When I opened my eyes, Tony Guerrero was still standing to the side of the screen narrating the flickering images. All the energy in the room was directed toward the screen and his voice. There wasn’t even the usual nervous cough or the shuffling of feet. I glanced sideways again at Raul, who was still staring straight ahead as though he were hypnotized. Lupe’s profile turned toward me slightly, and I thought she shook her head at me. To my left was an open doorway with a hall that led to the back of the building.

“Bathroom,” I mumbled at Raul’s left cheek as I got up. He looked at me uncertainly.

“Baño,” I repeated, nodding my head yes for emphasis. I got up from the chair and went for the doorway without waiting for his reply.

The first door was in fact the bathroom. I went in and locked the door to give myself a minute to think. There had to be some clue here in Casa Guatemala that would explain what was happening, something that would explain their involvement with Cathy Vega, but I didn’t know what I was looking for. In the mirror over the rust-stained sink I saw myself. I looked beat. In the harsh light, wrinkles I’d never noticed before stood out across my forehead, around my eyes. I looked like I hadn’t slept for days. There was a black smudge on my collar. A line of purple across my jaw. I splashed cold water on my face and wondered, as I blotted my face with paper towels, how long the video would last.

I left the water running. Closing the bathroom door quietly behind me, I went further down the hall. I could still hear Tony Guerrero’s voice. It was dark. Just a bare bulb in the ceiling. There was another door on the right side of the hall. I opened it. It was the office. Minimally furnished. It had a desk, a phone, a lot of posters, some stacks of colored paper and a beat-up mimeograph machine. A heap of fliers like the one I had been handed earlier in the day lay on the floor. I opened the top drawer of the desk. A half-dozen plastic pens and some chewed-on pencils rolled around. There was a deck of playing cards with bent edges, one and a half sticks of gum and some loose paper clips. In the movies this is when the hero finds a stack of love letters, a deed, a will, a signed confession.

A cockroach darted from one side of the drawer to the other.

The second drawer held boxes of staples. A worn paperback Spanish-English dictionary and other small office supplies. In the bottom drawer lay a receipt book. All the entries were in Spanish. None of the recorded figures were large. Nothing over twenty-five dollars. It all seemed to be for things like estampillas.