while he sent me to get dressed up because we were going to have dinner at a new Italian restaurant; I imagined it was his way of apologizing. I put on my little black dress and gold sandals, but I didn’t try to disguise my split lip or the marks on my cheeks with makeup. The restaurant turned out to be more agreeable than I’d expected: very modern, black glass, steel, and mirrors, no checked tablecloths or waiters disguised as gondoliers. We left our food almost untouched, but drank two bottles of Quintessa 2005, which cost an arm and a leg and helped to smooth things over. Leeman explained that he was under a lot of pressure; he’d been offered an opportunity in a fantastic but dangerous business. I assumed it was something to do with a two-day trip he’d recently taken, without saying where or taking along his associates.
“Now more than ever, a security breach could be fatal, Laura,” he told me.
“I spoke to that woman at the gym for less than five minutes about our yoga class. I don’t even know her name, I swear, Brandon.”
“Don’t do it again. This time I’m going to forget it, but don’t you dare forget, understand? I need to trust my people, Laura. I get along well with you. You’ve got class—I like that—and you learn fast. We could do a lot of things together.”
“Like what?”
“I’ll tell you when the right moment arrives. You still need to prove yourself.”
That much-heralded moment arrived in September. From June to August I was still wandering around in a fog. No water came out of the pipes in the apartment, and the fridge was empty, but there were always more than enough drugs. I didn’t even notice how high I was all the time; taking two or three pills with vodka or lighting up a joint turned into automatic gestures that my brain didn’t even register. My level of consumption was tiny, compared to the rest of the people around me. I was doing it for fun and could give it up any time I wanted. I wasn’t an addict—that’s what I believed.
I got used to the sensation of floating, to the fog muddling my mind, to the impossibility of finishing a thought or expressing an idea, to seeing the words of the vast vocabulary I’d learned from my Nini vanish like smoke. In my rare glimmers of lucidity I remembered my plan to return to California, but told myself there’d be plenty of time for that. Time. Where did the hours hide away? They slipped through my fingers like salt. I was living in a holding pattern, but there was nothing to wait for, just another day exactly like the previous one, stretched out lethargically in front of the TV with Freddy. My only daytime chore was to weigh out powders and crystals, count pills and seal plastic bags. That’s how August went.
At dusk I’d liven myself up with a couple of lines of coke and head over to the gym for a dip in the pool. I’d examine myself critically in the rows of mirrors in the changing room, searching for signs of the low life I was leading, but I didn’t see any; nobody would have suspected the perils of my past or the risks of my present. I looked like a student, just as Brandon Leeman wanted me to. Another line of cocaine, a couple of pills, a cup of very black coffee, and I was ready for my night shift. Maybe Brandon Leeman had other distributors in the daytime, but I never saw them. Sometimes he came with me, but as soon as I learned the routine and he knew he could trust me, he sent me out alone with his associates.
I was attracted by the noise, the lights, the colors, and the extravagance of the hotels and casinos, the tension of the gamblers playing the slot machines and at the card tables, the click-clack of the chips, the glasses crowned with orchids and paper parasols. My clients, very different from those in the street, had the brazenness of those who can count on impunity. The traffickers had nothing to fear either, as if there were a tacit accord in that city that they could break the law without facing the consequences. Leeman had arrangements with several police officers, who received their cut and left him in peace. I didn’t know them, and Leeman never told me their names, but I knew how much and when they had to be paid. “They’re a bunch of nasty, insatiable, damned pigs. You’ve really got to be careful with them—they’re capable of anything. They plant evidence to implicate innocent people, steal jewelry and money on raids, keep half the drugs and weapons they confiscate, and protect each other. They’re corrupt, racist psychopaths. They’re the ones who should be behind bars,” the boss told me. The unhappy wretches who came to the building looking for drugs were prisoners of their addiction, in absolute poverty and irremediable loneliness; they barely survived, were persecuted, beaten, hidden in their underground holes like moles, exposed to the cruel blows of the law. For them there was no impunity, just suffering.
I had more than enough money, alcohol, and pills, all for the asking, but I didn’t have anything else: no family, friendship, or love, not even any sunshine in my life; we lived at night, like rats.
One day Freddy disappeared from Brandon Leeman’s apartment, and we didn’t know anything about him until Friday, when we happened to run into Officer Arana, who I’d seen only a very few times, though on each occasion he always had some kind words for me. Freddy came up in the conversation, and the officer told us in passing that he’d been found seriously injured. The king of rap had ventured into enemy territory, and a gang beat him up and threw him in a Dumpster, thinking he was dead. Arana added for my information that the city was divided up in zones controlled by different gangs, and a Latino like Freddy, even though he was half black, couldn’t go picking fights with black kids. “The boy’s got a bunch of arrest warrants pending, but jail would be fatal for him. Freddy needs help,” Arana told us as he left.
It wasn’t advisable for Brandon Leeman to go near Freddy, since the police already had their eye on him, but he went with me to visit him in the hospital. We went up to the fifth floor and wandered down corridors lit with fluorescent lights looking for his room, without anyone noticing us; we were just two more people in the constant coming and going of medical personnel, patients, and relatives, but Leeman crept along the walls, looking over his shoulder, and kept his hand in his pocket, where he carried his pistol. Freddy was in a ward with four beds, all occupied, strapped down and connected to various tubes; his face was swollen, his ribs broken, and one hand so crushed that they’d had to amputate two of his fingers. The kicks had burst one of his kidneys, and his urine in a bag hanging from the side of the bed was the color of rust.
The boss gave me permission to stay with the kid for as many hours a day as I wanted, as long as I carried out my wor
k at night. At first they kept Freddy doped up on morphine and later they started giving him methadone, because in the state he was in he’d never have been able to withstand the withdrawal symptoms, but methadone wasn’t enough. He was desperate, like a trapped animal struggling against the straps on the bedrails. When none of the staff was looking I managed to inject heroin into the tube of his IV, as Brandon Leeman had instructed. “If you don’t do it, he’ll die. What they’re giving him here is like water for Freddy,” he told me.
In the hospital I got to know a black nurse, fifty-some years old, voluminous, with a loud, guttural voice that contrasted with the sweetness of her character and her magnificent name: Olympia Pettiford. She’d been on duty when they brought Freddy up from the operating room. “It pains me to see him so skinny and helpless—this child could be my grandson,” she said to me. I hadn’t made friends with anybody since I arrived in Las Vegas, with the exception of Freddy, who at this moment had one foot in the grave, and for once I disobeyed Brandon Leeman’s orders; I needed to talk to someone, and this woman was irresistible. Olympia asked me how I was related to the patient. To keep things simple, I told her I was his sister, and she didn’t seem surprised that a white girl with bleached blond hair, wearing expensive clothes, would be related to a dark-skinned, possibly juvenile delinquent drug addict.
The nurse took advantage of any spare moment to sit beside the boy and pray. “Freddy must accept Jesus in his heart. Jesus will save him,” she assured me. She had her own church on the west side of the city, and she invited me to evening services, but I explained that I worked nights and my boss was very strict. “Then you’ll have to come on Sunday, girl. After the service we Widows for Jesus offer the best breakfast in Nevada.” Widows for Jesus was a tiny but very active group, the backbone of her church. Being widowed was not considered an indispensable prerequisite for belonging, it was enough to have lost a love in the past. “I, for example, am married at present, but I had two men walk out on me and a third who died, so technically I have been widowed,” Olympia told me.
The social worker assigned to Freddy by Child Protective Services was an underpaid older woman, with more cases on her desk than she could possibly attend to. She was fed up and counting the days until she could retire. Children passed through the services briefly. She placed them in a temporary home, and a short time later they came back, once again beaten up or raped. She came to see Freddy a couple of times and stayed to chat with Olympia, which is how I found out about my friend’s past.
Freddy was fourteen years old, not twelve, as I’d thought, or sixteen, as he claimed. He’d been born in a Latino neighborhood in New York, of a Dominican mother and unknown father. His mother brought him to Nevada in a dilapidated vehicle belonging to her lover, a Paiute Indian, and an alcoholic like her. They camped here and there, moving if they had gasoline, accumulating traffic tickets and leaving a trail of debts in their wake. They both soon disappeared from Nevada, but someone found seven-month-old Freddy, abandoned in a gas station, malnourished and covered in bruises. He grew up in state homes, passed from hand to hand, never lasting in a foster home, with behavioral and personality problems, but he went to school and was a good student. At the age of nine he was arrested for armed robbery, spent several months in a reformatory, and then dropped off the radar of both the police and Child Protective Services.
The social worker was supposed to find out how and where Freddy had been living for the last five years, but he pretended to be asleep or refused to answer her questions. He was afraid they’d put him in a rehabilitation program. “I wouldn’t survive a single day, Laura, you can’t imagine what it’s like. No rehabilitation, just punishment.” Brandon Leeman agreed and got ready to prevent it.
When they removed the kid’s IV and catheter, and he could eat solid food and stand up, we helped him to get dressed, took him to the elevator, mingling with all the people on the fifth floor during visiting hours, and from there at a snail’s pace to the front door of the hospital, where Joe Martin was waiting for us with the motor running. I could have sworn that Olympia Pettiford was in the corridor, but the saintly woman pretended not to have seen us.
A doctor who supplied Brandon Leeman with prescription drugs for the black market came to the apartment to see Freddy and taught me how to change the dressings on his hand, so it wouldn’t get infected. I thought of taking advantage of having the boy in my power to get him off the drugs, but I wasn’t strong enough to watch him suffer so horrendously. Freddy recovered quickly, to the surprise of the doctor, who’d expected him to be laid up for a couple of months, and was soon dancing like Michael Jackson with his arm in a sling, but there was still blood in his urine.
Joe Martin and Chino took charge of revenge against the rival gang; they felt they couldn’t let an insult that serious go by unanswered.
The beating Freddy got in the black neighborhood affected me very deeply. In Brandon Leeman’s fragmentary universe, people came and went without leaving any memories. Some left, others ended up in prison or dead, but Freddy wasn’t one of those anonymous shadows; he was my friend. Seeing him in the hospital breathing with difficulty, in great pain, unconscious at times, tears flooded my eyes. I suppose I was also crying for myself. I felt trapped, and I could no longer keep kidding myself about addiction; I depended on alcohol, pills, marijuana, cocaine, and other drugs to get through the day. When I woke up in the morning with a ferocious hangover from the previous night, I’d make a firm plan to clean myself up, but before half an hour had passed, I’d given in to the temptation of a drink. Just a shot of vodka to get rid of the headache, I promised myself. The headache persisted, and the bottle was within reach.
I couldn’t kid myself about being on vacation, marking time before going to college: I was among criminals. One careless mistake, and I could end up dead or, like Freddy, plugged into half a dozen tubes and machines in a hospital. I was very scared, although I refused to acknowledge my fear, that feline crouching in the pit of my stomach. An insistent voice kept reminding me of the danger. How couldn’t I see it? Why didn’t I flee before it was too late? What was I waiting for to call my family? But another resentful voice answered that my fate didn’t matter to anyone; if my Popo were alive, he would have moved heaven and earth to find me, but my father couldn’t be bothered. “You didn’t call me because you still hadn’t suffered enough, Maya,” my Nini told me when we saw each other again.
The worst of the Nevada summer came with temperatures in the hundreds, but since I lived with air conditioning and only went out at night, I didn’t suffer too much. My habits did not vary, the work going on as ever. I was never alone; the gym was the only place where Brandon Leeman’s associates left me in peace, because although they didn’t come into the hotels and casinos, they waited for me outside, counting the minutes.
The boss had a persistent bronchial cough in those days, which he claimed was an allergy, and I noticed that he’d lost weight. In the short time I’d known him he had grown weaker. The skin hung off his arms like wrinkled cloth, and his tattoos had lost their original design; you could count his ribs and vertebrae; he was gaunt, haggard, and looked very tired. Joe Martin noticed before anyone else and started to put on airs and question Leeman’s orders, while the secretive Chino said nothing, but seconded his partner in dealing behind the boss’s back and fiddling the accounts. They did it so openly that Freddy and I commented on it. “Don’t open your mouth, Laura, because they’ll make you pay—those guys don’t forgive,” the kid warned me.
The gorillas were careless in front of Freddy, who they considered a harmless clown, a junkie with his brain already fried; however, his brain worked better than either of theirs, no doubt about that. I tried to convince the kid that he could rehabilitate himself, go to school, do something with his future, but he answered me with the cliché that school had nothing to teach him, he was learning in the university of life. He repeated Leeman’s lapidary phrase: “It’s too late for me.”
A
t the beginning of October Leeman flew to Utah and drove back in a brand-new blue Mustang convertible with a silver stripe and black interior. He informed me that he’d bought it for his brother, who for some complicated reason was unable to purchase it himself. Adam, who lived a twelve-hour drive away, would send someone to pick it up in a couple of days. A vehicle like that could not stay for a single minute on the streets of this neighborhood without disappearing or being disemboweled, so Leeman immediately put it away in one of the two garages of the building that had secure doors, the rest being caverns full of waste, hovels for passing addicts and spontaneous fornicators. Some destitute people lived for years in those caves, defending their square yard of space against other strays and the rats.
The next day Brandon Leeman sent his associates to pick up a package in Fort Ruby, one of Nevada’s six hundred ghost towns that he used as meeting points with his Mexican supplier, and after they’d left, he invited me to go for a drive in the Mustang. The powerful engine, the smell of new leather, the wind in my hair, sun on my skin, the immense landscape sliced by the knife of the highway, the mountains against the pale cloudless sky, all contributed to getting me drunk with freedom. The feeling of freedom contrasted starkly with the fact that we passed near several federal prisons. It was a hot day, and although the worst of the summer was already past, the panorama soon turned incandescent and we had to put the top up and turn on the air conditioning.
“You know that Joe Martin and Chino are robbing me, don’t you?” he asked me.
I preferred to keep quiet. That was not a subject he’d bring up for no reason; denying it would imply I had my head in the clouds, and an affirmative reply would be admitting betrayal by not having told him.