The Shadow of the Shadow

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  Out in the street a light drizzle had started to fall. A pair of horsemen spurred past a limping Ford. Verdugo opened the door of his bulletproof Packard and helped the journalist inside.

  "I've about had enough of this. It's time we did something."

  "The widow swore to me the whole thing's got nothing to do with her or her friends..."

  "Who's it got to do with, then?"

  "Beats me. But you're right about one thing. It's time we did something."

  "No one comes and says they're not guilty if there isn't some reason to suspect they are. No one comes around giving answers if there isn't somebody asking questions."

  "I suppose you're right. And anyway, it's the only lead we've ,, got.

  "Two days ago, some guy started taking potshots at the poet and nearly killed him. I say it's time we tighten the screws and see if the shadow comes out of the darkness and shows itself."

  "What shadow?"

  "Them, the enemy. That's what the poet calls them. And he says our little domino club's the shadow of the shadow. Lyrical, isn't it?"

  "Not bad. Valencia ought to come and work with me at the newspaper.

  While the lawyer and the reporter talked, the poet stood outside the delivery entrance of the Hotel Regis trying to sell the head cook six grade-A Toluca hams he swore could easily pass for Spanish Santanders. The poet had received the hams, which were really from Tlaxcala and not from Toluca at all, as payment for a poem he'd written for the fifteenth birthday of a rancher's daughter from Santa Ines. After a fair amount of wrangling, he managed to trade them for seventeen pesos and a coupon good for six meals in the hotel restaurant.

  A little while later, as he was trying to exchange the meal tickets for an equivalent amount of drinks at the bar, he ran into the North American Bertram Wolfe arguing with a reporter from the Hearst chain in one of the booths. The poet had met Wolfe before, an English teacher at the National Preparatory School and a friend of the muralists who were then decorating the school with their enormous paintings. The poet had taken a liking to the gringo from the very first time they'd met. His Spanish had improved considerably in the last few months and he talked about his experiences in the country with a passionate affection. He worked for a leftist news agency out of New York, wrote for the American Communist party newspaper, drank with moderation, and had a beautiful wife named Ella. All the same, the poet would have gone on and sat alone in a booth at the back to work out a poem he'd been carrying around in his head if he hadn't overheard the pair of gringos talking about the dead man Manterola had been investigating a week ago in the same hotel. He was getting used to the way the threads of this strange story kept crossing and recrossing without the slightest respect, so he pulled up a chair and joined them.

  There's not much else to say about that day's events except that, while the Chinaman worked at the mill, Rosa looked out the window of the tiny house in Contreras to see a pair of shadows keeping watch from down the street; Pioquinto Manterola slept restlessly through a series of nightmares in which a naked woman in a leghorn hat crawled on top of him to embrace him, with a pair of huge meat cleavers in her hands; and General Pancho Murguia crossed the border from the United States to head up yet another unsuccessful rebellion against Obregon's government.

  THE POET WALKED THROUGH the Majestic's swinging doors. Tomas, standing at the bar, didn't seem to notice the breeze blowing in from the street, but Manterola and Verdugo, seated at the customary table, smiled in greeting.

  They had to play this game of dominoes, and not so much for the way the bones fell on the table, but somehow to take control of the strange story that'd woven itself around them like a play where some absentminded director forgot to hand out the scripts and the actors found themselves caught up in the middle of dialogues, murders, parties, orgies, and songs without any clear idea of what part they were supposed to play. The poet knew it, and he walked straight to the table and sat down. Even Tomas felt strangely attracted by this new urgency and he left his glass half-drunk on the bar and went over to join his friends.

  This new change in the rules hung subtly in the air and the bartender, unable to understand, sensed it as some kind of threatening presence. He kept his distance from the marble table where the dominoes, black side up, mixed and turned under Pioquinto Manterola's agile hands.

  They wouldn't like to admit it, but tonight for the first time ever they sat down without choosing partners, drawing their chairs up to the table without any particular order.

  "Hele we go, gentlemen," said Tomas as he set the double-six. With that as the signal, the reporter pulled a sheet of paper from his vest pocket and unfolded it slowly.

  "I made up a list of questions to see if we can start to figure out this mess we've gotten ourselves into."

  "It's time we went on the offensive," said the lawyer Verdugo, playing the six/four.

  "If those fouls thele ale youl idea of an offense, then you'le in double, fliend," said Tomas, taking a strange pleasure from the others' uneasiness. By now his mask was like a part of his own skin and it amused him to see how his "inscrutable Oriental bearing" threw his companions off their guard.

  "Double-fours," said the poet.

  "Double trouble," said Manterola.

  "No, I wasn't referring to the fours, Tomas," said Verdugo. Then turning to the reporter, "Let's get on with it, Manterola. This whole thing's gone and woken me out of the sleep I've been in ever since November 1887."

  "What happened in November 1887?" asked the poet. "Oh, that's your birthday, isn't it? I guess I'm a little slow on the uptake tonight."

  "Well, I didn't put them in any particular order, but here we go. Number one: What's Margarita the Widow Roldan got to do with Colonel Gomez, Conchita, Celeste the hypnotist, Ramon the Spic and long-distance ejaculator, the lieutenant whose name we don't know, and the French aristocrat about whom we know even less? And after that, what have they all got to do with one another? What brings them together? Who else frequents the widow's house, and why?"

  "Not bad for starters, inkslinger," said the poet. He eyed the five the Chinaman set down on the table, and concluded that his partner's opening sixes were merely the luck of the draw. Following his instincts he rearranged his hand, separating the two sixes he'd been holding in reserve, placing one in line next to the blanks and the other upside down with the rest of his threes.

  "Do you want answers or have you got more questions?" inquired Verdugo with an embarrassed smile, both wanting and not wanting to go deeper into this strange story that had taken them prisoner.

  "We'll do the answers later," said the reporter. He played another four, leaving the original six still open at the other end of the row of dominoes. Then he returned to his sheet of paper and read in a dull, even voice: "Number two: Who killed Sergeant Zevada? Who killed Colonel Zevada? Let's assume for the time being the murderer or murderers were the same, which brings us, of course, to why? Next we have to ask ourselves what connects the Zevada brothers to the widow, Gomez, and the others. Are they connected, how are they connected, and to which ones? All of them or just some? We know the Zevada brothers knew Margarita, or at least one of them had her picture in his pocket and that's how we found the widow and her friends, by tracing the photograph. And we also know the widow was in the building on Humboldt Street when Colonel Zevada fell out of the window. That's all we know."

  "Bravo," said the poet. "A hell of a question." The Chinaman sat in silence, caught between the game and the conversation, debating whether or not to try and turn the game back to sixes. He sensed that his partner the poet had misinterpreted his strategy of holding out with the rest of the sixes in his hand, although the poet certainly hadn't done much to open the way for him either.

  "Go on," said Verdugo with a wide smile. "At the moment we seem to have more questions than answers."

  "Double-twos," said the journalist, setting his domino down with the rest.

  "Sixes," said the Chinaman, breathing an inaudible and privat
e sigh of relief. He played the six/two.

  "Well, that's one mystery solved," said Verdugo.

  "Number three," said the reporter. "Why did the dumber of the Zevada brothers have his pockets full of jewels?"

  "All right," said the poet, "all right. Twos, sixes, jewels. It all goes to show that when you don't understand anything there's nothing you can do but let the water run under the bridge."

  "Four: How many left-handers are there in this story?"

  "Before we go on to number five," said Verdugo, "I suggest that instead of classifying the Zevada brothers as the smart one and the dumb one-unless you know something the rest of us don't-we just call them the trombonist and the colonel," and he lightly tapped one of his dominoes on the tabletop, passing the hand.

  "Five: What was the Widow Roldan doing in the building on Humboldt Street? What was Colonel Zevada doing there? Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have to confess I was so taken up with the woman that I didn't really notice anything else. I apologize, gentlemen, for my complete lack of professionalism. I didn't even read the story in the paper the next day."

  "No problem there," said Verdugo. "I read it. He fell, or was thrown, out of the window of the waiting room of Weiss's jewelry shop."

  "But, if I remember correctly, the colonel didn't have any jewels on him."

  "And to complicate things further, the jeweler said he'd never seen the man before."

  "Excuse me, gentlemen, but, seeing as how the lepoltel hasn't gotten alound to taking his tuln, I suggest that you all go and lead the books of an Englishman named Althul Conan Doyle."

  "Have they been translated?"

  "No," said Verdugo, "but it wouldn't be a bad idea to get ahold of a copy. He wrote a whole series of detective stories in Strand Magazine. It's been a big hit in the United States, too. He's got this detective that always goes around with a doctor."

  "I suppose a detective needs a good doctor. We could use one, that's for sure."

  "Sorry, friends, but I think that things are complicated enough with the Brits and the Frenchman we've already got to deal with. What's this Frenchman's name, by the way?"

  "Michel Simon, something like that. I don't know if he's left handed, but he carries his gun on the left side, in his boot, a little number, a Derringer or some piece of trash like that."

  "Derringers are what they use to make those little holes in Swiss cheese," said the poet.

  "At three yards, it'll kill you just as well as a Colt .45," said Verdugo, who knew about that sort of thing.

  "Six: How did Gomez get to be Colonel of the Gendarmery when he used to be buddy-buddy with Pablo Gonzalez? How did he survive the purge of the Gonzalistas in 1920?"

  "Now there's a good question. Do you know anything about that, Tomas?" asked the poet.

  The Chinaman shook his head.

  "Seven: How did Mr. Roldan, the widow's deceased husband, die? That is to say, is Margarita a widow by natural causes?"

  The game had come to a standstill. Tonight the four friends were unable to interlace the conversation with the play of the bones. None of the other regulars came over to watch the game, as sometimes happened, and not even the bartender came by with the usual bottle of Havana brandy.

  "Eight: Does the Shadow Club, as our friend the poet has been inspired to call it, have anything to do with the Englishman murdered at the Hotel Regis? Is it just a coincidence that Colonel Gomez happened to be there, and what about his little trick with the keys? Who is the dead Englishman? What was he doing in Mexico City? Who's his disappeared friend? What happened to the million pesos'worth of stock certificates?"

  "I've got some information there," said the poet. "I ran into Bertram Wolfe and Williams, that patsy working for the Hearst chain, yesterday."

  "What's Wolfe say?" asked Pioquinto Manterola, who also knew the North American journalist.

  "Apparently the guy was representing the English-Dutch oil companies. They sent him to Mexico to talk with the government about export rights. Wolfe's got a whole theory about it. He says that since the Lamont-de la Huerta treaty was negotiated in New York, and since President Obregon acknowledged a billion-peso debt to the foreign bankers, with the railroads and oil-export rights as collateral, the oil barons are afraid the government's going to try and apply Article Twenty-seven of the constitution, which would make all mineral and oil deposits public property. In other words, the oil companies may be in for some tough negotiating. He says that this guy Blinkman was sent in secret by Aguila Petroleum to try and work out a separate deal with the government, separate from the gringos that is, before everything blows up in Obregon's face. Williams says that Blinkman had strange habits and that they shoved a pistol in his mouth instead of putting something else there, if you know what I mean. Wolfe swears up and down the whole thing's got to do with some hanky-panky of the oil companies, and he thinks that the hired guns of the American companies, Huasteca Petroleum or Texas Oil, were the ones who worked Blinkman over. He says there's going to be a lot of dead men without a name to put on their tombstones if the companies start to play roulette with one another like that. Williams says that Van Horn killed him-he's the guy who shared Blinkman's room and has since disappeared."

  "That brings me to number nine: What's Tampico got to do with all this? Both Zevada and Gomez were promoted to colonel while stationed in Tampico, and that's where the oil companies have their headquarters. Does this whole thing have something to do with Tampico?"

  "Tomas?" asked Verdugo.

  "When I was in Tampico I was wolking filst in a laundly and latel on as a calpintel. These two guys wele famous in Tampico back then. 01 maybe infamous is a bettel wold. In the big stlike back in `19, they wele both thele with oldels to splead a little lead among the wolkels. That's all I know. Back then Tampico was a dilty little city with a ton of dough going flora hand to hand. You could buy a colonel of a genelal just as easy as a piece of land, if you had the sclatch. Life wasn't wolth too much in Tampico. An oil well is like a big hole in the glound full of black shit.' hat's all I know."

  "Number ten: What's Tomas' Chinawoman got to do with all of this?"

  "Nothing," said Tomas, and he smiled as Tampico slipped momentarily from his thoughts.

  "Sorry to say it, Tomas, but there just aren't any chance encounters in this story. So when a young woman runs out of a gambling joint in the middle of a gunfight and asks you to take her away, I can't help but wonder."

  "Nothing," said Tomas again.

  "All right then, eleven: Who hired Suarez and Felipe Tibon to kill us? Who was the other guy that was with them? Which one of us were they gunning for? Was it me because I'd gone after the widow and said too much? Or the poet because he'd witnessed the trombonist's murder? Or Tomas because he'd saved Rosa Lopez and taken her away? Or me again because I wrote in the paper that Blinkman had been killed instead of committed suicide? Or were they going for all of us? And does it have anything to do with the rest of the story?"

  "That's too many questions for one night," said the poet.

  "Hold your horses, Fermin, here comes another one. Number twelve: What did Margarita Roldan want from me when she came to visit in the hospital?"

  "And what did Celeste the hypnotist want from me, apart from that little chat about magnetic forces? It's the same question. I never did figure it out."

  "One more. Thirteen: Who's this officer that suddenly starts taking shots at our friend the poet, and why?"

  "Hell, that's an easy one," said Verdugo. "If we hadn't had so much wine in us the other day, we could have figured it out sooner. Was he a guy about five-seven, long sideburns, sort of bug-eyed, thick eyebrows, in his late twenties?"

  "Sorry, that's not him. If I remember right-and you've got to understand as soon as he saw me he went for his gun-he was a skinny guy, plenty taller than me, clean shaven, light haired. One of these dark-skinned guys whose hair's gone blond from too much time in the sun or cold."

  "Who's your man?" Manterola asked the lawyer.

&nb
sp; "I thought it mightbe Gomez'aide-de-camp, this little lieutenant who was hovering around him and the hypnotist the whole time the night of the party at the widow's. But the poet's man still sounds familiar to me. Maybe it's some other officer in Gomez' entourage."

  "Well, if he isn't, then it's even more complicated. Did he say anything before he started shooting? Not very Mexican of him, if you ask me, to shoot first and ask questions later."

  "He didn't even say buenos dias. He looked at me, gave a doubletake, and went for his gun."

  "Fourteen: Who sent the poisoned chocolates to me at the hospital and why? Fifteen: What do we know? Are we getting in somebody's way, and who is it? What did we do?"

  "That's the best one of the bunch, inkslingel."

  "And the last one, too."

  ""That's enough," said the lawyer Verdugo. "What do you say we cut your sheet of paper there into pieces and divide up the questions? I think it's about time we had some answers. At any rate, the game's gone cold."

  "And just when Tomas and I were about to win, too."

  "My father always said that dominoes and talk don't mix," said Verdugo, carefully tearing Manterola's list into four equal pieces.

  "What'd he say that for?"

  "Who?"

  "Your dad."

  "My father never said anything to me in his whole life,"answered Verdugo.

  The poet smiled. Tomas got up from his chair and headed over to the bar of the Majestic Hotel.