Quevedo shakes his head. “You must tell Hermann, I am making progress in the transaction. I am very close to finding Jack Deny. I will have the photographs—”
Another page is torn free and Felix says, “Hey, idiot, I’m not an errand boy here. I’m not some goddamn answering service. I don’t know what you were supposed to get my uncle and honestly don’t give a rat’s ass.”
He walks back to the center of the store and slaps Quevedo across the forehead with the wounded book.
“You fucked up, you moron.”
“Please, Felix,” Luis stammers. “I am asking for time, I am asking for another day. Hermann is making a terrible mistake.”
“Hermann,” Felix yells, then pauses, lowers his voice, “doesn’t make mistakes. Now I don’t know what business you two were doing, but something has gone terribly wrong. My uncle thinks you’ve taken his money. He thinks you’ve failed to honor your end of an agreement. That’s like spitting in his face, Mr. Q. And you just do not spit in Hermann Kinsky’s face.”
Felix motions Vera Gottwald off her geriatric trotter and she jogs to an aisle to join Huck Hrabal. Quevedo starts to stand and Felix gives a short kick to his side, collapsing him to the ground, then grabs the old man by the suitcoat and yanks him up into a wing chair.
Kinsky walks behind the chair, reaches over and puts his thumb and forefinger on either side of Quevedo’s Adam’s apple.
“I don’t like you, Luis,” he says, pinching in on the neck. “In fact, of all my customers, I think I dislike you the most. And I’m not completely sure why that is.”
He begins to apply more pressure to either side of the throat.
“It could be that smugness, you know what I’m talking about? That nose-in-the-air bullshit coming from a guy who sells smut.”
More tension from the fingers.
A gurgle from Quevedo.
“Or maybe it’s those fucking eyes. I can never tell when you’re looking at me. How much can you really see—”
“Just do it,” Quevedo rasps. “Just take out your wire and finish it.”
Felix lets go of the throat and pats the bookseller on the head. He walks back around the chair and takes a seat on the couch, opposite Luis. Felix crosses his legs, smiles and shakes his head.
“The Schonborn,” he says, then bites his bottom lip and nods. “My uncle’s signature. He always uses the Schonborn. It never breaks.”
He starts to leaf through a book lying next to him on the couch—A Manual for Extended Ecstasy—and he mumbles, “Such a waste of energy.”
Felix closes the book and sits back. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Hrabal and Gottwald at the far end of an aisle, both staring into some thick art volume, transfixed by the image they’ve found, Huck’s arm hooking around Vera’s back to massage a breast.
Quevedo leans down, rests his elbows on his knees.
“Please, Felix,” he says, “You must speak with Hermann. If he genuinely wants the photographs, I am the only conduit.”
Felix sniffs, nods again. He leans back on the couch, seemingly exhausted.
“Luis,” he says, speaking to the ceiling, “I don’t know from any photographs. And I never use a Schonborn. It’s so,” he closes his eyes, brings a hand to his mouth, then to his chest, “primitive. Old world. You know what I’m saying? All that blood and spittle on the hands. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fine for Uncle Hermann. He’ll die with the old ways.”
He reaches inside his green suede jacket, withdraws a pistol.
“This,” he says, holding up the gun, “is the American way of business.”
And he squeezes the trigger twice, pumps two bullets into Luis Quevedo, one entering through the forehead, the other finding its target and tearing through the left eyeball. Quevedo bucks upward a bit, then the body just slumps to the right and slides down slightly, the head coming to rest at a ridiculous angle. The old man’s mouth opens but no sound emerges. Then the mouth closes, but the right eye remains open, its creamy marble interior rigid in its socket.
Felix stands, reholsters his gun, moves to the body and rifles inside Quevedo’s jacket, pocketing a wallet.
“Hrabal,” he yells down an aisle, interrupting Huck and Vera who are lost in an endless French kiss. Huck pulls away, wipes at his mouth and jogs to the front of the store.
“I want the body lost,” Felix says. “You think you can handle that? Or should I assign it to the little lady?”
Huck Hrabal meets his boss’s stare but doesn’t say a word.
Felix gives a soft snort through his nose, then turns and exits the store.
29
Sylvia sits inside this overgrown camera and starts to cry. And immediately she gets furious with herself. But the anger doesn’t stop the tears, doesn’t stop the feeling that floods into her stomach and lungs.
She throws the pictures and they rain down around her until the whole of the booth is filled with odd-angled glimpses of two people in various stages of copulation.
I left my mother’s couch for this. I pulled myself out of a world that was confined to the corner convenience store and the sound track from Rita Hayworth movies so I could be assaulted from every possible direction, so I could be confused and betrayed and paranoid. So I could sit in the vault of film and batteries and disposable cameras with my ankles covered by glossy images of my lover lying down with someone else.
And then the thought occurs to her that there’s no way the lab would have developed these prints. There are strict guidelines for this kind of thing. They’ll print an exposed breast or behind, but no full-frontal nudity and absolutely no sexual activity of any kind.
She fishes around on the floor, picking up and discarding envelopes till she comes to the Jones’s package. She turns it over and looks at the order blank where instructions for developing and pricing are located. But the order boxes are blank. The only thing written on the envelope is Mr and Mrs Jones. And it’s not in any handwriting she recognizes.
So the package didn’t come from the normal lab. Schick managed to include it with the regular delivery.
Maybe these pictures are what Leni wants to warn her about tonight. And maybe Leni can explain why Schick wants to do this.
The phone starts to ring again and Sylvia starts to cry again. She turns out the light in the booth and lets herself sob. She misses her mother with an intensity that feels like it will take over, like it will become the only emotion, the only sensation she’ll ever feel. She thinks of Ma, alone on that first night, realizing her husband is not coming back, that he’s dead or that he’s run off, whichever story is correct, it doesn’t matter. And for the first time Sylvia understands the true weight of that kind of realization, the possibility that in the instant that fact of loss takes hold of you and lodges, permanently, intractably, into the deepest marrow of your bones, you could turn against life and movement. You could turn against yourself. She can picture her mother, she can see her, so brutally clearly, twenty-five years ago, looking in on the daughter, in bed, in the dimness of that tiny room, Ma staring at the form beneath the quilting, Ma in the doorjamb, framed, backlit, motionless, a definitive picture of a woman alone, fighting a kind of half-apprehended terror that she senses might never go away, looking down on the responsibility of a child, of Sylvia, in front of her, filling her vision. And all of Ma’s innocence, her sense of promise and hope, just dead, just petrified in the emptiness of the rooms behind her. How did she go on for the rest of this imagined night?