Abel poured himself another glass of brandy. “Of course, that only lasted for so long. Eventually, people forgot all about the curse. Poof, gone, even that. Say Beyond the Yellow Door nowadays, and no one can remember I worked on that.”
“What happened to the reels you were able to shoot before your backers pulled out?” Montserrat asked.
“The reels were destroyed when the backer left. And my work? It doesn’t amount to anything. All I can do is tell you stories of dead people, and of Ewers, the sorcerer who swore one day I’d be one of the greats.”
She thought he might add something else, that he was about to elaborate on what he meant, but his face turned sour and distant.
A painful silence, and then Abel chuckled. “Well, I thought I was going to tell you a fun and interesting horror story, and it seems I’ve simply told you a sad one. I’m sorry.”
Abel’s eyes looked glassy as he clasped his hands together. He reminded her of Boris Karloff in The Black Cat. His visage was both elegant and worn down, and his hands looked frail. Before, she’d been able to envision the younger Abel Urueta with a colorful handkerchief around his neck, but now that image had faded. She was left only with the impression of age and melancholy.
The grandfather clock in a corner struck the hour. Montserrat turned her head, looking at the time. She groaned.
“I should get going. I have a shift,” she said, springing up from her seat.
“Oh, boy, Momo, tonight?” Tristán asked.
“Yeah. Gotta catch the work when you can.”
They all stood up. Abel walked them to the door. He smiled at them, with a sad, tired smile. “It was nice talking to you both. You’ll come back for a visit?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said and shook the director’s hand. She meant it, too. This was seldom the case. Tristán wasn’t wrong about her social life. She preferred the solitude of the sound cabin and the headphones to having to clink glasses with people. But Urueta’s mournfulness made him more, not less, appealing to her.
Tristán accompanied her down the stairs. He jangled the apartment keys in his jacket pocket as they walked through the lobby. “Interesting fellow, isn’t he? He told me a story about Irma Dorantes that I’d never heard before. A raunchy one.”
“Were there any occultists in that one?”
“No.”
“Beyond the Yellow Door is the kind of stuff they might cover on Enigma,” Montserrat mused. “Cornelia’s still working there.”
“That’s a terrible show. I don’t understand how it’s on the air.”
“Because people watch that stuff. Nino Canún has guests talking about UFOs every damn month on his show. He and Jaime Maussan, that’s all they talk about.”
“What’s going through that devious little brain of yours?”
“Nothing,” she said, sliding her arms into her jacket and adjusting the collar.
“Liar.”
But he was right. There was something going through her mind, and that was the simple fact that Enigma had money and needed content. American money, to be exact. The backers for that show were folks from Miami who were trying to slide into the Latin American market. Telemundo was now aiming to make their own soap operas, and the folks backing Enigma were looking for the same thing: original programming.
Montserrat didn’t know how to pitch stories to TV suits, but Cornelia did. You could get a two-hour special out of a German occultist if Nino Canún could get eleven hours and ten minutes on the air showing grainy video footage of lights that were supposed to be spaceships.
Amphibian babies, little gray men who abducted women in the middle of the night, pyramids designed by people from Atlantis. That’s what people wanted, and there was money to be made in that stupid line of work. She knew it because she’d seen Cornelia’s condo and her fancy furniture. Meanwhile, editing audio at Antares wasn’t leading her anywhere, and her sister was in a tight financial spot.
She checked her wristwatch. “I’ve gotta run.”
“Wish me luck,” Tristán said as he held open the front door for her.
“What luck?”
“For the ad campaign.”
“No such thing as luck, but I’ll tell Araceli to buy you a rabbit’s foot next time she goes to the Mercado de Sonora.”
“Very funny. Have lunch with me next week. You can help me run a few lines.”
“I need to finish the project I’m working on.”
“Phone me!”
She smiled, taking three steps from his doorway, hands in her pockets. “Go get that gig, handsome!” she yelled before she trotted off to find her car.
4
Tristán’s coping tactic was erasure. He was avoiding newsstands, he had vanished the calendar from his home, he had placed the box with Karina’s photos at the back of his closet where he couldn’t get to it easily. The little picture he carried in his wallet remained there because he never took that one out, but otherwise he was determined to pretend this was an ordinary month.
He had plenty of other things to worry about, anyway. The ad campaign for the whiskey was going to another guy, and Yolanda had phoned—the line was finally working—still talking about the missing CD, but really suggesting they should meet for dinner. Well…for fucking. Tristán felt everything was a bit too raw to think about having sex so soon after their breakup, and he suspected Yolanda might want to get back together with him, because that had happened once before. That would be unfair to her since he was as lukewarm about their relationship as he had been for the past few months. They had patched things up after their first, brief separation, only for Tristán to regret it within days. He suspected the same thing would happen again if he started seeing her: breakup, together again, breakup. It was not a pattern he relished. But he was also wildly, desperately, in need of distraction.
The days felt endless, and he couldn’t depend on Montserrat to keep him distracted, even if he longed to simply sit in a corner of the editing bay while she worked her magic with the controls. But Montserrat was busy. She had shifts at her job right now, and he was in one of those downward periods when the opportunities were scarce and the tedium kept mounting. The new apartment had cable, and he kept browsing through the channels or else sat on the couch, listless. No new gigs were going to manifest like this, and yet he felt less and less inclined to even try. In his early audio days, he’d gone to the big dubbing studios at nine a.m. and lounged around, fishing for work, waiting to see if a voice actor who was scheduled that morning had missed roll call so he could take his place. It was miserable, unproductive, hard work, and he was reluctant to head down that route again. It was better to stay put, to wait for the telephone to ring, than to be reduced to those awful, mendicant sessions.
On a rather gray and dreary Thursday he managed to gather the energy to clean his living room and make his bed. He even went for a walk, and while watching pigeons bobbing for crumbs on a stretch of greenery that passed as a park, he resolved to tell Yolanda that he didn’t think it was wise that they meet for dinner, rather than offering bland replies that could be mistaken for “maybes.”