“Do you, now? Well, Mr. Know-It-All, what do you know about Leonora then?”
“Leonora?” he repeated, staring at him stupidly, as though Elvis had spoken in Chinese.
“Yes, Leonora. You’re friends, no?”
“Yeah.”
“How good a friend are you?”
“We know each other.”
“You recite shitty poems for everyone you know?”
Sócrates blushed. The hands, which had been in the air, came down to rest crossed against his chest. “Who told you that?”
“People say you have a hard-on for Leonora. Lots of people.”
“They’re exaggerating. It’s not like that.”
Which meant it was like that. Not that Elvis blamed the guy: the girl was pretty. Her friend, Maite, was not, although to be honest he found her more interesting than Leonora. It was the eyes that did the trick. There was a spark of pain in them, there was shock and something cloudy and lost. As if she’d been dreaming and had suddenly been awoken by the clapping of thunder. It made him curious.
But Leonora. Leonora was the one he needed to be focusing on, Leonora was the lost lamb.
“Would you hide her if someone was looking for her?”
“Hide her where? In the bathroom?”
El Güero smirked at that. “He’s a joker,” he said and kept fiddling with a pile of books by the bed, opening and closing them. “It’s gonna be real funny when we stab you in the balls.”
Sócrates was already nervous, but that seemed to do it. He flinched and almost jumped a little, as if they’d administered an electric shock to said balls. “Man, I am not hiding her! Damn. I already told Anaya, I don’t know where she is!”
“Back up,” Elvis said. “How do you know Anaya?”
“Fuck,” Sócrates muttered.
“Fuck, yes. Talk. Fast.”
“I mean, I wouldn’t know where to begin, I mean, it’s not—I can’t tell you.”
“Hit him,” Elvis ordered.
El Güero turned around and slammed a book against Sócrates’s head, then moved across the room to start browsing the contents of a bookshelf. Sócrates let out a high-pitched whine, almost like a cat, and pressed a hand against his ear, eyes closed. Elvis let him sit like that for a minute, then he tucked the knife inside his jacket’s pocket and took out a cigarette. He lit it.
“I’m having a shitty week, and you don’t want to make it any worse,” Elvis said. “Talk before I get my friend to use every volume of your fucking encyclopedia on your ribs. How do you know Anaya?”
“I pass information to him.”
“You’re a rat.”
“An informant,” Sócrates said, still rubbing his ear.
A rat. A fucking squealer. A rat’s a rat no matter if you’ve read a thesaurus and can call it something fancy. But if he wanted to call himself Goldilocks, it didn’t matter to Elvis.
“You’re with DFS, then?”
“No, nothing like that! They nabbed us one time distributing leaflets, and Anaya said if I didn’t cooperate with him, didn’t help him, he was going to make sure I was tortured for weeks. So I do, I cooperate. He asks me questions from time to time, and I answer them.”
It wasn’t unheard of. Ears were a dime a dozen. Justo had been sniffing around Asterisk for the DGIPS, and this bozo had been talking to Anaya, and there was some Russian fucker too, and for all Elvis knew the CIA and Santa Claus also had spies in that little commie nest. Overkill and lack of coordination. That was the problem. The DFS hated the DGIPS, thinking they were hicks, and the DGIPS thought DFS agents were stuffy pricks.
“Anaya asked you about Leonora. What did you tell him?”
“Can I…can I have a cigarette?”
Jesus! Bumming his cigarettes! But if it helped get this dipshit explaining, Elvis would give him a whole pack. He took out one and lit it for the man. El Güero was whistling “La Cucaracha” and had gone into the bathroom.
Fucker, Elvis thought. He couldn’t stop giving him grief for one damn day.
Sócrates took a puff, then licked his lips. “I drove Leonora to Cuernavaca last weekend. She went to meet a journalist.”
“A friend of yours?”
“No. A friend of Emilio, her ex.”
“Did she have the pictures with her?”
“No.” Sócrates reached for a dirty glass sitting on a table by the bed and let the ash from his cigarette fall into it. “She didn’t know if she could trust the journalist. I drove her because I wanted to know if she’d tell me more about the photos, if maybe she’d show me where she kept them. On the way back, I asked her a few times, but she clammed up and asked me to drop her off at Casimiro Villareal’s house. She thought she’d be safe with him.”
“Not with Emilio? Or with Jackie?”
“No. I guess they weren’t the first people she thought about, and maybe she wanted to confess something to him. Religious stuff, you know? I tried to convince her she was better off staying with me, but I couldn’t.”
“Stay with you. So you could hand her over to Anaya?”
“She would have been safer. If Anaya knew where he could find her, he wouldn’t have made such a fuss about this.”
“You’re such a good friend.”
“Fuck you,” Sócrates said, his teeth almost clamping on the cigarette for a second before he took a puff. “I was hoping I could get her to hand over the photos to me, and I’d hand them to Anaya. I thought that was the best thing to do. That’s why I took her to Casimiro’s house and not Anaya. I could have turned her over to Anaya. But then she vanished.”
“Abracadabra, like a magician.”
“No one’s heard from her.”
“And you didn’t help her perform this magic act?”
Sócrates dropped the cigarette into the glass. “No. She has money. It’s not like she couldn’t have used it to go hide somewhere. And I’ve looked for her in all her old haunts. Nothing.”
El Güero walked back into the room. “Can’t find anything resembling a camera or pictures. Should we call it a morning?”
“I’m expecting someone in less than an hour,” Sócrates said.
“But we’re just beginning to know each other,” Elvis said.