“Emerson had no idea what he wanted, so the agency set up the pictures. They had me wear a bikini and smile at the camera while I was holding a small stack of gold coins in each hand. I thought it was a funny way to sell to investors. But Emerson didn’t seem to mind, and who was I to judge?” says Katia. “Still, that was the first clue. I should have realized.”
“Realized what?”
“Men,” she says. “Sometimes they come to the modeling agencies, mostly Americans…” Then she looks at me. “Sorry.”
“That’s all right, go on.”
“They…they hire models after they look at the pictures on the website. They pay for photo shoots they never use, just to meet the women.”
“Pike never used the photographs?”
“No. And he never did any advertising in Costa Rica. I didn’t know that until later. He seemed very nice. He invited me to dinner. We went out. He was fun to be with and he entertained well.”
I asked her what she meant by this.
“The best restaurants and nightclubs,” she says. “This went on for several weeks. I got to know him, at least I thought I did.”
Katia was comfortable with him. She introduced him to her friends and a cousin who was visiting from Limon at the time, all except her mother, who was away down in Colombia visiting other relatives.
“Does your mother know you’ve been arrested?”
“I haven’t been able to talk to her. Your friend Harry, that is his name, correct?”
“That’s right.”
“Harry was going to telephone one of my friends and ask her to leave a message at my mother’s house. He tried to call my mother’s cell phone, but there was no answer. She usually leaves the phone behind, turned off, when she goes to Colombia. I assume she has not returned.”
“Harry mentioned it.”
“She will want to know what’s happening.”
“So you think Pike sought you out because he liked your photographs on the modeling agency’s website?”
“It’s what I thought at first,” she says. “But later I realized that was not it. After he met my family, he kept asking questions. Mostly he wanted to know where my mother was.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It was as if he wanted to meet her. I told him she was away in Colombia. He asked what she was doing down there. I told him she was visiting relatives. He was very interested in this.”
“Did he say why?”
“No. Just that he wanted to get to know my family. Whenever I asked him why, this is what he would say-‘Because I want to know your family.’”
“And you didn’t believe him?”
“No. All he wanted to know was who the relatives in Colombia were. Strange, no?”
“Yes. Go on.”
“I told him I didn’t know them. It’s true. They are relatives of my mother but I have never met them. She mentions them once in a while but she tells me that they are distant relatives, that I wouldn’t really like them.”
“Did she say why you wouldn’t like them?”
“Not really.”
“And you never asked?”
“I assumed there was some problem.”
“You mean trouble with the law?”
“Es possible, I suppose. My mother never said anything.”
“But that’s what you’re thinking?”
“I don’t know. One of them is old, at least that’s what she says, and she goes down mostly, I think, to take care of him.”
“So your mother is from Colombia?”
“No. She was born in Costa Rica, same as me.”
“And your father?”
“He’s dead. He died when I was a baby. He was Tico, born in Costa Rica.”
“How did your mother’s relatives get to Colombia?”
“I don’t know. As I said, she would never talk about it.”
“But Emerson kept asking you?”
“Yes, all the time. And then one night we talked about it and I remembered I had some pictures in my camera that my mother had brought back with her from her trip a few months earlier. He was all excited.”
“Pike?”
“Yes. I thought it was funny. I laughed at him. He wanted to see them. I told him it was late. We had just come back from a movie. He said no, no, he wanted to see them, right now. So I got the camera and showed them to him.”
“Go on.”
“He kept asking me who they were. We looked at them in the little window in the back of the camera. I told him I didn’t know. I assumed they were my mother’s relatives. She borrowed my camera. She never told me the pictures were there. I found them when I went to use it. But it must be her relatives, no? Who else would it be?”
“What did Pike do then?”
“A few days later he told me he was going back to the United States and he wanted me to come with him for a visit. He invited me to come stay at his house near San Diego.”
“And you wanted to go?”
“Sure. Why not? But I told him I couldn’t. I had no visa for the United States. He told me no problem. And as I told you before, he got the visa.”
“Harry is looking into that, how Pike obtained it so quickly,” I tell her.
“Yes, and there was another problem too. Emerson must have been in a rush,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he insisted on completing the application for me, the application for the visa. He said I would sign it but he would fill it out be cause it would go faster. I didn’t like that. What, he thinks he’s smarter than I am?”
“So what happened?”
“I gave him my passport because he needed information from it to fill out the form, but he got my name wrong. I didn’t see it. He just had me sign the form. I wanted to look at it, but he said he was in a hurry. He had to go someplace and he took the form with him. Next thing I know he comes back with the visa and my name is not right.”
“Wait, wait, wait…you mean you didn’t go to the U.S. consulate with him when he delivered the application?”
“No. He said it wasn’t necessary, that he could take care of it. He took my passport and the application and the next thing I know he has the visa.”
“But the name is wrong. Did he misspell it?”
“No. He didn’t put down the last part of my name-Nitikin. I always used it, Katia Solaz-Nitikin. Solaz is my father’s name. My mother’s family name is Nitikin. It was on my passport. Emerson knew I used it. It was the name on the modeling agency website. It made me angry because if he’d let me fill out the application, I would have done it correctly. It’s the way he was. He always had to do things, even if it wasn’t his business.”
“A control freak,” I say.
“Yeah.” She snaps a finger and points at me. “That’s it.”
“But in the end the name on the visa wasn’t a problem. I mean, you got into the country all right?”
“It would have been better if I had not.” She looks around at the dismal surroundings, the concrete floor and
