"Tomas! Tomas!"
The Chinaman watched as the bulletproof Packard squealed to a stop with Manterola at the wheel, the poet asleep at his side, and two more men hunched up in the back seat. He held on to Rosa, who gripped his arm more tightly than before, and held out his hand to stop San Vicente from reaching for the gun in his jacket pocket.
"And where am I going to put you all now if I've only got one bed in my house?" the reporter wondered.
MANTEROLA TOOK CHARGE of his beleaguered troops. They drove around for nearly an hour before finding refuge in a crib house out in Tlalpan, paradoxically named The Rest-a-While Inn. The owner, a Spaniard, owed the journalist a few favors from when Manterola had defended him from the abuses of a group of army officers three years before.
The Dutchman remained unconscious, the lawyer Verdugo, although he appeared outwardly unharmed, raved deliriously, San Vicente had come down with a violent cold, the poet was in a state of profound dejection after so many hours of violence and tension, Rosa had burns all up and down her arms, and Tomas Wong had a deep cut across his forehead, oozing blood.
The best that Manterola could get was a pair of rooms with three beds and an armchair between them, a pot of old chicken soup, and an abortionist to patch up his wounded friends. Once everything was more or less under control, he went out onto the balcony to smoke a cigarette and savor the dawn. Tlalpan was a small town corrupted by its nearness to the city, living off a pair of textile mills, a handful of dairies, and a multitude of small truck farms. At that time of day, far from the highway and the factories, the town was sunk in the bucolic peace of the remotest Mexican village untouched by the years of revolution: a pair of women walked toward the market with baskets full of chiles and heads of lettuce, a dairyman drove a train of mules loaded down with huge five-gallon milk cans, a uniformed streetcar driver strolled along on his way to work. The reporter exhaled smoke and watched it chasing up toward the sky. He didn't know much about warfare, but he had the feeling the next move was up to them, whatever it was: gunfire, maneuvers, traps, newspapers. That was important, to have the power of the press behind them, the voice of God, the truth spelled out in black and white. And that was something Manterola did know about. The only thing that bothered him was the memory of Margarita, intruding stubbornly into his thoughts, naked except for her leghorn hat, a stray ringlet of hair falling across her face. He waved his hand distractedly to get the image out of his mind, as if he were waving away the smoke or shooing away a persistent mosquito. Then he asked himself what was really going on. During the two hours he'd spent driving around in the Packard, he'd found out about so many things that he felt truly incapable of putting them all together. The appearance of new characters in the story, Rosa's abduction and rescue, the comatose Dutchman, and the incorporation of San Vicente into their little club-the same anarchist who, if he remembered right, had been deported by Obregon in May of `21.
The reporter smiled. He could have written a hell of a story if he wasn't already up to his neck in the whole tumultuous affair. The truth was that Mexico City was paradise for a journalist who considered his profession to be the finest of the fine arts, and his personal specialty the best of them all. "It's the real poetry of the twentieth century," he told himself out loud and then went inside to look for a place to sleep.
San Vicente snored away in one of the rooms, revolver in hand, the armchair pushed up against the door. The Dutchman lay unconscious in the bed with the poet balled up at his feet, his boots still on. Manterola stepped through the door that led to the next room, where Tomas lay on one bed, smoking, with a bloody bandage wrapped around his head, a protective arm around Rosa lying at his side. Verdugo tossed and turned in the other bed.
"Evelything okay, inkslingel?" asked the Chinaman in a whisper.
"As good as can be expected. Not sleepy?"
"I've got too much on my mind."
Manterola took off his boots, folded his socks inside them, threw his jacket on the floor and unbuttoned his vest. Then he dropped down on the bed next to the lawyer, tugging a corner of the pillow out of Verdugo's viselike grip.
"How's she doing?" he asked.
"She'll be okay. The doctol said the bulns welen't too bad. Cigalette bulns, the sons of bitches."
Manterola turned over in the bed, leaving the Chinaman alone with his anger, and found himself staring into Verdugo's vacant eyes.
"Alberto, what's the matter?" he asked, but he realized that the lawyer couldn't hear him and that his eyes, although they seemed to stare fiercely into his own, were fixed on something far beyond: his own little private piece of hell.
Verdugo pushed back in the bed and brought his hands up to the reporter's throat.
"Hey, I'm Pioquinto Manterola,your friend,"said the journalist soothingly; without trying to evade the hands tightening around his neck. "Have you got so many friends that you can afford to strangle one of them?"
Verdugo's hands squeezed tighter. Manterola stared urgently into the lawyer's deranged eyes.
"Alberto, it's me, Manterola," he said, raising his voice. Tomas jumped out of bed with a shout: "Hey, take it easy!"
"I'm...your ...friend," gasped Manterola, feeling the first effects of asphyxiation. Tomas repeatedly struck the lawyer's wrists with the side of his hand, but Verdugo refused to let up.
"No, man, no, don't let him," shouted the Chinaman. "Don't let him do it." Manterola finally reacted, grasping the lawyer's hands, trying to pry them away from his throat.
"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?"
"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 demonstrati
ons, 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."
The Shadow of the Shadow Page 16
