The Shadow of the Shadow

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  "Listen, I'm not Gomez, I don't have a whole wad of bills to give out to whatever stupid son of a bitch comes along asking for a handout. I killed the Brit, and because you were stupid enough to try and get involved, I hired those three idiots to take care of you, too, but it turned out they couldn't shoot too good. It's not always going to be that way. Hired guns in this town are cheap and plenty. I'm offering you your own skin, gentlemen, that's all. You decide what it's worth. What do you want money for? To leave it for future generations to enjoy?"

  "In other words, you're saying that if we keep quiet, we live. Now that's a hell of a good deal, isn't it, Verdugo? A Mexican Army colonel bought off by the gringos and ready to sell them a piece of his own country says he'll let us live. A hell of a deal."

  "Can I say something, Manterola?" asked the poet.

  "Go ahead, Mr. Valencia."

  "This idiot colonel's got us figured all wrong. I wouldn't let scum like him lick my boots, let alone my dick."

  "Very pretty, poet," murmured Verdugo, shoving away the blond man who was pulling his gun out underneath the table. But the lawyer wasn't quite fast enough to entirely avoid the man's first shot, which sent his pearl gray Stetson flying and traced a thin line of blood along the top of his head. The lawyer reached for his gun, but before he could get it out of the holster, Fermin Valencia opened fire with the shotgun on Colonel Martinez and his other companion, tearing apart their faces and sewing the cabaret with buckshot.

  With the explosion of the shotgun blast, echoing through the room like fireworks on Independence Day, the journalist fell backward in his chair onto the floor. Verdugo whirled around searching for the man at the bar, who he found pointing a large Colt revolver in the reporter's direction.The lawyer fired three quick shots, and as the man doubled over his gun went off, throwing up splinters from the overturned table. Tomas Wong, knife in hand, stared down the men at the other nearby table, who smiled timidly at him and the steely black hole of San Vicente's .38 revolver.

  On the floor, the blond gunman got off another pair of shots, but the reporter stopped him with a lucky shot to the shoulder. Verdugo looked desperately around the room for any other suspicious movements. A strange silence fell gradually over the bar. Tomas stepped over and kicked the pistol out of the blond gunman's hand. The poet hopped around trying to extinguish his smoking pants leg.

  "Shit, I nearly blew my damn toes off," he announced to anyone who cared to listen.

  Verdugo went and took a look at the dead colonel and his bodyguard. The colonel's face was a disfigured mass of blood and splintered bone. He couldn't help it: he started to vomit on top of the corpses. Manterola stood up, fitting his wire-rimmed glasses over his nose with trembling hands. The reporter and his four friends were the only ones standing in the entire room. Somebody sobbed from behind a table. That was the only sound there was, that and Verdugo's retching. Manterola missed the rumba.

  I N T H E GA RAGE somewhere in Candelaria where they were spending the night alongside the ruby-red bulletproof Packard, there was an old broken-down piano where, to the poet's surprise and delight, Verdugo sat playing Chopin's Polonaises, one after the other. The poet, installed in the Packard's backseat with the door open, silently wrote some notes for an ad campaign he hoped to sell to the Stuart Company, given the sorry state of their current material (Stuart's Hemro Ointment cures hemorrhoids, a progressive disease).

  "Good evening, friends," said Manterola, walking in through the metal door with Tomas Wong.

  "We're all here. Did you bring the dominoes?"

  "You bet I did. But keep on playing, Verdugo. There's no hurry."

  "That's good, because there's no table, either," said the poet. "Where's your buddy, Tomas?"

  "He's out meditating, Felmin. He wanted to think things ovel and figule out if evelything we got him into this week jives with his plinciples."

  "And does it?"

  "I think so. You could say that in a solt of indilect and suigenelis way, we've been giving it to the state left and light."

  "The army, the cops, the banks. Not too shabby," said the poet, dragging three dilapidated chairs over to the piano.

  "On top of the piano?"

  "As soon as Verdugo finishes with Chopin."

  "Not even I can finish off Chopin," said the lawyer, pulling the lid down over the keys.

  "Any word from the newspaper?" asked the poet.

  "Not yet. I called a little while ago, but Alessio wasn't there. Dammit, I get the feeling they're not going to want to go ahead with it... The boys at the paper said there was a bunch of gendarmes hanging out on Humboldt Street. Gomez called a press conference, to make his counterattack, I suppose, but none of the reporters showed up."

  "Now that's what I call solidarity, inkslinger," said Verdugo with a smile. Without the Chopin, their voices echoed hollowly in the garage.

  "All the gendalmes that alen't staked out in flont of youl newspapel ale down in San Angel. They've got the whole town sealed off."

  "The strike about to start?"

  "If they don't set Malquez flee by tomollow," said Tomas, losing himself in his thoughts.

  "And if they don't print it, what are we going to do? Are we all going to go after Gomez together?" asked the poet.

  "If they don't print it, it's because the government wants to hold onto Gomez-it means they're protecting him. So then it doesn't matter what we do...there's not going to be enough city for us to hide in. They'll hunt us down like rats."

  "What would they want to protect Gomez for? What good's he to them?"

  "The cops ale a piece of shit."

  "I agree with you on that score, illustrious child of the rising sun. You don't need to be an anarchist to think that. But I still don't understand. The cops are a piece of shit, but they've got their rules all the same. I don't understand any of it."

  "You know what, inkslinger? I've still got more questions than answers. Now we know who sent the three gunmen to kill us, but who tried to poison you in the hospital?"

  "Gomez, I suppose."

  "And why did he have the Zevada brothers killed?"

  "I think I can answer that one," said Verdugo. "Zevada was the idiot kid in this whole story. After the Agua Prieta Revolt, the conspirators lost their chance to pull off a rebellion in the oil country. Things had changed too much. With Carranza dead, there were no longer tensions between him and Obregon's forces. Obregon had loyal generals stationed in San Luis Potosi and Monterrey, and later on Gomez, Zevada, and Martinez Fierro all got transferred out of the oil country. Their plan fell apart. Gomez, on the one hand, took up with the victors and started in fixing things up for himself in Mexico City. Martinez Fierro retained command over his troops. But Zevada was too slow on the uptake and he found himself out of the action. What I figure is that he tried to blackmail Gomez, who paid him off at first with jewels, and later on with a one-way trip out a third-story window."

  "Do you really want to know what happened, poet? For now, let's just cross our fingers and hope they print the story," said Manterola, stifling a yawn.

  The days had been all too long, the nights too short, and fear had been everywhere in the air.

  "I give up. Get out the dominoes and let's choose partners."

  "Six/one," said Manterola.

  "Six/four," said Verdugo.

  "Double-zelos," said Tomas.

  "One/three," said Fermin Valencia.

  "EL DEMOCRATA, SECTION TWO, Manterola here," said the inkslinger into the telephone mouthpiece.

  "Manterola, this is Colonel Gomez," said a cavernous voice over the telephone. "I'm going to give you a chance, even though you don't deserve it. You have sullied my honor, sir. So I challenge you to a duel. Just the two of us, alone. Stand up in front of me like a man, come out of the shadows..."

  "What honor?" asked the journalist after a brief pause. "Colonel, you can take your honor and stick it up your ass." He hung up and sat staring at the telephone. It dawned on him that he ought to remember th
at voice forever, those few brief words. It was the only more-or-less concrete thing he had, the only real contact with his enemy, with the man who'd turned his life into "a tale told by an idiot," as Verdugo had said.

  "Cheggidout, cheggidout," said Gonzaga, walking by in his eternal mental haze. "That's some friend you've got there."

  Manterola ignored the illustrator and turned back to his typewriter like a man possessed by a sacred fury. His fingers smashed the keys-time was running out. He was a professional and, although he was only waiting for his editor's decision, he couldn't keep from writing his daily piece. It was a rambling story about the rumors circulating in Durango that Pancho Villa had set out from his Hacienda Canutillo in search of buried treasure. Gonzaga read over the reporter's shoulder for a while, then went off to draw a picture of Villa in a cave, kneeling in front of a chest full of coins shining in the torchlight.

  The newsroom was hot with activity just before deadline. Ruvalcaba read hurriedly through the editorials that came to him from the director's office. A pair of reporters sweated over the lead stories, one about Finance Minister Adolfo de la Huerta's comments following his return from negotiations with the American banks in New York, and the other about the general strike called by the San Angel textile workers in response to the gendarmerie's kidnapping of their leader Marquez.

  Suddenly the subtle odor of violets wafted across the keys of his typewriter and the journalist looked up, adjusting his wirerimmed spectacles, to see Margarita Herrera, the Widow Roldan, standing in front of him.

  "May I speak with you?" asked the widow, under Gonzaga's watchful stare.

  "I'll be with you in a minute, ma'am," said Manterola, continuing to type furiously, trying to escape from the woman's piercing eyes. He yanked the last page out of the typewriter and was about to mark his corrections when a strange movement at the door to the newsroom forced him to look up again.

  "Whore! Worse than a whore!" shouted Ramon the Spic, charging toward the widow with a knife in his hand.

  Manterola tried to intervene but his desk stood in the way. The woman stood up, or started to, but her legs gave out under her and as she fell back onto her chair the Spic drove his knife twice into her breast. Manterola finally managed to reach the collapsed woman, taking hold of her arm and ignoring the Spic who just missed the reporter's ribs with a thrust of his bloody dagger. Gonzaga took a few steps back, the better to observe the action so that he could draw it later on. Life can be so ephemeral, so fleeting, if one isn't careful to take in all the details.

  Fortunately for the reporter, Rufino the messenger boy arrived in time to bean the Spic on the side of the head with a bronze paperweight thrown from across the room. He fell unconscious at the widow's feet.

  `Tm dying, sir. I'm only sorry we met so late," murmured the widow, sagging in the reporter's arms and staining his shirt with the blood that oozed slowly from her breast, masking her wounds, soaking into her white blouse.

  "Some loves are idiot loves, like our own," said the journalist. That was all he could think to say as the woman lay back, gulping in air that never made it to her lungs.

  The entire newsroom had assembled to watch the tragedy. Like a last sorrowful honor guard, Manterola's office mates, sweating, shirtless, their extinguished cigarettes clamped between their teeth, stood in silence around a woman who had poisoned her husband, taken up with a corrupt colonel, been murdered by a Spanish jewel thief, and now lay dying in a crime reporter's arms, the same man who had once wished he could have fallen in love with her.

  "The murderer's dead, too, Manterola... You did him right, Rufino. Holy hell, man, what an arm," pronounced Valverde, the rookie sports writer who had studied a couple of years of medicine before joining the paper.

  Gonzaga sat again at his desk, manipulating the pencils and charcoal sticks like an illusionist, trying to finish the drawing before the afternoon shadows darkened forever over the dead woman's bloodstained face.

  I T HAD ALL STARTED two nights before, when three police agents accompanied by plant manager Julio Imbert entered the Santa Teresa mill and kidnapped Julio Marquez, Interior Secretary of the Textile Workers Federation. All the next day, Marquez' whereabouts were still unknown. At 6:05 the following morning, a flood of workers entered Imbert's office demanding Marquez' release, insulting the manager, and threatening retaliation if anything happened to their leader. Imbert took a gun out of his desk drawer but the workers disarmed him before he could do any harm. Work in the factory was brought to a standstill, the immense looms shut down. A group of workers went out into the street and started to beat on the metal lampposts with steel bars.

  The metallic, rhythmic signal paralyzed the mills all over Contreras. Workers at the Magdalena, the Alpina, the Hormiga all quit working and went out to repeat the rhythmic signal.

  Five hundred marchers left the doors of the Santa Teresa and by the time they'd reached Tizapan there were over five thousand.

  The distant clanging woke up Tomas in the coal yard.

  "What the hell?" asked San Vicente, jumping out of bed.

  "Genelal stlike. Don't you heal the lampposts?"

  "I didn't know that was the signal. Hells bells, man, are we ever organized or what?"

  Rosa took the Chinaman's hand and squeezed it softly. "Be careful.' he streets are going to be full of police."

  "Thele's going to be mole of us than them. Just listen to it."

  Tomas went out wrapped in a heavy coat, an enormous straw hat covering his head, and San Vicente threw a scarf across his face. They joined the march as it turned onto Puente Sierra. And while they looked around for someone they knew to tell them what had happened, the workers at the front of the column ran across Imbert sitting in a car with four policemen. The marchers showered the car with stones and captured the mill manager, bleeding from a superficial cut on his face. They demanded that he publicly declare who had kidnapped Julio Marquez.

  Tomas and San Vicente found their friends Paulino Martinez and Hector, and together they tried to push their way to the front of the crowd through the enraged Santa Teresa workers.

  At 8:05, on the Ansaldo Bridge, five gendarmes led by a sergeant and accompanied by several nonunion workers from the Santa Teresa mill tried to rescue Imbert. The marchers responded with stones. The gendarmes fired into the air.

  San Vicente brought his hand up to his coat pocket. Tomas stopped him.

  "If we file back, that gives them the excuse to shoot into the clowd. Take it easy."

  The Spaniard nodded as the workers at the front of the demonstration chased the gendarmes with another volley of stones.

  At 8:30, nearly seven thousand marchers entered the main plaza at the center of San Angel. Two squadrons of mounted police were waiting for them. Imbert tried to break free, but was hit in the shoulder with a stone. The gendarmes cocked their rifles. Tomas tried again to get to the front, but he was trapped in a side street while the first lines of workers entered the square. Climbing onto a windowsill and holding on to the outer grate, he strained to see what was happening in the plaza. A double row of mounted gendarmes guarded the entrance to city hall. Two officers sat on their horses behind the second line. Tomas recognized one of them-Colonel Gomez, his face and body tense, sitting upright in the saddle, shouting an order. The gendarmes retreated toward Plaza San Jacinto before the surging crowd of workers. The marchers were trying to get to city hall, where they planned to force Imbert to declare openly what had happened to Marquez.

  The thousands of workers coming up from behind pushed the front of the march toward San Jacinto, but barely five hundred marchers had reached the plaza when the police opened up with their first volley. Six or seven workers dropped to the ground, and the crowd paused and fell backward. Tomas and San Vicente tried again to move ahead, but it was impossible.

  "It's Gomez, did you see him? Gomez is giving the oldels."

  "Let's get him."

  The police opened fire again, and now the plaza was covered with fallen
bodies. Some of the marchers tried to fight back, but their stones were no match for the police Mausers. Tomas was dragged along by the crowd, but San Vicente, protecting himself behind a tree, managed to get off a shot at the mounted Colonel. The bullet shattered a window at the colonel's back and he turned to try to see where the shot had come from. The gendarmes fired again, but the plaza was almost empty. The colonel made his horse caper in place for a moment, and then spurred the animal into a trot and left the plaza by the far side. San Vicente saw a tenyear-old boy with a bullet wound in his leg, took him up in his arms, and with his gun still in his hand retreated from the plaza, carefully watching the line of mounted police. Tomas waved him into the shelter of a nearby doorway. Slowly, several workers approached their fallen comrades-underneath the open mouths of the smoking rifles. Two dozen wounded lay on the ground. Two of them, the aged Emilio Lopez, veteran textile worker, and Florentino Ramos, with two bullets in his stomach, would die within a few hours.

  The bells of the Red and White Cross ambulances broke the fragile air. Tomas took San Vicente's scarf and tied a tourniquet around the boy's leg. The boy had fainted.

  Another squadron of mounted police entered the plaza and headed down the streets where the marchers had fled five minutes before.

  "Let's get out of here, Tomas, they're going to start arresting people."

  "This is why they'le plotecting Gomez. They need him fol this kind of bullshit."

  "Dammit all to hell and the Virgin Mary, man, I had him in my sights and his horse moved on me."

  "Let's get him, Sebastian. He must have gone off to the gendarmely ballacks at Peledo."

  "There's no way we can get through."

  "Let's get him, Sebastian. This doesn't have anything to do with the othel stuff. This is something between us and Gomez, us and Gomez and all of them," said the Chinaman, pointing to the bodies lying across the plaza.

  I WOULD HAVE LIKED to have sailed away in all the ships I ever loaded, all the ships whose passengers I helped down the gangplank, carrying their bags covered with brightly colored labels from hotels, customs inspections, railroads. I would have liked to have gotten aboard those big shiny white boats in the sunshine and gone away.