The Shadow of the Shadow (18 page)

"And why the hell didn't they pull him out of there?"

"Cheggidout. Locked himself in the cage, threw away the
key..."

"Pretty efficient. So how'd they get him out in the end?"

"Didn't think to ask. Have to remain unclear."

"What do you mean it'll have to remain unclear? Is he still in
there, or what?"

"Cheggidout. Could be. Lions still nibbling over his bones."

"Check it out," mumbled the journalist, not sure whether he
should laugh or cry. "Be a good fellow, won't you, and help me put
the typewriter on the table over there by the bed. I'm still not a
hundred percent with this leg and all."

"Got it," said Gonzaga, lugging the heavy machine over to the
bedside table.

"One last favor, Gonzaga. Go out to the reception and ask for
a few sheets of paper, will you?"

The illustrator was walking out the door when he collided with
the nun rushing back into the room.

"Please, brother, come quick," she shouted, and ran back the
way she'd come.

Manterola and Gonzaga glanced at each other and followed
the nun's flapping white habit to a room two doors down. A few
curious patients had gathered in the hall.

"Look at her, dear God, look at her. I gave her the box of
chocolates," wailed the nun, bursting into tears. A woman's body
lay on the bed, teeth clenched, eyes bugged out, hands curled in a
clawlike grip.

Two hours later the autopsy would reveal that she'd been
poisoned by a chocolate bonbon filled with cyanide.

"HEY, YOU KNOW WHAT? We're like a shadow's shadow.
Them, the confabulators there in the widow's house, if there's even
any confabulation at all, they're only a shadow, indistinct, without
any clear objective, at least as far as we know. And us, following
them around haphazardly, erratic, like a bunch of wild kids out
on a lark, stumbling across something in the darkness, we're the
shadow of the shadow. You get it?"

"A rather lyrical assessment of the situation, my dear poet.
That's the least I can say," said Verdugo as they dined on Spanish
omelettes and chorizo in the Restaurante Abel (one of the five best
restaurants in Mexico City, a little less elegant than the Cosmos
and the Bach, and a cut above Sanborns and the Regis). They
were finishing off their second bottle of a dry Spanish red wine
that had come into Veracruz by steamer less than a week ago, "a
bit agitated," according to the proprietor's judgment, but the two
friends found it excellent. A bitterly dry wine that stained their
lips a dark red.

"It's just that I'm convinced that even if we don't do anything
at all and just go on living our absurd lives the same as before,
they're going to kill us. Sooner or later we've got to go on the
offensive."

"Who's they?"

"The shadow. Or whatever it is that they're the shadow of, or
another shadow a little less confused than ours."

"Why the rush all of a sudden? Has something happened
since your run-in at Peltzer's?"

"Look, how many times do you think they can miss? In this town, if you want someone dead it isn't too long before they get
that way. It's time we started taking things seriously."

"I hate to say it, but it does seem like you're right," said the
lawyer, nodding, "I suppose it's not enough to simply return fire
and pretend like nothing's going on." He sighed.

The poet pulled his whiskers out of his wineglass and stared
the lawyer in the face. His friend was prone to certain suicidal
tendencies. And if he thought about it just a little bit, he could
see the same thing in Manterola and the Chinaman as well. He
couldn't hold it against them. Now and again he himself felt a
certain nostalgia for death, a yearning for peace deep down inside.
All of a sudden he was overcome with the memory of the cavalry
charge at Paredon. He felt like a miserable survivor who had lost
his chance for glory by not dying along with his comrades in the
best cavalry charge in Mexican history. But for him it was always
just a passing mood, usually connected to hunger or the flu, not
like Verdugo who seemed to live with Marguerite Gauthier's
eternal ironic smile fixed across his face, as though suffering from
an incurable case of tuberculosis.

"It's time for the shadow's shadow to move into action," said
the poet.

"What have you got in mind?"

"I say we take your lottery money and buy ourselves some
weapons. If there's one thing I learned from General Villa, it's that
whenever you've got a little extra cash on hand you should take
advantage of the opportunity to improve your firepower."

The poet's suggestion didn't surprise Verdugo, who understood
it fully in both its implications: guns and more Spanish wine.
He raised his hand and indicated to the waiter to bring another
bottle.

The restaurant was half-empty. It was well past time for lunch
and still too early for dinner, but the two friends had come to
celebrate with Verdugo's 1,700 pesos in lottery winnings. He'd
won in a most curious way. As he was leaving a bordello, he'd accidentally picked up another man's topcoat. He found a lottery
ticket in the pocket and the next day discovered he'd won third
prize. With the winds of fortune smiling on him so openly, the
lawyer had felt obliged to celebrate-he'd found Fermin Valencia
sitting in Alameda Park writing an impassioned acrostic dedicated
to the screen actress Lupe Velez.

They blissfully started in on their fifth bottle with a feeling
of mutual harmony that, on a different occasion, might have
seemed like an abuse of confidence. The poet read the lawyer a
lengthy poem in open verse he'd submitted to the Milpa Alta
Flower Festival poetry contest under the pseudonym Beatrice
Flor Lopez, in the hopes of winning a little prize money; and
the lawyer was moved to recount in detail the first three chapters
of his doctoral thesis in international law: Territorial Waters
and Transoceanic Canals. If one is to believe the records of the
Mexico City tavern archives-a registry carefully maintained in
the memories of bartenders, waiters, maitre d's, and cops on the
beat-this was the first and only drunk shared by the two friends
since they'd met many years before. Their motives were obscure.
What caused the poet Fermin Valencia and the lawyer Verdugo
to pass from moderate inebriation to a full-scale binge? Perhaps it
was because they'd both reached bottom in their own way, perhaps
their sudden and unexpected wealth had somehow carried them
over the edge, or maybe it was simply the tension of those strange
times. Whatever it was, the effects of the wine were generous and
slow, filling them with a teary but peaceful nostalgia, and they felt
themselves capable of anything. By six-thirty they had started in
on their seventh bottle.

"We need a tank, that's what we need," declared the poet. "A
combat vehicle, like the English had on the Somme in '17. With
tracks and a big gun on top, all iron and rusty."

"An armored car, a bulletproof Packard like General Pablo
Gonzalez."

"For all the good it ever did him."

"It was his own fault. The fool went off to Monterrey without
the Packard and that was the end of Pablo Gonzalez."

"So what're we going to do with the Packard?"

"The same thing as with that tank of yours, but without
attracting so much attention."

"I don't know," mused the poet, and he hid his head among the
empty wine bottles, surprised by the lawyer's suddenly serious stare.
"What if they're really the good guys and we're just sticking our
noses in where we don't belong like a bunch of nosy bosybidies?"

"That's a novel way of putting it."

"What is?"

"Do you really think they could be the good guys looking the
way they do? If Manterola were here, he'd set you straight on that
score. This Colonel Gomez looks like the type who'd steal the
bottle out of his baby brothers' mouths. Just look at them-the
Spic, that crummy little lieutenant, the Frenchman, the hypnotist,
the widow..."

"I kind of get the feeling the inkslinger's in love with the
widow, you know... And you're kind of hot on your old friend
Conchita, aren't you?"

"You surprise me, poet. I never made you out to be the
puritanical type. What the hell do we want a tank for, anyway?"

"Did I say something about a tank?" asked Fermin, and
he started to recite the verses of a young poet from Veracruz
named Maples Arce, whose poems he'd just discovered that very
morning:

Verdugo listened attentively to his companion.

"Dammit. I wish I could write like that kid," said the poet.

As they uncorked bottle number nine, they instinctively returned to the story at hand.

"I saw how they killed the guy with the trombone. Let me tell
you, it was ugly. There must've been ten thousand people there.
Well, maybe a little less, like five thousand, say, listening to the
band, and then, bam, they blow the poor guy's brains out. Just like
this, bam, blew his brains right out of his head."

"Me, I was at the widow's party. Of course I fell asleep, during
the picture I mean. But that crowd there, they're just like the
Romans, tanked to the balls and screwed to the walls. I mean it,
just like the Romans... And the bullets, my man, the bullets. Hell,
my hand still hurts," said Verdugo, flexing his bandaged left hand.

"Well, what about that lieutenant who almost killed me? He
had me crawling around the outside of that building like a monkey
in a circus. And my face all cut up by the broken glass. Look," and
he pointed to the fading cuts all across his face.

"I just wanted to...," said Verdugo, but he hesitated, thought
about it for a minute, and by the time he looked back at the poet
he'd forgotten what it was he wanted.

The next day after waking up with his stomach all queasy from
the Spanish wine, "a bit too agitated" as the proprietor had said,
but with the remainder of his lottery money still in his pocket, the
lawyer went out and bought himself a used bulletproof Packard.