A shit like all the other shits Elvis had ever known. Somehow he’d never realized that. Even when El Mago scared him, even when El Mago exuded danger instead of mirth, always, absolutely always, Elvis felt he was in the presence of a superior species.
And Justo had accused El Mago, but Elvis wouldn’t believe it. He had pushed his doubts and his sorrow deep down, and he didn’t let himself dwell on it.
“Have you switched sides already?” El Mago asked.
“No. Arkady might actually shoot us both in the next five minutes.”
On the floor Elvis saw strips of negatives. He bent down to look at the pieces of film. El Mago snickered. “They’re exposed. So if your Russian friend wants to start shooting, he can now. There’s nothing to see here.”
Elvis brushed his fingers against the film. “Then why are you hitting her?”
“Because I need to find my niece,” El Mago said, reaching for the woman and pulling her up, close to him.
“I told you. I don’t know where Leonora is,” the woman said, but softly. Her voice trembled.
She looked at Elvis, and Elvis stared back at her, into those tragic eyes of hers, now brimming with tears.
“She said she doesn’t know. Let her go.”
El Mago shoved the woman aside and turned to Elvis. She scrambled away from him, bumping into a side table, while El Mago straightened his coat, running a hand down a lapel then sliding it through his gray hair. In the other hand he clasped his gun. “It is not a good day to grow a conscience. Or to make new acquaintances,” he said, his eyes measuring the Russian before he fixed them on Elvis. “You were supposed to solve my problems, not make them worse.”
Elvis thought of all the damn work he’d done, all the spying and the beatings he’d earned himself and the bullet in his arm. The way El Mago spoke, it didn’t matter. It was nothing. He should have known that would be the case. But he was dumb. A marshmallow, like El Güero said. Worse than that.
“You were supposed to find the girl.”
“You never said the girl was your niece,” Elvis replied, taking a couple of steps toward El Mago.
“It was not important. Family matters, if you will.”
“That’s fucked up. Killing your own family.”
El Mago’s fingers were like claws as he again ran a hand through his thinning hair. “I did not want to kill her. I wanted to save her from herself. She was a fool, placing her trust in an informant. Sócrates! She might as well have telephoned Anaya.”
“Then it was you,” Elvis said. “You killed Sócrates.”
“One less rat in the world. It was not a great loss. At least you found out who betrayed her, who started this. You managed that much.”
Elvis took another couple of steps. He had a knot in his throat. He slid his hands into his jacket pockets to keep them from trembling. “Did you also kill El Gazpacho?”
El Mago actually seemed a little surprised when Elvis said that. So far his composure had been impeccable. Even when he’d been beating the woman, there had been little emotion. Now he frowned, his voice wavering. “Who told you that?”
“Doesn’t matter. He’s dead, isn’t he?”
El Mago didn’t reply. But he didn’t need to. Elvis chuckled and shook his head. He thought about poor Gazpacho, who loved Japanese movies and the songs of The Beatles. Dead. Tossed into a ditch like rubbish. People had to die one day, but not like that. Not by El Mago’s hands.
“Fuck. Why?” he asked in a whisper.
“The order came to disband the Hawks, to disband my units. They’re starting up something new.”
His units. His boys. Elvis, my boy. How many times had he heard El Mago say that? My boy.
“Disband doesn’t mean murder.”
“You really think you get, what, a goodbye card in these cases? He knew things! Too many damn things, and I already had Leonora to worry about, to be also worrying about another damn loose end who could ruin me if he decided to cozy up to Anaya. I knew Anaya was out to hang me and I couldn’t let him get hold of the rope. They think we don’t understand how to deal with guerilla fighters. Shoot them like dogs, is what they say. Shooting alone doesn’t fix things!”
“Says who?”
“These new shits! Shits like Anaya. And you know what they all want, don’t you? To get into politics. Gutiérrez Barrios, he was with the DFS and now he’s angling for something bigger. This is just a stepping stone for them, not a vocation. Or they want to steal, plain and simple. They’re thieves or they want to traffic drugs; they’re out to get what they can.”
“And you’re clean?”
“I’m no thief and no drug dealer either,” El Mago said, sounding affronted.
“Anaya’s dead,” Elvis said dryly.
“Is he?” El Mago laughed. A good, full laugh. Elvis always liked El Mago’s laughter. It was rare, but it was lavish, like the rest of El Mago. El Mago was so lavish, so big, so much. A god, not a man. El Mago wasn’t a coward who murdered his underlings because he was scared.
El Mago was a figment of Elvis’s imagination. But El Gazpacho had been real.
“Yeah. I guess we saved your ass in the end. You know, the Russian and I.”
“The same Russian who will shoot us in the next five minutes,” El Mago said, smiling; it was like a raw gash across his face.
“No,” Elvis said. Now he was standing right in front of El Mago, and he looked him straight in the eye. “He’s not shooting you.”
His fingers curled around the screwdriver in his pocket, and he jammed it into El Mago’s neck. The old man gasped, his mouth wide open, but no sound emerged. In his shock, he dropped the gun he’d been holding in his hand, the gun he’d been using to beat the woman.
El Mago was always telling them guns were a weapon of last resort, and Elvis had decided to follow his lesson plan, after all.
El Mago fell to his knees and made a motion, one hand fumbling, attempting to retrieve his gun. Elvis kicked the weapon away and bent down, pulling the screwdriver out. Blood welled like a fountain, and El Mago scrabbled at his neck, tried to press his hand against the wound, but it was too much blood. No way of stopping it.
He fell and lay on his back, his eyes fixed on Elvis’s face, and Elvis wondered if he’d had the decency to look into El Gazpacho’s eyes when he died. Elvis stared back at El Mago until he stopped shivering, then he dropped his own gun next to the screwdriver, on the puddle of blood that had formed by El Mago’s head.