He thought of the woman. Maite. With her startled eyes, the face like Bluebeard’s wife. The way she’d craned her head that morning when the hippie had been speaking to her in front of her building, before they got into the car. Her dress was yellow with a flowered print.
Elvis blinked, looking up at Arkady. The man had stopped hitting him and was now looking down at him, still smiling. His teeth were very white. He probably brushed them after every meal, the fucker. Combed his hair very nicely, made sure not a strand of it was out of place. Even now after hitting Elvis eight times in a row he looked pristine.
“Who do you work for?” Arkady asked, now tapping Elvis on the shoulder with the newspaper. A tiny tap. Elvis flinched and swallowed, the taste of bile coating his tongue. He’d once read about an asshole who beat a dog to death with a newspaper and wondered if you could do the same with a man. He wasn’t about to find out.
Reveal what you must, conceal the rest. That’s another thing El Mago always said. He decided to try that avenue. “DFS,” he muttered. A lie, but it sounded real enough. He was thinking about the DFS quite a bit lately, and it was safer to say he was with DFS than a Hawk. Even a KGB orangutan would think twice about putting a bullet in a DFS man. It would cause too much trouble.
“What do you want here?” the Russian asked.
“I’m guessing the same thing you want,” Elvis muttered. “An art education.”
“You mouthy idiot. What. Do. You. Want.”
Each word was followed by a blow and the rhythmic wah-wah of Clapton’s guitar until Elvis croaked a name. “Leonora,” he said, figuring what the fuck. He had to say something.
“Ah, Leonora. The girl with the pictures. Do you have any good leads?”
“My only lead brought me here, so it’s not much.”
“No, it’s not,” Arkady agreed. “Who’s your boss?”
“Some dude.”
Arkady hit him again. Half a dozen whacks to the face. Elvis’s mouth was bleeding. But if he answered too quickly, the man would know he was faking it. So he thought about Maite again, the picture he’d stolen from her apartment. The dark eyes captured in that snapshot, that quivering of the mouth, frozen in time.
Upstairs, the people were dancing again. The tap-tap-tap of their feet seemed to mark each blow. He couldn’t recognize the music. It sounded distorted, muffled by the radio in the room. Danzón, maybe. For all he knew, a tango. Yeah, probably a tango. He couldn’t dance. Put music on and he’d stand firmly in place, ramrod straight.
A fucking tango was taking place above his head, Los Hooligans were on the radio now that the song by Cream was done, and the damn Russian was striking him with indifferent, methodical blows while Elvis swallowed blood.
Another half dozen blows and Elvis spoke. “Anaya,” he sputtered. “It’s Anaya.”
It sounded honest, and Arkady seemed satisfied, though he still smacked him across the face with the newspaper one more time before stepping out.
Elvis waited a few minutes before testing his bonds. It was a good thing the men who had tied him up were nitwits because Elvis had never learned the finer points of undoing knots. He relied on stretching the rope and wriggling out of it in a rather clumsy manner, but it worked. He managed to untie himself.
Quickly Elvis put on his jacket and stuffed his possessions in his pocket. Then, curious, he looked into one of the many cardboard boxes around the room. It was filled with black-and-white flyers. The flyer said “UNITE!” in big letters. “Wake up to the struggle!”
The door to the storage room was garbage, and he jimmied his way out using his screwdriver; he didn’t even have to actually pick the lock. A couple of quick, efficient strokes and the door opened.
The Russian was gone, but outside the storage room was one of the men who had tied him to the chair. He looked quite startled by the sight of Elvis. Elvis paid him back by slamming him against the wall and kneeing him in the balls, then punching him once he was groaning and doubling over.
Elvis would have liked to pluck out the asshole’s fucking eyeballs, he would have liked to have found the damn Russian and slammed his screwdriver into his ear, but there was no time to waste. The storage room was on the ground floor, behind the stairs, and he sprinted his way to freedom.
Once outside, he kept running and didn’t stop until he was out of breath. His lungs were on fire, sweat dripped down his brow, and his hands were trembling. He didn’t know what to do. His training had taught him how to beat people and how to spy on them, but not much of this stupid game he was caught in.
El Güero was going to make fun of him, he knew it. He was going to say, you sad little fucker, getting beat up. And the Antelope wouldn’t be much better. El Gazpacho would have known what to do now, would know how to piece together all the info and deliver a report, cool and composed, but Elvis had no idea what was what.
Fuck, he’d been tortured by a damn KGB agent.
He found a public telephone in front of a tlapalería. He wiped his mouth with the back of his jacket’s sleeve. Copper. His mouth tasted of copper.
He grabbed the receiver, tossed a coin, and dialed El Mago’s number.
“Yes?” El Mago asked.
“Something happened, I need to come in,” he said. El Mago didn’t normally have any of them at his place—it was a rare treat—but he figured this was a special occasion.
There was silence.
“See you in half an hour,” El Mago said. “Bell number twelve, ring four times.”
Elvis hung up. Two streets from the tlapalería he hailed a cab. His face ached, and he rubbed his jaw.
He had almost forgotten El Mago’s address, and for a moment he panicked, thinking he wouldn’t be able to find it. But in the end he managed fine and rang the bell El Mago had indicated, four times. El Mago buzzed him in without a word.
Elvis climbed the stairs rather than using the old elevator. He didn’t need to knock. El Mago opened the door and let him in. El Mago took one look at Elvis and turned away from him.
“You need ice,” he said. “Come to the kitchen.”
The kitchen was as fabulous as the rest of the apartment, and despite the pain in his jaw he let himself admire it. The counters and cabinets were done in a dark wood, very classy, with silver knobs, and there were blue-and-white tiles on the walls. Nothing to do with the dirty linoleum and rickety furniture of Elvis’s childhood.
El Mago took out a few ice cubes and wrapped them in a kitchen rag. “What happened to you?” he asked, handing him the rag.
Elvis pressed it against his face. “I followed that woman, Maite, to Asterisk. I figured I’d go in there and do some talking with those artists, see what I could find, maybe even chat with her myself. Well, that shit priest we talked to the other day was also there. He recognized me and raised hell. There was a motherfucking Russian with him. He beat me up.”