The Shadow of the Shadow

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  "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 a
ll-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.

  Tired of reading standing up by the newsstand, Maharaja Manterola headed for the hotel bar where he installed himself in a dark corner at the rear, for the sake of surreptitiousness, if not comfortable reading. He opened up El Universal and found the page where Librado had written one of his emotionally twisted stories, asking publicly how one of the most prominent leaders of the city's graphics industry had died of lead poisoning when he had never spent any time in the leaded atmosphere of the print shops he owned. The story of Roldan's death, which in its time hadn't received more than a few lines on the obituary page, was now retold with abundant detail, augmented by several photographs of the widow and even one of the mansion in San Rafael. Almost at the end of the story, the reporter asked casually if this wasn't the same widow who had been seen frequently of late at the more stylish parties, arm in arm with a certain colonel of the Mexico City gendarmerie.

  Next, in Omega, and with a more conservative tone, de Blas explored the accusations of a nonexistent spokesman for the Aguila Petroleum Company about the activities of an armed gang headquartered in San Rafael that had kidnapped their representative Van Horn.

  Manterola ordered a whiskey in Hindi, which is the same as in Spanish or English, only accompanied by a series of elaborate gestures, and unfolded his own paper, which he'd been saving until the end.

  He wasn't used to rereading his own work. Journalism was an ephemeral art, and it had to be understood and lived the same way. The retelling of yesterday's events served as a link to the historical past, useful in reference to the present, but not the sort of thing you wanted to spend your life paging through again and again. Manterola often said that it made him proud to see his day-old articles used as wrapping paper for a good red snapper in the marketplace.

  But today he wanted to fully appreciate the details of the journalistic siege he'd laid around Colonel Gomez and company. At the top of the page there was a rather unflattering photo of the two corpses discovered on the sidewalk in front of the widow's San Rafael mansion. The bodies had been identified as those of Michel Simon, a French cardsharp, and gendarmerie lieutenant Estrada. After detailing the condition in which the bodies were found, one pumped full of buckshot and the other with two .45 bullet holes through the chest, the journalist suggested that both men had only recently been in the service of Colonel Gomez, and questioned whether it wasn't possible the colonel had had a falling-out with the dead men, for motives as yet unclear. He went on to link Lieutenant Estrada with the trombonist's murder, "according to several eyewitnesses," and brought up the close relationship between the trombonist's recently deceased brother and Colonel Gomez. "Colonel Jesus Gomez owes his superiors a thorough explanation," the article concluded, "in the interests of maintaining untainted the public image of the Mexico City gendarmerie."

  Manterola took his Swiss pocketknife and cut out the various articles. Diligently underlining Gomez'name every time it appeared and each reference to "a certain colonel of the gendarmerie," he took all the clippings and put them into an envelope, which he then addressed to General Cruz, Gomez' immediate superior. He rubbed his hands together again until they shone. The voice of the voiceless in action, the power of the printed word, he told himself.

  After leaving the union meeting at the Providencia mill, Tomas and San Vicente walked together through the back streets of San Angel. The Chinaman had found a hiding place for himself, Rosa, and San Vicente in a coal yard run cooperatively by a couple of his anarchist friends blacklisted in the local mills. Songbirds filled the bright cloudless blue sky.

  "I don't get it,Tomas. First you come out against a revolutionary action in the affinity group, and now you don't bat an eye when your friends say they want to rob a bank."

  "The olganization is one thing and we'le anothel. That's just the way it is, what do you want me to do?"

  "Hell's bells, man, you're all a bunch of friggin amateurs. `We're going to rob a bank,' they say, like it's as easy as jumping rope. That's the worst of it."

  "That's why we need you, blothel."

  "Oh, right. Well, that was obvious. The only thing is, like I said, if all you guys want is to get at the Dutchman's safe-deposit box and whatever's inside it, that's fine, but then I'm going for the money.

  "And nobody said you couldn't, eithel. Once you told them you didn't want the money fol youlself, but to stalt up an analchist newspapel, evelybody said yes, including me. So what's the ploblem?"

  "That's the problem right there, Tomas, that you're willing to hold up a bank, but not for the cause."

  "Someday you and me'll go tlavelling alound the wold lobbing banks and taking away the boulgeoisie's money, okay, but only in places whele thele's no olganization, so they can't go and lay the lap on the comlades. Is it a deal?"

  "I didn't want to kill him, but something made me keep on squeezing, I just couldn't stop. I knew it wasn't him, and still somehow it was," Verdugo said in a rush, not really feeling like talking at all.

  The poet was thinking about Odilia and answered the lawyer with a nod.

  "Who knows all the demons we've got bottled up inside us? That woman let one of mine out of the bottle, that's for sure, set it free to run wild in the streets."

  "I think maybe you ought to ask her to marry you, lawyer. Maybe she's a little cross-eyed and talks funny, but I think she's kind of cute."

  "Not a bad idea, really. I always did like redheads. Just think about the shingle we could hang outside the door: Verdugo, Attorney-at-law, Madame Celeste, Hypnotist."

  "Whiskey... another... please," said Manterola, wiping away the sweat pouring out from under his turban.

  "Make her a ruby red," Verdugo said to one of his contacts out toward Candelaria, who for a modest twenty-five pesos had agreed to give the Packard a new coat of paint.

  "Hell, robbing a bank is an art, man," explained San Vicente, "a real art."

  "What part of India are you from, sir?" asked a man with an Argentine accent. "I once served in my country's embassy in Bombay."

  "Red? That's going to look like shit," said the poet as he shaved off his mustache.

  "You can't get to be as old as we ale without falling in love with machines," the Chinaman told San Vicente out of the blue.

  "I hate to disappoint you, poet, but you're not going to get any taller by shaving off your mustache."

  "From Kuala Lumpur. I have never been to India, sir."

  "Let it burn," Colonel Gomez told his men, who were busy dousing Verdugo's apartment with gasoline, the bed, the walls, the rug.

  I COULD BE A GARDENER instead of a poet, and never have to touch a gun again as long as I live. You don't make poetry with guns. Or do you?

  VERDUGO SPENT THE LAST of his lottery money on gas for the Packard and a Kodak camera and film he bought at the American Foto Shop. He listened patiently to the salesman's instructions, despite the poet's insistence that he already knew how to work the camera. Then he asked his friends to pose for him in front of the National Palace on the Zocalo.

  San Vicente ended up taking the picture, adamantly refusing to have his own picture taken.

  "I had no idea you were such a romantic," the journalist told the lawyer as San Vicente clicked the shutter.

  The picture, which is probably still out there somewhere after all these years, stuck in some ancient photo album or lost in an old desk drawer, shows the four friends together: Verdugo, frowning, his pearl gray Stetson jammed down almost to his eyebrows, his impeccable double-breasted gray suit, his left hand toying with the ring on the middle finger of his right hand. Next to
him, the poet, sitting on a low wall, his boots dangling gaily, his arms wrapped around Verdugo's and Manterola's shoulders, looking a little baby-faced with his shaved-off mustache, smiling, happy, like in Zacatecas. Manterola, his eternal English cloth cap covering his balding head, has a paternal look on his face, like an old man playing at a child's game, a half smile on his lips, chewing on a filterless cigarette. Tomas Wong, standing next to the reporter, wearing the mustache the poet lacks, looks like an abandoned child, his hands shoved into his pockets, staring with a defiant eye at the National Palace, his muscles exploding out from under his white T-shirt. The recent scar shines on his forehead. In the background, the Mexican flag flutters atop a flagpole.

  After taking the picture, they went off to rob the bank. "Good morning, this is a holdup," said a short man in a mask. He headed straight for the safe-deposit boxes without paying much attention to whether the four customers, the tellers, or the guards raised their hands above their heads. After searching carefully for a certain number, he started to force the box open with a crowbar.

  "I believe the gentleman said this was a holdup," said another masked figure dressed in an elegant gray suit, a dapper pearl gray Stetson on his head and a shotgun in his hands. "Well, it is. So get your hands up over your heads, all of you."

  "This is a holdup, dammit. Put all the money in big envelopes, no coins, no gold or silver," said another masked man in shirtsleeves.

  "Shit... all I want is to bust open this pinata, boys," said the short man, struggling with the crowbar. After his second attempt, he walked over to the manager's desk.

  "Look, mister, this is the certificate for this here safe-deposit box. That gives me the right to open it, see? It's just that I seem to have lost my ID. Now I figure you could save me the trouble of having to open it with this crowbar and get your keys. What do you say?" he said, with his Colt .45 against the banker's throat.