“Everything’s all right with Emilio?” Jessica asked.
“With him, yes. But we were wondering if you’d talk to us for a few minutes. It’s about a friend of ours, and he thinks you might be able to help us,” Rubén said. “Please, we’ve come all the way from Mexico City. Do you have five minutes?”
The woman tilted her head, probably trying to figure out what was up with them. The young man in a wrinkled t-shirt and blue jeans and the secretary who looked exactly like a secretary, wearing her prim dress. The journalist probably thought they didn’t seem like Emilio’s usual friends. No, Maite imagined Emilio’s friends as a crowd of glittering people, very fancy, very smooth.
“Come on in,” Jessica told them.
They followed the woman into a small living room with rattan furniture and a multitude of cacti. There was a bookcase with ceramic figurines and pots made of barro negro, and another bookcase with stacks of magazines and books. The woman sat in a low chair, and they took the rattan couch.
“So who’s your friend?” the woman asked, grabbing a box of cigarettes that was resting on a circular coffee table and taking one out.
“Leonora. She came to see you. Now she’s disappeared. We’re worried about her,” Rubén said.
The woman lit her cigarette and pressed it against her lips. “I see. I’m not sure why you’re here, though.”
“You’re one of the last persons who spoke to her, and maybe you know where she might be.”
“Aha. She didn’t leave me an itinerary, you know.”
“Perhaps if you told us what you talked about?”
The woman shook her head. On the circular table there was also a glass, half empty, and the woman raised it to her lips, the ice clinking against the rim. “We talked about a possible story. I can’t discuss the particulars with you. You’ve made a long trip for nothing.”
“We know about the photos,” Maite ventured, wondering if that might get them anywhere. She clutched her hands tight before her. No one would be able to see the stains on her hands if she maintained that pose.
The woman set the glass down again, then crossed her legs and rested her elbow on her knee, leaning forward. She had long fingers, a good manicure. The tips of her nails were white half-moons. “You’ve seen them?”
“No. But we have a good idea of what’s in them. Anyway, we need to know what you talked about,” Rubén said. “We’re Leonora’s friends, we swear to god. You can phone Emilio and ask him if he knows us.”
Jessica didn’t reply. She kept looking at them.
“We’re trying to find out what happened to her,” Maite added. Now she clutched her hands harder. Now she was a supplicant.
The journalist sighed. “I imagine the same thing that happens to everyone that goes missing these days. You want to know what Leonora and I talked about? Exactly that. The disappearance of activists, the wiretapping of phones, the massacre in San Cosme on Corpus Christi day.”
“You were there?” Rubén asked.
“No. But plenty of my colleagues were.”
“Who do you work for?”
“I’m a freelancer. I’ve got stuff in Time and a bunch of other places. I’ve been covering Mexico for two years. Before that, I was in Peru.”
The woman took another sip of her drink, another puff of her cigarette. Practiced, elegant motions. She had little wrinkles around the eyes and her skin was dull, but the journalist was still attractive. Maite recalled what Rubén had said—Emilio slept with anything that moved—and she wondered if this was another one of his conquests. Maybe Emilio had a picture of her manicured pinkie in his house, or the eye, blown up, magnified, until it didn’t look like an eye.
“You talked about the attacks in San Cosme. What else?”
“Your newspapers are saying the students were armed, that they instigated this. El Sol de México, many other places, they’re taking the government line. They’re trying to wash the government clean. Leonora wanted to change that. She said she had access, through a family member, to pictures which proved the Hawks attacked the students and they were doing so with presidential orders. Not only that, the CIA helped train them.”
“The CIA,” Rubén repeated.
“That’s what she said. It would make quite the story. The problem was that Leonora didn’t carry any evidence with her. No pictures, nothing. She told me she was keeping the negatives in a safe place but wouldn’t say where.”
“Maybe she didn’t know if she could trust you.”
Jessica chuckled and grabbed an ashtray made of barro negro, tossed the cigarette into it. “Maybe. Maybe she was getting cold feet. She kept insisting that she didn’t want the names of certain people in the story. She wanted to make sure no one in her family would be identified.”
“What did you tell her?” Maite asked.
“I couldn’t promise her that. If what she was telling me was accurate, then that family member of hers was a top-ranking military man who recruited and trained Hawks. His name was bound to come up.”
“What happened in the end?” Rubén asked.
“In the end, she said she needed time to think about this. I gave her my phone number, told her to call me. She didn’t.”
“And you heard nothing from her at all?”
“No. Frankly, I didn’t think she’d cooperate. You get a feeling for this stuff. The people who’re willing to talk and the ones who won’t give you anything. She gave me very little. It was a great story, but there was nothing solid behind it to make it stick. I figured I’d pursue other channels.”
“But you think she did have the photos?”
“Probably. She was scared. Very scared. Can’t say I blame her. There’s a reason why I live in Cuernavaca: it’s harder to be placed under surveillance outside of Mexico City.”
They were quiet. There was a low hum. Air conditioning, perhaps, for this was a nice house and it was cool inside. The journalist was not a starving one. If she’d had the chance, Maite would have loved to steal something from this place. A little figurine from the bookshelf, or the ashtray. But she was clasping her hands together, and it was impossible considering where she was sitting.
“Did Emilio tell you Leonora would be visiting you the day she came?”
“He had mentioned something about a girlfriend of his who had a story I might be interested in, but no. We didn’t speak that day.”
“Afterward, did you talk to him?”