“This cancer is waiting for you, Jack,” she said. He could see her teeth clacking, because her lips were gone. “It’s eating into you. He can take it back now, but soon it will be too late even for him. Will you do what he wants?”
“Yes,” Hoskins whispered. “Yes, anything.”
“Then listen.”
Jack Hoskins listened.
10
There was no FBI warning at the front of Holly’s film, which didn’t surprise Ralph. Who would bother to copyright such an elderly artifact, when it was trash to begin with? The music was a hokey mixture of wavering violins and jarringly cheerful norte?o accordion riffs. The print was scratchy, as if it had been run many times by long-dead projectionists who hadn’t given much of a shit.
I can’t believe I’m sitting here, Ralph thought. This is loonybin stuff.
Yet both his wife and Marcy Maitland were watching with the concentration of students preparing for a final exam, and the others, although clearly not so invested, were paying close attention. Yune Sablo had a faint smile on his lips. Not the smile of a person who feels what he’s seeing is ridiculous, Ralph thought, but of a man glimpsing a bit of the past; a childhood legend brought to life.
The movie opened on a nighttime street where all the businesses seemed to be either bars or whorehouses or both. The camera followed a pretty woman in a low-cut dress, walking hand in hand with her daughter, who looked to be about four. This evening stroll through a bad part of town with a kid who should have been in bed might have been explained later in the film, but not in the part Ralph and the others saw.
A drunk wavered up to the woman, and while his mouth said one thing, the voice actor dubbing his voice said, “Hey, baybee, want a date?” in a Mexican accent that made him sound like Speedy Gonzales. She brushed him off and walked on. Then, in a shadowy area between two streetlights, a dude in a long black cloak straight out of a Dracula film swooped from an alley. He had a black bag in one hand. With the other, he snatched up the kiddo. Mom screamed and gave chase, catching him under the next streetlight and grabbing at his bag. He whirled around, the convenient streetlight illuminating the face of a middle-aged man with a scar on his forehead.
Mr. Cloak snarled, revealing a mouthful of fake fangs. The woman drew back, hands raised, looking less like a mother in terror than an opera singer about to belt her way into an aria from Carmen. The child-stealer flipped his cloak over the little girl and fled, but not before a fellow emerging from one of the street’s many bars hailed him in another hideous Speedy Gonzales accent: “Hey Professor Espinoza, where you go’een? Let me buy you a dreenk!”
In the next scene, the mother was brought to the town’s morgue （EL DEPOSITO DE CADAVERES on the frosted glass door）， and did the predictable histrionic screaming when the sheet was lifted to reveal her presumably mutilated child. Next came the arrest of the man with the scar, who turned out to be a well-respected educator at a nearby university.
What followed was one of cinema’s shorter trials. The mother testified; so did a couple of guys with Speedy Gonzales accents, including the one who had offered to buy the professor a dreenk; the jury filed out to consider its verdict. Adding a surreal touch to these otherwise predictable proceedings was the appearance of five women in the back row, all dressed in what appeared to be superhero costumes complete with fancy masks. Nobody in the courtroom, including the judge, seemed to find them out of place.
The jury filed back in; Professor Espinoza was convicted of murder most foul; he hung his head and looked guilty. One of the masked women jumped to her feet and declared, “Thees ees a miscarritch of justice! Professor Espinoza would never harm a child!”
“But I saw heem!” the mother screamed. “Thees time you are wrong, Rosita!”
The masked women in the superhero costumes trooped out of the courtroom in their cool boots, and the movie cross-faded to a close-up of a hangman’s noose. The camera drew back to show a scaffold surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. Professor Espinoza was led up the steps. As the rope was placed around his neck, his gaze fixed on a man in a hooded monk’s robe at the back of the crowd. There was a black bag between the monk’s sandaled feet.
This was a stupid and poorly made movie, but Ralph still felt a prickle run down his arms and covered Jeannie’s hand with his own when she reached for him. He knew exactly what they were going to see next. The monk pushed back his hood to reveal Professor Espinoza’s face, convenient forehead scar and all. He grinned, showing those ridiculous plastic fangs . . . pointed at his black bag . . . and laughed.