“I know it sounds odd, but Martínez Domínguez was Ordaz’s man. When Ordaz picked Echeverría to succeed him, it was Martínez Domínguez who wrote his speeches, at least before Echeverría turned on Ordaz. It could be the other way around, that Martínez Domínguez wanted to weaken the president. The PRI is a single party but that doesn’t mean it’s united. Ordaz and his favorites, they’re not the same as Echeverría. They’re the old guard. I would say Echeverría is worse, he’s sneakier. He drinks agua de chía or horchata at parties to make you think he’s not one of those stiff pricks who imports brandy and champagne. But I know he mails a crate of Dom Pérignon to the director of Novedades every Christmas. He wears a guayabera to an official function to show that he’s oh-so-Mexican, telling anyone who’ll listen that he’s firmly against Yankee imperialism, but he provides intel to the Americans.”
“Then it’s infighting.”
“Sure. Unless Echeverría and Martínez Domínguez jointly decided to quash the protesters. The CIA is terrified of communists in Latin America and Mexico is dangerously close to Cuba.”
“It all sounds very complicated.”
“I’m not saying it’s one way or another; everyone has a favorite theory.”
“What’s your favorite one, then?”
“Mine?” the young man said with a shrug. “They want us dead, period.”
Maite wondered how someone could say such grim things and look aloof, but her companion managed it. For a second she thought about calling this whole thing quits, but with each step she took her excitement built a little. Rather than being worried, she was invigorated.
It was like in the comics. It was like her words were rendered inside speech bubbles.
“What do I do after I talk to Emilio?” Maite asked. “I’d drop by your shop again, but I don’t think your boss likes it when you have visitors.”
“He’s a grouch. But it’s a steady job. I can stop by and see you on Saturday if you’re around. Lunchtime okay?”
“I don’t have plans,” Maite said and thought that if she wanted to ask him to come in, she could do it then. She’d have to politely dismiss him after that, though. She’d have to say, “Sorry, young man, I don’t think this ought to turn serious.”
She could tell Rubén what Cristóbalito had told her: We can’t have a future together. But she didn’t want to think about Cristóbalito. She wanted to savor this chance to lose herself in a different sort of story.
Rubén and Maite parted by her building’s doorway with a polite goodbye, and she climbed the steps quickly. Once she walked into her apartment that sense of fantasy, of her atoms being suddenly composed of thousands of Ben Day dots, evaporated. It was the sight of her humdrum environment that brought her crashing down to reality. She noticed the dishes that she’d let pile in the sink and the cheap linoleum in the kitchen. In the apartment above her the neighbor’s children were running around like a herd of elephants again.
God! The world was terribly ugly! Maite quickly made her way into her atelier, the sight of the books on the shelves soothing her and yet, at once, her anxiety seemed to rebound as she wondered what she’d tell Emilio Lomelí. She couldn’t call him now, but in the morning she would, and she didn’t want to sound like a fool.
She picked a record—“Blue Velvet,” the Prysock cover. Prysock made three minutes feel like an hour—his voice slowed down time. She began scribbling a script for herself on a notepad. When the song finished, she played it again and kept on writing. Then, when she was done, she rehearsed the whole conversation three times. She wrote herself a handful of lines, but she worried about the emphasis she should put on each word.
“Good morning, I’d like to speak to Mr. Lomelí. Oh, he’s not there? Could you tell him Maite Jaramillo phoned him? It’s about his camera,” she said.
She assumed that Lomelí would have a secretary and also that a very complicated introduction would confuse the secretary and put her off. Besides, she didn’t want to be an alarmist and say, “Your ex-girlfriend is missing.” No, the camera was a good enough excuse. She’d simply tell him, when he called her back, that she hadn’t found the camera, and she hadn’t been able to talk to Leonora either.
Maite wrote herself a few more lines. These would guide her conversation with Emilio, though the more she wrote, the more the topic diverged from Leonora. She wrote herself lines that sounded like dialogue from Secret Romance.
She played “Blue Velvet” a fourth time, the needle gliding across the record’s surface, the volume pumped up higher, and went to get her box of treasures. She laid out all of them on top of her vanity, lining them up. The Italian lace fan, the broken violin bow, a child’s tiny shoe, the plaster statuette of San Judas Tadeo.
Maite felt, in that moment, a pure, unadulterated bliss as she pressed the sheets of papers with her scribblings against her chest. All those objects upon her vanity were secrets. She had peered into the soul, the life, of another human being, and she had cut out a part of them and they’d never know it. Oh, it was bliss to be able to walk through the city and tell herself, They think I’m an ordinary secretary, but I sneak into the homes of people and steal from them. It was always such a delight to remember that.
But now…now perhaps she had more! Though Leonora’s disappearance had irked Maite, it now excited her. It guaranteed an escape from boredom. Nothing like this had happened to her, after all. It was like opening a new issue of a comic book. Who were Rubén and Emilio? What role would they play in the story? What would the next panel say?
10
ELVIS DIDN’T BOTHER going to bed. He slept on the couch, knowing the call would come early. It always did when El Mago was restless. And truth be told, Elvis was restless too; he kept thinking all kinds of junk. First he thought about the priest they’d fucked up and wondered if that was a major sin or a minor one. He tried to calm himself down by considering more pleasant stuff, but ended up with Cristina stuck in his head, remembering the exact color of her hair and how soft her skin felt under the palm of his hand. She’d been so very pretty, so very delicate, like lace and moonlight.
It was no good when he got thinking about Cristina. It always led down a bad road because he began questioning whether he should have left her. Not that he’d wanted to stay with those crazy fuckers from the cult, but he could have asked her to go with him. He could have and he didn’t; he took off on his own.
Normally, when Elvis was all messed up like that, anxious and sleepless, he’d talk to El Gazpacho, and they’d end up at an all-night restaurant, discussing nonsense, or they listened to music from The Beatles and talked it out over a few beers. But El Gazpacho was gone and Elvis kept waiting for the call, kept waiting for El Mago, kept hoping to fall asleep and failing.
The phone rang, and Elvis pressed the receiver against his ear.
“Fifteen minutes,” El Mago said.
Elvis hadn’t undressed. He ran a comb through his hair and splashed water on his face.
He grabbed his screwdriver and the two tiny pieces of metal he liked to use in a pinch to open doors. The lock pick kit was nice, but bulkier. He liked jumping back to basics sometimes too. It kept him nimble.
He headed downstairs, and the car turned the corner as he closed the door behind him.
El Mago didn’t like talking over the phone. He was paranoid, thinking a line could be bugged, probably because he himself had bugged many lines before, so they talked in coffee shops. When they conversed inside El Mago’s car it meant things were not going well. It was a sign, like an approaching thunderstorm, and Elvis felt nervous as soon as he got into the vehicle. If Elvis had slept a scant number of hours, it was obvious El Mago had slept less. Who knew what the fuck was happening, and Elvis couldn’t go out and say, “What’s wrong?” It didn’t work like that with El Mago.
It was raining a little. The windshield wipers went back and forth, providing th
e only noise inside the car. El Mago didn’t switch on the radio, and Elvis would never reach for the dial on his own, not in El Mago’s car, so he tucked his hands into his jacket pockets and stared ahead. It was early enough that there was barely any traffic, and the city looked different like this, with rainbows reflected in the large oil slicks by the side of the road and the rolling metal curtains of the shops shut tight. When they passed the fountain of the Diana Cazadora, her bronze arms raised to the heavens, El Mago spoke.
“What is the word of the day?” he asked.
“I didn’t pick one yet.”
“You should not forget your routines.”
“I won’t, sir.”
“What about your assignment?”
“There was no camera in the woman’s apartment,” Elvis said. “The priest didn’t have the camera either, though the girl stopped by his place, then left. He said she had a boyfriend and a sister. So she might be with them.”
“She’s not with her sister, and the boyfriend is a dead end too. Don’t approach them.”
“But the boyfriend, you don’t think—”
“Emilio Lomelí,” El Mago said. “His family is not only money, but they are also PRI supporters. No, you don’t go barking down that avenue.”
“And the sister, she also with the PRI?”
“Something like that. Did you find anything else?”
“The girl might have gone to a place called Asterisk, an art cooperative is what the priest called it. There’s a woman named Jackie there who was expecting her, but he didn’t think she’d made it there. Sounds like the place to look, though, if the boyfriend and the sister are out of the question.”
The cadence of the windshield wipers sliding against the glass filled the car for a few seconds as El Mago processed the information. “You will have to go to Asterisk, then, and keep tracing her steps. There is a man at the Habana who El Gazpacho worked with; his name is Justo. He has curly hair, wears glasses, and carries a cigarette behind his ear. He can get you into that place.”
“Then you’ve heard of it?”
“Some. He will know more. A nest of pinkos, at any rate. Justo will know them all.”
Elvis nodded. The Habana was notorious for that sort of crowd. Cops were always watching the place. It was almost a game; you couldn’t call it government surveillance. More like an old married couple, with the cops eating tortas outside and the reds inside having coffee. A placid relationship. Asterisk might be more of the same.
“There is something else for you,” El Mago said, pointing at a manila envelope that had been sitting on the dashboard this entire time but which Elvis had not touched until now, waiting for his cue.
He opened the envelope and took out the sheet of paper. Name, age, place of work, and address. No picture. It was a hastily put together file.
“This is the same building I went to,” Elvis said, frowning. “Same apartment?”
“Do not be a fool. Look carefully. It is a different apartment. She is a neighbor.”
“Maite Jaramillo. She know something?”
“That is for you to determine. She has been asking questions about Leonora, and she was seen at a shop that prints communist propaganda. I need you to tail her.”
“How long?”
“All day, for the next few days.”
Christ. That sounded like a full-blown operation. “It’s gonna be difficult with only three guys and this other stuff you have me doing.”
“That is what leading a squad means, Elvis. You must use your resources strategically. What do you think El Güero and the Antelope are for?”
“I know,” Elvis said. “But they don’t like me much.”
“How did they behave when you went to see the priest?” El Mago asked.
The question was neutral, but like most everything with El Mago this was some sort of test. Elvis stuffed the page back in the envelope. “They wanted to cut him,” he said, matching El Mago’s tone. Also neutral. “I told them no. You didn’t say nothing about gutting him.”
“Ever seen a cockfight, Elvis?”
“Not my thing, sir.”
“Not mine either, truth be told, but growing up in the countryside you are bound to see one at some point. With its spurs on, a rooster can be quite deadly. Yet it is not really the creature’s fault, is it? They are territorial, the birds. Put two together in a palenque and they will tear each other to pieces. It is in their nature. Tell me, what do you think is El Güero’s nature? Or the Antelope’s?”
He thought of El Güero, who was a complete asshole, a bully, and also a bit of an idiot, and the Antelope, who was annoying and a bit too chatty but not quite so bad.
“You saying they’re like roosters?”
“I am saying it is up to you to handle them. I cannot be there, asking those two to play nice. You either have the balls to lead them or they will cut your throat and I will not care.”
“I get it,” he said, still neutral, because El Mago was also neutral, his words impassive.
El Mago tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “You are one of many poor devils I have plucked from the street. Get working, really working, before I throw you back in the garbage where you came from. Are we clear?”
“Always, sir.”
El Mago stopped the car. It was still raining, and they weren’t anywhere near the apartment. Elvis stuffed the envelope inside his jacket, found the door handle and opened it, stepping onto the sidewalk.
“Try this word for the day: pawn,” El Mago said, before he rolled up his window and drove away.
In that brief sentence, said low and steady, Elvis read the most cutting scorn. It reminded him of his mother, who called him a useless burden, of the teachers who called him stupid, of the older American woman who had used and dumped him, and the cultists he’d befriended who saw in him nothing but free labor. It was all those hateful people and their barbs, distilled and concentrated into a single whole. And in that moment he felt a terrible, roaring anger, and his hands shook.
Water dripped down his back, under his jacket.
Elvis waited five minutes before he raised his arm and hailed a cab. It was still pretty early, so he went and had himself a coffee, then walked to the women’s building, a cigarette in his mouth. He had no idea what Maite Jaramillo looked like, so he stood on the other side of the street and watched people stream out of the building, some of them with briefcases in their hands, some of them tugging a child behind them. Office workers, first. Then came the housewives, who were going to the market or taking children to school. When he deemed a prudent amount of time had passed and everyone who had a job or an errand had left, he tossed away his cigarette and crossed the street. He took out his lock pick and opened the front door. Then he walked up the stairs to Maite Jaramillo’s apartment.
He knocked twice and had an excuse at the ready. But nobody answered. He let himself inside. A parakeet, in its cage by the window, stared at him across the dining room. It was only then, looking at the bird, that he felt a bit of apprehension.
He shouldn’t have done this. El Mago had told him he needed to work together with El Güero and the Antelope, but he had headed here on his own, intent on doing the exact opposite, like a stubborn child, his gut burning with humiliation and a quiet rage.
“Fuck it,” he whispered.
Elvis began looking around the apartment, glancing at the pictures on the walls. There was a diploma from a secretarial school showing a young girl in an oval picture. Hair parted in the middle, dark eyes, wide forehead. Nothing much to her.
He’d have to steal a picture of the woman. The others would need a form of visual identification. Maybe there was a photo album somewhere. Photos, photos…He also needed to see if this woman had Leonora’s camera. He found nothing in the bedroom, only a cheap pink vanity with the usual makeup and random items
you’d expect atop it, including a little statue of San Judas Tadeo. In the closet there were three suits, two in navy blue and one in gray, the sort of attire a secretary would wear, along with blouses and dresses.
Maite Jaramillo lived alone, and it was a modest living, by the looks of it. One toothbrush in the bathroom, a pair of nylons hanging from the shower rod, a pink bathrobe with a frayed hem dangling from a hook. It was all very ordinary.
The surprise was the room with all the books and the records. It quite impressed him, to be honest, all those shelves filled top to bottom with things to read and listen to. A lot of her music was in English, imported vinyl that cost more than the refritos by local bands. She was a collector.
On the turntable there was a record. Though he knew he shouldn’t, Elvis let the needle drop onto the vinyl. “Blue Velvet” began to play. She had good taste in music, he’d give her that.
He found a stash of comic books, neatly tucked in boxes. He didn’t read comic books and was a bit confused by the titles. Romance stories, that’s what they were. He didn’t even realize anyone printed those. What about her books? Lots of classics with nice bindings, all of them sensible purchases. An encyclopedia, which for some reason was missing the letter H. She also had an Illustrated Larousse. It was even the same edition he owned. He smiled, looking at the familiar cover, and then, remembering El Mago’s taunt about the word of the day, felt like hurling it out the window.
He didn’t dare. Gently, he returned the thick dictionary to the shelf.
Then he saw it, at eye level, the album. “Family Memories” was emblazoned in big, bold letters on the spine. He opened it and flipped through the pictures. It was like looking at those sped-up movies of flowers opening: a baby, a girl, a teenager, and then finally a woman. Maite Jaramillo, this was what she looked like now, with her hair still parted in the middle. Elvis grabbed one of the more recent photos and stuffed it in his pocket.
The cover of “Blue Velvet” the woman owned was really quite nice, and he played it again; he wanted to smoke a cigarette while he listened to it. But she might notice the scent of it. He wondered if the woman ever smoked and if she spent a lot of time in this room. It was dark, a burrow, even if the blinds were open.
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