Velvet Was the Night Read online

  Velvet Was the Night is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Circle colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Moreno-Garcia, Silvia, author.

  Title: Velvet was the night / Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

  Description: New York: Del Rey, [2021]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021005283 (print) | LCCN 2021005284 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593356821 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593356838 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593359808 (international edition)

  Classification: LCC PR9199.4.M656174 V45 2021 (print) | LCC PR9199.4.M656174 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021005283

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021005284

  Ebook ISBN 9780593356838

  randomhousebooks.com

  Design by Fritz Metsch, adapted for ebook

  Cover design and illustration: Faceout Studio/Tim Green, based on images © Getty Images, © Shutterstock, © Alamy, and © iStock

  ep_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  The Author’s Playlist to Velvet Was the Night

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  About the Author

  It is well established that the Hawks are an officially financed, organized, trained and armed repressive group, the main purpose of which since its founding in September 1968 has been the control of leftist and anti-government students.

  —United States Department of State, confidential telegram, June 1971

  1

  June 10, 1971

  HE DIDN’T LIKE beating people.

  El Elvis realized this was ironic considering his line of work. Imagine that: a thug who wanted to hold his punches. Then again, life is full of such ironies. Consider Ritchie Valens, who was afraid of flying and died the first time he set foot on an airplane. Damn shame that, and the other dudes who died, Buddy Holly and “The Big Bopper” Richardson; they weren’t half bad either. Or there was that playwright Aeschylus. He was afraid of being killed inside his house, and then he steps outside and wham, an eagle tosses a tortoise at him, cracking his head open. Murdered, right there in the most stupid way possible.

  Often life doesn’t make sense, and if Elvis had a motto it was that: life’s a mess. That’s probably why he loved music and factoids. They helped him construct a more organized world. When he wasn’t listening to his records, he was poring over the dictionary, trying to memorize a new word, or plowing through one of those almanacs full of stats.

  No, sir. Elvis wasn’t like some of the perverts he worked with, who got excited smashing a dude’s kidneys. He would have been happy solving crosswords and sipping coffee like their boss, El Mago, and maybe one day he would be an accomplished man of that sort, but for now there was work to be done, and this time Elvis was actually eager to beat a few motherfuckers up.

  He hadn’t developed a sudden taste for blood and cracking bones, no, but El Güero had been at him again.

  El Güero was a policeman before he joined up with Elvis’s group, and that made him cocky, made him want to throw his weight around. In practice being a poli meant shit because El Mago was the egalitarian sort who didn’t care where his recruits came from—ex-cops, ex-military, porros, and juvenile delinquents were welcome as long as they worked right. But the thing was El Güero was twenty-five, getting long in the tooth, and that was making him anxious. Soon enough he’d have to move on.

  The chief requirement of a Hawk was he needed to look like a student so he could inform on the activities of the annoying reds infesting the universities—Trotskos, Maoists, Espartacos; there were so many flavors of dissidents Elvis could barely keep track of all their organizations—and also, if necessary, fuck up a few of them. Sure, there were important fossils, like El Fish, who was twenty-seven. But El Fish had been in one political shenanigan or another since he was a wee first-year chemistry student; he was as professional as porros got. El Güero hadn’t achieved nearly as much. Elvis had just turned twenty-one, and El Güero felt the weight of his age and eyed the younger man with distrust, suspecting El Mago was going to pick El Elvis for a plum position.

  Lately El Güero had been making snide remarks about how Elvis was a marshmallow, how he never went on any of the heavy assignments and instead he was picking locks and taking pictures. Elvis did what El Mago asked, and if El Mago wanted him to pick the locks and snap photos, who was Elvis to protest? But that didn’t sway El Güero, who had taken to impugning Elvis’s masculinity in veiled and irritating ways.

  “A man who spends so much time running a comb through his hair isn’t a man at all,” El Güero would say. “The real Elvis Presley is a hip-shaking girlie-man.”

  “What you getting at?” Elvis asked, and El Güero smiled. “What you saying ’bout me now?”

  “Didn’t mean you, of course.”

  “Who’d you mean, then?”

  “Presley, like I said. The fucking weirdo you like so much.”

  “Presley’s the king. Ain’t nothin’ wrong in liking him.”

  “Yankee garbage,” El Güero said smugly.

  And then, when it wasn’t that, El Güero decided to use an assortment of nicknames to refer to Elvis, none of which were his code name. He had a fondness for calling him La Cucaracha, but also Tribilín, on account of his teeth.

  In short, Elvis was in dire need of asserting himself, of showing his teammates that he wasn’t no fucking marshmallow. He wanted to get dirty, to put all those fighting techniques El Mago made them learn to good use, to show he was as capable as any of the other guys, especially as capable as El Güero, who looked like a fucking extra in a Nazi movie, and Elvis had no doubts that his dear papa had been saying “heil” real merrily until he boarded a boat and moved his stupid family to Mexico. Yeah, El Güero looked like a Nazi and not any Nazi but a gigantic, beefy motherfucking Nazi, and that’s probably why he w
as so pissed off, because when you look like a blond Frankenstein it’s not that easy to blend in with no one, and it’s much better to be a shorter, slimmer, little dark-haired fucker like Elvis. That’s why El Mago kept El Güero for kidney-smashing and he left the lock picking, the infiltrating, the tailing, to Elvis or El Gazpacho.

  El Gazpacho was a guy who’d come from Spain when he was six and still spoke with a little bit of an accent, and it goes to show that you can be all European and pretty much fine because that dude was as nice as could be, while El Güero was a sadist and a bully with an inferiority complex a mile wide.

  Fucking son of an Irma Grese and a Heinrich Himmler! Fucker.

  But facts were facts, and Elvis, only two years with this group, knew that as the most junior of the lot he had to assert himself somehow or risk being sidelined. One thing was clear: there was no fucking way he was headed back to Tepito.

  Therefore, it’s no surprise that Elvis was a bit nervous. They’d gone over the plan, and the instructions were clear: his little unit was to focus on snatching cameras from journalists who would be covering the demonstration. Elvis wasn’t sure how many Hawks would be coming in and he wasn’t quite sure what the other units would be doing, and really, it wasn’t like he was supposed to ask questions, but he figured this was a big deal.

  Students were heading toward El Monumento a la Revolución, chanting slogans and holding up signs. From the apartment where Elvis and his group were sitting they could see them streaming toward them. It was a holy day, the feast of Corpus Christi, and he wondered if he shouldn’t go get communion after his work was over. He was a lapsed Catholic, but sometimes he had bouts of piousness.

  Elvis smoked a cigarette and checked his watch. It was still early, not even five o’clock. He went over the word of the day. He did that to keep his mind sharp. They’d kicked him out of school when he was thirteen, but Elvis hadn’t lost his appreciation for certain types of learning, courtesy of his Illustrated Larousse.

  The word of the day was gladius. He’d picked it because it was fitting. After all, the Hawks were organized in groups of a hundred, and they called the leaders of those groups “the centurions.” But there were smaller units. More specialized sub-groups. Elvis belonged to one of those; a little goon squad of a dozen men headed by El Mago, further subdivided into three smaller groups with four men each.

  Gladius, then. A little sword. Elvis wished he had a sword. Guns seemed less impressive now, even if he’d felt like a cowboy back when he first held one. He tried to picture himself as one of those samurais in the movies, swinging their katanas. Now wasn’t that something!

  Elvis hadn’t known anything about katanas until he joined the Hawks and met El Gazpacho. El Gazpacho was all over the Japanese stuff. He introduced Elvis to Zatoichi, a super fighter who looked like a harmless blind man but who could defeat dozens of enemies with his expert moves. Elvis thought maybe he was a bit like Zatoichi because he wasn’t quite what he appeared to be and also because Zatoichi had spent some time hanging out with the yakuza, who were these crazy dangerous Japanese criminals.

  Gladius. Elvis mouthed the word.

  “What’re you learning today?” El Gazpacho asked. He had his binoculars around his neck, and he was wedged by an open window and didn’t look nervous at all.

  “Roman shit. Hey, you know any decent flicks with Romans?”

  “Spartacus is pretty okay. The director filmed 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s cool, takes place aboard a spaceship. ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra.’ ”

  Elvis had no idea what El Gazpacho had said, but he nodded and held out his cigarette. El Gazpacho grinned and took a drag before returning it to him. El Gazpacho grabbed his binoculars and looked out the window, then he checked his watch.

  The students were singing the Mexican anthem and the Antelope was mocking them by singing it with them. In a corner, El Güero looked bored as he cleaned his teeth with a toothpick. The others—members of their sister unit, another little group of four—looked tense. Tito Farolito in particular had resorted to telling bad jokes to lighten things up because the word was there were ten thousand protesters, and that was no small amount. Ten thousand is the kind of number that makes a man think twice about this whole line of work, even if he’s drawing 100 pesos a day and twice as much if he’s with El Mago. Again, Elvis wondered how many Hawks would be at the demonstration.

  The Hawks began to stream into the rally, carrying signs with the face of Che plastered on them and chanting slogans like “Freedom for the political prisoners!” It was a ruse, a way to allow them to get close to the protesters.

  It worked.

  Just when the students were walking in front of the Cosmos movie theater there came the first shots. It was time to rock and roll. Elvis put out his cigarette. His unit hurried down the stairs and exited the apartment building.

  Some of the Hawks carried kendo sticks, others shot into the air, hoping to scare the students that way, but Elvis used his fists. El Mago had been clear about the basics: grab any journalists, take their cameras, rough them up if they get stubborn. People with cameras and journalists only. They weren’t to waste their time and energy beating any random nobody who didn’t have film with him. No killing, either, though they could rough ’em up nicely.

  Elvis had to give it to the protesters because in the beginning, when the fighting started, they weren’t doing half bad, but then the shooting was no longer bullets in the air, and the students began to panic, began to lose it, and the Hawks were prepared, streaming in from different sides.

  “It’s blanks!” a young man yelled. “It’s not real bullets, it’s just blanks. Don’t run away, comrades!”

  Elvis shook his head, wondering what kind of stupid dumbfuck you had to be to think those were blanks. Did they assume this was an episode of Bonanza? That a sheriff with a tin star pinned to his vest was going to ride in before the commercials, and it would be fine?

  Others were clearly not as optimistic as that guy urging everyone to stay put. Doors and windows were slamming closed along the avenue and the nearby streets, and shopkeepers pulled down their rolling steel shutters.

  Meanwhile, the granaderos and the cops were sitting pretty. There were plenty of men with thick anti-bullet vests and heavy helmets on their heads and shields in their hands, but they were forming a sort of perimeter around the area and none of them intervened in one way or the other.

  Elvis grabbed a journalist who had an ID clipped to his vest, and when the journalist squirmed and tried to hold on to his camera, Elvis told him if he didn’t let go he was going to break his teeth, and the journalist relented. He could see El Güero wasn’t being so polite. El Güero had another photographer on the ground and was kicking him in the ribs.

  Elvis exposed the film of the camera he’d grabbed and then tossed the camera away.

  People with cameras were easy to spot, but El Mago had also told them to give all journalists in general a scare, not only the photographers—’cause all journalists could use a lesson about who was boss, these days—and it was a bit harder to figure out who the print and radio journalists were. But the Antelope knew all their faces and names, and he pointed them out when he saw them; that was his role. The other thing to keep in mind was that they couldn’t let themselves be photographed, so Elvis spent half his time trying to spot cameras, trying to watch out for a flash, lest some eager little fucker get a good picture of him.

  Nevertheless, it was all going pretty much as expected until the sound of a machine gun blasted the air, and Elvis turned to look around.

  What the fuck? Bullets were one thing, but were the Hawks now shooting with machine guns? Was it even their own people? Maybe a clever student had brought firepower. Elvis raised his head and looked at the rooftops, at the apartment buildings, trying to figure out where the hail of bullets was coming from. It was hard to tell, with all the people running to an
d fro, and the screaming, and someone on a loudspeaker saying that people should retire to their homes. Retire to your homes, now!

  The ambulances were coming, he could hear them wailing, heading down Amado Nervo. They were pressing forward and the machine gun had ceased, but bullets were still flying, and Elvis hoped no trigger-happy idiot hit the wrong target. The majority of the Hawks had their hair cut short, and they wore white shirts and sneakers to help identify them, but Elvis’s group also sported denim jackets and red bandanas because they were part of one of the elite teams; because this was the dress code for El Mago’s boys.

  “Grab that son of a bitch,” El Gazpacho said, pointing to a dude who held a tape recorder in his hands.

  “Got it,” Elvis said.

  The dude looked old, but he was surprisingly nimble and managed to run a few blocks before Elvis caught up with him. He was screaming outside the back door of an apartment building, begging to be let in, when Elvis yanked him back and told him to hand over his equipment. The man looked down at his hands as though he didn’t remember he had been lugging that around, and maybe he didn’t. Elvis took the recorder.

  “Get lost,” he ordered the man.

  Elvis turned around, ready to go find his teammates, when El Gazpacho stumbled into the side street where Elvis was standing. Blood dripped down his chin. He stared at Elvis and raised his arms in the air and tried to speak, but the only sound was the bubbling of blood.

  Elvis rushed forward and caught him before he tripped and fell. A minute later El Güero and the Antelope rounded the corner.

  “What the fuck happened?” Elvis asked.