The Shadow of the Shadow (28 page)

"Felmin, Sebastian!" yelled the Chinaman, the reporter's eyes
starting to bug out of their sockets, locked in a death grip with
Verdugo's hellish gaze.

"Leave him alone. It's the lepoltel, you idiot. Leave him alone," shouted Tomas, wildly beating the lawyer across the chest. But
the lawyer held on. San Vicente and the poet ran in from the
other room. Rosa was up now too, pulling the lawyer by the hair.
Between the four of them they finally managed to get the two
men apart and the reporter collapsed on the bed, gasping for air.
Verdugo crashed down onto the floor. Manterola struggled to pull
breath into his burning lungs.

"What the hell is wrong with you? That's Manterola, you
idiot," the poet screamed in the lawyer's face. Verdugo started to
sob.

"No, he's fooling you. It's my father. He tried to fool me, but
I can tell. He's my father," murmured Verdugo, the tears sliding
down his face.

San Vicente helped the reporter sit up in bed, brought him a
glass of water. Rosa burst into tears, sobbing in unison with the
lawyer.

"Shit, man, this is a damn nightmare," said the poet. "I'm going
to wake up now and everything's going to be all right,"

"He tried to fool me. He said he was my friend," said Verdugo,
wiping away his tears, trying to find some way to explain to his
friends the latest in a series of entirely inexplicable truths.

THE BLAZING V E RAC R u Z SUN beat down on the lawyer
Alberto Verdugo's white-white suit as he descended the gangplank
off the Miraflores. He quickened his steps, trying to squeeze past
another pair of passengers and catch up to the woman in the
diaphanous yellow dress, the daughter of a German merchant from
Campeche, who he'd been flirting with all the way from Havana.

At the foot of the gangplank, a one-handed wrinkled old man
held out a bowl toward the departing passengers, asking for money.
Verdugo automatically put his hand into his vest pocket to pull out
a coin and his eyes accidentally met the beggar's.' he man smiled,
pulled back his bowl, and winked at the lawyer.

Taken aback, Verdugo hesitated for a moment, then pulled
out his last pack of Upmanns, Cuban cigarettes made from the
best dark tobacco in the world, sat down by the beggar's side, and
offered him a smoke.

The lady in the yellow dress walked off into the crowd, but the
white-suited lawyer didn't even notice, bending over the beggar to
light their two cigarettes under the blazing Veracruz sky.

I T WAS THE POET'S IDEA and it was also the poet who
opened with the double-sixes. A madhouse like this wouldn't be
complete without a game of dominoes, he said, and he'd disappeared
halfway through the morning to return a quarter of an hour later
with a box of dominoes, two dozen tacos wrapped up in paper, and
a pitcher of hibiscus water.

"What the hell is this?" protested San Vicente, taking a long
drink from the pitcher.

"What's the mattel? You don't have any obsessions?" Tomas
scolded him. "Do you believe in flee will or don't you? Have
something to eat, take a siesta, and shut up, of sit back and watch
the game."

Lucky for them the room had a table and three chairs, four
including the armchair the anarchist had slept in the night before.
Rosa was taking a bath in the other room, humming a little tune
while she washed the burns on her arms. The poet provided
accompaniment with the rhythmic clack of the bones.

Verdugo, excessively pale, lined up his dominoes as if he
thought he could hide behind them. After his attempt to murder
the journalist earlier in the morning, he had apologized profusely
and then fallen into a moody silence, alternated with spells of fitful
sleep from which he would wake up screaming at the top of his
lungs, covered in a cold sweat. Pioquinto Manterola seemed to
be suffering from a peculiar post-strangulation form of laryngitis.
The poet, who'd taken upon himself the task of raising the group's spirits, sat swollen faced and his attempts at humor come off a
little too sharp-edged. Tomas looked like a casualty of the Boxer
War.

The poet opened with the double-sixes. It would seem like the
perfect signal for their long-awaited strategy session to begin, but
in rapid succession the Chinaman played the six/four, Manterola
responded with the four/two, and the lawyer Verdugo played
another six opposite the poet's opening bone. There was no way
to hold a council of war or retell the events of recent days until it
became clear whether the poet's sixes were entirely the luck of the
draw or if he held more in his hand. The poet passed and the stage
was set for the powwow to begin.

"I say we all tell what we've found out in the last couple of
days and then see if we can put the pieces together," proposed
Manterola.

"And what makes you think the pieces all go together? Whoever
said it was going to be like a jigsaw puzzle where everything fits
into place?" countered the poet, smoothing out his mustache.

"In my dreams just now, under the effect of the drugs, I kept
thinking about a line from Shakespeare I heard once in a play in
Milan. `Life's but a walking shadow, a tale told by an idiot, full
of sound and fury, signifying nothing,"' said Verdugo, playing the
game's first three.

"If that's the way you fellows want it, let's just play the game
and we can talk about bullfighting or baseball. It's all the same to
me. With traveling partners like you all, Columbus would have
landed at Lake Texcoco."

"And opened up a bakely," added Tomas.

"And called it The Flower of the Americas," said the poet,
trying to ignore the fact that the sixes were coming his way once
again.

"The Three Calavels," said the Chinaman.

"The Rising Sun," said the lawyer, revealing his professional
inclinations.

"How about if we start with the jewels?"

"Columbus didn't bring any jewels," said the poet. "Just a lot of
crummy glass beads to pawn off on the locals."

"Gentlemen, you can all go to hell," said the journalist, forced
to play his last four.

"All right, have it your way. What about the jewels?"

"Two years ago, two old Spanish ladies were found dead in
their boardinghouse on Gante Street. Before they were killed, they
were tortured, presumably until they told where they'd hidden the
family jewels. The jewels disappeared along with their nephew,
recently arrived from Spain."

"Ramon the Spic," said Verdugo.

"Could be, although he wasn't called Ramon then. The nephew
was named Dionisio. Our friend Colonel Gomez was one of the
police officers in the investigation. Gomez and his men chased a
mysterious vehicle out toward the Toluca highway, a vehicle that
presumably contained the murderous nephew."

"And...?"

"They found the car, a Cole and Cunningham, but the driver
escaped. Threes."

"Doubles," said Verdugo.

"I've got some news about a Colonel Martinez Fierro," said
the poet.

"Tampico again," said Tomas.

"Martinez Fierro? When I was waiting for you all at the
Majestic the other night, I had a very interesting interview with a
captain from the Secret Service, who mentioned Martinez Fierro
and urged us to continue with our investigation, as he called it.
He said that he got his orders directly from the president, and
that..."

"Did you ask him what investigation?" the poet interrupted.

"He didn't give me the chance. But, he did say that two
different people had tried to kill us, or me, as the case may be, on
two separate occasions: Martinez Fierro and Gomez."

"Maltinez Fiello was a gallison commandel in noltheln
Tamaulipas, not too fal flom Tampico. He's plobably anothel one
of Pablo Gonzalez' boys."

"That makes three colonels who were all in Tampico together
as of two years ago: Zevada, Gomez, and Martinez Fierro."

"So what do Obregon's goons have to do with all this?" asked
the poet.

"Your guess is as good as mine. I quote: `General Obregon is
personally interested in the success of your investigation."'

"The bloody hand of death," said the poet.

"I'll second that one," said the Chinaman, whose personal
relations with the government were worse than bad. Obregon and
his government had been clamping down with ferocious zeal on
the red unions for almost a year now.

"The poet and I've got more about this Martinez Fierro. With
six hundred pesos to loosen his tongue, a man called The Gypsy
told us Martinez Fierro hired the three thugs who attacked us the
other night."

"Who's The Gypsy?"

"One of this gentleman's underworld connections," said the
poet, pointing at the lawyer.

"I just defended his cousin once in court," objected Verdugo,
going out with the double-twos, laying the domino on the table
with a flourish.

"Holy smokes, that's the game."

Verdugo mopped the sweat off his forehead with a
handkerchief, and the poet, who'd been keeping an eye on him,
asked with concern: "Do you want me to open the window?"

"Would you? Damn, it's stuffy in here."

"I knowwho killed the trombonist," said Fermin Valencia as he
walked over and opened the door to the balcony. "And I also have a
pretty good idea why I got shot at that day at Peltzer Tire."

"Dammit, if things keep up like this, pretty soon we're going
to know everything, except what the hell's going on around here."

"Do you all remember the officer and the Frenchman? Well,
Peltzer told me the officer's name was Estrada. I didn't recognize
him in his uniform and all. I don't see too good from a distance. But
after the shootout at Verdugo's place, when I saw him in civilian
clothes and with the same hat on, I realized he was the guy that
got the drop on the trombonist. I didn't recognize him, see, but
he must have spotted me that day at the park, so when he saw me
again at Peltzer's he went crazy and started to spit lead."

"Well, that gives us the connection between Gomez and
Zevada. But why?"