Klinsman turned back to the bar and smoothed the cool lip of his beer bottle over his eyelids. He stared down at the brass bar top and noticed a fingerprint, neat and perfect, in the center of a water ring. The fingerprint was long, including the whorls below the second joint. The imprint of the woman who had rested so primly, so intentionally on the bed in room 9 flickered inside the hollow of his camera-self along with the rest of the images he had just gathered. She swayed like thin, dark seaweed between the figures of the Luchadors, her hips nudging them, her hair curling around their necks, her spiral fists up before her breasts, dancer, boxer.
When he looked up and faced the bar mirror, he saw that one of the Luchadors had taken a seat beside him. He wore a Blue Demon mask and a dark business suit with a thin ‘50s tie. The tie had a silk-screened flying saucer and a ringed planet on it. The Luchador was trim, not like the burly Blue Demon from Channel 12, and the elegant bones of his face were outlined on his silk mask. His lips were full, pushed into lushness by the blue mask.
“You’re Del Zamora,” said Klinsman.
The Luchador stared back with no reply.
“I didn’t know you were with these guys again.” Klinsman tilted his beer but did not sip. “I saw you with them a long time ago. Here. You’ve done well since then. I saw you onstage at the Globe. And in Searchers 2.0.”
The Luchador nodded toward Klinsman’s Tecate. “How much you pay for that?”
Klinsman eyed the bottle as though assessing its full value.
“Four fifty. Plus tip.”
“Remember when you could get it in Baja for fifty cents?” asked Del. In the oblong opening of his mask his lips looked as soft and thick as sea anemones, supple and articulate with the tide.
“In Tecate,” replied Klinsman, “during feria they’d pour it in the streets. When I was a kid I loved the smell so much. The town reeked of it, hops baking on the sidewalks.”
“It looked green in the sunlight,” said Del, squeezing a tiny smile.
Klinsman cocked his head, stroked his jaw. “But you’re not from there. Or here. You’re not even a real Mexican. You’re mostly Apache or something. From New Mexico. Way back in Repo Man was when they turned you into a Chicano.”
“I’m not Zamora.”
“You are,” said Klinsman. “I have no doubt. The mask only convinces me more. Highlights your features. Your voice.”
“I’m Blue Demon,” he said, lips moist with the truth.
3.
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.
4.
Outside, the downtown air smelled of the bay, a barnacled hull. Rita and Klinsman shouldered their way through the 5th Avenue crowd to catch the southbound trolley. She got slightly ahead of him, always the photographer, always in front. She wore black boots, heeled to give her some height and vantage. Otherwise all her subjects would look nose-up and arrogant, she claimed. The black boots and jeans made her look cholo. “Chola,” she would always say, correcting him. Then she would push her hip toward him, lifting, twisting a little, pinch a little flesh. “La la Cholitas. Never quite down enough for the clothes we wear.”
She looked back to him as they neared the trolley. “We can take my car.”
“You’ve been drinking.”
“Only beer. And whatever was in those little green glasses the wrestlers were serving.”
“I hate cars,” he said.
“I hate the trolley this time of night.