“You shouldn’t worry about me.”
“I admit I am a little concerned.”
Concerned! About her! Maite almost undid the ribbon, her fingers clumsy. He was sweet! Then, for a second, she remembered that scary man who had come to her office, and she wondered if it wasn’t sweetness, if it was merely levelheadedness and she was a fool. Shouldn’t she be a little frightened, after all? She had been, the previous day. But now his proximity intoxicated her, now she felt like she was in one of the issues of Secret Romance.
The phone rang. Emilio excused himself and picked up, smiling apologetically at her. “Yeah? No, I have a visitor. No, there’s no word on that…We’ll be done soon, yes…I wish you wouldn’t.” He turned his back to her for a moment, muttering something into the receiver before hanging up.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“Work,” he said, glancing at his watch. “I’m needed at the store.”
“I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to take so much of your time. You didn’t even have a chance to eat your lunch.”
“It’s fine. I’ll grab something later. Besides, I’m glad you stopped by. We’ll be in touch?”
“Of course,” she said.
It wasn’t until she was almost home that she realized she had somehow pledged assistance to two entirely different men. It was a contradictory, impossible task. She’d told Rubén she’d help him find Leonora. She’d now told Emilio the same. And by keeping Rubén’s involvement in this quest quiet, she had perhaps endangered her nascent friendship with Emilio. He might be upset if he found out she’d gone to see him at Rubén’s insistence. And there was that man Anaya. She had no idea what she was going to do about him. She hoped he wouldn’t bother her again.
It was all turning into a mess.
Angrily she remembered that she still didn’t have her car back. And the cat! She must feed the cat.
As Maite walked down the street, toward her apartment, she was so distracted that she didn’t notice the man stepping out of a car and following her until he touched her arm.
14
“WHAT THE FUCK are you doing this far away? Can you even see a damn thing?” Elvis asked as he sat down in the passenger’s seat. He’d brought a bag of peanuts and a couple of sodas. Elvis was going to take a short shift so El Güero could head back to the apartment and get a little shut-eye.
El Güero snorted. “I ain’t blind, like others, Mister Magoo. I can see the door of the building fine from here. Besides, I can’t park any closer. Too fucking obvious, and someone else’s already staked out the prime spot.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning we’re not the only ones watching this building. Can I have some of those?”
“Stuff yourself,” Elvis said, handing him the bag and craning his neck. “Who else’s watching?”
El Güero tore the bag of peanuts open and tossed a couple into his mouth, chewing loudly. “Like I know? Can’t very well go asking them, can I? But I can tell.”
“DFS, maybe,” Elvis muttered, remembering what Justo had said about the dude named Anaya.
“Not those fuckers, damn it. What they want?”
“I’m not sure.”
“There she is. Finally,” El Güero said as Maite Jaramillo stepped out of the building.
“Follow her.”
El Güero sighed. It seemed his naptime would have to be deferred. The woman was easy enough to tail. Elvis was more worried about the car ahead of them that also seemed to be tailing her, though once they reached Polanco, the driver either noticed Elvis’s car behind them and decided to split or simply changed his mind. Either way, by the time they parked, it was only El Güero and Elvis following the woman.
Elvis noted the address the woman went into, scribbling it in a tiny notebook. He opened his soda and they waited. Often, when they had to watch someone, Elvis brought a crossword puzzle or a book, to keep the boredom at bay. But he hadn’t bothered with that this time; he’d been too tired to remember. He hadn’t forgotten the word of the day, thank God. It was dilated. The way Elvis tried to memorize the words was to use them in everyday conversation, but El Güero thought he sounded like an idiot when he did.
Dilated, he thought, looking at his reflection in the rearview mirror. The pupil is dilated.
El Güero crossed his arms and closed his eyes, dozing off. Elvis let him, feeling kind. Besides, that way he didn’t have to talk to the guy. They’d never gotten along and they weren’t going to start now, especially if the Hawks were done for and they wouldn’t see each other again.
Not that Elvis knew the Hawks were done for, but that shit Justo had mentioned hadn’t gone down well with him.
He lit a cigarette and, having nothing better to do, began thinking about the woman they were following. She reminded Elvis of someone. Bluebeard’s wife. Well, the way he pictured Bluebeard’s wife in one of the few books he’d owned as a child, a volume of fairy tales. Each story had an illustration. With “Jack and the Beanstalk,” it was Jack throwing the seeds on the ground and a tiny sprout emerging: that was his favorite story.
In Bluebeard’s case, there was a woman in a long dress, bending down to look through a keyhole. The way the picture had been drawn, you couldn’t see the woman’s face that well, her long hair partially obscuring her features, but you could see the eyes. The resemblance was in the eyes, and it seemed to him that if she had turned to look at the reader directly, the woman would have looked exactly like Maite Jaramillo.
The eye is dilated, he whispered.
It was the expression on Maite’s face, slightly lost and scared in all those pictures he’d found of her in that photo album.
Well, at least she had good musical taste, and he couldn’t fault her on the account of books either. She had books by Caridad Bravo Adams and he’d never read her, so he had no idea if that was a decent author or not, though he recognized the name from a soap opera. But Maite also owned a bunch of volumes from the Sepan Cuantos collection, and also a fair amount of Brontë and Austen and a fine edition of El Quijote, all of which pointed to class and sensibility; the sort of stuff the university students bought. He admired a gal with class. He wasn’t sure what to make of her taste in comic books. He’d never been one for those, and if he ever flipped through them at the newsstand, he flipped through Westerns.
He began humming “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down).” Did Maite have any Nancy Sinatra in her collection? Chances were yes.
After a while, the woman came out, and Elvis nudged El Güero awake. They followed her back to her building, where she was intercepted by a young, long-haired man. He looked like a standard-issue hippie. They exchanged a few words and got into his car, making El Güero groan in frustration, because now they needed to tail her somewhere else.