“Then Marisa Montero is Alma,” Montserrat said.
López had gone back to nibbling his sandwich and bobbed his head.
“Is that even possible? How would she have managed it?” Montserrat asked.
The cat was now rubbing itself against Tristán’s legs, and he picked it up and began scratching its head.
“Ewers didn’t give enough credit to some of the people around him,” López said. “He didn’t think Alma was capable or smart enough, but she’s crafty. Of course, he didn’t think I’d amount to much, either, and I was not stabbed in the back ten times.”
“You were the one who told Alma he was cheating on her. Why?”
“Why not?”
“Wasn’t Ewers your friend?”
López brushed crumbs off his shirt. “Ewers had no friends. Only followers.”
A thought occurred to Montserrat, and her fingers danced upon the top of the book poking out from her purse. “Alma didn’t kill him. You both did.”
López tossed his dirty glass in the sink.
“I need to nap,” he muttered as he elbowed Montserrat away and went back toward the living room, parting the bead curtains, making them rattle. She followed him, moving quickly; her leg ached again. Damn polluted, cold Decembers. They wreaked havoc on her body. The stress probably didn’t help.
“Why did you do it?”
“I’m tired. At my age, spell casting is not easy.”
“I asked why.”
López spun around and stared at her. “I saved your life today.”
“I’d like to know the reason.”
López sat down on the rattan couch. The center table was also rattan, as were two matching chairs with a pattern of palm trees on the cushions. Montserrat leaned against the back of a chair but did not sit down, watching the old man.
“The reason won’t make any difference.”
“Indulge me,” she said.
He sighed. “Alma was a great actress in her day, but by the time Ewers came along her career was finished. He appealed to her vanity, but what’s the harm in that? We all want to be admired, once in a while.
“Ewers promised things. Wealth, fame, fortune. To Alma he promised her lost beauty and her youth. The spell he was designing was supposed to achieve that. He lied. The spell was for him. He’d weave it on film with his runes and his special alchemy of sound and movement. And then, when the film had been screened and hundreds of people had seen this glorious movie, he’d commit suicide in a special ritual and be reborn a healthy man. I told Alma his true plan, and she was the one who stabbed him.”
“And then, she did what?”
“She must have used the film stock for her own rituals. I don’t know and did not ask. Magic does not easily dissipate, it lingers in the air,” López said, raising a hand, his fingers tracing a beam of light that illuminated a section of the floor. Tiny dust particles floated in the sunbeam.
“Like radiation,” López continued. “Or a recurring infection, I suppose.”
“Then Alma benefited from this but everyone else was cursed?” Tristán asked. He was also standing behind a wicker chair, in imitation of Montserrat. Perhaps he feared to sit down. In his arms he still carried the cat, which was beginning to wriggle, impatient.
“Not everyone. Just as radiation may give someone cancer, it could leave the person standing next to them in good enough shape.”
“You haven’t said why you wanted him dead,” Montserrat said.
“Because I knew who he was.”
The cat tried to bite Tristán. He put it down, and it ran off to a dark corner of the room. Montserrat sat down on the chair and placed her purse on her lap.
“When I met Wilhelm Ewers I was forty-one years old. Clarimonde and Abel were still practically kids, but I was on my way out. Abel was not even thirty yet. I’d been writing since I was sixteen with no luck. I worked on minor projects, polished a few lines here and there. I earned most of my money as a copy editor, which is what I still do to this day to pay the bills. José López the copy editor and Romeo Donderis the writer. I thought it sounded more distinguished.”
“But then you did get the gig writing for Beyond the Yellow Door, and you worked on other films before and after that,” Montserrat replied.
“Sure. I almost wrote a movie for Karloff when he was shooting flicks in Mexico. Low budgets and low salaries, that was my life. It was Alma who approached me for this gig. She was interested in astrology, as was I. Magic practices, the occult, the whole thing. I’d been fascinated by it for a few years. She called me over to her apartment, and Wilhelm was there. He shook my hand, we discussed his theories on runes and magic, and he decided I was the man he needed to co-write this script. I had talent, that’s what he said.”
“As a screenwriter or as a magician?” Montserrat asked.
“Both, according to him. It was fine in the beginning. The job paid well. No surprise, Alma was putting a nice amount of money into the production, and she signed checks without wincing. The team was pleasant, and I had worked with Abel before, so there were no issues with him. He was a bright, young director and Clarimonde, who was hanging around him all the time during the shoot, was a delightful girl. My conversations with Ewers were invigorating, his theories, although wild, were interesting, and our arguments were intelligent. There were two small matters that soured our relationship. I noticed one almost immediately; the other it took me a long time to accept.
“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.”