The Shadow of the Shadow (29 page)

"Let me see if I can't reconstruct what we know so far. First
off, we've got the widow who killed her husband, or at least
we can assume she did. Because I talked to the manager at the
Industrial Printworks and he said Roldan never spent enough
time at the presses to have died from lead poisoning. He spent all
his free time playing cards, roulette, what have you. 'hen there's
the Spic, who kills his aunts and steals their jewels. We've got a
French cardsharp, a pair of lieutenants, a hypnotist, and a social
secretary. And Gomez, who some way or another is at the center
of everything. Elena Torres told me that Gomez has some scam
going, something to do with the concession for selling horse fodder
to the army here in the valley."

"That's just the icing on the cake," said the poet, returning to
his chair and mixing up the overturned bones.

"So what we've got is a well-armed gang led by the head of the
city gendarmerie, a man up to his neck in union busting, repression
of demonstrations, the whole nine yards."

"Okay, so we've got this gang, and evidence that more or
less links them to the murder of the Zevada brothers, and they
come down on us like they wanted to wipe us off the face of the
earth..."

"No, not them.' his Martinez Fierro," said the journalist.

"So who tried to kill you at the hospital, then?" asked the
poet.

"And who kidnapped me and drugged me?" asked the lawyer
Verdugo.

"And why did those other two come to your apartment? The
two I finished off," said the poet, warming up to the subject. "You
know what? Instead of trying to figure out what the hell's going
on, we should just go find Gomez, put a couple of bullets in his
head, and that's that."

"And what about Martinez Fierro?"

"Same thing."

The poet's words were followed by a lengthy silence. "You've
got to admit the whole thing is pretty damn absurd," said Verdugo.
"They shoot at us, they try and kill us, they've practically got us
surrounded, and then they kidnap me when I go out to buy some
cigarettes, inject me with who the hell knows what, hypnotize me,
and then send me back here to kill you, Manterola."

"When did they hypnotize you?" asked Tomas with renewed
interest.

"That's just what I figure must have happened. All I know is
that I was walking out of the building when someone hit me over
the head and I passed out. Then I remember everything was kind
of hazy and I'm looking into the eyes of that redhead who talks
with a lisp and she's telling me not to resist... I've got two needle
marks here on my arm, too. And then I wake up here in the hotel
and try to kill Manterola thinking that..."

"I'm your father. Which I didn't find at all funny, Verdugo. I
figure your old man's got a few years on me at least..."

"Dammit, if I wanted to kill my father, I could have done it
without needing to be hypnotized."

"Don't worry about it, Verdugo, nothing happened in the end.
I'm just a little hoarse, that's all."

"But if it hadn't been for Tomas...'

"I'm a little hoarse, I walk with a limp from a bullet hole in my
leg, they try and poison me with cyanide in the hospital, and now
hod carriers aren't even hod carriers anymore. I'd be just as happy as the rest of you to knock off a couple of colonels and call the
whole thing quits, but somehow I don't think it's as easy as all that.
By now Gomez probably has the whole mounted-police force out
looking for us."

"What was that you said about hod carriers?"

"Forget it, it's not important."

"As long as we're getting ourselves up to date, what've you
been up to, Tomas, and to what do we owe the pleasure of your
friend San Vicente?"

"Foltunately that's all anothel stoly that doesn't have anything
to do with this one hele, a hell of a lot simplel, the kind of stoly you
can shoot youl way out of and that's the end of it."

And maybe Tomas was about to tell the rest of the story, but
Rosa rushed into the room and stopped him.

"He's dead," she said.

"Who?"

"The man in the bed, the foreigner."

"Van Horn..."

"Are you sure?" asked Manterola.

"He's not breathing. I checked."

"That's gratitude for you. And after I carried him around half
of Mexico City," said the poet sadly.

THE POET HUNG A POLYGLOT SIGN on the door of the
women's bathroom in the Hotel Ginebra: OUT OF ORDER/
DESCOMPUESTO/ SCOMVOSTO, then stationed himself
out front to keep out any curious passersby who might not think
the sign applied to them. Meanwhile, Manterola was busy inside
setting up chairs and ashtrays.

Librado Martinez, the famous "bloodhound" of El Universal,
was the first to arrive, a skeletal figure suffering from an acute case
of cirrhosis of the liver. The doctors gave him two to three months
to live. A minute later came C. Ortega (no one knew what the "C"
stood for, it was the man's best-kept secret). Among Ortega's many
accomplishments was his account-in impeccable prose-of the
house fire that killed his wife and two children. He'd written the
story and then collapsed onto his typewriter, overcome with grief.
After Ortega came the stuttering Luis Martinez de la Garza,
alias The Louse, who, unhindered by his speech impediment, had
become the ace crime reporter for El Heraldo de Mexico. A white
streak running through his hair gave him a parrotlike appearance.
Then there was Omega's Juan Antonio de Blas, who lived a double
life as vice reporter and transvestite, dressing up in women's
clothing after work and cruising the city's most sordid dives.

The four men who had answered the call of the dean of
Mexican crime reporting, Pioquinto Manterola, had little in
common as far as age, dress, or personal style were concerned.
However, they were all incorruptible, believing their work to be the
last rampart between civilized society and absolute barbarity, and
they professed strange ideologies, greatly influenced by Nietzsche,
the second act of The Barber of Seville, the moral stance of Victor Hugo, and the exemplary lives of Edmond Dantes and Marguerite
Gautier, Epicurus and Tono Rojas.

Once they were all inside, the poet carefully shut the door
and took up his post, armed with a bottle of Chianti the Ginebra's
head cook had given him to pass the time. After three quarters
of an hour the journalists filed out, no more disheveled-looking
than was their custom but perhaps with a somewhat livelier step.
Manterola was the last to emerge, with a gleam in his eye, rubbing
his hands.

SOMEONE WAS DOING HIS BEST to break the door
down with the butt of a rifle and the poet barely had time to pull
on his pants and let Odilia down on a rope to the patio below.

Before they'd managed to entirely demolish the door, the poet
opened up.

"What's all the fuss about, gentlemen?"

"Fermin Valencia?" demanded a gendarmerie sergeant. Two
other soldiers stood behind him in the hall.

"The one and only. What's the matter, your sister feeling
lonely?" improvised the poet, and for that he got a rifle butt across
the face, knocking out two of his teeth.

"Your mother," hissed the sergeant.

Fermin spat blood. Just then the lawyer Verdugo pushed his
way through the crowd of onlookers amassed around the broken
door. Tacubaya was the sort of neighborhood that lent itself to
spectacles, fights in the street, the kind of place where everyone
loved a free show.

"Excuse me, excuse me," said Verdugo, making his way to the
door.

"Who are you?" asked the sergeant.

"I'm this gentleman's lawyer. What's he been accused of?"

"The murder of an officer of the Mexican army."

"Do you know where your navel is, Sergeant? Well, I'm going
to make you another hole just the same size, only a little bit higher
up," said Verdugo, drawing his revolver from its shoulder holster
in a motion he'd been practicing all morning long in the Opera
bathhouse. More prudent than his friend the poet, Verdugo had
passed the night wandering around the city he knew so well, the city that hid him and protected him. In the morning he'd gone to
the public baths at number 15 Filomena Mata Street, taking cold
showers, swimming in a small warm-water pool, and practicing his
draw in one of the private rooms.

"So I suggest you let the gentleman go, unless you want to
wind up in his place, that is."

He took the poet by the arm but Fermin turned back, stripped
the soldiers of their Remingtons, and threw the guns out the
window into the patio below, praying that Odilia wasn't still down
there. Then he dug his Colt out of the lumped-up sheets and with
the gun in his hand walked back over to face the sergeant;

"Sergeant, you had orders to arrest me, but knocking my teeth
out waswhat should we call it?-above and beyond the call of
duty.,'

"You'll never get out of here. I've got two more men waiting
in the street."

"So I want you to repeat after me: I'm a stupid copper, dumber
than a swine. I went and hit a poet, and now I'll get it from
behind... Loud and clear now: I'm a stupid copper..."

Figuring that there's no better disguise than the ridiculous,
Manterola had dressed himself up as a Hindu prince and rented a
room in the Hotel Regis under the name of Maharaja Singh Lai
from Kuala Lumpur (at least all those Salgari novels he'd read
were good for something). Now he went down to the lobby in a
turban and brocaded shirt, to buy the morning papers.

Excelsior dedicated the entire eight columns ofthe crime section
to a retelling of the story of an almost forgotten jewel theft and two
murdered aunts, identifying the fugitive Dionisio Garrochategui as
"a certain Ramon currently enjoying the protection of an officer of
the city gendarmerie." It went on to connect the stolen jewels with
those found in the pockets of a murdered trombonist, the brother
of a now-deceased colonel who had once been close friends with
the officer previously mentioned.

The Maharaja rubbed his hands with glee and turned to the
front page of the second section of El Heraldo, which revealed
with abundant detail (what a genius this Martinez de la Garza
was, the only serious competition around!) the story of widespread
corruption in the army's purchase of horse fodder in the Valley
of Mexico. Because the paper was owned by General Alvarado,
Martinez had far more leeway than anyone else to attack certain
elements of the official power structure. According to the reporter's
sources, a certain unnamed colonel of the city gendarmerie (there
being only three in all-Gomez and two of his subordinates-the
man in question was obvious enough) controlled the concession
for the sale of feed and hay to the cavalry throughout the Valley
of Mexico and used his monopoly to sell at 60 percent above the
regular market price. The reporter wondered how this shameful
situation was allowed to continue, and in a superb moralistic finale
asked General Cruz to take charge of the situation and clean
house, for the sake of the good name of the revolutionary armed
forces.