“Give her apartment a sweep. If you are lucky, the photos are there and half of your work is over.”
“And if I don’t find it there?”
“Then things are getting started for you, are they not?”
A waitress came back with their coffees and Elvis’s slice of cake. She asked if they wanted anything else, but El Mago waved her away. Once the waitress was gone El Mago took out another file and handed it to Elvis. This one was substantially thicker.
Elvis flipped through it, staring at the photos of a man with glasses. A man in a black habit with a white collar. He’d never seen that before.
“It’s a priest,” Elvis said, glancing up at El Mago in surprise.
“A commie,” he clarified.
“A commie priest?”
“A Jesuit. A member of Obra Cultural Universitaria. They are from Monterrey. They were supposed to keep students in check. Instead, some of them are preaching liberation theology and making trouble. Christ, the first communist, they say.” El Mago smiled his pleasant smile. But there was something sour in it. As usual, the smile hid the fangs.
“What’s he doing here if they’re from Monterrey?” Elvis asked, taking a bite of his cake.
“There is a lot of nastiness going on, Elvis. These reds, they have been talking guerillas and weapons, and do not doubt it, these crazy Jesuits like this Father Villareal, they are eager to see blood spilled. They have been waiting for a spark to light the bomb, for something to make everything go off.”
“Wouldn’t us beating those students have made it worse, then? That would make us the crazy ones, not them. Unless someone above wanted it to go off.”
El Mago had opened his lighter and was about to light his cigarette but he stopped, staring at Elvis.
“You are too damn clever sometimes, Elvis,” he said.
Elvis rubbed the back of his neck. El Mago finished lighting his cigarette, took a drag, then tapped a finger against his cup of coffee, frowning. “You are correct, that mess did not help one bit. If I had been in charge of the whole operation…but there are plenty of fools who do not know how to handle problems without bullets and liters of blood. That is why I am telling you right now: this operation here,myoperation, it needs to be clean and quiet. These are dangerous times to be standing out.”
“Yeah, I get it. But what’s the priest got to do with the girl? She also with Obra Cultural?”
“No. This priest, he came here to make friends with all the rabble who are starting up commie associations and groups. All that garbage. The girl is part of a subversive art collective. He met her through that. Before all of this, she was a good Catholic girl. Now he is her confessor.”
“Couldn’t have been that good a girl if she’s hanging with reds, no?” Elvis said. “Although I guess it matches the color of her lipstick.”
El Mago grabbed a glass ashtray and slid it to the center of the table. “Do not be overly amusing today, Elvis.”
“Sorry,” he said, taking a sip of his coffee.
“Talk to him, rough him up a bit and give him the treatment. See if he knows where she is.”
“Rough him? I don’t know—”
“This Jesuit needs a good punch in the mouth.”
“I don’t want to beat no priest,” Elvis said quickly.
“What, nowyouare a good Catholic boy?”
Elvis couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone to mass. Long before he joined the Hawks, that’s for sure. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t wary of messing with someone of the cloth or that he didn’t make the sign of the cross when he saw an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Even the fools in Tlaquepaque, with their healing crystals and their chants, believed in something. You had to be a bit afraid of a superior power. Those who weren’t were treading on dangerous soil.
“I’m not going to hell if that’s what you’re thinking,” Elvis said. “I’m pretty sure you’ll be toasty warm in hell if you go on hitting priests, whether they’re Jesuits or whatever.”
El Mago gave Elvis an icy look. The Antelope said some of the upper-level Hawks had been trained abroad, with the CIA and shit, to help keep the commies out of Mexico, out of Latin America, and they’d learned lots of interesting and useful tactics. Elvis wondered if it was those folks who’d taught El Mago to stare like that, all frost. It was like staring into an abyss.
That’s what El Mago was. This damn abyss, sucking you in. This damn fucking force of nature. You didn’t cross him. Not because you were afraid he’d pull out a gun and shoot you, but because he simply had that aura about him. The feeling that this was someone who devoured people, but never got his suit dirty.
The thing was, he wasn’t always like that. The rest of the time, he was very much all right, even nice. Elvis liked talking to El Mago. He didn’t fool himself into thinking they were friends, but he thought they might be associates. He wanted to do good work for El Mago. Hell, he wanted to make him proud. El Güero had even made fun of him about that, chuckling and saying Elvis wished El Mago would adopt him. That was a crock of shit—first of all because Elvis was a grown man, and second because he’d never particularly missed his stupid father, so why bother trying to find a second one—but it cut dangerously close to the truth.
