Gladius, then. A little sword. Elvis wished he had a sword. Guns seemed less impressive now, even if he’d felt like a cowboy back when he first held one. He tried to picture himself as one of those samurais in the movies, swinging their katanas. Now wasn’t that something!
Elvis hadn’t known anything about katanas until he joined the Hawks and met El Gazpacho. El Gazpacho was all over the Japanese stuff. He introduced Elvis to Zatoichi, a super fighter who looked like a harmless blind man but who could defeat dozens of enemies with his expert moves. Elvis thought maybe he was a bit like Zatoichi because he wasn’t quite what he appeared to be and also because Zatoichi had spent some time hanging out with the yakuza, who were these crazy dangerous Japanese criminals.
Gladius. Elvis mouthed the word.
“What’re you learning today?” El Gazpacho asked. He had his binoculars around his neck, and he was wedged by an open window and didn’t look nervous at all.
“Roman shit. Hey, you know any decent flicks with Romans?”
“Spartacus is pretty okay. The director filmed 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s cool, takes place aboard a spaceship. ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra.’ ”
Elvis had no idea what El Gazpacho had said, but he nodded and held out his cigarette. El Gazpacho grinned and took a drag before returning it to him. El Gazpacho grabbed his binoculars and looked out the window, then he checked his watch.
The students were singing the Mexican anthem and the Antelope was mocking them by singing it with them. In a corner, El Güero looked bored as he cleaned his teeth with a toothpick. The others—members of their sister unit, another little group of four—looked tense. Tito Farolito in particular had resorted to telling bad jokes to lighten things up because the word was there were ten thousand protesters, and that was no small amount. Ten thousand is the kind of number that makes a man think twice about this whole line of work, even if he’s drawing 100 pesos a day and twice as much if he’s with El Mago. Again, Elvis wondered how many Hawks would be at the demonstration.
The Hawks began to stream into the rally, carrying signs with the face of Che plastered on them and chanting slogans like “Freedom for the political prisoners!” It was a ruse, a way to allow them to get close to the protesters.
It worked.
Just when the students were walking in front of the Cosmos movie theater there came the first shots. It was time to rock and roll. Elvis put out his cigarette. His unit hurried down the stairs and exited the apartment building.
Some of the Hawks carried kendo sticks, others shot into the air, hoping to scare the students that way, but Elvis used his fists. El Mago had been clear about the basics: grab any journalists, take their cameras, rough them up if they get stubborn. People with cameras and journalists only. They weren’t to waste their time and energy beating any random nobody who didn’t have film with him. No killing, either, though they could rough ’em up nicely.
Elvis had to give it to the protesters because in the beginning, when the fighting started, they weren’t doing half bad, but then the shooting was no longer bullets in the air, and the students began to panic, began to lose it, and the Hawks were prepared, streaming in from different sides.
“It’s blanks!” a young man yelled. “It’s not real bullets, it’s just blanks. Don’t run away, comrades!”
Elvis shook his head, wondering what kind of stupid dumbfuck you had to be to think those were blanks. Did they assume this was an episode of Bonanza? That a sheriff with a tin star pinned to his vest was going to ride in before the commercials, and it would be fine?
Others were clearly not as optimistic as that guy urging everyone to stay put. Doors and windows were slamming closed along the avenue and the nearby streets, and shopkeepers pulled down their rolling steel shutters.
Meanwhile, the granaderos and the cops were sitting pretty. There were plenty of men with thick anti-bullet vests and heavy helmets on their heads and shields in their hands, but they were forming a sort of perimeter around the area and none of them intervened in one way or the other.
Elvis grabbed a journalist who had an ID clipped to his vest, and when the journalist squirmed and tried to hold on to his camera, Elvis told him if he didn’t let go he was going to break his teeth, and the journalist relented. He could see El Güero wasn’t being so polite. El Güero had another photographer on the ground and was kicking him in the ribs.
Elvis exposed the film of the camera he’d grabbed and then tossed the camera away.
People with cameras were easy to spot, but El Mago had also told them to give all journalists in general a scare, not only the photographers—’cause all journalists could use a lesson about who was boss, these days—and it was a bit harder to figure out who the print and radio journalists were. But the Antelope knew all their faces and names, and he pointed them out when he saw them; that was his role. The other thing to keep in mind was that they couldn’t let themselves be photographed, so Elvis spent half his time trying to spot cameras, trying to watch out for a flash, lest some eager little fucker get a good picture of him.
Nevertheless, it was all going pretty much as expected until the sound of a machine gun blasted the air, and Elvis turned to look around.
What the fuck? Bullets were one thing, but were the Hawks now shooting with machine guns? Was it even their own people? Maybe a clever student had brought firepower. Elvis raised his head and looked at the rooftops, at the apartment buildings, trying to figure out where the hail of bullets was coming from. It was hard to tell, with all the people running to and fro, and the screaming, and someone on a loudspeaker saying that people should retire to their homes. Retire to your homes, now!
The ambulances were coming, he could hear them wailing, heading down Amado Nervo. They were pressing forward and the machine gun had ceased, but bullets were still flying, and Elvis hoped no trigger-happy idiot hit the wrong target. The majority of the Hawks had their hair cut short, and they wore white shirts and sneakers to help identify them, but Elvis’s group also sported denim jackets and red bandanas because they were part of one of the elite teams; because this was the dress code for El Mago’s boys.
“Grab that son of a bitch,” El Gazpacho said, pointing to a dude who held a tape recorder in his hands.
“Got it,” Elvis said.
The dude looked old, but he was surprisingly nimble and managed to run a few blocks before Elvis caught up with him. He was screaming outside the back door of an apartment building, begging to be let in, when Elvis yanked him back and told him to hand over his equipment. The man looked down at his hands as though he didn’t remember he had been lugging that around, and maybe he didn’t. Elvis took the recorder.
“Get lost,” he ordered the man.
Elvis turned around, ready to go find his teammates, when El Gazpacho stumbled into the side street where Elvis was standing. Blood dripped down his chin. He stared at Elvis and raised his arms in the air and tried to speak, but the only sound was the bubbling of blood.