Velvet Was the Night

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  He bent down and grabbed a copy of the comic book she’d left on her chair. “Secret Romance.”

  “Oh, yes,” Maite muttered, feeling even more flustered and clutching her hands together as he flipped through the pages. “Let me put that away.”

  He handed her the issue. “Does this one have the Aztec sacrifice in it?”

  “No, it’s not the one.”

  Maite tucked the comic book away and put on “No Me Platiques Más,” not because she felt particularly like she wanted to hear Vicente Garrido’s romantic lyrics, but because she couldn’t make up her mind. She wanted to impress Rubén with her taste, but she also suspected it would be futile.

  “I wanted to say I’m sorry, by the way.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been a bit rude, you know. Saying you don’t read the papers or know anything. Saying you read syrupy stuff—”

  She didn’t want him talking about her reading habits. Nurse romances, that’s what he’d said, like it was very funny. And so what! What if people wanted a bit of romance once in a while? A bit of fantasy? Didn’t he fantasize about things? People? Maybe about Leonora?

  “I suppose you read important books, being a literature major,” she muttered, even though her instinct was to shut her mouth. Speaking would invite further commentary.

  “Not lately,” he said.

  Rubén had moved from one side of the room to the other. He stood by the window and looked out, even if there wasn’t anything to look at. Just another building, very much like her own. The blinds traced dark lines over the worn square of red-and-white carpet she’d bought from a Lebanese shopkeeper. She told herself it was a Persian rug, but knew it was not. It was a fancy she had, like calling this room the atelier.

  “It might be dangerous, getting involved with those people in Guerrero.”

  “Better than being dragged to Lecumberri and rotting in a cell there,” Rubén replied with a shrug. “And don’t doubt it, we’ll all be dragged one day, over nothing. I’d rather be running from the cops around Guerrero than ending up a political prisoner.”

  “It can’t only be those two options.”

  “That’s what people like Emilio say, but trust me, in the end you either fight or lie down to be trampled.”

  “But what does a print shop worker know about guerillas?”

  “There’re all kinds of people with the guerilla. Lucio Cabañas used to be a teacher. You might say, what does a teacher know about revolution? Hell, what did Emiliano Zapata know about revolution when he organized a bunch of peasants?”

  “I guess I can’t see how you’d change anything. It all feels complicated. And the cops! We all know what the cops might do to you.” She took a couple of Elvis Presley records from the shelf and flipped them over, looking at the song list. “Love Me Tender.” She slid her nail along the record sleeve.

  “You’re direct.”

  “I’m not trying to be cruel.”

  “Nah. You’re good at hiding your head.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that! If more people minded their own business the world would be a better place.”

  “I strongly disagree.”

  Maite brushed a strand of hair behind her ear and bit her lip. She quickly switched her record, putting on “Piel Canela” and flipping up the volume, then she sat down on her corner chair and crossed her arms, her foot moving to the music.

  “You mind if I have a smoke?”

  “Not here,” she said, not so much because she didn’t like cigarettes but because she wanted to punish him. He was irritating. Nice one moment and then annoying the next. No wonder Leonora had dumped him.

  “Whatever you say,” he muttered and stepped out of the room.

  After a couple of songs Maite also left the atelier and peeked into the living room, to see if he’d taken refuge there, but no. He was leaning in the doorway of her apartment, his head turned toward the hallway.

  She thought to tell him that there wouldn’t be cigarettes in the sierra, that he wasn’t nearly as interesting as he thought he was, and his little fantasies about guerillas and guns and revolution weren’t any more solid than her own daydreams. But then she didn’t know if there was a point in bickering, and she suddenly felt very tired.

  The way he stood, he also looked tired, and something about the way his shoulders were slumped made Maite guess he was thinking about Leonora.

  Maite fed sunflower seeds to the parakeet while watching the young man.

  21

  IT WAS TOO early to drop by La Habana and talk to Justo, so Elvis went by Maite’s building and gave the Antelope a chance to rest for a few hours. He had already sent El Güero back to the apartment after they’d stopped to place their ad in the paper. Alone in the car Elvis dismissed one station after another, settled on Stereo Rey as he usually did, and smoked cigarettes, patient, drumming his fingers against his thighs. “Dream a Little Dream of Me” was playing.

  A few songs later, Maite stepped out and into a car with the same man he’d seen her with before. The hippie with the unibrow. Elvis followed them, but after a good fifteen minutes he lost track of them when a taxi veered to the right and blocked his path. Fucking drivers! You couldn’t shadow someone properly in this city, not with the multitude of fucking cars and buses and taxis and pedestrians, although the truth of the matter was that maybe Elvis wasn’t cut out for this shit.

  Maybe El Güero was right that he was a marshmallow, a softie, and he couldn’t measure up to El Gazpacho.

  Damn it! The woman. Where could she have gone? For a minute he panicked, thinking maybe she was meeting with Leonora, but then he calmed himself down. No, Leonora was still in hiding; she wouldn’t read the ad in the newspaper until the next morning. Could be the woman was visiting Emilio Lomelí again. That’s where she’d gone the last time. He remembered his address quite clearly, along with other details in the file.

  Or maybe they were driving to the art collective? He doubted it, judging by the direction they’d taken.

  Fucking shit. He was too tired and too tense, that was the problem. He still ached from the beating, his muscles screaming about the mistreatment inflicted on them. In particular his back, his spine, they burned like holy hell, and it was getting worse, as if every nerve ending was waking up to the reality of the situation.

  He stopped by a pharmacy and bought a bottle of aspirin, then drove back to the apartment. It was one o’clock. Still a while until he could hit La Habana, and he needed a rest. All of them needed a rest if they were going to manage tomorrow and for the next few days. That’s when they must be alert. So he decided to get some shut-eye, just like the others.

  The boys were napping, but they’d be up in a couple of hours. He pinned a note to El Güero’s door telling him he had the next shift and it started at five. Then at eleven the Antelope should take his place. He wasn’t sure who he wanted watching Sócrates and who he wanted watching the woman.

  The woman. She wasn’t much, and yet there he was, thinking about her again. He supposed it was because he couldn’t have a normal life and therefore almost any woman would catch his interest. Not that he’d ever had much of a normal life, first living with that older American lady and then with that weird cult.

  He was in bed, on top of the covers, smoking a cigarette with the lights off and trying to lull himself to sleep. He knew he shouldn’t do this, that chain-smoking was already bad, but doing it in bed was a recipe for waking up with third-degree burns, but he did it anyway when he felt acutely empty.

  Cristina, Cristina. Dimples and long brown hair flowing down her back. He remembered her naked, laid out on a narrow bed, humming a song. He liked to remember her like that, naked, next to him.

  The woman didn’t look anything like Cristina, who had been exactly his type. Petite, pale, with a pretty, kissable mouth. That’s the way h
e liked them. But he was still smoking in the dark, wondering whether, under different circumstances, it wouldn’t be possible for him to bump into Maite in the street and meet her that way.

  Hundreds of people met every day, after all. It was the easiest thing to chat up a girl on the bus or in line for the movies. And he wasn’t interested in her in a perverted way; it was all very innocent. He was simply curious.

  He kept wondering what her voice sounded like. He’d seen her from afar, stared at her photo, read the information El Mago had provided, but he couldn’t imagine her voice. It probably wasn’t anything special, but he wanted to have a full picture of the woman. He wanted to ask her how many records she owned and whether she listened to “Blue Velvet” late at night and swayed to the music, all alone, while the city slept.

  He couldn’t imagine her with others, certainly not with that hippie with the bushy eyebrows. She existed in isolation, standing in front of a stark, white background.

  Some people are made to be lonely.

  He put out his cigarette and slept.

  When he woke up it was late in the evening. His body still ached. He winced as he put on a jacket and headed to La Habana.

  At that time of the day it was packed, with old men shuffling their dominoes and the literary types crowded around the tables. He saw Justo sitting near the back. He had his pack of Faritos on the table and his coffee, and was immersed in a book or doing a good job at pretending that was the case. His baby face was neatly shaved, and he gave every appearance of being a young, eager student taking a break.

  You’d think him newly baptized, that’s how innocent he looked.

  Elvis took a seat in front of him. Justo turned the page. Waiters in black trousers and black vests walked around carrying orders of molletes on round trays. The scent of coffee beans and cigars mingled together. People spoke with accents in this place. Spanish, Cuban, some Chilean.

  “Back so soon. Keeping busy?” Justo asked, but he didn’t look up.

  “Sure, I guess,” Elvis said, not knowing how to begin. Now that he was here, he was thinking his idea was pretty dumb. After all, why would this guy want to lend him a hand? And even if he did, how was he going to pay him? Elvis had his stash of money in the cigar box, but he didn’t want to spend it like this.

  The young man bent the corner of the page he was reading and set his book down. “I might as well tell you right away: your friend’s dead.”

  Elvis heard what he said, but at first he didn’t understand. He was still thinking about the stakeout he needed to conduct, and the words flew by. But Justo kept staring at him from behind his horn-rimmed glasses, looking serious, and then Elvis got it.

  El Gazpacho.

  He meant El Gazpacho.

  “He can’t be dead.”

  “I did some quick checking around and found him, saw him with my own eyes. He’s definitely dead.”

  Elvis shook his head. “You’ve got it wrong.”

  But Justo was now looking at Elvis with bemused pity, and Elvis knew he didn’t have it wrong. He thought of El Gazpacho, drenched in blood, and the sounds he made as Elvis drove the car to the doctor. Maybe he’d been too slow or too clumsy transporting him. Maybe it was his fault. His mouth was dry.

  “Where’d you find him?”

  “They picked him up in a ditch near Ciudad Satélite. He was strangled,” Justo said, and he took out a matchbox and lit his cigarette. He offered Elvis one, but Elvis did not move.

  Elvis stared at him, watching as Justo tossed the match into a cup.

  “Strangled,” he repeated. “No, he had a bullet wound, and I dropped him off at the doctor’s place.”

  Justo chuckled and took a drag, sliding the box with cigarettes closer to the center of the table, inviting Elvis to pick one with a gesture of his wrist. “Your boss doesn’t like bullets.”

  Elvis almost laughed at that. What a prick. To say that. To even think it.

  “It wasn’t El Mago.”

  “Who, then? El Coco?”

  “Fuck—” Elvis said, and he pressed his hands hard against the table with such force that Justo had to steady the damn thing so it wouldn’t flip over.

  “Sit down, you imbecile,” Justo muttered, and in that moment, his face contorted with anger, he didn’t look as young as before. There were tiny creases on the sides of his eyes, and his mouth was stern. “I liked El Gazpacho. He was an okay dude. That’s why I bothered looking for him and then bothered to tell you. I could have just taken your money. El Mago is no saint, you should know that by now.”

  “Why would he kill him, huh? He was a Hawk.”

  “How the hell should I know? He wouldn’t be the only dead Hawk this week.”

  “Makes no sense.”

  A man had won a game of dominoes. He laughed, and the murmur of a radio in the corner drifted across the café. Violeta Parra was singing about being seventeen and innocent again. Elvis stared at his hands. He wanted to grab a cigarette, but he was afraid his fingers would shake, so he sat there, stiff and afraid and trembling inside instead while men laughed.

  “Look,” Justo said, lowering his voice until it was nothing but a whisper across the table, “They’re disbanding the Hawks, trust me on that. Things are way too hot and El Mago is up to his neck in problems. He fucked up—people are going to pounce on him. You ought to get yourself away from him now. The clock’s ticking for that guy.”

  “Clock’s ticking for everyone.”

  “He killed El Gazpacho.”

  Parra spoke of the chains of destiny and strummed a guitar.

  “I heard you the first time,” Elvis said. “But there’re others who could’ve done it. CIA, for one.”

  “CIA? You kidding me?”

  “They trained some of the Hawks. Maybe they got nervous,” he said, realizing he sounded as stupid as the Antelope when he got into one of his conspiracy streaks. “Fuck, I don’t know. El Gazpacho was one of El Mago’s boys, so you can’t peg it on him.”

  El Gazpacho. Poor, smiling, Gazpacho with his love of Asian films and his good-natured jokes, saying brother this and brother that. And it didn’t mean anything, except it did. Brother. He’d never had a friend like El Gazpacho, a friend who really cared, someone who wasn’t there just for himself.

  El Gazpacho was there for all of them, but mostly he was there for Elvis.

  He squeezed his eyes shut for a second, just a damn second. He felt a black rage in his body, bile coating his tongue. He crammed a cigarette into his mouth.

  “What’ll happen to the body? Is someone claiming it? He had family. A sister.”

  “You know her name?”

  “No,” Elvis muttered. “I don’t know his name or hers. Maybe you could find out?”

  “I did enough finding him. You owe me for this, motherfucker.”

  “You sure it’s him? If he really wanted him gone, wouldn’t El Mago have cut off his head or something? To prevent identification?”

  “Why? He doesn’t have a name.”

  Elvis wouldn’t even be able to go to church and have a mass said for the dead man because he had no idea who El Gazpacho had really been. Just a guy. An anonymous dead guy. If Elvis dropped dead tomorrow, he’d be an anonymous dead guy too. A fucker from the gutter El Mago had found and discarded, lower than El Gazpacho or the others.

  Elvis wasn’t sure his mother would give a fuck even if he was identified. He hadn’t seen his family in years. They liked it like that.

  His real family were the Hawks. El Mago, El Gazpacho, even those fuckups El Güero and the Antelope. That’s what he had.

  Elvis let the cigarette dangle from the corner of his mouth, his eyes unfocused.

  “You’ve got company tonight,” Justo said.

  “Where?” Elvis asked, raising a hand, slowly holding the cigarette between his fingers
, his voice made raspy with pain. Tears pricked his eyes, but he squeezed them away.

  “Behind, to the right, table near the door.”

  Elvis opened his eyes, but he didn’t look. Instead he fiddled with one of Justo’s books, pretending he was reading it. “What does he look like?”

  “Tall, brown hair. Suede jacket and turtleneck.”

  “Anaya’s man?”

  “Couldn’t swear on it, but I’d said no. They usually travel in twos, and he doesn’t look like a gorilla. Snappy shoes, this one.”

  “Fucking prick,” Elvis muttered. He’d bet an eyeball it was that Russian shit-eater again, with a Makarov tucked in its leather holster. It had to be a Makarov. What the hell did he want? He’d already given Elvis a good beating. His back was still tender from the damn newspaper he’d swatted him with.

  “Not a friend?”

  “No.”

  “Who?” Justo asked, curious.

  “Another player,” Elvis said, because he didn’t think it was a good idea to be revealing it was a damn KGB agent. He didn’t really know Justo. His whole idea to ask him for help was stupid.

  He didn’t know what to do. Head back to the apartment and pretend everything was normal? Forget that El Gazpacho was dead?

  God fucking damn it, El Gazpacho was dead. El Mago had killed him. El Mago had fucking killed him. Or maybe not. No sense into leaping to conclusions.

  It better not have been El Mago.

  “Is there a way out the back?”

  “Past the bathrooms. Remember, you owe me, so if I ever need—”

  “I know how it works,” Elvis muttered.

  Elvis stood up. He walked at a normal pace, like he wasn’t worried, and wound his way out the back. He darted past a couple of waiters who were having a smoke break, leaning against the wall in their black vests and starched shirts. It was dark now outside.

  He walked faster, began running. He ran until he was out of breath.