be the case.
Some of the copy was about Del Zamora, and he knew Gina would edit it even if it somehow passed fact check. So he typed one more line to be cut: You know this woman beneath you.
When he came to the press floor first and early like this, he fell easily into believing he was in the true heart of this city, removed from the tourist spectacle of the Gaslamp and Old Town. It was part of Gina’s design for the Review, for all of them. Outside, the Boulevard ran due east from the edges of downtown to the foothills of the Cuyamaca Range, straight through endless miles of work and dreams, cultural blends and barriers. When alone like this, Klinsman could feel the Boulevard’s waking buzz, a wire always seeking full connection, popping here and there, up the way or back against the sudden rise of downtown. The temperature rose ten degrees if you moved from the sea air of the west end to the smoggy push against the desert hills of the east. In that rise of heat you could get a loan, your car fixed, a good or bad haircut, a hooker, a book, a drink, coffee, or drugs; you could quit a day job, play a gig, or speak Spanish, English, Vietnamese, Tagalog, and then a different-sounding English and Spanish.
At desk 7, Klinsman always felt off-kilter, as anyone would at the four middle desks: 6, 7, 10, 11. No one could be at the precise center. Gina was at 10, an over-the-shoulder glance at Klinsman’s 7.
The overhead lights were still off, the only other glow coming from the rest-area lamp in the back. He returned to the couch for the fourth or fifth time this new morning. In the coffee-table spread someone had left a hard end from yesterday’s baguettes just for him. His favorite breakfast was black coffee and a hard roll. He felt sorry for, the only one of the sixteen desks to have no job prospects after next week’s final issue, the only one who was still coming to work on time. The perfume of the strawberries made him want to go outside, ride down to the border, see the bullring at the sea’s edge.
Klinsman sensed movement, a gray blur at the upper edge of his vision, and looked to the monitor above the back door, which scanned the entryway outside. In the monitor stood Oscar Medem, encased in the webby light of the cheap security. The grainy capture, the camera’s struggle to make sense of the contrast between Oscar’s dark skin and light shirt, reminded Klinsman of the stock footage so often seen in Santo movies. Oscar might have been thinking something similar as he eyed the little outside screen that showed what awaited inside. Gina’s sense of balance again, her tilt on the collective.
Oscar entered and moved along the edge of the desks, arms folded, that marching stride he had, watching Klinsman smell a strawberry. The act of keeping a secret hung on Klinsman’s shoulders, kneaded along the muscles of his back. He must have shifted his posture. Oscar, he could see, had been about to say something, something maybe about the strawberries, but then he closed his mouth, reasserted his honest gaze, and tightened his arms about his chest. He tilted his head as though Klinsman were something new, something exotic and behind bars. Klinsman would have to tell him about Rita, but now felt too blunt, too soon. It would have to be sometime before Rita divulged anything. If Rita told first, Oscar would be hurt, betrayed even. Such was the timbre among the desks, especially those at the floor’s heart—Oscar, Gina, Klinsman, Rita, 6, 10, 7, 11.
Oscar proceeded into his routine, walking the row to his desk, checking any open pages or notes or photos on other desks along the way, picking up fallen pens. He looked back at Klinsman in quick glances, selectively, as though Klinsman were one in a crowd.
He punched in his jump drive, bringing his screen to light, then slung his messenger bag over the back of his chair. He set his notepad to the right side of the keyboard and his green metal water bottle to the left. Without sitting down, one arm braced on the desk edge, he visited his home page—the site of a journalist in El Paso, the woman who’d written the first book on the Juárez femicides and who was still keeping tabs on those kills. The one journalist trying hard to keep it real, the one who was not going to let it all disappear into wrong metaphor and the wash of drug violence from here to there. She was Oscar’s hero, Klinsman’s demon.
Oscar folded his arms across his chest again and stepped to the side of his screen so Klinsman could get a look, a hard look at the pink cross in the sand and the incredible number below it counting the bodies found in the desert. Then he freed his arms like a boxer stepping back, Ali into the ropes. His t-shirt hung loose and threadbare about his shoulder muscles, a silkscreen of an extinct frog spread across its front. Worry passed over his face, the waver of flame light.
Klinsman had met him six years ago on a story at the Tijuana Cultural Center, an exhibition called “Africa’s Legacy in Mexico.” It was a photography show touring the world, offering portraits of black Mexicans, pardos, the descendants of slaves. Oscar was finishing up his studies at UNAM then. The university had sent him up to Tijuana to follow the show as it crossed the border into the States.
Oscar was himself a pardo. Among the portraits in the exhibit he looked as though he had stepped from a frame to wander stunned through the press party in his t-shirt and jeans. Klinsman brought him to the Review, and Gina hired him and helped him get his green card. She told him to learn to flatten his expression, told him his face was too forthcoming, all his features like living clay. She wriggled her fingers above his cheekbones. If you can’t do that, she told him, then maybe try looking happy when you’re sad, surprised when you’re bored. Don’t let your subjects get ahead of you. She made him into the best investigative reporter.
Oscar gathered himself—leaned against a desk and hooked his thumbs into the belt loops of his jeans. He faced Klinsman, drew the soft morning light of the pressroom floor into thoughtful shadow and flush. Klinsman could see his own copy on the desktop in front of Oscar. Then it blinked away, disappearing into screensaver.
“What are your three?” Oscar asked. He knew what Klinsman’s three assignments were. Oscar knew everybody’s assignments, often better than they did.
Klinsman answered anyway, in this quiet but demanding light. “She has me doing three old stories.” Remaining at the back, on the couch edge, he nodded toward his screen. “The Luchadors’ show last night. Then park surveillance. And then this little blotter piece at Motel San Ysidro.” Klinsman shrugged but felt secrecy and guilt weigh on his shoulders.
“Why’s that one old?”
Klinsman shrugged again, trying harder to seem casual. “I don’t know. It just feels somehow like walking into the past. Maybe it was just the light.”
“Old like stale?” asked Oscar. “Or old like something deep?”
He always sounded as though he knew your answers. So Klinsman gave him something new, something not wholly considered. “I found a woman. A kind of woman, I mean. Someone found and vanished at the same time. On the bed. From the bed.”
Oscar appeared skeptical, an unusual expression for him, a glare to his eyes.
“I know her and don’t know her—at the same time,” Klinsman said. This didn’t help. “I’ll show you,” he said. He stood to walk toward his desk.
Oscar leaned back on the desk edge, elbows into his sides, again into the ropes.
“Why do you keep doing that?”
“What?” asked Oscar. “Doing what?”
“Leaning away. Like you’re staying out of a circle. My circle.”
Oscar looked to the side as though catching an eavesdropper, then straight at Klinsman. “There’s trouble about you, Aron.” Ahrone, he pronounced it, trilling the r once.
