The Shadow of the Shadow (25 page)

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, was
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 poet was returning from the bathroom with a vase full of
water for the comatose Dutchman when a faint knock sounded on
the door. The poet dropped the vase onto the rug and grabbed his
shotgun. "Who's there?" he called out, masking the metallic click
as he cocked the twin hammers.

"Milkman," said a man's voice that was immediately drowned out by the massive double-barreled blast.

Fermin Valencia aimed high, following the lawyer's advice,
although high for him was only about five feet seven inches off
the ground. The result was a fifteen-inch hole in the middle of
the door, pocked all over with buckshot. He reloaded and crept
forward, careful to stay out of line of the smoking hole. Kneeling
down, he turned the knob with his left hand and cautiously pulled
the door open. A bloody corpse lay on the floor in front of him
but he couldn't afford more than a quick glance, as three pistol
shots suddenly rang out from the landing, the bullets whizzing
by inches from his head. The poet let go with another blast from
the shotgun and, without taking time to reload, threw the weapon
to one side and drew his Colt. Leaping over the dead man he
ran down the stairs, yelling at the top of his lungs and firing
away as he went. Another corpse lay hunched up on the stairs
between landings. The poet had no time to react. He tripped over
the body and tumbled crazily down the stairwell, finally coming
to rest against the door of a dentist's office on the floor below.
Taking advantage of this involuntary pause, he reloaded the Colt
then continued down the stairs, more cautiously this time, until
he came out onto the street. There was no one in sight. The poet
made a vengeful figure, standing in the doorway in his stocking
feet, his hair sticking out in all directions, and a Colt .45 smoking
in his fist. Suddenly a car roared into gear. Without hesitating, the
poet fired on the accelerating vehicle, perforating its rear window
and picking off one of the side mirrors.

He was left alone in the empty street, one stockinged foot
ankle deep in a puddle of rainwater, deafened by the gunfire, his
teeth clenched, his throat dry, possessed by a slow shaking that
started in his legs, turned into a nervous ache around his kidneys
and climbed in a subtle shiver up the back of his neck. He dropped
down onto his knees and mumbled under his breath as though he
were praying:

"Fermin, what a man you are. Fermin, what a hell of a tough guy. Fermin, don't shoot anymore, Fermin. Fermin, forgive me."

All of a sudden he felt someone watching him, and turned his
head to see the lawyer Verdugo sitting against the wall a few yards
to his left, his head dropped listlessly onto one shoulder, his eyes
glazed over, his shirt unbuttoned, and his sleeves rolled up.

"Verdugo, what's wrong? What've they done to you?" asked
the poet in desperation, scrambling hurriedly to his feet.

When Manterola got back to the newspaper he had two routine
assignments waiting for him. One was the story of a Guadalajara
bank robbery in which the holdup men's trail led to Mexico City,
where the police had run out of clues. The other was the story of
a single mother who had turned on the gas and stuck her head in
the oven. The two together took him only a couple of hours and he
handed in the work before deadline just as the rumbling inside his
stomach reminded him he hadn't had a bite to eat all day.

He tracked down his editor, told him he was going to keep
working on the story of the stolen jewels, and got himself out of
a few pieces of minor work. It was eight o'clock by the time he
left El Dem6crata. He stopped first on Puente de Alvarado for a
plate of chilaquiles, then headed over to Guerrero to look up the
manager of the Industrial Printworks, having gotten the address
from a friend at the paper who used to work there. After talking
with the manager for half an hour, he limped his way toward the
Majestic Hotel.