“Only if we activate them,” said Klinsman. “Like you just did.”
Oscar shook his head. “I didn’t activate the cameras. I only activated the screens, switched view options. The cameras are always on, Klinsman. Always, because they are really just lenses. Lenses with tiny filaments, nerves, taking in, sending out.”
Oscar was obsessed with secret apertures, the detritus of abandoned lenses, cheap and random eyes left by amateurs and pros, voyeurs and snoops of all types, to catch what they could. He liked finding them while researching stories. He liked collecting the newest kinds at tech conventions he covered.
Klinsman scanned the desks. He noticed one screen still black, or maybe gone black.
“One isn’t,” he told Oscar.
Oscar’s gaze followed Klinsman’s to the blank screen.
“Number 11,” said Klinsman.
“Rita.”
11.
What does it mean to call someone salamandro?” he asked Oscar as they watched the fifteen remaining screens, one at a time, go into squiggles and patterns of saver mode.
“I hear it sometimes around the campuses. State, UC. It’s new. A salamandro’s a mozo spending too much time in their cave, under rocks, watching their screen. Turning white from it. Even if you’re like me.” Oscar rubbed his jaw, pushed his dark skin. “Why? Someone call you salamandro? One of the Luchadors last night?”
“No.” Klinsman nodded to desk 11. “Rita used it. I think that’s the word she used. Her Spanish is too fast. She was scolding a kid on the trolley. A guy watching her too much. Dressed strange. Like a waiter from the ’50s. When I picture him, I see him in black and white.”
“Rita used it?” Oscar lifted his chin, scowled a little. “How was she with the Luchadors?”
“Okay. Her usual good. Having people pose, then taking shots in between. The real ones. Mixing. You forget what she is, even with all that equipment hanging from her.”
“Yeah,” said Oscar. “But I mean was she different with any of the Luchadors? Was she keen on any of them?”
“Maybe,” replied Klinsman. “One of them. I’m pretty sure it was Del Zamora.”
“Zamora’s not helping Culture Clash anymore.”
“He was last night. I’m sure it was him, behind the mask.”
“You’re seeing things,” said Oscar.
“I am seeing things. All the Luchadors seemed different.” “Different how?”
“Even more mixed into the crowd. More than usual.” Klinsman pictured Santo thickly dancing with the club women. Remembered X-25 in her orange pantsuit, barely shaking her hips, scanning the room. “More in,” he explained to Oscar. “Blurred in. Like they were sucking you into the screen with them. Almost.”
Oscar looked intently at Klinsman, tasted something.
“Why?” asked Klinsman.
“Nothing.”
Klinsman tilted, watched his image fragment across the screens. Then he looked back to Oscar.
“Your three. What are your three tags?”
“The clothes mountain out near Tecate. An old story like yours. Then the Juárez benefit up in La Brea. Again. But I did ask Gina for that one.”
“And the third?”
“Gina didn’t give me one. I’m waiting for the third shoe to drop. It’s put me on edge a little. About everything. Rita. You even. And with Gina being gone like this. Staying gone. What’s she up to, you know? What’s she up to?”
The desk screens began blinking into sleep mode, going blank in perfect order like dominoes.
They went outside to climb the landing, one floor above the late-morning traffic of El Cajon Boulevard. The T-shaped North Park sign spread its arms, looking quaint and somehow stunned by what had grown around it over the decades. Klinsman loved all such signs along the Boulevard, their grand arching, their neon script, the crumbling stucco of their bases, like fragments of aqueduct in ancient cities.
Oscar squinted at the sun over the eastern hills. An ocean breeze this far inland made the sky feel even more blue.
“It’ll be even nicer in the borderland,” he said.
“The strawberries are out.” Klinsman visored his hand above his eyes, mildly watching the Boulevard, counting good car, bad car.
“But forget about the strawberries,” said Oscar. “For once, Aaron. Forget about the strawberries and all the things you used to see and taste and smell down there. Go down there and try some things. One thing that always works for me. Get things wrong. When you talk to the clerk, get things wrong. People love to be right, love to correct.”
“Any clerk at the Motel San Ysidro would be all over that, Oscar.”
Oscar shook his head, bit his lower lip. “Even if that happens, keep going. If he’s on to you, watched too many cop shows, then he’ll slip into his role. Really. It’s even better when you get them to slip into their role. Direct them. Milk them.”
“Want to come along?” Klinsman asked.
“No. I got my old piece. That mountain of brand-new clothes, last year’s lines, piled into an old airplane hangar. You buy Chanel and Prada and Gap and Kmart, all mixed together, by the pound. You go in like a miner.” He exaggerated his accent on the brand names, making the last one seem the best prize.
Klinsman looked down at his own clothes, fingered a fauxpearl button on his Western shirt, thumbed the silhouette of a cowboy galloping past cactus across a sunset.
“Maybe I’ll find something there for you,” said Oscar. He put his hand on Klinsman’s shoulder. “You do fine.”
In the Motel San Ysidro parking lot workers were stacking mattresses from the rooms, tilting them together on end like giant books. They had taken nightstands and bureaus from most of the rooms and arranged them in stacks for hauling, fitting the cheap matching units together, snug as Lincoln Logs. It unnerved Klinsman to see the mattresses and furniture laid out that way in the morning sun, years of intimacy and secrecy, night stuff, whispers, mechanically exposed to the day. A man from a city truck was spray painting green and orange marks on the asphalt.
“What’s going on?” Klinsman asked him.
The guy wore his yellow helmet at an absurd slant, embarrassed maybe. He kept looking down at his work, at the measure of his strokes. The paint hissed, then flicked, hissed, then flicked.
“Getting set for a teardown.” He glanced at Klinsman—blue eyes under hard black brows, deep laugh lines that only made it seem he was done laughing forever—then he back-stepped to his next target on the asphalt.
Klinsman stepped with him. “Think I could check one of the rooms? I think I left something last night.”
The guy shrugged and sprayed two lines, one green, one orange, deftly working the toggle switch on his paint torch. “Most of the doors are open. But if it was worth anything, you won’t find it now.”
Klinsman found the door to room 9 wide open, a yellow bar of sunlight across the colorless carpet. One of the movers resting on some stacked furniture briefly eyed Klinsman. Still wearing his clothes from the night before, his TJ Western shirt untucked and wrinkled, his hair dirty and mussed, Klinsman must have looked the part, a drifter wishing to retrieve his wallet, hoping desperately that woman hadn’t stolen it, hadn’t wanted him for that. Not just for that.
Inside, the room was