"Shit."Tomas spat out the word.
"They were Chinese, too, Tomas. Just like you, but bad ones."
San Vicente opened the upper drawer of the dresser and took out a .38 revolver. Flipping back the cylinder, he checked to see that it was loaded.
"I guess you know where," he said to the Chinaman.
"Shit," Tomas said again, and took his knife out of another drawer.
It was a Saturday evening and the pairs of soldiers and maidservants, the most common couples in Mexico City in those days, strolled contentedly through the streets of San Rafael. Pair after pair ambled past the house of the Widow Roldan, under the watchful gaze of the poet and the lawyer who sat parked in the bulletproof Packard twenty yards beyond the widow's front gate, on Rosas Moreno.
"Tell me the part about electricity again, poet."
"Okay, but then you tell me that poem by Verlaine you translated."
"If you want, but I'm no poet to go translating someone like Verlaine. It's strictly an amateur job. You're right about that Maples Arce kid, he's the poet of our times."
"The insurrectional city of luminous signs/floats in calendars on the wall, and there a tramcar bleeds,/ from afternoon to afternoon,/ along the well pressed street," the poet recited in a soft, even voice.
"We walked at the mercy of the night and the road,/like infamous men and murderers,/ Widowers, orphans, roofless, childless, with no tomorrow,/ In the light of familiar forests in flames," quoted the lawyer Verdugo in return, giving the poet a glimpse of the esoteric knowledge he'd gleaned throughout so many years of solitary abandonment.
They'd passed the afternoon in this way, their attention drawn occasionally by some movement around the widow's mansion. Around five-fifteen, the widow and Conchita had arrived, and the lawyer had to duck down in the driver's seat to keep from being seen. An hour and a half later, Ramon the Spic drove off in a ramshackle Ford. Shortly thereafter, Celeste the hypnotist appeared in front of the house in an ornate cocktail dress and boarded a waiting taxi. After that, nothing.
Seen from the outside, the mansion looked like a pile of gray stone, surrounded by a large garden built no more than five years earlier. There was a double entrance with a black iron gate. An imposing tier of stone steps led up to the house, with pink stone balustrades crowned by flower boxes full of mallow flowers. From the street and through the railing of the gate, the two watchers could see the main hall, its brightly lit windows.
It was the poet's idea to set up watch outside the widow's house, a way to bide time until they could get together with their other two friends at the Majestic later on that night and report on the unexpected entrance of Martinez Fierro into the story. They'd already tried unsuccessfully to find the reporter at El Democrata, and they had no way of getting ahold ofTomas.lhe poet practically had to drag the lawyer along with him, since Verdugo wanted to go home, change his clothes, and read over some papers for a court hearing scheduled for the following Monday. In spite of his insistence, not even the poet really expected anything out of the ordinary to happen. But life often does its best to make sure that things turn out exactly the opposite from what we expect.
"Here comes the Spic in the Ford again," said the poet all of a sudden, elbowing his companion and staring intently into the rearview mirror. The Ford's horn beeped twice and the garage door swung open. Ramon got out of the car and walked toward the garage. The poet realized that something unusual was in the works when he saw the Spic look cautiously up and down the street. The Frenchman stepped out of the garage dressed in a gray suit and derby hat, dragging the struggling figure of a man across the pavement toward the waiting car.
"What's going on?" asked the poet.
"Grab your shotgun, man!" yelled the lawyer as he opened the car door. The poet wasted a few seconds fumbling for his glasses in the pockets of his coat, then scrambled for the shotgun in the backseat and ran after the lawyer, jamming a shell into the barrel as he went.
"Hands up, you clowns!" shouted Verdugo at the two men. In their surprise, they dropped the man they'd been carrying onto the ground.' he man was in a sorry state, bloody scratches all over his face, his shirt tattered and soaked with blood, his pants torn. He made a feeble effort to haul himself up, grabbing onto Ramon's pants leg.
"This is inadmissible, a violation of public order, dammit," protested the Spic.
"And what do you call what you've done to this poor fellow?" answered the poet, training his gun on the Frenchman who was slowly moving his hand down toward his left boot. The poet might have been a little slow to react, but he had a quick memory.
"Qu'est-ce qui se passe?" said the Frenchman, just to say anything at all. But the fact of the matter was that the situation was perfectly clear.
"It's time to pray, gentlemen, because we're going to fill you full of holes," said the lawyer, cradling his shotgun in one arm and pointing alternately at the two men.
"I won't forget this," said Ramon.
"You don't even know where to stick your dick, mister," answered Verdugo.lhe poet let out a brusque laugh and glanced nervously toward the mansion beyond the iron railing.
Under the surprised stare of a maid out walking the dog, the two friends made off toward the Packard, with the lawyer carrying the wounded man like a sack over his shoulder. The poet covered Ramon and the Frenchman with his gun while Verdugo started up the engine. Then he jumped onto the running board, steadying himself with his free hand:
"Let her rip, lawyer, I always wanted to be part of a fancy getaway," he shouted.
The Packard roared into gear, burning rubber. From his place on the running board, the poet discharged his shotgun only yards from the terrified enemy, shattering one of the flower boxes on the mansion's front steps.
"Viva Villa, you sissy bastards!" he shouted happily as they roared past.
Perhaps at that very moment, Tomas and his friend Sebastian San Vicente were getting out of a taxicab in front of the Alameda and heading off toward Dolores Street.
In the late-evening hours with the first shadows devouring the light of day, Chinatown began to change its face. The shops and restaurants were abandoned by their non-Chinese customers and the Chinese residents retook the streets. The opium trade, hidden away during daylight hours in elegant salons and lowly dives, moved out timidly onto the sidewalks. Beggars turned into opium freaks, family men, moon-eyed lovers. Human relics collapsed unconscious in the middle of the street, where passersby nimbly stepped over them without a backward glance.
The recent rain had left the ill-lit cobblestones covered with mud. Tomas shook off a medicinal herb vendor who followed stubbornly along brandishing a wooden tray full of samples. San Vicente stuck to his friend like a shadow until they stopped in front of the Peking Duck Restaurant, where Tomas stood silently considering his next move. Their faces were lit up now and then by the light from inside the restaurant as groups of customers went in or out.
"What are we waiting for, Tomas?"
"This is the place whele she came out of. Eithel this one, of that place next dool."
During the cab drive, Tomas had forced himself not to think about how much the girl really mattered to him. He didn't want his emotions clouding his thoughts. But he had so little to go on. All he knew was that Rosa had been sold to a Chinese restaurant owner in exchange for gambling debts acquired by her father, the owner of a laundry on Lopez Street. And when the police raided the gambling house in back of the restaurant she'd taken advantage of the chaos and escaped.
He finally made up his mind and pushed in through the beaded curtain.
"I want to talk to the ownel," he said to a Chinaman in a white waiter's jacket.
"Ta'i Lu."The Chinaman spoke his employer's name.
"I don't speak Chinese, comlade," answered Tomas. The waiter stared at them darkly and motioned them to a booth at the back of the restaurant.
Two couples sat eating dinner at the tables, and a pair of Westerners were drinking tea and talking business with a Chinam
an at the red lacquer bar. The place seemed too desolate for that time of night. San Vicente cautiously eyed the door through which the waiter had disappeared, then lit up a cigarette and settled down to wait. Tomas felt as much of a stranger there as his Spanish friend. When it came right down to it, he was a Chinaman only by chance.
"Come right this way, mister," the waiter said, returning almost instantly.
Tomas listened admiringly to the way he pronounced his r's.
The waiter led them along with a Coleman lantern through dark and narrow corridors, behind the kitchen, through a storeroom full of grains and vegetables, along a hall covered with paintings and tapestries several layers thick, past a coop full of chickens and ducks and through other rooms piled high with boxes. They followed a strange, circuitous route, turning left, then right, then left again, occasionally doubling back the way they'd come. After they'd walked more than a quarter mile, the passageway came to a dead end. The Chinese waiter opened a door and stepped to one side for Tomas and San Vicente to go through. Our two friends found themselves in a large deserted room, decorated like a variety theater and dominated by a huge bamboo throne surrounded by a set of bronze spittoons. The door closed behind them.
"What the hell is this? Where the hell are we?" asked San Vicente, walking toward the center of the room.
"Youl guess is as good as mine," answered Tomas at his heels.
That's when the floor gave way under their feet.
THROUGHOUT HIS LONG CAREER as a police reporter, Manterola had developed some very definite opinions about the limitations and possibilities of the police force that had evolved out of the Revolution. His basic impression could be summarized very precisely in a single sentence: It was good for nothing. The police only discovered crimes by absolute chance. And the force's contacts with organized crime in the city were so intimate and extensive that the shadowy zone that separated them had turned into a practically limitless territory where the police and the criminal element cohabited, dedicating themselves to the same activities. And what was worse, while the police were good for nothing, the Mexico City mafia had managed to develop a remarkable sophistication in the years since 1916, when the Revolution finally left the capital city in peace. On the one hand, a tremendous army of specialists in the various sectors of criminal activity had found their way to Mexican shores, fleeing the war in Europe. On the other hand, all sorts of easy money, stocks, jewels, gold, and silver had floated to the top on the Revolution's chaotic tide, where many an anxious hand groped for advantage. The violent world of kidnappers, bandits, and murderers was buffered by a feather mattress of confidence men, pickpockets, swindlers, opportunists, grifters, procurers, ladies of the night (or the afternoon, time willing), quack doctors, and bogus inventors. The criminal underworld's sophistication was visible not only in the quality of its work but also in the exotic names that adorned the principal gangs: The Hand That Squeezes, The Murderer's Legion, The Red Mark; and their leaders: Mario Lombardi, The Black Hat, The Silk-Fingered Frenchman, The Apache Turk, Shitkicker, Won-Li, Fingers Eufrasio.
Manterola admitted a certain responsibility for this new sophistication, shared in part by his colleague at El Heraldo. The power of the press and a well-turned phrase were capable of converting a miserable rat like Ranulfo Torres into the legendary Invisible Man, or an undistinguished streetwalker like Maria Juarez into The Woman with the Fatal Bite, on account of her bad aim.
Never before had the city seen such an underworld, so many outcasts, such an extensive sewer system. So when Manterola decided to try to trace the jewels found in Sergeant Zevada's pockets, he had plenty of material to work with. He started out by reading clippings from his own paper, ElHeraldo, and Excelsior which he'd been storing in a box in his office over the last three years. The key word was jewels, and with a little bit of patience he dug out six or seven articles in only half an hour of leafing through the first of three fat notebooks. But the newsroom was too quiet for him that early in the day. He went and asked his boss for the morning off, saying he was in the middle of an important investigation, and went out to read somewhere else.
Just two and a half minutes after Pioquinto Manterola walked out of the offices of El Dem6crata, the phone rang in the newsroom and someone asked for him.
"What'd they say?" asked the poet.
"He just went out," answered the lawyer Verdugo.
They'd spent the night at the Red Cross waiting for the sawbones to patch up their battered foundling. But the man had taken a brutal beating and there was only so much the doctors could do.
"He's in shock and likely to say any sort of craziness," the doctors told them. "I wouldn't pay much attention to anything he says for the next couple of days at least. Make sure he gets a lot of rest. Feed him soup and chicken broth. Once he comes around, bring him in again and we'll see that you get him back just like new.
They spent half the morning driving around town with the unconscious man in the backseat of the Packard, wrapped in an English wool blanket.
First they went and made a court appearance, where the lawyer demonstrated his ample abilities by sending a professional soccer player up the river for rape. The fellow, who played for Pachuca, had the gall to claim that his talents on the field (quite inferior in the poet's opinion) justified the violent seduction of a chorus girl from the Eden Theater (her stage name was Iris but back in Puebla where she came from everybody called her Magdalena). Afterward, they'd made their way over to the lawyer's empty house to rest up and kill time until they could find Manterola and bring him up to date.
They deposited the unconscious man on the lawyer's bed. Verdugo dropped exhausted into his armchair, and the poet stretched out on the floor cradling his new shotgun in his arms.
"You know what, that Frenchman looked a lot like the guy who was with that trigger-happy lieutenant who tried to kill me the other day."
"Wouldn't surprise me if it was the same guy," said Verdugo, stifling a yawn.
"Did you know your shotgun was unloaded back there at the widow's place?"
"Damn, I think you're right. My father always said I was totally irresponsible," said Verdugo with a smile.
"It just goes to show that style is what matters the most," said the poet, lighting a cigarette. "You know, we really ought to search this guy here. Maybe he's got something on him that'll tell us something."
Verdugo slowly detached himself from the armchair and walked over to the bed.
"Let's see. Nothing in his pants pockets... Nothing in his vest. Hey, look at this, a receipt from the Hotel Regis."
"It's the missing Dutchman!"
"What'd they say his name was? Van Horn, isn't it? ...Nothing in his left jacket pocket, a blank picture postcard of Toluca in the right pocket, and another one with a photo of my friend Ines Torres."
"Let me see."
"You want it autographed? I can have her sign it for you free of charge."
"No, I'm just curious, that's all. Look in his socks. These Europeans are pretty stupid. Chances are some chump from the British foreign office told him that'd be the best place to hide something in Mexico."
"All right ...hey, you were right."
"What'd I tell you?"
"It's a certificate for a safe-deposit box in the Bank of London."
"Let me see that."
The lawyer handed the stiff green paper to the poet, who pulled a pencil stub from his pocket and started to write a poem about socks on the back side.
"I'm going out to buy us some cigarettes," said the lawyer after a while. "If anyone tries to get in this door without knocking three times, shoot to kill, but just make sure you shoot high. You never know when some young lady might drop by for a visit."
"Yessir," answered the poet, reloading his shotgun and taking up position in the armchair. Verdugo straightened his pearl gray hat and walked sluggishly out the door.
Pioquinto Manterola had always wished he were a more methodical sort and he often told himself that now, today, wa
s as good a time as any to begin. So he carefully compiled the relevant clippings, made a list of all the jewels mentioned, with an accompanying description of each one, wrote down the names of the various gangs reputedly involved in each of the holdups, robberies, embezzlements, swindles, confidence jobs, and the corresponding convictions, confessions, arrests, and cases pending. Then he went through his list again, crossing off the jewels that had already been recovered. In the process, he ran across the names of a pair of fences but, if his information was correct, both of them were currently resting their bones in the Belen Federal Penitentiary.
All that effort made the reporter nervous. Too many jewels, too many cases of old ladies tortured until they told where the family fortune was hidden. Too many officers implicated in robberies, with the booty ending up decorating the necks or ears of their high-class mistresses, shining in the candlelight at some fancy reception. The words he read propelled him back into his memory: he remembered the color of the rug, the bugged-out eyes of the strangled women, the stuttering voice of the captured fence, the cold night air in the garage with the bodies of the couple who'd committed suicide.
"Why'd you ever go and become a crime reporter, in the first place, Manterola? Because that's where you find the real literature of life, my friend," he asked and answered himself, absolutely convinced he was right.
Every now and then the music from the Ferris wheel quit and the reporter would look up from the thick hardcover notebooks with their brass-lined edges. The sun was getting high in the sky.
THE LIGHT FILTERING THROUGH the half-open Venetian blinds was fading steadily. The poet had taken off his boots and now crouched inside the armchair like a cat, glancing back and forth from the unconscious Dutchman to the door through which his friend the lawyer had gone over six hours ago. He was hungry, but there wasn't so much as a scrap of food in Verdugo's house and he didn't dare go out onto the street for a bite to eat. Occasionally he went and looked out the window, hoping to see some sign of the lawyer, but all he saw was an old organ-grinder playing for a circle of children, and a couple of construction workers heading home from work. Now and then the Dutchman murmured something and Fermin, who'd picked up a little English in his years with Pancho Villa when he'd crossed the border to take on arms or supplies, carefully jotted down the man's incoherent ravings. The sum total of his efforts throughout the course of the afternoon was a mixture of random sentences in English and Dutch and a few fines of poetry all written down on the back of a piece of sheet music. Did the lawyer play music, did he compose? There wasn't a piano, a guitar, or even a penny whistle in the lawyer's house, but the sheet of paper the poet had been using was covered with handwritten notes and bore the title Carmen, a bolero.
The Shadow of the Shadow Page 14