22 | Mercedes
‘So are you going down to the festa?’
She claps her hand to her heart. ‘Jesus, Paulo! You have to stop doing that! I swear you’ll kill me!’
Paulo grins. ‘Not if you’re not doing anything wrong.’
For such a solid-set man, he is remarkably light on his feet. A primary qualification for a security specialist, she guesses. To not be noticed until it’s too late.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I always go down. I’ll be working. In the restaurant. It’s one of the biggest nights of the year.’
‘I can imagine. And your man?’
‘Yeah, him too. You’re going?’
Paulo shakes his head. ‘On duty.’
‘Oh, shame.’
She turns back to the heart-leaf philodendron whose leaves she has been wiping over with a mix of water and furniture polish. His reflection in the window shrugs. On the far side, Tatiana’s four girls frolic in the pool in little string bikinis while their host rests against the cushioned back of a sun lounger and swipes at the screen of her mobile phone.
‘Goes with the territory,’ he says. ‘Roberto and I are going to watch from the roof terrace.’
‘Ah, yes. It’s a good view from there.’
‘Yeah. He’s got a lovely bit of fillet steak and a bottle of some German stuff that wine merchant dropped off. Freebie. Steak sandwiches, on panini. Béarnaise to soften it all up.’
‘Superb,’ she says.
‘I’m surprised you’re not going to be at your da’s.’
Her turn to shrug. She wouldn’t go to Mediterraneo, with its panoramic view of church and marina and harbour wall and its VIP party, even if her father paid her. And he isn’t.
‘He’s got all the staff he needs,’ she says. ‘My mama’s the one who will be overwhelmed.’
‘Mamasita,’ he says, vaguely. ‘I’ll be dropping Her Royal Highness and her ducklings off at nine and then I’m done till they are.’
‘But the Saint will be out by then!’ she protests. ‘The streets will be closed!’
A cynical laugh. ‘As if she’d let that get in her way.’
He comes and stands beside her and watches their guests at play. They’ve grown companionable over the clutch of years they’ve known each other. He’s easy to be around, with his jaundiced eye and his wry asides. I trust him, she thinks. What an irony, when I can trust no one here at all. What would he think, if he knew that I was doing the very things he’s employed to prevent?
‘Well, they’re certainly more decorative than last week’s lot,’ he says.
Wei-Cheng. Sara. Gemma. Hanne. All seventeen years old, except for Hanne, whose passport shows that she turned sixteen three months ago. It’s so – calculated. It would almost be less disturbing if the odd unchecked fifteen-year-old slipped through the net. But every girl who comes here is always legal, even if it’s just by a few days.
Paulo watches in his detached way. Mercedes has never really known what he thinks, and has never asked. If she knew the answer, what then? Would she like him more, or less? Trust him more, or less? They are all tainted, in their way. Anyone who works in these houses, on these boats. She knows she is.
‘Yes,’ she replies. They are lovely, these little girls. Like kittens, or puppies; still filled with that electric aliveness that adulthood drains away. Skin that needs no nurture, muscles that ripple without help from personal trainers. The women they hosted last week were glossy, fragrant, perfected over decades. But no surgeon, however skilled, will ever achieve with art what nature achieves every single day, and that’s the thing these old men seek.
She sighs. ‘And yet I wouldn’t be young again,’ she says.
‘Oh, I would,’ says Paulo. ‘Like a shot.’
‘We had different youths, I suppose.’
‘I guess maybe growing up in a beautiful place like this you feel as though you got a youth,’ he says.