“I’m trying this nicotine patch, and all it does is piss me off,” Cornelia said as she leaned forward and set her elbows on the table. “What about you? I was going to phone you last month but then I got stuck with an assignment and how have you been?”
Montserrat informed Cornelia that she was doing fine, and Cornelia replied by beginning a long story about a mole on her back that she was having checked. Conversations with Cornelia were never linear. They diverged, her thoughts doubling back then steamrolling forward, but she was a decent friend and a good production assistant.
Finally, Montserrat was able to guide Cornelia toward the topic of Enigma and their current episode lineup.
“My hours at Antares are getting cut all the time.”
“I told you if you trained that kid, soon they’d have him doing your job in no time. Never teach anyone anything! How long have you been there? For years and years! It’s because you’re not in the union. Leeches. That’s what these people are.”
“If the owner even heard the word ‘union’ he’d fire us on the spot. Which brings me to Enigma: I have an idea for an episode.”
“Finally! I told you to get out of the sound business. It pays peanuts. What’s the idea, then?”
“I met this director, Abel Urueta. He used to make horror movies back in the day and turns out he worked on a film that was written by an occultist: Wilhelm Ewers.”
“They don’t ring a bell,” Cornelia said, scratching the spot on her arm where she wore her nicotine patch.
Montserrat talked about Urueta’s filmography and explained she could get an interview with him. By the time their food arrived, and Cornelia began picking at her chicken, Montserrat suspected she was fighting a losing battle.
“I thought you said you might have something for me if I came up with ideas for the show,” Montserrat said. “Get into production, you said.”
“Yes, but I was thinking something more like finding the Mexican Amityville. Haunted houses. Lloronas and chaneques. Jaime Maussan has people talking about energy lines, and the cover of Conozca Más is about the fate of Atlantis. You have an unknown director and a dead German writer.”
“And A?o Cero says we can discover the secrets of ancient civilizations by mediating with a crystal pyramid. My story doesn’t sound any crazier than that.”
“That’s the problem. It doesn’t sound as meaty, at least not the way you’re selling it. You’re making it all sound very proper and elegant.”
“It’s a retrospective about a lost film.”
“Yeah, and the Nazi occultist is the interesting part. So, what else do you know about him?”
“Not much,” Montserrat admitted, although she’d spent plenty of hours daydreaming about Beyond the Yellow Door.
“There’s your problem,” Cornelia said, waving her fork at Montserrat. “You need to get more info on the guy.”
“Could you give me an advance on this? That is, if I began the research,” she said, feeling that tickle of excitement she hadn’t felt in a long while with a project. At Antares they kept her on a leash.
“If you want to work for the show, you need to give me more than that. Can you sit Urueta down for a pre-interview? I can tape the formal interview in the studio, but a pre-interview would help me figure out what we have here. And show notes, research. Otherwise, it’s too difficult to gauge the material.”
“You want him on camera?”
“Yes. Nothing fancy. If it looks meaty, our going rate for freelancers is good, but without some proof of concept I can’t do anything. It’s the way the system works.”
“I know. Leeches,” Montserrat said, balling her napkin tight.
“Oh, come on. Don’t make that face! I don’t make the rules, if I could, I’d pay you ten advances. You think about it, all right? Otherwise, we could wait and see if anything opens up in the sound department.”
Fat chance. Montserrat knew she could be waiting for years for that. On Friday, Montserrat checked Riera’s Historia Documental del Cine Mexicano and searched for information on Urueta’s movies. There wasn’t anything in the eight-volume compendium about Beyond the Yellow Door, not that she expected there to be, but there was no harm in double-checking. She phoned the Cineteca and asked if she could drop by the archives and look at their fact sheets and press clippings for Urueta’s other films. She typed up a page of notes with whatever she remembered about Urueta and what she’d heard about Beyond the Yellow Door. She had no idea who had worked on the production aside from Urueta and the screenwriter, Romeo Donderis. She’d check his filmography at the Cineteca, too.
On Sunday, she met Urueta and Tristán at an agreed-upon intersection, and they walked to the market.
Montserrat didn’t haggle and she was afraid of pickpockets; therefore the market had little appeal for her. Tristán, on the other hand, seemed eager to explore the stalls. He was wearing his trademark sunglasses and a loose plaid jacket. He looked bohemian, which was fine. There were all kinds of people at the Lagunilla, from the homeless to a ritzier clientele hungrily searching for a bargain. Some of the goods sold were illegal, and when the police felt like it, they raided the place. But not that day.
The three of them looked at nineteenth-century chairs and plastic Barbie dolls with their hair in disarray. There was fayuca and genuine porcelain. Paintings of idealized adelitas sat next to posters of José José. Urueta was concentrating on watches. When he found an item that interested him, he took his glasses from his front shirt pocket and examined the item, then stuffed the glasses back in their place. He repeated this motion a half dozen times, sometimes nodding to himself and muttering under his breath.
“I sell them in the Zona Rosa,” he explained. “There’s always a clientele for watches, and I know a guy who is good at fixing them.”
They walked past a stall full of Nazi memorabilia. It had jackets emblazoned with red armbands and swastikas, Nazi war medals, old pistols, helmets, even flags and an Adolf Hitler doll. Montserrat stopped and stared at the display. She supposed it hadn’t been that hard for Hitler’s followers to make it to America, not with greedy people willing to harbor them. Some of those mass murderers must have been flush with Jewish loot, with the belongings of the poor Romani they tried to exterminate, and the coins stolen from the corpses of disabled people. And so they’d come to the Americas, to be greeted with open arms by Perón and others like him.
“You told us Ewers might have been a Nazi,” Montserrat said as Urueta stood next to her, a blue plastic market bag dangling from his wrist. He was carrying a couple of watches he’d bought in it. “Was he an agent in Mexico, like the actress you mentioned?”
“I still find it hard to believe there were actual Nazi spies in Mexico,” Tristán said, brushing a lock of hair away from his face. Montserrat saw Urueta and herself reflected in the dark lenses.
“They had their sympathizers. Ever heard of the Gold Shirts? They were around in the thirties, and even later. Rubén Moreno Padrés organized two anti-Semitic meetings right here in La Lagunilla back in 1940. They handed out a lot of leaflets that year, accusing the president of allowing Jewish immigrants into the country and leading it to its ruin. But I can tell you Ewers didn’t join flashy demonstrations of that sort, and he wasn’t with any particular group. It was more…well, it stretches farther back. Ewers was into runes and magic and film. All of it, combined.”