“Call me back, Sylvia.”
“Okay, I’ll call. I’ve gotta go now.”
“Call me.”
She hangs up the phone. She doesn’t know why she lied to him. She doesn’t know why she couldn’t talk to him. She reaches down to pick up the last of the dropped pictures and the phone rings again. She stares at it, thinking about letting it ring, thinks that it might be Cora checking on her and picks up the receiver.
“Snapshot Shack, Sylvia speaking. Can I help you?”
“In more ways than you can imagine.”
It’s Hugo Schick.
“Actually,” he continues, “I think we can very likely help each other.”
“If you’re calling about the job, Hugo—” she begins, but he cuts her off.
“Did this morning’s delivery come yet, Sylvia?”
This throws her and she looks down at the black plastic envelopes in her lap. “Yeah. About five minutes ago.”
“I’m hosting a working party tonight, Sylvia. I need for you to be there. It’s going to be a major event. I’ll be filming all evening and into the morning. I’ll be completing my meisterstück. Tonight, we finish years of work on Don Juan Triumphant. I need you to document it all, Sylvia. I need your eyes.”
“I’m not coming to the party, Hugo.”
“We’ll be taking down a wall and using both studios. Bring your equipment, Sylvia.”
“I won’t be there, Hugo.”
“You’ll want to talk to me. And if you come, I promise I’ll make time. We’ll steal away at some point.”
“I’m sorry, Hugo—”
“In this morning’s delivery. A package for a Mr. and Mrs. Jones. Not much technique, but you have to credit their imaginations. You take a long look at their pictures, Sylvia. And then you decide about tonight.”
“Look Hugo,” but he’s already hung up.
She replaces the receiver. She shuffles the envelopes and looks at each name sticker until she comes to one that reads Jones. She puts all the other envelopes to the side and holds the Jones’s in her hands. She breaks the seal and pulls out the prints. They’re 4 × 6 color shots. Of Perry. And of Candice Haskell. And they’re having dinner in a restaurant that could be Fiorello’s. And they’re walking in what looks like a public park, holding hands. And then they’re seen from a distance, through the window of some nondescript room, kissing each other. They’re touching each other. They’re on top of each other. Perry on top. Candice on top. There are shots of them on some leather couch, necking. Shots of them half-clothed, bent over Perry’s desk at Walpole & Lewis.
Shots of them in Sylvia’s bed, completely naked, sitting up, in motion, chest to chest, both sets of eyes closed as if they were straining against the force of some imminent explosion.
28
Mr. Quevedo moves down Waldstein Avenue striking the sidewalk with his cane, tapping out the beat of a song from his childhood, “La Tablada,” a tango by Vincente Greco. He’s pleased with his recollection, though the song holds no sense of nostalgia for him, no longing for an unretrievable past time. Quevedo is simply happy and surprised that his memory is not only intact at this advanced age, but seems to be somehow improving. Images he hasn’t pulled up in decades are now being screened daily behind his ever worsening eyes. The candy store on Tucuman Street where the guapos bought their mermaid playing cards. The garden in Palermo where grandfather practiced his topiary. The old-book smell in the basement of the library at Montevideo.
We go back to the past, replay the familiar in slightly different ways, with new shadings and colors that give what was once mundane a new aura of excitement, and sometimes, of meaning. There’s no harm in this reconstruction. Like everything else, its a way to occupy the hours until the true darkness falls. Certainly it’s a more pleasant diversion than trying to determine where a schizophrenic camera salesman might be hiding.
There was a time in Quevedo’s life when the more complicated transactions were the most worthwhile and when a modicum of precariousness gave an exquisite seasoning to the deal. Those were the days of long afternoons in Turkish cafés, drinking raki and not having any idea whether the briefcase being opened by a fat man in a linen suit contained a stolen Egyptian fertility totem or a 9 mm Beretta automatic. Fortunes impenetrable to the tax man were made in Istanbul’s spring and squandered by Stockholm’s autumn. Contracts were sealed with a passing of the jewel-encrusted hashish pipe and ruptured with a bundle of dynamite underneath the antique Rolls-Royce.
Now, Luis Quevedo is a marble-eyed refugee in a city abandoned by God. And his lunch hour is spent, not bribing a customs minister with naked photos of Victoria Regina, but begging for information from trust-fund artists with brass rings dangling from one or more nostrils. Lucifer never fell so far, Quevedo thinks as he unlocks and opens the door to Brody’s Adult Books.
And is yanked inside by Huck Hrabal and thrown to the ground at the feet of Felix Kinsky.
Felix slaps closed an atlas-sized volume titled The Succubus Through History and heaves it over his shoulder.
“What in the name of God?” Quevedo says and tries to stand up, but Vera Gottwald steps forward and puts a boot on the old man’s back.
“The only God worth praying to today,” Felix says, coming down on one knee to pat Quevedo’s head like that of an indulged beagle, “is named Hermann Kinsky.”
“I’ve paid this month’s service fees—”
“My visit,” Felix says, “has nothing to do with our service fees.”
Quevedo tilts his head up and squints, as if contracting the skin around his eyes will do what a half dozen marathon surgeries at Havana Eye and Ear could not. He sees the usual ghost-world, the cloud-draped, shadowy symbols that have instinctively come to represent physical reality. There are a dozen people in his store. Their posture alone is disrespectful. They are lounging on his sofa, reclining on his Persian rugs, poring over his wares like dimadolescents surveying the cheapest skin magazines on the planet.
“My uncle,” Felix says in a whisper, “is extremely disappointed in your abilities, Luis.”
Luis, from the mouth of this teenager.
“Then your uncle,” Quevedo says, unbowed, spitting out the relation, “should have come to see me.”
Felix stands up, walks to a nearby shelf, pulls down Don Juan: The Suppressed Versions and starts to open to the illustrations.
“If you knew Hermann,” he says, “you’d know that he hates to waste time. And you, Luis, have become an enormous waste of his time. And, I will add, of his money.”
Quevedo makes another attempt to rise and this time Vera Gottwald climbs on his back, straddles him like a miniature pony at a petting zoo. All the Roaches laugh and Felix says, “Be careful, Luis, she’s wearing her spurs today.”
Then he snaps his fingers and Hrabal and Krofta and Bidlo get up and wander down different aisles, begin to grab books and toss them in the air, knock them in piles to the ground.
“Please,” Quevedo cries, “some of these texts are very old, very fragile.”
Felix steps to the first-editions case, runs a finger down a row of spines and pulls out a slim, leather-bound volume.
“Magdalene Revealed,” he says to the room. “Tell me, Luis, how much would this item be worth today?”
“Please,” Quevedo repeats, only to be answered with the cringe-inducing sound of brittle paper being torn from its binding.
“Five thousand,” he yells.
Felix clucks his tongue in the hollow well of his mouth and says, “Jesus, old man, we’ve been underchanging you.”