The Shadow of the Shadow (24 page)

"Who'd they get, boy?" asked San Vicente.

"His Chinawoman, mister. Tomas' Chinawoman. They took
her away."

"Where? Who?" asked Tomas, his face suddenly tense.

"In front of the Aurora Theater, Tomas. When she was leaving
the show. They took her and put her in a car. There was three of
them in all, in a white car with wooden strips on the side. I was
with her, Tomas, she took me to the movies and when we were
coming out they got her. She was holding me by the hand, and one
of them kicked me so's I'd let her go. I grabbed onto her but then
her dress ripped. I did what I could. Honest, Tomas."

"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 Chinaman 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.