The Shadow of the Shadow (11 page)

MANTEROLA LOOKED AT THE BODY, reread the suicide
note, and decided to invest a few pesos and take the forensic
specialist out to lunch. This was no more a suicide than Rudolph
Valentino was Manterola's uncle.

"First of all, you've got the downward trajectory of the bullet,"
said the doctor.

"Either that or he was sucking on the gun like a lollipop."

"That's what I was thinking. He had scratches on his lips and
a cut on the palate made by some sharp object..."

"The barrel of the revolver."

"Naturally."

"That's what I've been saying all along," said Manterola,
carving away at his steak. The forensic specialist had already
finished his some time ago, and now busied himself gobbling up
all the scraps of bread left on the table. Pioquinto looked at him
with annoyance.

"Come on, Doc, leave me a piece a bread for the salsa, will
you?"

"Sorry, I didn't think you wanted any more."

Well-dressed waiters bustled past their table balancing large
trays above their heads-"just like in Paris"-dodging customers,
lottery ticket vendors, cigar hawkers, a pair of charros with their
oversized guitarron, a variety singer, and the children running
underfoot.

"Let me guess, Doc. There was a fight, someone stuck a pistol
in the guy's mouth and pulled the trigger."

"Obviously," said the doctor, who had started out his career as an army veterinarian under General Francisco Coss. His years in
the service had left him with a preference for dead bodies.

Pioquinto Manterola wiped the sweat off his forehead with a
white handkerchief The city suffocated in the afternoon heat. The
rains were late this year, maybe they'd never come at all.

As they were leaving the Sanborns, Pioquinto glanced at his
watch. He had two hours before his deadline. Hoping he could
find a few more details to fill out his story, he headed off with
quick steps back toward the Hotel Regis.

As he walked, Manterola thought deep and hard. He needed
to know more about the dead Englishman. He needed the ideas
to turn into questions, the questions into words, the article to
start pulling itself together along a single thread, complete with
headline, paragraphs, and punctuation marks.

If he hadn't been hurrying along with his head down and his
eyes pegged to the ground like someone looking for spare change,
he would have seen his friend Tomas Wong crossing the street
between a pair of shiny Lincolns and an old hackney pulled by a
rust-colored horse. Tomas was humming an old Irish ballad his
friend Michael Gold had taught him several years ago in Tampico.
Gold, a New York Jew, had come to Mexico in 1917 to escape the
war. Now Tomas was on his way to Chinatown to buy a couple of
reams of paper for Fraternidad, the union's weekly newspaper.

Tomas was a stranger to Chinatown. Orphaned when he was
five years old and living with a mestizo family in Sinaloa until he
was ten, he'd never learned to speak Chinese. Growing up among
Mexicans and gringos in the oil fields of Mata Redonda and Arbol
Seco, he'd never known the great Chinatowns along the Pacific
Coast, and he'd moved through the Chinese ghetto in Tampico
like an outsider. If he talked with an accent, dropping his r's, it was
more than anything else out of a sense of contrariness, a certain
pleasure in emphasizing his difference. He had no way of knowing
that in recent months the six or seven square blocks of Mexico
City's Chinatown, spread out on either side of Dolores Street, had been the scene of a fierce war between competing tongs, merchant
societies, revolutionary lodges, the monarchists of the Chi-Konton, and the Triads.

His friend the journalist, just then walking across the lobby of
the Hotel Regis, knew far more about these strange events than
he did. And Pioquinto Manterola might well have put aside the
mystery of the Englishman's "suicide" had he been able to see that
just as Tomas turned the corner off Juarez onto Dolores Street,
Chief Mazcorro of the secret police, Commander Lara Robelo,
and six of their men were advancing from the far end of the block
on their way to raid an illegal gambling house.

But neither Manterola nor Tomas realized what was about to
happen. It wasn't until Tomas stepped back out of the stationers
onto the street, lugging two boxes of paper tied up with string,
that he saw everything wasn't as it should be. A fifty-year-old
man jumped out of a second-story window, almost landing on top
of Tomas. A crowd in the street applauded the old man's escape,
and their cheers mixed with the intermittent pop of gunfire from
inside the house.

While Tomas might have been a stranger to Chinatown, he
was no stranger to violence; as soon as he heard the first shots he
pressed up against the wall and covered himself as best he could
behind the boxes of paper. He watched as Mazcorro emerged from
the house pushing a Chinaman in front of him. The man waved a
fifty-peso note in the air, shouting: "I pay, boss, I pay. No wolly."As
far as Tomas was concerned, the only fights worth getting mixed
up in were the ones he chose of his own free will. Or when it was
a matter of defending his ideas, or just plain orneriness. He took
ahold of his boxes and was walking rapidly toward the near end of
the street when he felt a hand grab his arm.

"Get me out of here," she said. "Please, save me. Get me away
from here."

Tomas stared at her for a moment and then resumed his
previous pace, only this time with the young woman at his side.

The overwhelming smell of violet-scented perfume filled his
nose and made him wrinkle up his face.

At that moment, the reporter Pioquinto Manterola wrinkled
up his own nose, metaphorically speaking.

"So you're sure the door was locked from inside, are you?"

"I was with the colonel when they broke into the room. Later
on he saw it and pointed it out to the rest of us, that the key
was still in the lock on the inside of the door," said the hotel
employee.

"Have you got a pair of keys to one of the rooms?"

"Of course. What do you have in mind?"

"A little scientific experiment." The reporter grinned, taking
the hotel man by the arm, leading him along.

"This one here'll do, I suppose. The guest ought to have his
key, and I've got the master."

Manterola knocked softly on the pale green door adorned
with golden frets.

A fat-cheeked pink face ringed below by a half circle of neatly
trimmed beard peeked through the door.

L' acqua non e calda. Miparti degli ascingomani, sapone."
Manterola showed the man his best smile and pushed him
gently back into the room.

"Let's have a look at your key, sir," he said, gesturing to show
the man what he wanted.

"Desidera la mia chiave?"

"That's right. And now you put your key in the lock on this
side," he directed the hotel man. "All right, now turn the key. See,
the other one stays in the lock. You can lock the door from the
outside while leaving the other key in place on the inside of the
door. It's because the shaft is so long."

"How did you know?" asked the hotel man.

"Before I was a reporter I used to work as a locksmith...
What did you say this captain's name was?"

"It's colonel, Colonel Gomez. He was in the bar with a couple of gringos, and when the police arrived he came over to see what
was going on..."

La mia chiave, per favore. "

"Much obliged," said the journalist, bowing slightly to the
fat-cheeked gentleman and stepping away from the door. But his
thoughts were already miles away.

When he walked back out onto the street, he was dizzy from
so much thinking. He could almost feel the smoke drifting off
the top of his bald head. For appearances' sake, and to conceal
the nonexistent smoke from any nonexistent observers, he lit up a
cigar and crossed Avenida Juarez. On the other side of the street
he bumped into his friend Tomas, struggling under the weight
of two enormous boxes of paper and with a very beautiful young
woman hanging on to his arm, dressed in a sky blue cheongsam
embroidered with the image of a dragon.

IT WAS GETTING HARDER and harder to keep their minds
on the game, each time the strange plot closing in around them
surrounded the marble tabletop with words, impeding their concentration. Dominoes is a game that's meant to be played with its
own special kind of banter, full of barbed but imprecise allusions
to the game at hand. You shoot the breeze, you joke around, you
bluff, but you never say anything to guide your partner, to reveal
your hand, to send a hidden message. You talk but you never really
say anything, so as not to break the cardinal rule of silence. So
there was no way to play a decent game of dominoes with the
shadows of three murders, a rescued Chinawoman, an unnatural
liaison, and the sound of the rain in Madero Street dancing over
the bones.

The characters were doing the best they could, trying not to lose
the thread of that schizophrenic night. The bartender noticed their
uneasiness, the tension in the game, and put it down to the rain,
the rent strike that was shaking the city, the rising unemployment,
the day's results at the racetrack, the flu epidemic...

"Without wanting to know anything, we know too much already. So why don't we try and see what else we can find out?" said
the poet.

"It's your turn, my friend."

Manterola, who'd been playing it close to the chest through
the first two rounds to see which way the wind was blowing, now
attacked with the double-fours. Tonight he was partners with Verdugo.lhey all knew how the game would turn out: it was the
aggressive play of the Chinaman and the poet against the lawyer's
and the reporter's no-holds-barred brand of wily malice. In a
normal night, the lawyer and the reporter would win six out of
ten. Tonight, however, was anything but normal, and they'd been
losing ever since they sat down.

"It's not that I want to defend normalness, Bakunin help me,
as Tomas would say, but that was one of the strangest liaisons I've
ever seen in my life. And I wasn't born yesterday... Now, I'll admit,
I haven't exactly had the opportunity to observe the sexual habits
of too many of my fellow citizens at such close quarters. My own
seem normal enough to me, and maybe that's my problem... But
picture this:' here they are, the two of them, screwing with a good
three feet between them, and me stuck in the closet like a peeping
Tom."

"Maybe she doesn't love him, or maybe the Spic doesn't wash
his hands," suggested the poet, meeting Manterola's fours with the
double-twos.

"No. Nobody said anything about hands. It was just that the
Spic had a thing about not taking his shoes off."

"It's deal as a bell," said Tomas with a smile. "If you don't take
off youl shoes, at least one yald."

"I hope they didn't splash you," said the poet, trying to knock
Verdugo off balance. Despite his sardonic tone, the lawyer still
hadn't quite recovered from his strange vigil.