“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.