The Shadow of the Shadow (8 page)

"Gentlemen, please. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
When an invitation says eight o'clock, it means you're not supposed to show up before eight-thirty... Why, licenciado Verdugo!
Bless my soul!" and with a hurried "excuse me" to the two artillery
men, she took Verdugo by the arm and led him off into a corner.

"I never thought I was going to see you again, Alberto, and
then the other day, by chance, a friend of mine gave me your
address. I'm in charge of the invitations, and.. .well here you are. I
can't tell you how good it is to see you."

Conchita had been at the height of her career when one of the
other actors had inadvertently stuck a foil into her thigh during a
performance of Don Juan, and she fell screaming off the stage into
the orchestra pit.' That was the beginning of the end of her artistic
career. The real end came a couple of weeks later when, back on stage, she took a bronze jug and attacked the fellow who had
stabbed her, breaking his collar bone. She was a small, vivacious
young woman with a pair of bright green eyes that in her time had
turned many a leading actress green with envy. Everything she said
was accompanied by a dramatic gesture, a habit she'd picked up in
the theater, a unique kind of body language that gave her words
the sense of a double affirmation.

Verdugo took her hand and kissed it.

"Now let's not overdo it, Conchita. I'm flattered enough as it
is," said the lawyer.

"What do you mean don't overdo it? When I've got this town's
only truly civilized lawyer right here in my own hands..."

"I've come as a spy, Conchita," he whispered.

The young woman interrupted her chatter to stare at the
lawyer.

"To see how life's been treating you," Verdugo added quickly,
retreating in front of those green eyes.

"Oh, well that's different. I certainly can't complain... Excuse
me a minute while I attend to these simpletons, and then I'll be
right back."

She left Verdugo in the hall, hat in one hand, cigarette in the
other.

Society affairs in those days tended to bring together a fairly
standard blend of young officers on the rise, cultured senoritas,
young students in the Vasconcelos mold practicing their Greek,
politically ambitious lawyers who spoke and dressed like their hero
Jorge Prieto Laurens, well-to-do industrialists, character actresses
from the more acceptable variety theaters, and young renegades
from the Porfirian aristocracy whose fathers had the good sense
to break with the hacienda and make new fortunes speculating in
real estate, removing some of the old stigmata from their sons and
families and making them more palatable in the renovated world
of postrevolutionary politics. For dessert, there was the whole
spectrum of hustlers, crooks, high-lifers and confidence men the war in Europe had loosed upon Mexican shores: Russian counts,
French engineers, Catalonian shysters, high-class housebreakers
and specialists in the old family jewels game. There were also a
few highbrow reporters and Sunday poets from El Heraldo and
El Universal, and a smattering of the sons of Spanish immigrant
shopkeepers. It was a society whose insecurities sprang out of its
own immaturity, virginity, and lack of faith. It wasn't Verdugo's kind
of crowd, and he felt out of place as he watched the other guests
enter through the front door, liberating themselves of their hats
and gloves (a vain and pointless accessory in the warm Mexican
spring). For Verdugo's taste, the party-if it could be called thatlacked the necessary contingent of soldaderas, anarchists, lottery
ticket vendors, horses, dogs and other assorted livestock, northern
cattle ranchers about to make their first million, and a healthy
troupe of the prostitutes who were his good friends.

The press of the late arrivals forced the lawyer and the others
toward the back of the great hall and the rooms bordering on it.
Verdugo somehow got himself dragged into a conversation about
the virtues of the climate in the state of Veracruz with the French
industrialist owner of a textile mill and an army captain, adjunct to
the general staff of "Tiger" Guadalupe Sanchez.

The officer knew General Santa Ana's biography by heart and
made a great effort to insinuate his knowledge into the conversation
wherever possible. Verdugo made an offhand comment about the
practice of witchcraft in the Tuxtlas region and its common use
against the "paleface" foreigners, but his two companions only
stared at him as if they'd just discovered some rare species of beetle.
That was the problem with this new society: it spent so much time
trying to be modern that it forgot where it had come from. The
only ones they were fooling, however, were themselves.

Verdugo lit another cigarette and turned his back on his two
companions. It was a fortuitous move, because at precisely that
moment their hostess, the Widow Roldan, made her appearance.
She descended the main staircase dressed in a loose black gown that hung gracefully from her shoulders on two garlands of white
velvet flowers. She wore long white Swedish gloves that reached
to her elbows, and a pair of high Russian boots. The blackness of
her dress stood out starkly against the whiteness of her shoulders
and arms. She smiled languidly, the kind of prefabricated grin that
had come into fashion lately in the wake of a much-heralded run
of Dumas' Camille.

Endowed with a marvelously utilitarian instinct, the lawyer
took his eyes off the widow and concentrated instead on the
faces of his fellow guests. There was a little bit of everything:
envy, fascination, contempt, lust. He paid particular attention to
a certain officer stationed at the bottom of the stairs. The man
looked at the approaching woman with an expression of-what?
Pride? Possessiveness? "There's my man," thought Verdugo, and he
glanced up at his friend Conchita, walking at her mistress's side.
As she passed the officer in question (a colonel, thought Verdugo,
counting the stripes on his sleeve), Conchita stared at the man
with barely concealed contempt.

Slowly the guests filtered into the screening room. Verdugo
took a seat in the back row where he was better placed to sneak a
quick nap if the double feature dragged on too long (Los opalos del
crimen, ten rolls, starring Beatriz Dominguez, and Los Filibusteros,
six rolls, based on the novel by Emilio Salgari).

And lulled by the sound of the pianola, that's exactly what
he did.

" H ow' D I T GO ? " asked the poet.

"I had myself a nice little nap..." said Verdugo.

"No, the dinner, idiot."

"Oh, it was all right, as those things go..." said Verdugo, trying
somehow to distract the journalist and keep him from playing his
last two, leaving Verdugo with the double in his hand.

"And the widow?" asked Manterola, slapping the two/one
onto the table.

"She's one of a kind, all right. She manages to be everywhere at
once without really trying. Margarita, the Widow Roldan, a hell of
a name, if you ask me... She's sharp, too. I'd call her a sweetenedup version of Lucrezia Borgia."

It was well past 2 a.m., and the bartender, in keeping with
established ritual, went around turning off the lights one by one
like someone plucking the feathers from a chicken or blowing out
the candles on a cake, until the domino players remained together
inside a single circle of yellowish light.' here was something Last
Supperish about the scene, only with four glasses of Havana brandy
in place of the supper. The cantina was nearly deserted. Reckless
Ross was sleeping it off under the bar. His days as a hero on the
motorcycle circuit long past, he'd taken to drowning his sorrows in
mezcal, a drink he acquired a taste for following that famous race
in Toluca when he was carried off the course in a stretcher after
dropping his bike at sixty-five miles per hour.

"I'm out, senoles," said the Chinaman dryly, playing his last bone. He failed to see the humor in his friends' jokes, their
needling of the new aristocracy-as though, despite their selfimposed marginality, they'd never quite managed to break the
ties that bound them to the world from which they came.

"You pulled that one out of thin air, Tomas. I had no idea,"
said the journalist, counting up Verdugo's and Valencia's remaining dominoes.

"So what's the gist of it, man? I want to know what really
happened," insisted the poet again, trying to take his mind off
the game he'd just lost.

"Well, to make a long story short: What it all boils down to
is one gorgeous and shrewd widow, one gendarmery colonelwho I'm sure you'll recognize when the time comes, one personal
secretary who, going by appearances, doesn't hold said colonel
in very high esteem, one female hypnotist-scientific-mumbo-
jumbo-type to cure the widow's migraines and toothaches, one
French industrialist's son living off daddy's bank account, one
rough-looking Spic-the kind you can dress up in silks but still
can't hide the scars-and one police lieutenant who seems to
serve as the colonel's errand boy. That's what we could call the
inner circle. The rest of the guests seemed as out of place as I
was. Or rather, at least as lost and a lot less charming than yours
truly."

"I think I can add a new detail," announced the reporter,
licking a few drops of brandy off his mustache. "I found out
how the Widow Roldan became a widow. Her husband was
poisoned."

His three friends turned to stare at the journalist who paused
for a moment to relish the effect of his surprise announcement.

"The late Senor Roldan owned a print shop. He died of lead
poisoning, or saturnism, as it's known in the printer's trade."

"I remember my father used to talk about that," said the
poet. "He always drank lots of milk to protect himself from the
lead."

"Sounds like the widow's late husband didn't drink enough,"
observed Verdugo.

"So who poisoned him?" asked the Chinaman, his curiosity
piqued at last.

"He owned the Industrial Printworks, the largest print shop
in the city."

"The CLOM's got a union there," observed Tomas, adding his
own bit of expertise.

"What about the woman? I want to hear more about her. What
does she look like? I only saw her in the picture, after all," said
the poet, losing interest in the defunct spouse. "Young, beautiful,
domineering..."

"And, lest we forget, her picture was found in the pocket of
a murdered trombonist, and she was there in person when the
trombonist's brother fell to his death out of a third-story window,"
added Manterola.

"This much we know," said the poet.

As the dominoes shuffled and clicked across the tabletop,
the bartender brought over another bottle of Havana brandy. The
sound of the bones was sacred and he set it down gently.

"This colonel you'le talking about is Gomez, isn't it?"

"You guessed it, my friend. Jesus Gomez Reyna, one and the
same.

The Chinaman pictured the face of Gomez, chief of the Mexico
City gendarmerie, the mounted police, the same man who almost
a year ago ordered the police attack on the strikers at the Palacio
de Hierro Department Store. The same Gomez who ordered his
troops to fire on the militant railroad workers. The black beast, the
arch-enemy of the anarcho-syndicalists in the Valley of Mexico.

"This woman reminds me of another woman I used to know,"
said Manterola, choosing his seven bones one by one and standing
them up in front of him.

"It's been known to happen,"said the poet. "One woman reminds
you of another one, who reminds you of another one, who..."

"Gentlemen, please," said the lawyer.

"And the winner by threeeee huuuundred yaaaaards," roared
Reckless Ross from the floor underneath the bar.

The cuckoo clock called out the half hour.