It was raining, and he walked with brisk steps toward a public telephone booth, tossed in a couple of coins and waited.
“Yes?” El Mago said.
Elvis braced himself against the plastic wall of the booth and pressed the receiver close to his mouth. “It’s Elvis. We need to talk.”
“Where are you?”
“Girl’s place.”
El Mago mentioned the name of a nearby intersection and told him he’d drive by in half an hour, which was more than enough time for Elvis to walk back, tell the Antelope he was meeting El Mago, and then head to the intersection.
He was running low on cigarettes, so he wandered into a pharmacy and bought another pack. He stood under the green glow of the store’s sign for several minutes, thinking of nothing, watching the rain trickle down the awning. Persistent, this rain. All day long it had fallen slow and steady.
El Mago was punctual, and as soon as he rolled around the corner, Elvis tossed his cigarette away and hopped into the car, setting his leather bag on his lap. For a couple of blocks Elvis didn’t say anything, hypnotized by the back-and-forth of the windshield wipers.
“What is it?” El Mago asked.
“The mole knew how to get in touch with the girl with a code in the classifieds, so I used that, thinking I might flush her out. But nothing so far.”
“You have a new scrape on your brow.”
“Yeah,” Elvis said, touching his forehead and glancing at the rearview mirror. “Sócrates is dead. Anaya and his buddies thought we did it, so they gave us a beating. El Güero was pummeled pretty bad and I had to take him to the doctor. Everything else is pretty much the same.”
“There is no sign of the girl?”
“No. But as you can imagine, I’m a little short-staffed right now,” Elvis said, trying to keep a very formal, straightforward tone about the whole thing. It made no sense to wriggle like a worm in El Mago’s presence. It would make it worse.
“What, did El Güero lose a hand?”
“Almost lost an eye. He’s too mangled, can hardly move. Maybe you could get El Gazpacho back to us?” he asked, managing to maintain that same neutral tone. He sounded casual.
El Mago frowned. Elvis stared straight ahead, looking at the big billboard with a picture of a woman inviting everyone to drink a tall glass of Jugo V8.
“El Gazpacho has his walking papers.”
“But this is a special situation. El Gazpacho—”
“El Gazpacho is not part of this.”
Elvis watched the raindrops slide down the windshield and thought about Gazpacho’s body in a ditch. But maybe Justo was a liar. Maybe he’d made all that up. Still, Elvis didn’t get why El Mago wouldn’t bring him in to assist them if it was necessary.
“What about one of the other Hawks? El Topo or El Tunas?” he asked, remembering two of the other men they’d sometimes collaborated with. Men who were also under El Mago’s watch.
“Damn it, Elvis. You cannot see what is happening?” El Mago asked, surprising Elvis by the way he raised his voice. The light ahead of them turned red, and El Mago hit the brakes so quickly Elvis was jolted forward and had to grasp the dashboard to steady himself.
El Mago muttered something under his breath and turned a corner, parking the car in a random street, in front of a stationery store that was closing its doors. For a while they sat there, in front of a sign that clearly said “no parking,” both of them watching the rain slide down the glass and listening to it pound on the roof of the car. In the distance there was the rumble of thunder, slowly rolling closer.
“You know how the Hawks came into existence? It was the mess of ’68. Students wanting to vandalize the new subway line, painting graffiti, organizing protests. And after Tlatelolco, we decided you could not break down protests with military men. It was a task better suited for other kinds of people. But the problem is that everyone is always thinking small.
“Thugs. That is what they wanted. Thugs who could beat and who could spy on young students, but not much more. What use is teaching a man to beat another one if you are not going to aim higher, I say? So I asked to lead a few small units that had more refined personnel. But people like Anaya do not like that sort of thinking, they do not like you stepping a little higher. They abhor competition, they need to own the whole ring. You get it?”
“Kinda,” Elvis mumbled.
“There is talk about a new unit, this time under the command of the DFS. A ‘special brigade.’ ” El Mago snickered. “Special. Younger, that’s what they mean. Young idiots leading other young idiots. Anaya is thirty years old.”
“They’re thinking about replacing the Hawks with that brigade?”
“Now you’re getting it.”
“But we’ve done what they wanted.”
“It is a turf war. On many levels. The president was probably killing two birds with one stone: flexing his muscles and showing the lefties who’s boss, and kicking Alfonso Martínez Domínguez out of the way by pinning this on him. Meanwhile, people like Anaya see a chance to cut a few heads and gain a bit more power. With the Hawks gone, he and his men will swoop in to deal with the radicals once and for all.”
“But it’s not fair!”
“I think this is what I like most about you, Elvis, how you are still, at times, capable of being such a child. A big, giant baby. I wonder how you do it, that you can look at the world and manage to think there is a speck of fairness to it when all that the eye can see is garbage from here until forever. What a fool you are.”
Elvis stared at El Mago’s reflection in the rearview mirror. The man looked older that night, the wrinkles under his eyes were deeper, and even with his round, black-rimmed glasses, he did not resemble a retired professor. He looked like a bitter, worn soldier.
El Mago smiled a crisp, small smile, his eyes fixed on Elvis in the rearview mirror, as if he could guess what he was thinking.
“It is just us, dear boy,” he said. “Just us. There is no cavalry. If we can solve this mess, if we can find the girl and get those photographs, then I might be able to save our hides and steer us into a safe harbor. Anaya thinks he has me, but he does not have shit.”
It’s not like we have shit either, he thought.
“Get me something,” El Mago said. “Get me anything.”
There was something raw and desperate when El Mago spoke, and Elvis almost felt like laughing.
It was his cue to exit. Elvis opened the car door and got out, clasping the leather messenger bag tight, feeling the weight of the gun and the bullets tucked inside. He ended up thinking about the woman again so he wouldn’t think about what the fuck he was doing, so he wouldn’t think about El Gazpacho bloated and purple in a ditch.