The Shadow of the Shadow

by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

  "No, Ramon, that's not the way it is." He heard Conchita's voice.

  A man's hoarse voice answered her, but the lawyer couldn't make out what he said. The sound of their steps approached the room and, as the voices became clearer, the lawyer slipped inside a large wardrobe next to the dressing table.

  "She thinks she can run the whole show. But the truth is, we have as much right as any of the others do. As much as her or the colonel."

  "You don't understand. They've been doing all right up until now, so let them go ahead with it, I say. Our time will come."

  "The fact of the matter, Ramon, is that you let yourself be led around too easily. You're a very servile person when it comes right down to it. It's in your blood," said Conchita, opening the door. The lawyer made himself as small as he could inside the wardrobe, surrounded by Conchita's lacy silk dresses, his head wedged into the tiny space between the clothes rack and a shelf crammed with shoe boxes. The door to the wardrobe didn't shut properly and he could see out into the room through a slight crack.

  Now he watched as Conchita stepped inside, trailed by the hard-faced Spaniard he'd picked out on the night of the party as a member of the widow's inner circle.' he Spaniard hesitated in the doorway as if waiting for permission to go any farther.

  "Can I come in?"

  "I don't know, little boy. Can you? What are you afraid of?" said Conchita.

  The lawyer watched from his hiding place as the Spaniard's face puckered into a grimace, a look of hatred flashing across his eyes.

  Conchita sat down in front of the dressing table, out of the lawyer's line of sight. All he could see was her feet.

  "Come on in, little boy. And close the door," said Conchita. "Lucky for you I'm not the widow, she would have kicked you out of her bedroom in half a second."

  Ramon the Spic stepped into the room and flopped down on the bed. Verdugo could hardly contain himself. He hated to think he was going to have to stand there and witness the amorous relations between Conchita and Ramon the Spic.

  "Take your shoes off, you dirty pig. I don't know why I even let you in here."

  "Maybe it's because you like to fuck with me," said Ramon prosaically. Verdugo struggled to keep from laughing out loud.

  "You're the most vulgar little boy I know, Ramon," said Conchita, moving back into Verdugo's field of vision, but this time without nearly as many clothes on. She wore a transparent white silk nightgown. The hair on Verdugo's neck stood on end at the sight of his friend's shapely, swaying buttocks, clearly visible through the gauzy fabric.

  "Ramon, if you don't take your shoes off, I'm going to throw you out of here right now."

  "Excuse me, but I happen to like to do it with my shoes on, you know that," said the pouty-faced Spic, standing up and allowing the woman to take his place on the bed. Conchita slid across the covers, letting off little sparks of static electricity.

  "Shit," thought Verdugo, staring longingly at the thick curly mat of reddish pubic hair between his friend's legs, until the Spaniard stepped between Conchita and his hiding place, ruining his view.

  "What is it with you, anyway? You think it's more sophisticated to do it with your shoes on, is that it? Makes you feel like the goddam Prince of Barcelona, or something? And I suppose you're not going to take your clothes off, either. What, are you scared someone's going to come in and find us here?"

  "Who else comes here?" asked Ramon as he unbuttoned his trousers.

  "Nobody. Who do you think? Hey, stand back a little farther."

  Ramon stepped back from the bed and Verdugo could see part of the woman's body, the nightgown rolled up around her hips, an exposed breast, her thigh with the scar of an old wound.

  "I don't like to do it this way. Let me get on the bed with you," whined Ramon.

  "Shit and double shit," thought the lawyer. "Complete with ideological discussion and everything. By now they could have done it like any normal person and had it over with."

  The woman stood up. Even barefoot she was still several inches taller than the Spic.

  "'here, you're fine right there," she said, keeping a couple of feet between herself and her lover.

  "'Ihe things a guy has to put up with in this life...," the lawyer thought, trying to adopt the contemplative attitude of a monk and letting his curiosity deflect the guilt he felt as the hidden witness to a scene that didn't belong to him.

  MANTEROLA LOOKED AT THE BODY, reread the suicide note, and decided to invest a few pesos and take the forensic specialist out to lunch. This was no more a suicide than Rudolph Valentino was Manterola's uncle.

  "First of all, you've got the downward trajectory of the bullet," said the doctor.

  "Either that or he was sucking on the gun like a lollipop."

  "That's what I was thinking. He had scratches on his lips and a cut on the palate made by some sharp object..."

  "The barrel of the revolver."

  "Naturally."

  "That's what I've been saying all along," said Manterola, carving away at his steak. The forensic specialist had already finished his some time ago, and now busied himself gobbling up all the scraps of bread left on the table. Pioquinto looked at him with annoyance.

  "Come on, Doc, leave me a piece a bread for the salsa, will you?"

  "Sorry, I didn't think you wanted any more."

  Well-dressed waiters bustled past their table balancing large trays above their heads-"just like in Paris"-dodging customers, lottery ticket vendors, cigar hawkers, a pair of charros with their oversized guitarron, a variety singer, and the children running underfoot.

  "Let me guess, Doc. There was a fight, someone stuck a pistol in the guy's mouth and pulled the trigger."

  "Obviously," said the doctor, who had started out his career as an army veterinarian under General Francisco Coss. His years in the service had left him with a preference for dead bodies.

  Pioquinto Manterola wiped the sweat off his forehead with a white handkerchief The city suffocated in the afternoon heat. The rains were late this year, maybe they'd never come at all.

  As they were leaving the Sanborns, Pioquinto glanced at his watch. He had two hours before his deadline. Hoping he could find a few more details to fill out his story, he headed off with quick steps back toward the Hotel Regis.

  As he walked, Manterola thought deep and hard. He needed to know more about the dead Englishman. He needed the ideas to turn into questions, the questions into words, the article to start pulling itself together along a single thread, complete with headline, paragraphs, and punctuation marks.

  If he hadn't been hurrying along with his head down and his eyes pegged to the ground like someone looking for spare change, he would have seen his friend Tomas Wong crossing the street between a pair of shiny Lincolns and an old hackney pulled by a rust-colored horse. Tomas was humming an old Irish ballad his friend Michael Gold had taught him several years ago in Tampico. Gold, a New York Jew, had come to Mexico in 1917 to escape the war. Now Tomas was on his way to Chinatown to buy a couple of reams of paper for Fraternidad, the union's weekly newspaper.

  Tomas was a stranger to Chinatown. Orphaned when he was five years old and living with a mestizo family in Sinaloa until he was ten, he'd never learned to speak Chinese. Growing up among Mexicans and gringos in the oil fields of Mata Redonda and Arbol Seco, he'd never known the great Chinatowns along the Pacific Coast, and he'd moved through the Chinese ghetto in Tampico like an outsider. If he talked with an accent, dropping his r's, it was more than anything else out of a sense of contrariness, a certain pleasure in emphasizing his difference. He had no way of knowing that in recent months the six or seven square blocks of Mexico City's Chinatown, spread out on either side of Dolores Street, had been the scene of a fierce war between competing tongs, merchant societies, revolutionary lodges, the monarchists of the Chi-Konton, and the Triads.

  His friend the journalist, just then walking across the lobby of the Hotel Regis, knew far more about these strange events than he did. And Pioquinto
Manterola might well have put aside the mystery of the Englishman's "suicide" had he been able to see that just as Tomas turned the corner off Juarez onto Dolores Street, Chief Mazcorro of the secret police, Commander Lara Robelo, and six of their men were advancing from the far end of the block on their way to raid an illegal gambling house.

  But neither Manterola nor Tomas realized what was about to happen. It wasn't until Tomas stepped back out of the stationers onto the street, lugging two boxes of paper tied up with string, that he saw everything wasn't as it should be. A fifty-year-old man jumped out of a second-story window, almost landing on top of Tomas. A crowd in the street applauded the old man's escape, and their cheers mixed with the intermittent pop of gunfire from inside the house.

  While Tomas might have been a stranger to Chinatown, he was no stranger to violence; as soon as he heard the first shots he pressed up against the wall and covered himself as best he could behind the boxes of paper. He watched as Mazcorro emerged from the house pushing a Chinaman in front of him. The man waved a fifty-peso note in the air, shouting: "I pay, boss, I pay. No wolly."As far as Tomas was concerned, the only fights worth getting mixed up in were the ones he chose of his own free will. Or when it was a matter of defending his ideas, or just plain orneriness. He took ahold of his boxes and was walking rapidly toward the near end of the street when he felt a hand grab his arm.

  "Get me out of here," she said. "Please, save me. Get me away from here."

  Tomas stared at her for a moment and then resumed his previous pace, only this time with the young woman at his side.

  The overwhelming smell of violet-scented perfume filled his nose and made him wrinkle up his face.

  At that moment, the reporter Pioquinto Manterola wrinkled up his own nose, metaphorically speaking.

  "So you're sure the door was locked from inside, are you?"

  "I was with the colonel when they broke into the room. Later on he saw it and pointed it out to the rest of us, that the key was still in the lock on the inside of the door," said the hotel employee.

  "Have you got a pair of keys to one of the rooms?"

  "Of course. What do you have in mind?"

  "A little scientific experiment." The reporter grinned, taking the hotel man by the arm, leading him along.

  "This one here'll do, I suppose. The guest ought to have his key, and I've got the master."

  Manterola knocked softly on the pale green door adorned with golden frets.

  A fat-cheeked pink face ringed below by a half circle of neatly trimmed beard peeked through the door.

  L' acqua non e calda. Miparti degli ascingomani, sapone." Manterola showed the man his best smile and pushed him gently back into the room.

  "Let's have a look at your key, sir," he said, gesturing to show the man what he wanted.

  "Desidera la mia chiave?"

  "That's right. And now you put your key in the lock on this side," he directed the hotel man. "All right, now turn the key. See, the other one stays in the lock. You can lock the door from the outside while leaving the other key in place on the inside of the door. It's because the shaft is so long."

  "How did you know?" asked the hotel man.

  "Before I was a reporter I used to work as a locksmith... What did you say this captain's name was?"

  "It's colonel, Colonel Gomez. He was in the bar with a couple of gringos, and when the police arrived he came over to see what was going on..."

  La mia chiave, per favore. "

  "Much obliged," said the journalist, bowing slightly to the fat-cheeked gentleman and stepping away from the door. But his thoughts were already miles away.

  When he walked back out onto the street, he was dizzy from so much thinking. He could almost feel the smoke drifting off the top of his bald head. For appearances' sake, and to conceal the nonexistent smoke from any nonexistent observers, he lit up a cigar and crossed Avenida Juarez. On the other side of the street he bumped into his friend Tomas, struggling under the weight of two enormous boxes of paper and with a very beautiful young woman hanging on to his arm, dressed in a sky blue cheongsam embroidered with the image of a dragon.

  IT WAS GETTING HARDER and harder to keep their minds on the game, each time the strange plot closing in around them surrounded the marble tabletop with words, impeding their concentration. Dominoes is a game that's meant to be played with its own special kind of banter, full of barbed but imprecise allusions to the game at hand. You shoot the breeze, you joke around, you bluff, but you never say anything to guide your partner, to reveal your hand, to send a hidden message. You talk but you never really say anything, so as not to break the cardinal rule of silence. So there was no way to play a decent game of dominoes with the shadows of three murders, a rescued Chinawoman, an unnatural liaison, and the sound of the rain in Madero Street dancing over the bones.

  The characters were doing the best they could, trying not to lose the thread of that schizophrenic night. The bartender noticed their uneasiness, the tension in the game, and put it down to the rain, the rent strike that was shaking the city, the rising unemployment, the day's results at the racetrack, the flu epidemic...

  "Without wanting to know anything, we know too much already. So why don't we try and see what else we can find out?" said the poet.

  "It's your turn, my friend."

  Manterola, who'd been playing it close to the chest through the first two rounds to see which way the wind was blowing, now attacked with the double-fours. Tonight he was partners with Verdugo.lhey all knew how the game would turn out: it was the aggressive play of the Chinaman and the poet against the lawyer's and the reporter's no-holds-barred brand of wily malice. In a normal night, the lawyer and the reporter would win six out of ten. Tonight, however, was anything but normal, and they'd been losing ever since they sat down.

  "It's not that I want to defend normalness, Bakunin help me, as Tomas would say, but that was one of the strangest liaisons I've ever seen in my life. And I wasn't born yesterday... Now, I'll admit, I haven't exactly had the opportunity to observe the sexual habits of too many of my fellow citizens at such close quarters. My own seem normal enough to me, and maybe that's my problem... But picture this:' here they are, the two of them, screwing with a good three feet between them, and me stuck in the closet like a peeping Tom."

  "Maybe she doesn't love him, or maybe the Spic doesn't wash his hands," suggested the poet, meeting Manterola's fours with the double-twos.

  "No. Nobody said anything about hands. It was just that the Spic had a thing about not taking his shoes off."

  "It's deal as a bell," said Tomas with a smile. "If you don't take off youl shoes, at least one yald."

  "I hope they didn't splash you," said the poet, trying to knock Verdugo off balance. Despite his sardonic tone, the lawyer still hadn't quite recovered from his strange vigil.

  "Only in a moral sense, my dear bard, only in a moral sense."

  Manterola hesitated, then played another four, hoping Tomas wouldn't close the hand and leave him with the six/five and the double fives.

  "Oul fliend the joulnalist is playing at suicide," said Tomas, closing the game.

  "Shit, I knew it," said Manterola. He poured his partner a glass of brandy as a sort of apology. "Sorry about that, my dear lawyervoyeur. They don't all come out the same."

  "The thing that worries me is that, at least in this case, they don't all go in the same."

  "Did you find out anything else?" asked the poet, standing up and stretching. "Apart from your stimulating discovery of coitus telegraphicus."

  "Nothing. And I spent five hours inside that damn wardrobe. Even now, when I close my eyes, I feel like there's a hanger watching me."

  "We waited for you for a few hours, and then we had to call the game. The bartender couldn't believe it. I think it's only the third time in two years we haven't played. Once when Tomas was in jail for a week, and the other time when I got run over, and now this," said Manterola, proud of their little club's consistency.


  Verdugo mixed the dominoes with a monotonous, sleepy shuffle.

  "So who was this dead man that inspired our friend Colonel Gomez to play that clever trick with the doorknob?" asked the poet.

  "He was a Brit. An engineer working for one of the British oil companies, El Aguila, I think it was. He was here on a business trip."

  Tomas looked up from the bones. El Aguila was part of his personal territory in the land of memories. In the same way that Pancho Villa and his Northern Division belonged to the poet, the haciendas of the old aristocracy to the lawyer, and bloody murders to the reporter, El Aguila belonged to him.