"Blinkman was his name. I didn't have time to dig any deeper. There was just enough time before deadline to get in the story of the suicide that wasn't a suicide."
"Did you say anything about Colonel Gomez being involved in the trick with the key?" asked Verdugo.
The four friends drew their dominoes from the pile in the middle of the table, each in his own way. The poet lined his up in a row, pressed with his fingers on either end and stood them up all at once. The lawyer stood his up one by one and left them in the order he found them. Manterola set his on their sides, and Tomas took a minute to arrange his bones to his satisfaction.
"No, I kept quiet on that score. I figured it was enough for now to unmask the fake suicide. It didn't seem prudent to go any further. Somehow I got the feeling it was something that didn't really belong to me. Like it belonged more to the night and to this table, gentlemen."
"Mantelola, in this town gentlemen lide holses, and I happen to have left my holse at home..."
"Tomas is right, we're more the infantry type," said Verdugo. "But the inkslinger's got a point," said the poet, scratching his mustache with his index finger. "No matter how you look at it, this thing belongs to us. Whether we like it or not. The dead trombonist is mine..."
"And I've got the suicide that wasn't a suicide, the English oilman, the widow, and the colonel that fell out of the window..."
"And I've got the picture show at the Widow Roldan's, and the tryst between Ramon the Spic and Conchita," said Verdugo.
"All I've got is a blood debt with Colonel Gomez," said Tomas.
"What about the Chinagirl you rescued?"
"Don't take youl coincidences too fal afield, comlade. She's just a pool lonely olphan who managed to escape when the police laided that gambling house whele they had hel like a plisonel. Like a slave. It's the kind of thing you heal about all too often these days, unfoltunately."
"But how can you be sure she's got nothing to do with it?" asked the reporter, playing a blank off the poet's opening domino. "I don't know what to think anymore. Everything seems to be connected. It all fits together too well. Do you all believe in fate?"
"I suppose I ought to. Isn't that what they say: Fatalistic Olientals?"
"Seriously, Tomas," persisted the reporter.
There was a pause in the play as the four friends stopped a minute to think the question over. The rest of the bar was deserted. The swinging doors had been still for over half an hour. The night, the place, belonged to the four of them and the bartender. And to the four of them alone, and to the table and the bones, belonged the fragments of a mystery that revolved around the house of the Widow Roldan.
"No, not me. I believe in chance, and when the coincidences stalt to pile up, I believe it's time to do something about it."
"At this point I'm ready to believe in anything," said the poet. "I believe the Archangel Gabriel wants us to get involved in something and he's been sending us messages."
"Why the Archangel Gabriel?"
"Well, I don't believe in God, so I had to pick somebody up there."
"I believe it's going to rain all night long," said the lawyer, and the players turned their attention back to the game.
The Chinaman played a six/three and forced Verdugo to pass.
"What'd you do with her, Tomas?"
"I took hel to my humble home, as my countlymen say in bad novels."
"Do I detect a glimmer of Oriental romance here?" asked the poet. "Without wanting to pry, of course..."
"I don't leally know, illustlious bald. Fol now we'le just going to shale loom and boald."
"What'd you say her name was?"
"Losa Lopez."
"Losa Lopez?"
"I think he means Rosa Lopez," clarified Manterola.
"Ah, another enigma for this rain-swept night," said the poet, playing the double-four, and with the last three fours hidden safely in his hand.
AFTER LEAVING THE TAQUERIA where they ate a late dinner, the poet lagged behind, pissing contentedly against a lamppost. It was time to call it a night. Manterola was only a few blocks from home, Verdugo would head south, and the poet and the Chinaman would walk together as far as Tacubaya where Tomas would catch a streetcar for San Angel.
"Come on, we don't have all night," the Chinaman called to Fermin.
The poet saw the lights of a car turning the corner onto Gante Street and driving slowly toward them, and he hurriedly packed away his valuable instrument and buttoned his fly.
The car passed by Fermin, hidden in the shadows, and stopped a few yards beyond where Manterola stood lighting Verdugo's cigar.
Tomas was the first to react.
"Look out!" he shouted, whipping out his knife and hurling it at the automobile.
Two masked men got out of the backseat. Alerted by the Chinaman's warning, Verdugo clamped the half-lit cigar between his teeth, dropped to his knees, and drew his revolver.
Manterola was slower to react and it wasn't until he heard the shot and felt the burning pain in his leg that he realized what was going on.
From behind his lamppost, the poet fired his long-barreled .45, booming like a cannon in the quiet night. The bullet ricocheted off the body of the car and shattered the jaw of one of the masked men. The red blood soaked invisibly into the red kerchief that covered his nose and mouth. The second masked man fired three times at Verdugo. The lawyer returned fire, stepping out a strange ballet as he scurried desperately for cover behind a nearby flower box. The bullets slammed into the wall behind him. A windowpane exploded somewhere in the dark. One bullet passed cleanly through the palm of his left hand and another knocked his hat off his head.
Manterola was thrown backward onto the sidewalk. His glasses were broken, but he pulled out a twenty-five-caliber Browning automatic and fired at the biggest thing he could see, emptying an entire round in the direction of the car.
The masked attacker trading fire with Verdugo glanced out of the corner of his eye at his companion, spread out on the ground and making strange noises through his shattered jaw. With lead raining down on him from all sides, he broke into a run, wildly firing his last two bullets and killing a dog that stood anxiously watching the gunfight from a nearby rooftop.
The masked man, pausing at the corner to reload, turned to see if he was being pursued and in that moment Tomas' knife caught up with him. Hurled through the air, it drove home, slicing into his throat. Blood oozed through the kerchief over his face.
One by one the lights came on in the surrounding houses, adding to the glow from the lampposts. The poet approached the car and kicked the man with the bloodied kerchief in the head. The man jerked once and then lay still. Inside the car, a third man lay across the steering wheel, one of Manterola's bullets through his head. The poet reached in and turned off the engine.
The silence was strangely sudden and complete.
Together the reporter and Verdugo assessed their wounds. "Damn it all to hell, my leg's as good as busted. I'm going to be a gimp for the rest of my days," complained the reporter as he tightened his belt around the upper half of his leg in the form of a tourniquet.
"As for me, it's going to be a while before I can move the dominoes like I used to," Verdugo answered him.
"How's yours, Tomas?" shouted the poet.
"Deceased," said the Chinaman from the end of the block. He wiped his knife on the dead man's trousers.
"This one seems like he's still got some life in him," said the poet, pointing to the man sprawled next to the car.
Two mounted policemen rounded the corner of Gante Street. A pair of hookers, friends of Verdugo, curiously approached the scene of the battle from the other direction.
"Call an ambulance. If it's not too much trouble," Verdugo shouted up to a man in pajamas leaning out to get a look from a third-story window.
A few minutes later they could hear the bells of the approaching ambulance. It reminded the poet of the bells that announced the start of the bullfights in Zacatecas.
<
br /> By now the street was bright with light, making that little corner of the city seem like just another part of the bigger party.
THE FOLLOWING WEEK WAS ABSURD enough in its own way. Nothing happened. The poet was asked to prepare an advertising campaign for the Torrelavega Mattress Company (On a Torrelavega mattress you'll feel like you're riding on a celestial carriage-rejected; Even your wife looks better on a Torrelavega mattress-rejected; Buy a Mexican mattress for a Mexican mattress massage-accepted), and he came away with a fat roll of bills in his pocket after several sleepless nights spent poring over different designs, posters, and advertisements in search of the proper slogan.
Tomas the Chinaman got involved in the strike at the Abeja Mill, and he didn't make it home six nights out of the seven. Manterola was taken to a private hospital and the newspaper paid him handsomely for the exclusive eyewitness story of the gunfight (EL DEMOCRATA REPORTER WOUNDED IN SHOOTOUT). He only wrote one other story the whole rest of the week, a charming little item served up to him on a tray by his friend Verdugo, who in spite of his bandaged hand found a way to get himself mixed up in an interesting bit of bordello intrigue.
There were no domino games and they never got the chance to talk things over all together or retell the story of the shootout.
Verdugo and Manterola managed to talk awhile in the hospital where the reporter was recovering from his wounded leg. The poet went by once to see Manterola, and he ran across Tomas one evening in a streetcar.
Strangely enough, none of the three attackers survived the encounter. The four friends only learned their names from the newspaper reports, confirmed later on when they each appeared before Lieutenant Mazcorro, Chief of Special Investigations for the Mexico City police. Mazcorro interrogated Manterola in his hospital room, and he had the lawyer, the Chinaman, and the poet meet with him in his office at headquarters.
Without having discussed the matter among themselves, they each told the same story and refused to give any additional information. None of them claimed to know who would want to kill them, they denied being involved in any kind of trouble, or having any personal enemies. They didn't need to talk it through to get their story straight. It was a private affair between them and whoever had sent the three men to kill them. And they all were careful to leave out certain details, like the way the poet kicked the wounded man in the head or that he was urinating on a lamppost when the shooting started. Those things were private, too.
Tacitly, they all agreed to postpone further action or comments, and life went on in its own way.
So none of them bothered to try and trace the stolen car their attackers had been driving, or to track down the buddies of "El Gallego" Suarez (the dead driver) or Felipe Tibon (the one who died at the corner with a knife in his throat). The third man went unidentified.
Mazcorro didn't learn anything worth mentioning from his interviews with the four friends. Perhaps the most interesting was his brief session with Manterola, who was under the effects of tranquilizers and craving a cigarette. The reporter, on the other hand, found out from the police lieutenant that the dead Englishman whose suicide wasn't a suicide had a roommate who had since disappeared. The Aguila Petroleum Company was demanding an investigation. Apparently, the two men had come to Mexico to swing an important deal, with a million pesos in stock certificates in their possession. It occurred to the reporter that he ought to make a note of the roommate's name, but at the time the lack of tobacco worried him far more and he ended up forgetting all about it.
All in all it was a pretty stupid week, although both Tomas Wong and the lawyer Verdugo, each in his own way, found themselves with plenty to do.
I T MIGHT HAVE SEEM E D like a contradiction, but it wasn't. What had started out as a form of self-degradation, the flagrant rejection of his aristocratic past, somewhere along the line had turned itself into a kind of simple appreciation of the ephemeral.
It's enough to say that in a country where over a million dead were witness to ten chaotic years of revolution, there was ample room for a lawyer who dedicated himself to the defense of ladies of the evening.
Verdugo's ladies were a motley troupe, dolled up in swirling skirts, fashionable hats, coats, frayed shawls, and Spanish lace mantillas that had seen better days. From the rouged misses who sold their bodies, their time, and their compassion for a few pesos a day, to the gay chorus girls who expected sooner or later to land themselves some young officer or well-to-do merchant, they all availed themselves of the lawyer's professional skills. Verdugo plied his understanding smile and barrister's know-how from within an office whose confines were encompassed by the brim of his hat and a borrowed table in any one of numerous cantinas, cafes, tearooms, brothel sitting rooms, the back rooms of liquor stores, or dance-hall dressing rooms.
Reflecting on the unique nature of his particular contribution to the common good, Verdugo read out loud from his friend Pioquinto Manterola's article concerning his role in the dramatic story of Maria Luz de Garcia:
She was raised an orphan and an only child in the impoverished home ofher aunt, Francisca jurado. Enduring the slow slippage of the hours, a lackluster existence deprived of the glad affects of a normal childhood and with no one to share the cornucopia of tenderness that truly belonged only to her dead mother, in repeated scenes worthy of Toulouse's macabre palette, the child suffered the harpy's beatings without protestation, the aunt begrudging her a corner of her house and a crust of bread, not out ofany heartfelt commiseration for the orphan girl, but rather looking forward to the day when this heap of flesh and bones would cease to merely occupy space and become productive. It was thus that one day the cruel aunt turned her niece over to the care of one Ema Figueroa, a woman of faded beauty who presides over a house of ill-gotten pleasures in the heart of the aristocratic Roma district. The innocent Maria de Luz was offered up in sacrce to the deities of Hedonism during a party in honor of a certain wealthy personage, and there, unable to flee, as ff hypnotized, a mere child of ffteen years, she was dressed in silks and served up as the main course to whomsoever was willing to pay the matron's exorbitant price.
Is this what we choose to cal/prostitution? Or is it rather another example of the perfidy of our society, which abandoned this child, deprived her of her rights, and sank her into the depths of moral corruption?
The story, however, has a happy ending. It was to the girl's greatgood fortune that she happened to meet, one day this week, the lawyer A. Verdugo who, discovering her unhappy state, and armed only with a single long-barreled revolver, forced his way into the bordello where she was being held against her will and rescued her from the clutches of her jailers.
But these same individuals, in no way slow to react, thinking only of protecting their investment, and the influence they seem to enjoy in the Tenth Police Precinct, accused this well-known barrister ofthe crime of kidnapping a minor. Little did they know with whom they were dealing.
Mr. Verdugo, whom we have had occasion to write about at other times in the pages of this newspaper, explained the situation with such vehemence and veracity before Captain Ponce, that this officer of the public order was moved not only to dismiss the charges against the lawyer, but ordered the incarceration of the aforementioned Madame Figueroa, along with her bodyguard and procurer, a man who goes by the alias The Snake.
It would be unfitting to end this account without adding that Maria de Luz Garcia (obviously a pseudonym adopted to protect the innocent girl's identity) is now employed in a reputable commercial establishment in this capital city.
"Well, what do you think, Maria?"
"They didn't say anything about how you set dona Ema's house on fire."
"Thatwas the work of an anonymous arsonist," replied Verdugo, firing up a long cigar and pouring himself another glass of mezcal. He gazed dreamily at the afternoon light drifting in through the open window, painting white splotches across the elusive form of the naked woman moving languidly by the side of the bed.
"It's not really
like they say. I only wanted to get out of that place, but that old witch wouldn't let me. I never said I was going to quit going to bed with whoever I felt like," said the girl.
"I rather think what we're dealing with here is the twin reality of a puritanical newspaper establishment and the fact that our friend Manterola had to fill up his column... Besides which, yours is simply a problem of independence. And I'm a strong believer in independence. It is true, however, there isn't a whole lot of difference between dona Ema's place and what Manterola calls a respectable commercial establishment... All in all I prefer it here in your apartment," said Verdugo, cautiously flexing the fingers of his bandaged hand.
"He didn't put anything in about all that money you took from behind the painting at dona Ema's."
"Let's just call that my honorarium, my dear girl, and a lawyer's fee, like his services, are strictly confidential."
"Confidential, my ass. What about sharing some of it with the client?"
"All you had to do was ask, miss," answered the lawyer, smiling. But his smile turned bitter. The man that he'd invented, the character he'd assumed, the one that answered to his name, wore his suits, his hat, his wound, was all of a sudden not very fond of himself. Verdugo concurred with Manterola's opinion that a man lives during the day the autobiography he writes for himself the night before. But today he had the feeling someone had handed him the wrong book, even as the light slipping through the halfclosed Venetian blinds sketched beautiful figures over the woman's naked flesh.
MANTEROLA WAS ABOUT TO turn thirty-nine years old in the hospital (La Iluminada, near the streetcar yards), in a room he shared with a moribund construction worker and with the sinking feeling that his leg was never going to be like it used to be, that the bone was never going to mend properly, no matter what the doctors told him.
Manterola is turning thirty-nine, and that sadness that comes with all birthdays after thirty-five, with the first hours after giving birth, with a man's meaningless victories and overwhelming defeats floods over him.
The Shadow of the Shadow Page 7
