“Me, yes. Who else?” he replied, pulling out a chair in turn and sitting next to her. “Because I care, okay?”
Montserrat nodded. She dropped the envelope and folded her hands in her lap, looking down, not glancing at him.
“I’m scared, Momo. Real scared.”
“I know. Doesn’t mean you should be such a dick.”
“Doesn’t mean you should be a dick to me either, yet here we are.”
Tristán bumped his shoe with hers. Like they did when they were kids, telegraphing their thoughts, grinning as they planned mischief in his mother’s kitchen. He smiled. It was such a warm and friendly smile; the first time she’d seen it she’d been infatuated with him. A second was all it took.
“What time are we going to see Clarimonde Bauer?” he asked.
“I didn’t mean…you don’t have to go with me, Tristán.”
“What else do I have to do? It’s not like my phone is ringing off the hook with calls from producers.”
“You were right. It could be dangerous.”
“Oh? Did you find something else in that book?”
“Well, no. Not really.”
“Then we’ll go—oh, shit,” Tristán said. His beeper had gone off. He unclipped it from his belt and checked the message. “Can I use your phone?”
“Sure.”
He promptly picked up the receiver and dialed. Montserrat ventured into the kitchen to fetch a glass of water and give him a little privacy. When she came back, he was standing looking thoughtful in the middle of the living room.
“Was that about the photo shoot?”
“No. It was Marisa Montero. She said she wants to meet with me this evening. She’s worried about her aunt. I said I’d see her at a restaurant near her home. Somewhere public sounded like the best idea. I don’t trust her. Could be she slices me with a machete like she’s Jason Voorhees’s mom if no one’s looking. Sluts like me always get killed midway through the picture.”
“How would you know? You closed your eyes all through Friday the 13th, you coward.”
“I kept them open when people were getting naked.”
“Liar.”
“What, were you watching me?”
“Only when you flinched.”
“That would be ninety percent of the movie,” he said, but he did it with a laugh, and she shook her head, smiling back at him.
“You’ll require a charm. I’ll show you how to make one.”
“A charm?” he asked blankly.
“We need a handkerchief.”
“What about all the stuff I bought? Won’t any of that help?”
She looked at the candles, powders, and soaps Tristán had brought with him. “No. You can’t buy magic for twenty pesos and expect it to work.”
“Does Ewers say that?”
He did, and he said plenty more. She’d found a certain comfort in the pages from his book. She liked the idea of systematization; an orderly world appealed to her nature. She could understand his methodic outlook—and there was a method to it, it was only that at first she’d been unable to grasp it. Tristán blossomed in chaos, but Montserrat liked control. Zeroing in on the details, looking at life through a macro lens. Ewers shared this tendency.
“Something like that. Magic is willpower made tangible,” she explained. “You must immerse yourself in it, so to speak. The warding charm I made is easy enough. Prick your finger and draw a rune. Or well, a word, I guess.”
“What is it, a rune or a word?” he asked, frowning.
“Ewers used runes, but I used words. I think you could use a stick figure and it might work.”
“Isn’t that like changing ingredients in recipes? Why would it work?”
“Why not? Don’t you personalize recipes? Give them your own touch?”
“Sure, but you don’t cook. When you do, it’s ghastly. Except for the meatballs,” he said, spinning one of the soaps he had bought between his hands.
“Be serious, Tristán.”
“I am serious.”
“The runes meant something personal to Ewers. But they don’t mean anything to us. They were his secret code.”
“Like what, like when we invented our own language in the fourth grade?” Tristán asked, tipping his chair back.
Montserrat stared at him. “What?”
“Don’t tell me you forgot. We invented our own language so we could pass messages back and forth. It was fine until Miss Mireles caught us sending each other notes and gave us detention. We spent one month sitting outside the principal’s office, writing down ‘I will pay attention in class’ in our notebooks.”
Of course. They’d always played like this. At one point, they’d gotten hold of a pair of walkie-talkies and tried to talk to each other at night.
“Do you remember any of the alphabet we invented?”
“Sure, some, I guess,” Tristán said, scratching his head. “Why would that be useful?”
“Because that was our language, yours and mine alone. Same as the runes were Ewers’s. Here,” she said, tearing out a piece of paper from the notebook she’d been using and handing him a pen. “Write something.”
“All right. Um…there.”
Montserrat looked at the letters he’d scribbled in blue ink. It was a crude, silly alphabet. A half-moon represented the “t” and a square with an X in the middle was the letter “m.” They hadn’t used it for ages. But she could still read it.
“Tristán and Montserrat,” he said, tapping the page. “And we abbreviate it…here. You and me, like that.”
Their initials. They’d carved that into their chairs at school and doodled it on random bits of paper, signing off their messages this way. The half-moon, filled in, and the square with the X. A line beneath each symbol served as a rudimentary flourish. It was the first signature they ever drew. The code for me and you.
“Okay, write the word ‘shield,’？” she said.
19
The restaurant Marisa Montero selected was a Spanish venue close to her home. Montserrat parked across the street and stayed behind the wheel, as if she were the driver of a getaway vehicle. Tristán felt more Cantinflas than James Bond, despite his sharp outfit. The vision of Karina remained fresh in his mind. He couldn’t shake it off and had smoked two cigarettes before they parked and he stepped out. The charm he’d made, following Montserrat’s instructions, lay heavy in his pocket.
Montserrat had been correct. He was not the right person to conduct interrogations. But they’d both decided maybe this time his charisma might be more effective than Montserrat’s bluntness. Besides, Marisa had called him and made no mention of having Montserrat at their meeting.
Tristán straightened his jacket and stepped into the joint. It was the kind of place that sold overpriced cabrito al horno and imported wines. Marisa had a table at the back. The lighting in the restaurant, or perhaps the makeup she wore that evening, did her no favors. He’d thought her fiftyish when they’d first met, but now he calculated she was edging close to sixty. The blouse she wore was a pale blue, the shoulder pads on her navy suit jacket were quite large, like something Joan Crawford would have worn in her heyday. Or else it was the power suit women used to favor a few years before when the look had come back in vogue.