“Okay, maybe he appealed to Clarimonde’s ‘pure’ German genes and such. But you do not look German,” Montserrat said.
“No, I don’t. Ewers told me perhaps I descended from Aztec royalty, to please me and himself. An idiocy.”
“And so? What happened?”
“What happened was that I was good at magic. I’d tried it before, it was a hobby, and working with Ewers it became obvious I had talent. He might have liked Abel and Clarimonde better than me, but I was twice as good as them. So, for a while, I simply enjoyed my job, enjoyed the connections I was making, enjoyed Ewers’s praise. I accepted that he had…flaws, but that didn’t bother me. Not anymore.”
López’s mouth turned down into an ugly grimace, and he shook his head. “We were finishing the picture when I accepted the second truth about Wilhelm Ewers: that he had no limits.”
The cat had wandered back toward the rattan couch and now jumped on it, giving Tristán an irritated look. López petted the animal absentmindedly.
“The spell for the movie had complicated components. There were six runes that were to appear in the credits at the beginning of the film and then at the end. There was the silver nitrate and the dubbing that would have to happen in post-production. Ewers also mentioned blood, to cement the runes, as a sort of binding agent. We killed a chicken every two weeks we were shooting, one for each rune. Then there was the last rune that would flash on screen. I was the one who had obtained the chickens for the other ceremonies we had, so I asked Ewers if I should go to the market, get the chickens. He told me there was no need for it: for the final rune we’d use the blood of a man.”
“Like your leeches?” Tristán asked.
“No. He said there were many homeless people in the city and no one would miss one from a corner. I thought he might be joking. Ewers exaggerated and lied to suit his purposes. But then he looked me straight in the eye and said: ‘You knew it would come to this.’？” López took a deep breath. “He was right, I did know.”
Tristán, who had been standing up until this moment, sat down and gripped the arms of his chair. “He was going to murder someone?”
“I believe he’d killed before and he’d kill again.”
“He did, in Europe,” Montserrat said, remembering Ewers’s dead associate, from whom he’d purloined documents and a fresh identity. “It was in his letter. He thought it gave him power.”
Before that, there had been Ewers’s father, who had been left behind to perish. Ewers didn’t write of other deaths in his letter, but it didn’t mean he hadn’t killed more people. He thought himself better than everyone else, an ?bermensch surrounded by untermenschen. Across the ages she had read something cold and calculating in his gaze: only I matter, that was what Ewers’s photos said.
“You didn’t mention a murder,” Tristán told her. “You carry his book in your purse, you pin his photos to your wall—”
“I need to understand,” Montserrat said angrily.
“What? That he was a murderous, mean little man who thought the Holocaust was cool?”
No, the spell. She wanted to understand how the pieces of Ewers’s magic fit together, the same as she might want to know how you transferred data between sequencers or how you record a FSK sync tone.
There was an awkward silence. Tristán sat there, smoldering, while López simply looked tired.
“How could you be sure Alma would kill him?” Montserrat asked instead of replying to Tristán.
“We planned it. The whole of it,” López said. “He was sick and tired at that point, and he depended on me for several tasks. It wasn’t that difficult. Alma was the one who did the actual stabbing. After it happened, she was supposed to destroy the film, but she did not. I did not know immediately what had taken place, but a few years later I heard her niece was handling her affairs. A niece I had never heard of before, and when I saw Marisa, I realized the truth.”
“Did she pay you off so you’d stay quiet?”
“No. I think she fears me a little because I knew the full story of what happened to Ewers. Now Clarimonde, I’m sure she has guessed what happened, but I have my wards, and Alma must have even stronger ones. After all, she gained a great measure of Ewers’s power. That is why she must be interested in you.”
“God. You two are giving me a headache,” Tristán protested. “We don’t have anything to do with this. Can’t you cut us loose?”
“But you do have something to do with it, Spider-Man. You caused a second bigger explosion, remember? It must be affecting her, too. Before it was only Alma siphoning off that radiation, now you opened a valve and we’re all soaked in it. Clarimonde and Abel helped Ewers cast his spell on film, Alma and I killed the bastard, and you two allowed him to wake up and start bothering us again. You made yourself part of the story, buddy.”
“Fuck me, just what I needed. Some good old thermonuclear black magic,” Tristán muttered, then he turned his head slightly and looked down, as if he were interested in examining the arms of the chair.
It was like splicing a new piece of film onto a reel, then running it smoothly through a projector. In the beginning of this tale there had been Ewers and his associates, but now Tristán and she had made their way into the picture. Their voices had been used to dub the movie. That performance couldn’t be erased. She wondered about the other players in the film, the ones who had come before them.
“You never told Abel the truth about Alma?” Montserrat asked. “That she’d used Ewers’s film for her own purposes?”
López laughed and shook his head. “No. I made a mistake, telling him that Clarimonde was in love with Ewers and she was cheating on him. I implied I’d told Alma about it, too. He was furious. He said I’d ruined his picture. He said that was why Alma had shut us down. Can you believe it? We didn’t talk for years. A while back we got in touch. He was a very lonely man.”
Montserrat remembered Abel Urueta, inviting them into his apartment, showing them his trinkets, asking them to accompany him on errands. Yeah, she supposed he’d been lonely. Lonely and desperate enough to reach deep into the past and attempt one last spell, one last shot at greatness. The only problem was he had never informed them what he was getting them into.
“You haven’t said why you saved us,” Montserrat told López.
“This spell never ended. But I intend to put an end to it now,” López said firmly.
“Well, no, it didn’t end. Ewers’s death did something to the film, didn’t it?” Montserrat mused. “You thought by killing him you’d be rid of the man, but instead you made sure he stuck around. You said his magic was never this powerful when he was alive, but now…I mean, it’s blood magic. That’s what you did. He didn’t kill himself, but you offered a sacrifice anyway.”
“We didn’t plan it that way,” López said. “But yes, and now you’ve both made it even worse. We need to get rid of him permanently.”