Читать книгу Panopticon - David Bajo - Страница 8

Someone wants to take our picture,” said Blue Demon, nodding toward the space behind Klinsman.

Klinsman turned on his bar stool, Blue leaned in, and Margarita Valdez snapped the photograph. With a sideways bend in her wrist, she waved Klinsman out of the frame and then took a careful portrait of Blue Demon.

“Take off your mask,” she said, lifting her chin.

“Then you won’t know who I am,” replied Blue.

“Besides,” said Klinsman, “the rules are clear. You’d have to wrestle him. Pin him and then unveil him. Dig your fingers under his jaw.”

“It’s never been done,” said Blue. “Not even Santo has beaten me that badly.”

Rita looked at Klinsman instead, her black camera, with its fluted portrait lens, held aside but at the ready. She gazed oddly at him, lingering and with a hidden smile, as though catching him cheating, approving of it. She looked pretty whenever she did that, curvy, barely gathered. Her mouth formed a perfect ellipse, divided equally, full, a kind of emerging red. Her eyebrows were almost straight, never arcing, but lithe like something searching upward, or ready to search upward, above smooth and sleepy lids. A look of disdain appeared always atrigger in her eyes and mouth. Her black hair was gathered in a desperate failing ponytail, for her work, and this exposed her face to her subjects, its olive shape and color behind the free and springy strands.

When Klinsman and Rita turned in unison to address Blue Demon, they found him gone. Klinsman scanned the floor.

“There he is,” said Rita.

He followed her gaze upward to the screen over the bar. Back in the Atlantis movie, Blue Demon stood with a woman at a cocktail party, planning something over martinis, same suit, same flyingsaucer tie. Klinsman and Rita gazed at the screen together, necks bent like friends watching after-school TV. They got into the scene together, feeling their jobs slipping away behind them, their jobs ending after seven years. Seven days left. What were Blue and his striking accomplice planning?

“Why do the women take off their masks?” Rita asked as she and Klinsman watched together, drank their beers. “Why doesn’t she wear her mask with her business suit? Like him? Why only the men?”

“Because the men are beastly under those masks.”

“That guy we just talked to wasn’t beastly. He was pretty. You could tell.”

“He was Del Zamora,” Klinsman told her. “I’m sure he was.”

“Why are the men beastly?”

“Because they’re actually wrestlers. Not actors. Which also explains keeping the masks on.”

“They look like barrels wearing suits, with arms and legs.”

“The women don’t,” said Klinsman as they continued to watch. The scene hadn’t moved. Blue Demon and the woman were still chatting, their martinis unsipped. This was typical of these movies, the way they droned domestically between sudden outbursts of wrestling. “The women all are beautiful. So they take off their masks.”

“They all look like Edwige Fenech. Mexican Edwige Fenechs. That actress in your Uncle Mir’s giallo collection. How does she get her hair that high? How does she get her chiches that high? They’re like rocket ships.”

Rita scooped up her breasts and looked down at herself. Her camera clunked to her side, slung over her lens pouch. Her shirt was caught up in the straps of the pouch and camera, exposing the slope and curl of her waist above her jeans. Klinsman felt a sway inside him, seaweed bending.

“Can you come to San Ysidro with me?” he asked her. “After you’re finished here? I know it’s late. But I think it’s important. It might be a story. Of some kind. I need pictures. Good pictures. I need you to see.”

“Sure,” she said, beginning to compose that look for him. “I’m finished here. Where we going?”

“San Ysidro Motel. Room 9.”

Her eyebrows leaned upward, her lips did something, fought gently against something, approved.