“Yeah, we bumped into them at the other location.”
“So what now?” the Antelope asked. “Do we stay here?”
Elvis wasn’t sure, but he didn’t want to say that because then they’d think him indecisive, weak. El Güero solved his problem by speaking up. “I’m starving, man. Let’s get a decent meal and come back.”
“Fine. Antelope, stay here in the car and wait. We’ll be back in twenty minutes,” he said. Now that El Güero mentioned it, Elvis needed to grab a bite. He had a damn headache. Maybe he could stop at the pharmacy too.
A couple of blocks from the apartment building there was a park and around its perimeter a little tianguis, where office workers and low-tier government functionaries clustered around food stalls, drinking soft drinks and eating tacos. Everyone preferred a comida corrida and the comfort of a chair and a beer, but sometimes it was hard to make ends meet, and tacos de canasta served as well as anything else.
Elvis and El Güero stopped at a stall selling barbacoa, where a woman deposited two bowls filled with meat in front of them. Elvis salted his food and ate slowly, sitting on an overturned bucket that served as a chair while a little radio played “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” and for a moment he didn’t mind sitting there, squeezed between El Güero and a stranger, with a scrawny dog circling around them, waiting for scraps.
For a moment the music smoothed the edges of everything away and he felt like in those movies, when the lens is blurry and a halation—that’s a word he’d learned from his handy dictionary—distorts the light.
Then some prick changed the station, and they were playing “Surfin’ Bird.” Elvis frowned and took a sip of his soda. That’s when he noticed the four men standing on the other side of the food stall. They were wearing suits and ties, but those were no bank tellers or office workers—he could recognize trouble when he saw it.
He nudged El Güero, asking him for a light. El Güero took out his lighter, and Elvis lowered his head and pressed his cigarette against the flame, eyes down on his bowl of barbacoa. “Four fuckers right across.”
El Güero put away his lighter and pressed a napkin against his face. “I’ve seen that fucker on the right, he’s been watching the building. These assholes must be DFS.”
“Figures.”
“What the fuck do they want?”
“Guess they’re marking their territory, like dogs pissin’ on the sidewalk.”
“You got the gun? Take it out.”
Elvis shook his head. “Don’t have it. What you got?”
“Pocketknife.”
“Let’s get the fuck outta here. Follow me.”
They stood up slowly and began walking between the stalls. The men matched their pace. When they reached the edge of the park, Elvis made a sharp right, and they dashed across the street. It was a performance worthy of marathon runners but it did them no good; they couldn’t shake those motherfuckers off. Elvis veered into an alley behind a laundry; the smell of detergent was strong, spilling out of an exhaust pipe. He eyed the door to the laundry, wondering if he could pry it open quickly. But the men were right on their heels. Four at one end of the alley and two on the other end, blocking their way.
El Güero took out his pocketknife. Elvis bent down and picked up a wooden plank that had been left on the ground; there was no point in trying to do much with the screwdriver. His palms were sweaty. Six against two. The Hawks beat people, but it was usually defenseless students, not trained agents. He wished he had a real weapon.
One of the agents charged toward Elvis, and he swung the plank, hitting him hard and sending him staggering back. But that meant that another two rushed forward and tried to land a punch. Elvis whacked one of them in the face, but the other son of a bitch was like a ninja from a movie, and within two moves he had twisted Elvis’s hand and pulled away the wooden plank.
Elvis fell to his knees and then he tugged forward, pulling the agent down. For a minute he thought he had the upper hand as he punched the fucker in the face, but then the man he’d whacked with the plank decided to get revenge by kicking Elvis in the ribs. Quick as that, the fucking ninja had pinned him down and was choking him into oblivion.
Elvis managed to raise an arm and hit the son of a bitch on top of him with his elbow, stunning him for a second, and coughing and wheezing, he leaned on a pile of crates and pulled himself to his feet.
Meanwhile, for all his strength and his knife, El Güero didn’t seem to be doing too hot either. A man was hitting him in the face with the butt of a gun. “Fuck, leave him alone! What do you want?” Elvis yelled, and the guy beating El Güero turned to Elvis and pointed the gun at him.
“Easy there, don’t shoot them.”
A man who had been leaning against a wall, arms crossed, now stepped forward. He made a motion with his hand, flashing a ring, and the man with the gun put his weapon away. El Güero slumped down. His face was painted crimson, and Elvis was pretty sure he’d lost several teeth. As long as he didn’t swallow them, he’d live. Or so he hoped.
“Hello, hello, how are we doing today?” the man with the ring asked. He sounded chipper.
“Well, our lunch got fucked up,” Elvis said, spitting on the ground, “so not that great.”
“Sorry to hear that. But you deserve it.”
“What the hell you talking about?”
“My name is Mateo Anaya. I’m with the DFS.”
“I know who you are.”
The man ran both hands through his hair and adjusted his cuffs. “Good. Then you know what this is about. You interrogated one of my agents. I want to know what he told you.”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“I would. Turns out he’s dead.”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“Liar.”
“He’s telling the truth,” El Güero said, his voice raspy. “It wasn’t us.”
Anaya cocked his head and frowned, like he was trying to figure out whether they were hiding an ace up their sleeves, but it was plain as day that the beating would have taken the liar out of any man. “It doesn’t matter,” Anaya said finally. “I want to know what he told you.”
Elvis wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “He told us he spied for you.”
“And?”
“Told us about the girl, Leonora, and said he had a way to contact her, through an ad in the paper. But we haven’t seen her, she hasn’t shown her face, so maybe he was lying.”
“That’s it?”
“What the fuck else should he have told us? He said he was a rat.”
“Told you. Carrion peckers. They don’t know shit,” the man with the gun muttered.
A teenage boy holding a pack of cigarettes in one hand opened the back door of the laundry and stared at them in astonishment. Elvis rushed forward, pulling El Güero with him by the arm, and they shoved the boy aside and made their way into the shop.
Many shirts, suits, and dresses hung from the ceiling, wrapped in plastic. It was a veritable labyrinth of clothes, and Elvis yanked some coats away, dragging El Güero until they reached the front of the store and stumbled out. Then it was a mad dash back to the Antelope and the car. When they reached him, the Antelope was happily chewing gum. He stared at them, mouth open.
“Open the fucking door!” Elvis said, and the Antelope fumbled with the locks until Elvis was able to shove El Güero in and jumped into the car. “Drive!”
The Antelope turned the key, turned the wheel, obeying with a quick nod of the head, and they were off. The big man moaned pitifully while Elvis attempted to get a better look at his injuries. El Güero had lost teeth and his nose was a mess, but the thing that worried him was the eye. The right eye was probably busted.
“Antelope, let’s go to Escamilla’s place,” he said. That was the same doctor they’d visited when El Gazpacho was injured, and El Gazpacho
maybe died in his fucking office, but Elvis didn’t know any other doctor that could help them.
The doctor lived in La Guerrero, which wasn’t exactly next door but was close enough by car and besides, they didn’t have much choice, whether it took twenty minutes or fifty-five to drive there depending on the fucking traffic.
Escamilla’s ratty office sat atop an ugly, peeling yellow building a few blocks from La Lagunilla and right next to a gym where boxers trained. When they walked in, with El Güero oozing blood from everywhere, the doctor was standing in the reception area, a cup of coffee in his right hand. He looked at them and stirred his coffee with a plastic spoon.
“Hello, gentlemen, come over to the back,” he said, like it was no big deal to have a man without teeth stumble into his office. And maybe it wasn’t, with so many boxers in that neighborhood, plus the assorted unsavory characters who needed bandages.
The doctor told El Güero to lie down on the examination table while he washed his hands in a tiny sink. Then he shone a light in El Güero’s eyes, checked the inside of his mouth. The doctor moved away from the patient, opened a cabinet, and began pulling out gauze, bandages, cotton swabs, and disinfectant with slow, methodical fingers.
“Might be an orbital fracture,” the doctor said, raising his head and looking at Elvis. “You can step out. This’ll take a few minutes.”
Elvis obeyed. A young man in a gray smock had materialized and was mopping the floor, cleaning the blood that had dripped onto the linoleum. He didn’t look at either Elvis or the Antelope. Elvis sat down on a plastic chair, and the Antelope took the other chair. Between them there was a tiny table with a pile of old Reader’s Digests.
“You going to tell me what happened?” the Antelope asked.
“DFS happened,” Elvis said. “They found Sócrates dead and wanted to pin it on us.”
“That little shit we saw Saturday?”
“That shit.”
“Pricks. Who do you think killed him?”
Elvis shrugged. For all he knew, Sócrates’s commie friends had wised up and killed the traitor, or maybe it had been that big fucking Russian—after all, he’d followed Elvis to the Habana. Or, hell, maybe it was Leonora, or Maite and that hippie. After all, they’d run out of the building real quick. He definitely didn’t like that hippie.
The doctor wandered into the reception area. His white coat was splattered with crimson, and he was wiping his hands on a rag. “How’s he doin’?” Elvis asked.
“I gave him painkillers and cleaned everything up, but he’s going to lose that eye if he doesn’t have surgery. I can make the arrangements.”
“Can I have a word about that with you, doc?”
“Come on,” the doctor said, and they went into a second examination room. There was a bowl filled with mints in a corner atop a mini refrigerator and one of those charts with all the human bones on the wall.
“I’m not letting you take El Güero anywhere. The last team member I brought here ended up in a ditch, strangled.”
The doctor stared at Elvis. “That’s not my business.”
Elvis grabbed the doctor by the collar of his shirt and slammed him against the wall, his mouth a snarl. “What happened to him?”
“I don’t know. I released that man, and he was supposed to head back to his apartment,” the doctor said, and Elvis had to give it to him, the doctor had balls, because he didn’t flinch and he didn’t yell, speaking instead like he was dictating a prescription.
But Elvis supposed the doctor didn’t have to be afraid. The people he worked for, they must make sure he didn’t get in any trouble.
Elvis released him and stepped back. The doctor rubbed the back of his neck with his hand and glared at Elvis. Elvis went into the examination room where El Güero was sitting. “Let’s go,” Elvis said.
“The doc said he was getting an ambulance.”
“No he ain’t.”
They went down the stairs real quick and got into the car. Elvis wasn’t sure what to do. In the end, he told the Antelope to drive to a Cruz Verde. El Güero wasn’t too happy with that idea. He was still going on about the ambulance.
“Look, things are fucked here left and right,” Elvis said. “Check yourself in and lay low. It’s the best chance you got.”
“I don’t get it.”
“El Gazpacho’s dead and you saw the DFS is out for us. So, stupid fuck, lie low and get your damn eye fixed. Find us in a few days.”
El Güero looked at Elvis suspiciously, but he grunted a “fine, fucker,” and when they reached the hospital, he got out of the car and didn’t ask any more questions.
“Where to?” the Antelope asked.
“Back to our apartment, then to the girl’s place.”
The Antelope took out a stick of gum and unwrapped it. “You weren’t joking about that shit, about El Gazpacho being dead?”
“I’m not sure.”
“We’re not calling in El Mago? About this stuff?”
“Later tonight,” Elvis muttered. “Right now we better go get the fucking gun.”
24
MAITE HADN’T LIED when she told him she thought too much. After a brief nap, she’d woken up to find Rubén snoring next to her, and quickly her mind jumped to everything that had happened to them so far, like unspooling the reel of a film and looking at it frame by frame. And then, of course, she started worrying about the whole situation and wondering about the police and what they might do to them if they connected them to the dead man in the apartment.
Unable to lie still, Maite got up and went to the atelier. She couldn’t play her music for fear of waking Rubén up—he looked like he was enjoying his sleep—so instead she sat down and leafed through old issues of Secret Romance. She’d reached the panel where Jorge Luis kisses the heroine for the first time when he cleared his throat and she looked up to find him by the doorway.
He was still naked, standing there, hair tousled and eyes fogged by sleep. She glanced down at the floor, feeling embarrassed. She’d fucked him, but she hadn’t really looked at him.
“I thought you were gone for a moment,” he said.
“Where would I go?”
“I don’t know. I thought you might still be mad at me. I guess I should say I’m sorry. I shoved you away but I needed you to hang up. I wasn’t thinking right. I don’t want Leonora to wind up dead.”
“She wouldn’t wind up dead by talking to us.”
“She could. We can’t meet with her. She needs to lie low, until they move on to something else. We should lie low too.”
Maite stood up and placed her comic books back on the bookshelf. Then she touched the cuffs of her nightgown and brushed her hair behind her ear and looked at him. The stupid nightgown did her no favors, and she was sure he was comparing her to Leonora. Who wouldn’t? Maybe he was laughing at her dismal performance.
When she’d pictured an encounter with a stranger, it was sexy and intriguing. But if she replayed the scene with Rubén in her mind, it all seemed tawdry. She wondered if he was going to complain about it, but instead he yawned.
“Want to get a bite to eat? I’m starving,” he said, scratching his belly with his left hand. He was slim, his stomach was flat, a bit of muscle there and also in the arms, perhaps from lifting boxes around his job. Or else he played a sport.
“It wouldn’t be…you know, dangerous?” Maite asked.
“It’s probably safer outside,” he said. “It’s harder to kill someone in the middle of a restaurant. I’ll take the gun, just in case.”
“Can you even shoot it?”
“It’s not that hard.”
They headed back to her room, and she quickly picked a blue dress with a paisley print that she thought flattered her. Or at least wasn’t one of her dismal office outfits. He followed her and scooped up his shirt and jeans from the fl
oor.
“Do you?” she asked, as she buttoned her dress, half-hiding behind the dresser’s door. She didn’t want him looking at her as she changed, noticing her imperfections: the annoying curve of her belly, her dry skin, the stretch marks left from puberty crisscrossing her ass. Maite’s mother had varicose veins, and she feared she’d have the same one day, to make it all worse.
“Do I what?” he replied.
“Know how to shoot.”
“Sure I do.”
“Where’d you learn?”
“Jackie taught me,” he said nonchalantly.
She watched him sit down and put on his jeans. “Why were you arrested? You didn’t shoot anyone, did you?”
She was merely curious, not really concerned about the possibility of spending time with a killer. He zipped up his jeans and looked at her, and then he laughed merrily. “As if!”
“Then?”
“I joined a protest, which is enough to get you labeled as a member of a ‘criminal conspiracy.’ That’s what happened three years ago, in Tlatelolco. That’s what the president said. That all the students protesting were criminals and agitators, subversive elements. Same as always, I guess.”
“Were you there? At Tlatelolco?” she asked. That had been a huge mess. Some political activists escaped the country after that. It was the sort of thing that was so big, no one could keep a lid on it. Even Maite had seen the pictures of the tanks and the soldiers and people screaming. Still, that hadn’t stopped the same thing from happening again.
“No way. If I had, I’d probably be dead now. That wasn’t my scene yet. After that, that’s when I got into this whole activism thing. You couldn’t ignore what was happening and so I went to meetings, printed leaflets. I got thrown in jail for a night for the leaflets and then got caught at a protest another time.”
“Why didn’t you stop?”
“What do you mean?”
“If I’d been thrown in jail twice, I wouldn’t do anything like that again.”
“That was nothing, a bit of time in a cell. I was lucky. They torture people, Maite. They kill. What happened at Tlatelolco, what happened with the Hawks? That shit is going to keep on happening if we don’t stand up and defend ourselves. That has to end. We need to rise up in arms.”
Velvet Was the Night Page 23
