The Shadow of the Shadow (30 page)

Tired of reading standing up by the newsstand, Maharaja
Manterola headed for the hotel bar where he installed himself in
a dark corner at the rear, for the sake of surreptitiousness, if not
comfortable reading. He opened up El Universal and found the
page where Librado had written one of his emotionally twisted
stories, asking publicly how one of the most prominent leaders of
the city's graphics industry had died of lead poisoning when he had
never spent any time in the leaded atmosphere of the print shops
he owned. The story of Roldan's death, which in its time hadn't
received more than a few lines on the obituary page, was now
retold with abundant detail, augmented by several photographs
of the widow and even one of the mansion in San Rafael. Almost
at the end of the story, the reporter asked casually if this wasn't
the same widow who had been seen frequently of late at the more
stylish parties, arm in arm with a certain colonel of the Mexico
City gendarmerie.

Next, in Omega, and with a more conservative tone, de Blas
explored the accusations of a nonexistent spokesman for the
Aguila Petroleum Company about the activities of an armed
gang headquartered in San Rafael that had kidnapped their
representative Van Horn.

Manterola ordered a whiskey in Hindi, which is the same as
in Spanish or English, only accompanied by a series of elaborate
gestures, and unfolded his own paper, which he'd been saving until
the end.

He wasn't used to rereading his own work. Journalism was an
ephemeral art, and it had to be understood and lived the same way.
The retelling of yesterday's events served as a link to the historical
past, useful in reference to the present, but not the sort of thing
you wanted to spend your life paging through again and again.
Manterola often said that it made him proud to see his day-old
articles used as wrapping paper for a good red snapper in the
marketplace.

But today he wanted to fully appreciate the details of the
journalistic siege he'd laid around Colonel Gomez and company.
At the top of the page there was a rather unflattering photo of the
two corpses discovered on the sidewalk in front of the widow's
San Rafael mansion. The bodies had been identified as those of
Michel Simon, a French cardsharp, and gendarmerie lieutenant
Estrada. After detailing the condition in which the bodies were
found, one pumped full of buckshot and the other with two .45
bullet holes through the chest, the journalist suggested that both
men had only recently been in the service of Colonel Gomez,
and questioned whether it wasn't possible the colonel had had
a falling-out with the dead men, for motives as yet unclear. He
went on to link Lieutenant Estrada with the trombonist's murder,
"according to several eyewitnesses," and brought up the close
relationship between the trombonist's recently deceased brother
and Colonel Gomez. "Colonel Jesus Gomez owes his superiors
a thorough explanation," the article concluded, "in the interests of maintaining untainted the public image of the Mexico City
gendarmerie."

Manterola took his Swiss pocketknife and cut out the various
articles. Diligently underlining Gomez'name every time it appeared
and each reference to "a certain colonel of the gendarmerie," he
took all the clippings and put them into an envelope, which he
then addressed to General Cruz, Gomez' immediate superior.
He rubbed his hands together again until they shone. The voice
of the voiceless in action, the power of the printed word, he told
himself.

After leaving the union meeting at the Providencia mill, Tomas
and San Vicente walked together through the back streets of San
Angel. The Chinaman had found a hiding place for himself, Rosa,
and San Vicente in a coal yard run cooperatively by a couple of his
anarchist friends blacklisted in the local mills. Songbirds filled the
bright cloudless blue sky.

"I don't get it,Tomas. First you come out against a revolutionary
action in the affinity group, and now you don't bat an eye when
your friends say they want to rob a bank."

"The olganization is one thing and we'le anothel. That's just
the way it is, what do you want me to do?"

"Hell's bells, man, you're all a bunch of friggin amateurs.
`We're going to rob a bank,' they say, like it's as easy as jumping
rope. That's the worst of it."

"That's why we need you, blothel."

"Oh, right. Well, that was obvious. The only thing is, like I
said, if all you guys want is to get at the Dutchman's safe-deposit
box and whatever's inside it, that's fine, but then I'm going for the
money.

"And nobody said you couldn't, eithel. Once you told them
you didn't want the money fol youlself, but to stalt up an analchist
newspapel, evelybody said yes, including me. So what's the
ploblem?"

"That's the problem right there, Tomas, that you're willing to
hold up a bank, but not for the cause."

"Someday you and me'll go tlavelling alound the wold lobbing
banks and taking away the boulgeoisie's money, okay, but only in
places whele thele's no olganization, so they can't go and lay the
lap on the comlades. Is it a deal?"

"I didn't want to kill him, but something made me keep on
squeezing, I just couldn't stop. I knew it wasn't him, and still
somehow it was," Verdugo said in a rush, not really feeling like
talking at all.

The poet was thinking about Odilia and answered the lawyer
with a nod.

"Who knows all the demons we've got bottled up inside us?
That woman let one of mine out of the bottle, that's for sure, set it
free to run wild in the streets."

"I think maybe you ought to ask her to marry you, lawyer.
Maybe she's a little cross-eyed and talks funny, but I think she's
kind of cute."

"Not a bad idea, really. I always did like redheads. Just think
about the shingle we could hang outside the door: Verdugo,
Attorney-at-law, Madame Celeste, Hypnotist."

"Whiskey... another... please," said Manterola, wiping away
the sweat pouring out from under his turban.

"Make her a ruby red," Verdugo said to one of his contacts
out toward Candelaria, who for a modest twenty-five pesos had
agreed to give the Packard a new coat of paint.

"Hell, robbing a bank is an art, man," explained San Vicente,
"a real art."

"What part of India are you from, sir?" asked a man with an Argentine accent. "I once served in my country's embassy in
Bombay."

"Red? That's going to look like shit," said the poet as he shaved
off his mustache.

"You can't get to be as old as we ale without falling in love with
machines," the Chinaman told San Vicente out of the blue.

"I hate to disappoint you, poet, but you're not going to get any
taller by shaving off your mustache."

"From Kuala Lumpur. I have never been to India, sir."

"Let it burn," Colonel Gomez told his men, who were busy
dousing Verdugo's apartment with gasoline, the bed, the walls, the
rug.

I COULD BE A GARDENER instead of a poet, and never
have to touch a gun again as long as I live. You don't make poetry
with guns. Or do you?

VERDUGO SPENT THE LAST of his lottery money on
gas for the Packard and a Kodak camera and film he bought at
the American Foto Shop. He listened patiently to the salesman's
instructions, despite the poet's insistence that he already knew
how to work the camera. Then he asked his friends to pose for
him in front of the National Palace on the Zocalo.

San Vicente ended up taking the picture, adamantly refusing
to have his own picture taken.

"I had no idea you were such a romantic," the journalist told
the lawyer as San Vicente clicked the shutter.

The picture, which is probably still out there somewhere after
all these years, stuck in some ancient photo album or lost in an old
desk drawer, shows the four friends together: Verdugo, frowning,
his pearl gray Stetson jammed down almost to his eyebrows, his
impeccable double-breasted gray suit, his left hand toying with
the ring on the middle finger of his right hand. Next to him,
the poet, sitting on a low wall, his boots dangling gaily, his arms
wrapped around Verdugo's and Manterola's shoulders, looking a
little baby-faced with his shaved-off mustache, smiling, happy, like
in Zacatecas. Manterola, his eternal English cloth cap covering
his balding head, has a paternal look on his face, like an old man
playing at a child's game, a half smile on his lips, chewing on a
filterless cigarette. Tomas Wong, standing next to the reporter,
wearing the mustache the poet lacks, looks like an abandoned
child, his hands shoved into his pockets, staring with a defiant
eye at the National Palace, his muscles exploding out from under
his white T-shirt. The recent scar shines on his forehead. In the
background, the Mexican flag flutters atop a flagpole.

After taking the picture, they went off to rob the bank. "Good
morning, this is a holdup," said a short man in a mask. He headed
straight for the safe-deposit boxes without paying much attention
to whether the four customers, the tellers, or the guards raised their
hands above their heads. After searching carefully for a certain
number, he started to force the box open with a crowbar.

"I believe the gentleman said this was a holdup," said another
masked figure dressed in an elegant gray suit, a dapper pearl gray
Stetson on his head and a shotgun in his hands. "Well, it is. So get
your hands up over your heads, all of you."

"This is a holdup, dammit. Put all the money in big envelopes, no
coins, no gold or silver," said another masked man in shirtsleeves.

"Shit... all I want is to bust open this pinata, boys," said the
short man, struggling with the crowbar. After his second attempt,
he walked over to the manager's desk.

"Look, mister, this is the certificate for this here safe-deposit
box. That gives me the right to open it, see? It's just that I seem to
have lost my ID. Now I figure you could save me the trouble of
having to open it with this crowbar and get your keys. What do
you say?" he said, with his Colt .45 against the banker's throat.