Exposure by Mal Peet

seems to have shaken off his post-cup indolence and woken up to the possibilities presented to his side by having Otello leading the attack.
The move that led to the goal was without doubt one of the most elegant I have ever seen. It began, inauspiciously, with a forced back pass to the Rialto keeper, Gabriel. Instead of hoofing the ball clear, Gabriel, with two attackers bearing down on him, played a calm pass out to Airto. The back, finding space yawning in front of him, made twenty-five yards before laying the ball off to Roderigo. Two weeks ago, the Rialto captain would have held the ball or played a square pass, but on this occasion he turned beautifully away from one challenge, beat off another, and then fed the ball out to Enrique, who had run wide to the right.
Otello, making an expertly timed run (as always) seemed surprised that Roderigo had moved up to support him, and when Enrique’s cross came in, Otello took it superbly on his chest, dummied his marker, and rolled the ball to his captain. Roderigo, twenty yards out, had every right to make a shot, and the Porto defense expected it. As they rushed to close him down, Roderigo lifted the ball with the outside of his left foot — his weaker foot, as we all know — into the only vacant spot inside the Porto penalty area. Given that Otello has hardly received a decent pass from Roderigo this season, it seems unlikely that he could have been expecting such a ball, yet he moved onto it with extraordinary speed.
Most strikers would have gone for a full-blooded volley to the near post. That is certainly what the Porto keeper expected, and so he was left helpless when Otello’s almost gentle side-footed shot curved past him into the bottom left corner of the net. Nonpartisan lovers of the game will want to see this incisive attack as a promise of things to come and hope that Rialto has at last recognized the enormous potential that their new signing has brought to the club.
    There are certain things that Faustino chooses not to mention. Such as, when Otello turned away after scoring the goal, the first of his teammates to embrace him was the only other black Rialto player, Airto. Such as, there was a significant hesitation before Roderigo and others joined in the congratulations, and Roderigo’s way of doing so was to ruffle Otello’s hair briefly in the way that old ladies touch the heads of small children. Nor does Faustino record the fact that immediately after the goal, he looked up at the directors’ box (from which Nestor Brabanta was again conspicuously absent) and saw, as he expected, Desmerelda doing her arms-high celebration samba to the obvious pleasure of the men surrounding her. But two rows below Desmerelda, Diego Mendosa sat with his arms folded, his face like a grim idol carved from stone. And that was interesting.

“A W , D IEGO, C’MON , man. This is not what I do — you know that.”
    “I know it’s what you have so far refused to do, Capitano, which is not quite the same thing.”
    Otello goes to the big window of the penthouse and gazes down at the boats that are packed densely into the marina. He wishes Desmerelda were home.
    “Yeah, well, maybe the things we don’t do are more important than the things we do.”
    Diego, seated on the sofa, seems to consider this. “That’s deeply philosophical,” he says eventually. “And as your friend, I wouldn’t mind passing the afternoon debating it. But as your agent, I need to concern myself with money. Elegante has agreed to a fee of six hundred thousand. Which is far more than they had in mind before I took them to lunch.”
    Down at the quayside a couple of skinny boys are lugging a basket from one pontoon to the next. A security guard is watching them from just inside the gate of the compound. Otello cannot see what it is that the kids are trying to sell, but he knows they will have scant luck. On weekdays the place is a graveyard, the sleek white yachts and cruisers aligned like