Velvet Was the Night

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  “I don’t care what you believe.”

  Elvis stepped forward and slowly extended his arm and the razor, inching it close to the man’s face. The priest began trembling. He was indeed young. Boyish, even. Elvis could have been the priest and the priest could have been Elvis. But Elvis had come from Tepito and the priest had come from Monterrey, and they had followed entirely different trajectories.

  Luck, that’s what it was. Good and bad luck. El Gazpacho had carried a rabbit’s foot for luck and see where it got him. El Mago was right: you made your own luck.

  “You better care I believe you,” Elvis said.

  The priest didn’t reply. He was staring at Elvis, terrified.

  “You sure you don’t have the camera? The pictures?”

  There were tears in the priest’s eyes. His incipient bravado was melting. “No, no,” he mumbled. “No, I don’t.”

  “Absolutely sure?” Elvis whispered, and the razor was now so close to the man’s eye he could have sliced it clean off with a bit of pressure. Carved it out and left a bloody hole behind.

  “I’m sure,” the priest whispered back. “I swear on the Virgin of Guadalupe.”

  Elvis lowered the razor and nodded. “I believe you, and because I believe you we are going to break your teeth. But if you put up a fight or if you yell for help, we are going to kill you.” He glanced at the Antelope. “Help keep him quiet. Güero, pummel him.”

  El Mago always said you had to watch when a man was being killed. Cowards looked away. But since this wasn’t a murder, Elvis let his gaze wander toward the mirror in the bathroom, staring at his reflection while El Güero’s fists connected with the priest’s flesh. Despite Elvis’s warning, he was sure the young man would have screamed, but the Antelope had pressed the pillow against his face.

  It was quick work, at any rate, and Elvis was grateful for that. He had never taken any pleasure in torture. Grabbing a telephone directory, slamming it against a man’s back, it held no appeal. Nor did any of the other tricks of the trade he’d learned about: electric shocks to the feet, wrapping someone’s head in a plastic bag. This at least was relatively clean. Fists, blood.

  Elvis stared into the mirror, saw his black hair parted to the side. Sometimes he looked like a darker Elvis Presley, skin tanned, and sometimes he didn’t look like the musician at all. Right now, he thought for a moment he looked like El Mago. Something about the tilt of the mouth. And his eyes were all black, even if no human eye can really be black.

  Elvis walked into the bathroom and opened the cabinet above the sink. He found the gauze and the rubbing alcohol and returned to the bedroom. El Güero and the Antelope had finished and were wiping their hands clean. The priest was on the bed, bleeding copiously. The pillow had been discarded at some point and tossed outside the room. On the bedspread Elvis spotted two teeth. The priest moaned and turned around, hiding his mangled face, and the teeth fell to the floor.

  Elvis tossed the bottle of rubbing alcohol and the gauze onto the bed. “You don’t tell anyone we were here.”

  On the way back to the apartment El Güero said they should stop for tacos de carnitas. Elvis ignored him. The stench of fresh blood clung to El Güero’s clothes, infecting the car, even though the men had quickly tidied themselves up before stepping out of the apartment. Elvis didn’t want to go sit in a food joint, holding a greasy plastic plate in one hand and a beer in another.

  He fiddled with the radio, looking for a melody. And there it was, Los Apson singing a cover of “Satisfaction.” Yes, baby. Let’s rock, ’cause the fucking car smelled of pain.

  9

  SHE HAD FANTASIZED, when she moved into her own apartment, about what it would be like when she was able to organize parties and invite her friends over. She pictured cocktails, good music, charming conversation, beautiful people in attendance. But Maite seldom had anyone over. When her mother visited, she made sure to point out any new item Maite had purchased and complain it was a needless expense. Why should she buy new curtains? What was wrong with the old table? As a result, Maite tried to invite her mother to her apartment as little as possible.

  As for gentlemen callers—Maite liked to refer to men as such; it sounded more dignified—she hadn’t slept with anyone in ages. The last man in her apartment had been a disdainful clerk she’d brought over a couple of times and who commented on the size of her record collection, stating it seemed to him ridiculous to have so many books and records when you could simply turn on the TV. Maite had a large collection of imported records in English rather than the Spanish-language covers everyone bought at a cheaper price, but just like her mother the man couldn’t understand why she’d throw away her money on them. They were different, Maite tried to tell him. And he said, what’s the difference if you don’t speak English? What does it matter who’s singing? She said there’s a difference between Badfinger singing or Los Belmonts. And the album art, she said. And the texture. And the liner notes, waiting to be deciphered one day. Besides, Los Dug Dug’s sang in English even if they were from the north of Mexico. You couldn’t just buy a Spanish cover of them, even though they had started out as cover artists, like everyone else.

  The man had no idea what she was talking about. She said she was a collector, and collecting was like hunting, a sport. The man thought she was mad. A song was a song. You didn’t need all three versions of it.

  That’s why Maite was ready with her purse under her arm at six p.m. When Rubén knocked, she opened the door and without any hesitation locked it behind herself and started walking down the stairs. She wasn’t inviting him in for coffee so he could judge her curtains or her records. This also ensured the super wouldn’t gossip about Maite. He looked too much like a hippie to be decent company.

  They went to a coffee shop a block away. The walls were lemon yellow, as were the booths, and the pictures on the walls were shabby black-and-white photos of Italy. She didn’t like the place, but it was better than heading into an ice cream shop, as though they were boyfriend and girlfriend.

  She asked for a coffee, he ordered a Sidral Mundet. Rubén had changed from his overalls into a t-shirt and jeans. He looked more presentable this way, though he’d hardly qualify for the role of the hero in any of Maite’s comic books. He had that Che Guevara style that was popular with students of the UNAM. It was unappealing.

  “Then she hasn’t come back?” Rubén asked, taking a sip of his soda.

  Maite reached for the sugar basin, which had a crack clearly showing where it had been clumsily glued back together, and measured a spoonful of sugar. “No. Did you go to that place? The Asterisk?”

  “She hasn’t been there. I’m worried. I talked to Jacqueline, who sort of runs Asterisk, and she said she talked on the phone with Leonora, and Leonora told her she had information on the Hawks.”

  “Who exactly are the Hawks?”

  “Don’t you read the paper?” Rubén said, looking scandalized by her lack of knowledge.

  Maite picked up her coffee cup daintily and took a sip. “Excuse me, I work all day long.”

  “So do I. I still find the time to glance at a paper, especially these days when we’ve got the government engaged in vicious repressive activities.”

  “I bet you’re one of these people Leonora likes to bail out,” she said, trying to guess how many mug shots they’d taken of him.

  Rather than appearing abashed, the young man looked proud, raising his hairy chin. “Yeah, she’s helped me out,” Rubén said. “So what? I print leaflets with political cartoons on them. The government? They’ve got roving gangs of thugs beating students up. Who do you think attacked us when we were demonstrating?”

  “I thought those were your anarchist buddies.”

  “Very funny. So you don’t read the papers but you still spout the government’s line? It figures. How are you even hanging out with Leonora, anyway?”

 
Rubén gave her a suspicious look, as though he thought maybe they were in one of those James Bond films and Maite was a spy.

  “We’re not best friends, if that’s what you’re wondering,” Maite said. “We know each other from the building.”

  “Then why are you so interested in finding her?”

  “Because I’m watching her cat. What? Do you think I’m one of your Hawks?”

  “You never know,” Rubén said. “But no. They’re all men, and they’re all thugs. They were under the command of Alfonso Martínez Domínguez, our recently ousted regent—in case you were too busy working to know that name. They like to sic them at us when they think we’re getting out of line.”

  “Yes, I know what you mean now,” she said, her spoon rattling against the cup as she added more sugar. The coffee was sweet enough, but she was trying to do something with her hands. This man was terribly irritating. She felt like slapping him. “But the Hawks are not supposed to be real.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “It’s what they say around my office.”

  “The Hawks are the ones who attacked the people outside the Cine Cosmos. Someone decided to massacre students. It wasn’t ghosts,” he said, sounding petulant.

  “I didn’t say it was ghosts, just that they’re not supposed to be real. Anyway, Leonora had information on the Hawks. What kind of information?”

  “We don’t know. It was photos.”

  “Her ex-boyfriend was looking for her camera,” Maite muttered, the memory of Emilio Lomelí burning bright in her mind. Now that was a real man, not this print shop employee moonlighting as an activist.

  “Emilio?” Rubén asked. He looked pretty shocked by her words.

  “He stopped by to see her, and I let him into her apartment because he wanted her camera, but he couldn’t find it so he left. But it doesn’t really mean anything.”

  “You think it’s a coincidence? Leonora goes missing after she tells us she has some photos and Emilio is asking about her camera? What do you think are the odds?”

  Well, when he put it like that, it didn’t sound very likely, but she detested the tone he was using. As if Maite was an idiot because he bought a paper now and then.

  “I don’t know. He seemed like a decent guy. He left me his card, in case Leonora stopped by. If he had anything to do with her disappearance, he wouldn’t have left his card.”

  “I bet he knows something. And it’s a place to start digging. Maybe you should give him a call.”

  “Me?” Maite asked, the spoon slipping from her fingers. She gripped the sugar basin instead.

  “You just said he gave you his card.”

  “Yes. But—”

  “People don’t go vanishing off the face of the Earth for no reason. Leonora must be in some kind of trouble, and we need to help her. Now this guy, maybe he knows something.”

  “Fine, let’s say he does, and then let’s say it’s our business—”

  “Of course it’s our business.”

  “But if it’s a missing person case, then the police—”

  “The Hawks work for the government. The police and the army, they let the Hawks shoot at us. There were police cars all lined up nicely down the avenue with their megaphones, but they weren’t there to stop them. They were there to ensure they could kill with impunity.”

  “But they ousted the regent over that business, didn’t they? You said he was ousted.”

  “The president kicked him out, yeah, but it was so he could blame all this on someone. Fuck, maybe he even wanted the beatings to get out of hand precisely so he could oust Martínez Domínguez. Or maybe Martínez Domínguez fucked up, but you can bet that the president was aware of what the Hawks were going to do and he told the cops to stand down. Anyway, it’s a repeat of Tlatelolco, and those pigs can’t be trusted.”

  In the papers, columnists accused communist foreigners of corrupting Mexico’s youth and attempting to destroy the nation. The cops were innocent, lawful citizens doing their jobs. Perhaps it wasn’t true, but it made Maite’s skin prickle with dread, because no one wanted a repeat of ’68. That had been a bloody mess. People whispered snipers hired by the government had opened fire. Student riots had threatened the Olympics, and the government had quelled them by force. People whispered, and Maite tried not to listen. But still she heard things here and there. She couldn’t drown out reality.

  “I’m not sure I—”

  “Aren’t you worried about Leonora?” Rubén asked.

  “The cops—”

  “The cops can fuck themselves!”

  “Will you let me finish a sentence?” Maite asked, shoving the sugar basin away.

  They stared at each other for a minute. He looked like a child who’d had his knuckles rapped, and this gave Maite some satisfaction.

  “I’m not going to contact the cops . God knows I don’t want to be talking to any policeman! What I was trying to say is her family might get hold of the cops, and then it wouldn’t look too good if we’re nosing around. Besides, even if this is our business, why am I supposed to phone Mr. Lomelí? Why not you? You seem to know the guy.”

  “He’d hang up on me,” Rubén said. “We don’t like each other. I broke his nose.”

  “Why?”

  “He put the moves on Leonora back when she was my girlfriend. She ended up dumping me.”

  Maite couldn’t blame the girl for improving her love life, but it still made her uncomfortable to picture Emilio Lomelí as the kind of man who went around sweeping other men’s girlfriends off their feet. It didn’t square with her image of him. She had cast him in the role of the romantic hero, not the lothario, though lotharios could be fun. Take Pablo from Secret Romance. True, before meeting Beatriz he had been slipping in and out of the beds of countless beauties, but only because Magdalena Ibarra had perished in that dreadful scuba diving accident. Perhaps it was the same for Emilio.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Maite said.

  Rubén shrugged. “It was a while back.”

  “You two study together?”

  “We used to. We weren’t in the same faculty, but we were both at the UNAM. I left a year ago.”

  “You obviously still care about her.”

  “We’re friends now.”

  Maite didn’t get that. People being friends after a breakup, especially a bad one like this one must have been. She could have never been friends with Cristóbalito after what happened between them. One time, two years ago, while walking down Bucareli, she’d thought she’d seen him coming in her direction, and she had been possessed by an irresistible desire to run. She dashed into an alley and promptly vomited up her guts there, on top of a pile of wet cardboard.

  She had been terrified of him laying eyes on her, of seeing the disappointment in his face, her paltry charms having grown paltrier in the years since they’d been lovers. That night, at home, she pinched the flabby skin of her belly and thought about cutting it with a pair of scissors. Then she wept over an issue of Secret Romance.

  She supposed such encounters didn’t rattle men. Besides, Rubén was young. He was in his early twenties. He still had possibilities.

  “Something bad has happened to Leonora. If Emilio has any idea where she is or what happened to her, then I want to know. And I think you want to know too, no?” Rubén asked.

  Well, yes, obviously. There was the practical question of the money Leonora owed her, but also the fact that Maite wasn’t going to be stuck eternally taking care of that cat. But she was also plain curious. She wondered what the girl was up to. Most of all, it was a great excuse to chat with Emilio Lomelí.

  Maite grabbed a paper napkin and began tearing it into strips. A bored waitress behind the counter switched on a radio and Los Shain’s began playing.

  “What would I even tell him?”

  �
�Tell him what you told me. That Leonora hasn’t come back and you’re looking for her. And don’t mention me. Like I said, the guy hates me. If he thinks I’m the one looking for her, he won’t say a peep. He’s a spiteful bastard.”

  “That bad?”

  “Oh, yeah. I broke his nose. Well, he ruined my car.”

  “How?”

  “He paid someone to steal it and drive it directly into a telephone pole. I can’t prove it and even if I could it wouldn’t matter, but it was him.”

  Maite began rolling the strips and turning them into tiny balls of paper, sliding them to rest in the center of the table, and thought about Beatriz, who was desperately trying to find out what had happened to Jorge Luis, and poor Jorge Luis in a coma. It was possible something similar had happened to Leonora. She could be held by a shadowy villain in an old mansion. The idea of drifting into one of the storylines from her comic books appealed to Maite immensely.

  She looked up at Rubén and shoved a ball of paper in his direction. The waitress had switched off the radio, still looking perfectly bored.

  “I’ll give him a call.”

  “That’s great, thanks.”

  He smiled. Although he wasn’t good looking and she didn’t quite like him, she wondered what would happen if she asked him to walk her home to her apartment and invited him in. It was that old fantasy of behaving badly, the thought of a stranger between her thighs. She didn’t know how other people did that sort of thing. But she didn’t really want him. She was merely bored, and the memory of Emilio Lomelí had ignited a sharp erotic impulse that made her cheeks warm. It was similar to that feeling she got sometimes when she stood in front of the newsstand and glimpsed the adult comic books on sale there. Westerns filled with women with huge breasts. It was trash, the lot of it.

  They left the coffee shop. It was raining, a drizzle, and they were walking under the awnings taking their time to reach her building. Or at least she was taking her time, and he wasn’t rushing her.

  “You really think the Hawks beat those students just so the president could kick the regent out?”