Elvis motioned for Sócrates to sit on the bed, and when he did the bed creaked, as if uttering a complaint. For a moment Elvis felt weird standing there with the young man staring at him. This room, this setup, wasn’t so different from where Elvis had lived when he was younger, and it made him uncomfortable. Maybe it would have been better if he’d gone to see Lomelí. It might have been fun to slap a rich fucker around. Right now, he didn’t feel too great about torturing this kid, just as he hadn’t felt good about beating the priest, at least at the beginning.
But then he remembered how the priest’s buddies had grabbed him and the Russian slapped him with the newspapers, and Elvis’s sympathy was drained.
“Look around for the camera,” Elvis told El Güero, and then he turned to Sócrates. “You try anything, I cut off your dick.” He traced an arc in the air to emphasize his words. Sometimes people were real stupid and needed visual aids, a fucking diagram to tell them what was what.
Sócrates raised both of his hands. “I’m not trying anything. I know your type!”
“Do you, now? Well, Mr. Know-It-All, what do you know about Leonora then?”
“Leonora?” he repeated, staring at him stupidly, as though Elvis had spoken in Chinese.
“Yes, Leonora. You’re friends, no?”
“Yeah.”
“How good a friend are you?”
“We know each other.”
“You recite shitty poems for everyone you know?”
Sócrates blushed. The hands, which had been in the air, came down to rest crossed against his chest. “Who told you that?”
“People say you have a hard-on for Leonora. Lots of people.”
“They’re exaggerating. It’s not like that.”
Which meant it was like that. Not that Elvis blamed the guy: the girl was pretty. Her friend, Maite, was not, although to be honest he found her more interesting than Leonora. It was the eyes that did the trick. There was a spark of pain in them, there was shock and something cloudy and lost. As if she’d been dreaming and had suddenly been awoken by the clapping of thunder. It made him curious.
But Leonora. Leonora was the one he needed to be focusing on, Leonora was the lost lamb.
“Would you hide her if someone was looking for her?”
“Hide her where? In the bathroom?”
El Güero smirked at that. “He’s a joker,” he said and kept fiddling with a pile of books by the bed, opening and closing them. “It’s gonna be real funny when we stab you in the balls.”
Sócrates was already nervous, but that seemed to do it. He flinched and almost jumped a little, as if they’d administered an electric shock to said balls. “Man, I am not hiding her! Damn. I already told Anaya, I don’t know where she is!”
“Back up,” Elvis said. “How do you know Anaya?”
“Fuck,” Sócrates muttered.
“Fuck, yes. Talk. Fast.”
“I mean, I wouldn’t know where to begin, I mean, it’s not—I can’t tell you.”
“Hit him,” Elvis ordered.
El Güero turned around and slammed a book against Sócrates’s head, then moved across the room to start browsing the contents of a bookshelf. Sócrates let out a high-pitched whine, almost like a cat, and pressed a hand against his ear, eyes closed. Elvis let him sit like that for a minute, then he tucked the knife inside his jacket’s pocket and took out a cigarette. He lit it.
“I’m having a shitty week, and you don’t want to make it any worse,” Elvis said. “Talk before I get my friend to use every volume of your fucking encyclopedia on your ribs. How do you know Anaya?”
“I pass information to him.”
“You’re a rat.”
“An informant,” Sócrates said, still rubbing his ear.
