Silver Nitrate(54)

“Alma Montero certainly wants yours. Did she say she’d kill you and specify the time?”

“She said I needed to return the things that belonged to Ewers. She said she’d be stopping by.”

“Then she didn’t threaten to kill you.”

“I saw it later,” Abel said. “I was standing in front of a mirror and I saw it, and the time it would happen too. Someone is going to slice my throat at 2:29. I know you don’t quite believe in magic, but once upon a time clairvoyance was my talent.”

“But you could not bet on the ponies nowadays,” Montserrat said, remembering his words. “You said your talent atrophied.”

“When he died, yes. But maybe it’s all come back. I must do something, I must go, I’ll die—”

Before he could stand up she pointed behind him. “It’s after two thirty.”

“What?”

He turned his head and looked at the clock in the food court, then he glanced at his wristwatch. He put out his cigarette and sat back, pressing his hands against his face, then ran his fingers through his hair and let out a sob.

The teenagers who had been smirking at them now looked worried.

“I need to lie down. Montserrat, can you give me a ride back to my apartment?”

“Sure,” she said immediately.

When he stood up and they began walking, he threw a couple of nails on the floor. “Throw nails behind you when you walk so you cannot be followed,” he mumbled.

“A spell?”

“A counter-spell.”

He stopped once in front of a store with faceless mannequins to fetch more nails from his pocket and sprinkle them on the ground, and to light another cigarette. The glass of the shop window reflected Montserrat’s worried face. Behind her someone had stopped to stare at them, probably alarmed by the old man who was throwing nails on the ground as though he were tossing crumbs to pigeons. She couldn’t see the stranger’s face, only the outline of his silhouette, the shape of a trench coat.

She grabbed Abel by an arm and pulled him quickly through the doors of the mall and onto the street before someone called security on them.

Montserrat let Abel smoke inside the car because it seemed to calm him down, and by the time they reached his building, he was quiet and serene. Once inside his apartment, Montserrat set the kettle on a burner and prepared a cup of coffee. They sat at the table together.

“You think I’m mad, but I’m not,” he said, his voice low, as she pushed the cup his way. He pressed his hands around it without drinking.

“I don’t think you’re mad. I’m simply trying to understand what is happening. Why would Alma care if you cast a spell?”

“I don’t know and I can’t ask her or José, assuming that it was José who informed her of my comings and goings. Magic was a game for me, a youthful impulse. But others took it seriously.”

He sipped his coffee, then contemplated the many photographs and memorabilia in the glass cases behind Montserrat. “What did the letter you found say?”

“It narrated Ewers’s life story. The real one, not whatever lies and fragments he shared with you. Abel, you said that what we were doing was completing a circuit and you didn’t expect any negative consequences, but there are consequences now. Maybe we should undo it.”

“You’re not untying a knot, Montserrat. We could make it worse. We could turn our luck even blacker than before.”

“You and Tristán are both having hallucinations.”

“Visions,” Abel said angrily. “I had a vision. I had them before, when Ewers was around. I was able to glimpse future events. I did bet on the ponies back in the day. I won several races. He died and it all went away. And Clarimonde, she left, too. All of it, gone.”

He slammed a hand against the table, but his anger was burning down quicker than the cigarettes he’d consumed. Abel stared at Montserrat, his lips trembling.

“Can you get me the film and the letter, please?”

“Are you going to give them to Alma?”

“Very likely.”

Montserrat hesitated. It was not that she particularly relished the thought of keeping Ewers’s possessions, nor that this would surely destroy any chances at a TV segment about the occultist, but she felt a preservation instinct that told her they ought to hold on to this material. But ultimately all these were borrowed items. They did not belong to her.

“I’ll swing by Antares on Monday. The vault is kept locked, and I have to ask for someone higher up to open it, I don’t have keys for that. I can give you the letter at the same time unless you want me to bring it by tomorrow.”

“Monday is fine, I suppose. Maybe I was mistaken about my vision. Maybe I shouldn’t give these things to her. What do you think? Should I? And what if she wants the duplicate we made, too? I couldn’t part with that.”

“Where are you keeping it?”

“Oh, in the living room next to my crystals. It was such a lovely piece of work we did on that. I wanted to show it at my retrospective. She’ll probably cut it into pieces, like she did with the rest of my movie. It’s a pity. I was never as great a sorcerer as Clarimonde, or even José. If I was, I might attempt—but never mind.”

Abel didn’t say much after that, and she eventually bid him goodbye. She knocked on Tristán’s door before exiting the building, but he didn’t answer. She left him a note under the door asking him to call her. Around eight p.m., she phoned Abel.