Savages

81

Elena lies in her big lonely bed and looks at a soap opera.

Watches other people’s passion.

Magda calls from school.

How are you? I’m fine. How are you? Nothing new, really …

Elena knows that the call is meant to conceal more than it reveals but she understands and even approves. Good for the girl to get out and have her own life. As much as she can, anyway, shadowed everywhere by bodyguards. She has told them to be discreet and that they are security, not spies—she does not need to know what she does not need to know.

The light from the television flickers on the grenade screen outside the window and Elena watches that for a few moments. Then the two lovers on the screen start to yell at each other and she turns her attention to that and the argument resolves in an embrace and a fiery kiss.

When the phone rings it’s Lado.

The two gueros went out with a girl and they all went back to the same house.

“A whore?” Elena asks.

“Not a professional,” Lado answers. “I don’t think.”

She looks and acts like a rich girl.

Elena hears this and wonders about Magda. Does she look and act like a rich girl? Probably so. I should have a word with her about toning it down.

“Whose girlfriend is she?” Elena asks. “Does she belong to Mr. Let’s Cut the Shit or Mr. Fuck You?”

“I don’t know,” Lado answers.

He explains his difficulty.

“You’re there now,” she says.

“Outside the house, yes.”

“And the three of them are still there?”

“Yes.”

“Interesting.”

Not to Lado. He’s bored. He has four good men with him, all mujados, paperless, untrackable, stone killers who could be back across the border before the sun goes up. The three gueros are drunk and stoned—this might be the easiest they would ever have it against the killer—

“I can do it now.”

“That means the girl, too, though.”

Lado lets his silence answer.