Silver Nitrate(91)

“Ewers organized people into a pyramid. People like him, brilliant Aryan stock, were at the top. Then came all the mutts of the world. That’s what he called them. The ‘mutts.’ The mixed people of Mexico. And then all the other races that made him shudder; each level of the pyramid was carefully color-graded.”

“He thought he descended from Atlanteans,” Montserrat said. “He said the Aztec and the Inca had been great but they had—”

“Degenerated,” López said. “Yes, that was the line he took.”

“It would seem to be a bad idea to call the people around him ‘mutts,’?” Tristán said. “Pretty ballsy since they were working with him. Didn’t anyone punch the guy?”

“Have you not met Clarimonde? Did you not realize what her last name is? Her father moved from Munich in 1938. Carl Wilhelm Kahlo changed his name to Guillermo to sound more like a local, but Clarimonde’s dad never wanted such a thing. Abel Urueta would get a sunburn if he stood at the beach for three minutes. Alma: same story. The elites in Mexico are proud of their European roots. Do you know who came up with the theory that Atlanteans founded Tiwanaku?”

“Edmund Kiss,” Montserrat said. “He wrote adventure novels and was an amateur archeologist. His name popped up when I was doing research.”

“No, it was Belisario Díaz. A Bolivian man. Why? Because to imagine Indigenous intelligence and power would have been unthinkable. We are all taught to despise the whiff of darkness, of Indigenous blood and of Blackness. We speak about ‘bettering the race,’ and by that we mean injecting more European blood into our veins. What Wilhelm said wasn’t considered outrageous at the time. It’s not even outrageous now, sadly.”

“Okay, maybe he appealed to Clarimonde’s ‘pure’ German genes and such. But you do not look German,” Montserrat said.

“No, I don’t. Ewers told me perhaps I descended from Aztec royalty, to please me and himself. An idiocy.”

“And so? What happened?”

“What happened was that I was good at magic. I’d tried it before, it was a hobby, and working with Ewers it became obvious I had talent. He might have liked Abel and Clarimonde better than me, but I was twice as good as them. So, for a while, I simply enjoyed my job, enjoyed the connections I was making, enjoyed Ewers’s praise. I accepted that he had…flaws, but that didn’t bother me. Not anymore.”

López’s mouth turned down into an ugly grimace, and he shook his head. “We were finishing the picture when I accepted the second truth about Wilhelm Ewers: that he had no limits.”

The cat had wandered back toward the rattan couch and now jumped on it, giving Tristán an irritated look. López petted the animal absentmindedly.

“The spell for the movie had complicated components. There were six runes that were to appear in the credits at the beginning of the film and then at the end. There was the silver nitrate and the dubbing that would have to happen in post-production. Ewers also mentioned blood, to cement the runes, as a sort of binding agent. We killed a chicken every two weeks we were shooting, one for each rune. Then there was the last rune that would flash on screen. I was the one who had obtained the chickens for the other ceremonies we had, so I asked Ewers if I should go to the market, get the chickens. He told me there was no need for it: for the final rune we’d use the blood of a man.”

“Like your leeches?” Tristán asked.

“No. He said there were many homeless people in the city and no one would miss one from a corner. I thought he might be joking. Ewers exaggerated and lied to suit his purposes. But then he looked me straight in the eye and said: ‘You knew it would come to this.’?” López took a deep breath. “He was right, I did know.”

Tristán, who had been standing up until this moment, sat down and gripped the arms of his chair. “He was going to murder someone?”

“I believe he’d killed before and he’d kill again.”

“He did, in Europe,” Montserrat said, remembering Ewers’s dead associate, from whom he’d purloined documents and a fresh identity. “It was in his letter. He thought it gave him power.”

Before that, there had been Ewers’s father, who had been left behind to perish. Ewers didn’t write of other deaths in his letter, but it didn’t mean he hadn’t killed more people. He thought himself better than everyone else, an ?bermensch surrounded by untermenschen. Across the ages she had read something cold and calculating in his gaze: only I matter, that was what Ewers’s photos said.

“You didn’t mention a murder,” Tristán told her. “You carry his book in your purse, you pin his photos to your wall—”

“I need to understand,” Montserrat said angrily.

“What? That he was a murderous, mean little man who thought the Holocaust was cool?”

No, the spell. She wanted to understand how the pieces of Ewers’s magic fit together, the same as she might want to know how you transferred data between sequencers or how you record a FSK sync tone.

There was an awkward silence. Tristán sat there, smoldering, while López simply looked tired.

“How could you be sure Alma would kill him?” Montserrat asked instead of replying to Tristán.