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 Orzibel’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.