What nonsense is that Leonora mixed up in? Maite wondered. It had to be something bad if DFS agents were looking for her.
She needed to hide somewhere in case they were following her. She needed to think. She went into a café de chinos and ordered a bistec and a soda. She rubbed her wrist, feeling the place where the man had dug his fingers into her skin, and wondered if she’d have bruises in the morning.
There, seated at a table and with the soothing noise of a radio playing “Bésame Mucho” softly in the background, she was able to calm her nerves. Maite took out the issue of Secret Romance she was carrying in her purse and flipped through it, looking at all those lovely faces and the sentences suspended in speech bubbles. She’d already read the issue, but she read it again.
She gazed at the face of Pablo, the playboy with a heart, and folded and refolded a paper napkin a dozen times absentmindedly. She needed to do something with her hands when she was like this.
A long time passed before she tucked the comic book back in her purse and paid the bill. When she opened the door to her apartment the telephone was ringing. She grabbed it and spoke loudly into the receiver. “Yes? What is it?”
“Miss Jaramillo?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Emilio Lomelí. Sorry to bother you at home, but I called your office and they said you were gone for the day.”
She dumped her purse on the kitchen counter and opened her mouth, not knowing what to say. It was him! With Anaya’s intrusion and the excitement of the day she’d forgotten about Emilio. She’d hoped he’d call, and now he had. It was such a wonderful moment; she closed her eyes.
“It’s no bother, Mr. Lomelí.”
“It’s nice of you to say that. Anyway, I got your message, and I’m phoning you back. You needed to speak to me?”
“Yes. I was hoping in person, but if you’re busy I can understand. I’m sure you—”
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” he said, interrupting her, and she could feel him smiling through the phone line. “Why don’t you stop by my place tomorrow? Say around noon?”
Maite’s breath was a ball of fire, caught in her throat, burning bright. She held it there until her tongue felt as though it had been scalded and she spoke. “Yes, yes, of course.”
“Do you have a pen?”
She grabbed the pad by the refrigerator and the pen, scribbling the address. When she was done he said a polite goodbye and hung up. She stood there with the receiver in her trembling hand and slowly returned it to its place.
12
EL GÜERO AND the Antelope were not too pleased to learn they had to tail a woman. They had been blissfully enjoying their downtime at the apartment, and now it turned out they needed to do real work, and it wasn’t even fun work, like breaking bones. It was the tiresome old watch and report.
“I got a molar aching and need to visit the dentist,” the Antelope said. “Was hoping I could go soon.”
“You always have a tooth aching when there’s surveillance to be done,” El Güero muttered. “Take an aspirin and fuck off.” Then he turned to Elvis. “Who’s this bitch, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” Elvis said. “It’s tied to some other woman who’s got the pictures El Mago wants.”
“And we’re supposed to babysit her.”
“El Mago’s orders.”
“Surveillance is a crock of shit,” the Antelope intoned glumly, and he rubbed his cheek, where his molar was aching.
Elvis couldn’t deny that. There was nothing fun about spending hours in a car, pissing into a Coca-Cola bottle and watching someone’s door. But there was nothing Elvis could do about that, and he shrugged.
“You grab the first shift, then let the Antelope take the next one,” Elvis said.
“Where you going?”
“I got something else to take care of.”
El Güero and the Antelope needed the car, so Elvis hailed a cab and asked the driver to drop him off a few blocks from the Café La Habana. It was located on Bucareli and Obregón, therefore assuring itself a steady stream of journalists from the nearby papers, all of them wannabe Hemingways with dubious pedigrees who, on payday, drank too many beers and stumbled home to sleep away their hangovers. There were also Spanish refugees nursing old wounds, wannabe novelists and poets, and plenty of pinkos lured by the specter of Che Guevara, who had once sat in a corner with Fidel Castro and planned a revolution.
As Elvis rounded the café, he noticed the agents watching the building. There were always people keeping tabs on that place due to the clientele. He supposed it was almost a game: every patron knew they were being watched, but the constant watching also ensured a certain safety net. Better to be watched here than to have an asshole putting on binoculars and trying to peep through your window. Maybe it was force of habit. Someone’s got to spy on someone.
Elvis had never been inside. It wasn’t his type of haunt, and El Mago made them keep a low profile. But there he was. It was a large café, the ceilings were high, the tables were small. Black-and-white pictures on the walls spoke of the charm of Old Habana, perfumed with the stench of cheap cigarettes and stale dreams. In a corner there were excited chirpings about Allende, who they said was transforming Chile, and in another corner someone spoke reverently about José Revueltas, who’d been jailed in Lecumberri a while back—he was a hero! But the mood was somber, and the sound of the dominoes slapped against the tables couldn’t hide the plain truth: lots of people were still spooked about the stuff that had gone down on June tenth.
Spooked or not, the place was packed. No matter what was happening outside, people needed a drink, and the reds drank as much as anyone else.
Elvis spotted the guy he was looking for pretty quickly, cigarette tucked behind his ear like El Mago had said, and a notebook on the table. Next to the notebook, a pack of Faritos, a glass ashtray, and a cup of coffee. Elvis had imagined that the man would be one of those fossils who wander around the universities all the time. Long in the tooth for a student and obviously enrolled for the sole purpose of beating activists. But the fellow didn’t really look like a fossil; he was baby-faced, with horn-rimmed glasses and attired in a nice but not too flashy plum-colored velvet jacket. As far as informants went, this one had, at the very least, a little taste, and Elvis felt immediately a bit shabby in his old leather jacket and his hair slicked back with too much Vaseline.
“You Justo?” Elvis asked.
The man had been scribbling in his notebook, but now he looked up at Elvis. “Yes. And you are?”