The Shadow of the Shadow (27 page)

THE REPORTER FINALLY ARRIVED at Verdugo's
apartment around two in the morning after having first tried the
poet's apartment, the Chinaman's house in Contreras (which he
found empty with the door open and the lights on), the Red Cross,
the White Cross, the morgue, and several of the downtown police
stations. He finally got the lawyer's address from a young woman of
Verdugo's acquaintance whom he ran into at the morgue. She was
watching over the body of her father, who'd gone on a binge and
died out in the cold. The lawyer's three-story building on Tabasco
Street was sunk in darkness, surrounded by vacant lots and houses
under construction. The streetlights were only just being installed
and the lightless posts stood like grim messengers of civilization.
The moon threw a soft pallor onto the street. Manterola ran up
the stairs. After his long wait at the Majestic and so many hours
of fruitless searching, he was convinced something terrible had
happened. By the time he got to the first landing, stabs of pain
were shooting up his bad leg.

"Verdugo!"

"It's about time, inkslinger," came the poet's voice through the
ragged hole in the door.

The door stood ajar. Manterola groped in the dark for the
light switch, flicked it on, and was greeted by a shocking sight.
The poet sat red-eyed in an armchair in a large carpeted room,
a shotgun gripped in his hands. Verdugo and a man Manterola
didn't recognize lay on a bed nearby.

The rug was stained with a trail of blood that led into the
interior of the apartment.

"I've got two dead men in the bathroom, inkslinger... You have any cigarettes? I already finished off the lawyer's cigars and a
pack of cigarettes I got off of one of the corpses."

Manterola took out a pack of Argentino Ovals and offered
one to the poet, who held on to the shotgun with one hand, resting
the stock on his thigh. The reporter followed the trail of blood to
the bathroom where the two dead men sat bolt upright in the tub.
One of them had half his head blown off, the other had two nearly
symmetrical bullet holes perforating his chest.

"It's that Frenchman and the guy who shot at me that day over
at Peltzer's. It's the same guy who killed the trombonist. When I
saw him at Peltzer's, he was in uniform and I didn't recognize him,
but now that I see him with the same hat he was wearing that first
day, I'm sure it's him. Besides, he's got his holster on the left side,"
he heard the poet saying from the other room.

"And the cops didn't come?"

"Around here they could rape your mother and broadcast it
over a loudspeaker and nobody would notice."

"What happened to Verdugo? How long've you been here?
Who's this other guy?" asked the reporter coming back into the
room. He closed his eyes to get rid of the image of the dead man
with only half a head.

"All afternoon and all night. Maybe twelve, fifteen hours by
now. Verdugo went out to buy cigarettes around three o'clock.
Round about eight these two came knocking at the door, and later
on I found the lawyer down on the street. He's alive, but they must
have done something to him because all he does is lie there in a cold
sweat, shouting all sorts of nonsense. I don't know what to do with
him... And the other one's Van Horn, the missing Dutchman, the
one who shared a room with the Englishman who didn't commit
suicide. He's in a coma. Now and then he says something but none
of it makes any sense. There's only one bed so I put them both
there together. I mean, the Dutchman's not a buddy of mine or
anything, but I just didn't feel right leaving him on the floor... You
know something, inkslinger...it's the strangest feeling, I wish my father was here, if he weren't dead I mean, and that he'd take me by
the hand, tuck me into bed, give me a glass of water, and tell me a
bedtime story. And then I'd go to sleep and sleep and sleep..."

"I wish I'd been here with you, Fermin," said the reporter.

"Yeah, me too, Manterola," said the poet, finally letting his
head fall back and shutting his eyes.

The reporter worked without stopping for the rest of the
night. In spite of his bad leg, he carried both Verdugo and the
Dutchman down to the waiting Packard, helped the poet down,
put the two shotguns in the car, and shoved the two dead men
into the trunk. Then he went upstairs again and carefully washed
all the bloodstains off the floor and rug. Once everyone was safely
in the car, he drove along Insurgentes as far as Las Artes, where
he turned left. Following the poet's instructions, he made his way
through San Rafael to the widow's mansion. It was three-thirty
in the morning when he took the bodies out of the trunk and
left them on the sidewalk out front. No lights came on in the
neighboring houses, there was no sign of movement in the hulking
mansion, and they drove off again into the night. They went up
Tacubaya to Avenida San Angel, the moon beating softly down
on the cornfields on either side. The poet snored in the seat next
to Manterola. They passed a streetcar and later on a grocery cart
hitched to a burro. Their headlights shone on three solitary figures
walking along the side of the road. The reporter fitted his pince-
nez over his nose.

"Tomas! Tomas!"

The Chinaman watched as the bulletproof Packard squealed
to a stop with Manterola at the wheel, the poet asleep at his side,
and two more men hunched up in the back seat. He held on to
Rosa, who gripped his arm more tightly than before, and held out
his hand to stop San Vicente from reaching for the gun in his
jacket pocket.

"And where am I going to put you all now if I've only got one
bed in my house?" the reporter wondered.

MANTEROLA TOOK CHARGE of his beleaguered troops.
They drove around for nearly an hour before finding refuge in a
crib house out in Tlalpan, paradoxically named The Rest-a-While
Inn. The owner, a Spaniard, owed the journalist a few favors from
when Manterola had defended him from the abuses of a group of
army officers three years before.

The Dutchman remained unconscious, the lawyer Verdugo,
although he appeared outwardly unharmed, raved deliriously, San
Vicente had come down with a violent cold, the poet was in a state
of profound dejection after so many hours of violence and tension,
Rosa had burns all up and down her arms, and Tomas Wong had
a deep cut across his forehead, oozing blood.

The best that Manterola could get was a pair of rooms with
three beds and an armchair between them, a pot of old chicken
soup, and an abortionist to patch up his wounded friends. Once
everything was more or less under control, he went out onto the
balcony to smoke a cigarette and savor the dawn. Tlalpan was a
small town corrupted by its nearness to the city, living off a pair of
textile mills, a handful of dairies, and a multitude of small truck
farms. At that time of day, far from the highway and the factories,
the town was sunk in the bucolic peace of the remotest Mexican
village untouched by the years of revolution: a pair of women
walked toward the market with baskets full of chiles and heads of
lettuce, a dairyman drove a train of mules loaded down with huge
five-gallon milk cans, a uniformed streetcar driver strolled along
on his way to work. The reporter exhaled smoke and watched it
chasing up toward the sky. He didn't know much about warfare,
but he had the feeling the next move was up to them, whatever it was: gunfire, maneuvers, traps, newspapers. That was important,
to have the power of the press behind them, the voice of God,
the truth spelled out in black and white. And that was something
Manterola did know about. The only thing that bothered him was
the memory of Margarita, intruding stubbornly into his thoughts,
naked except for her leghorn hat, a stray ringlet of hair falling
across her face. He waved his hand distractedly to get the image
out of his mind, as if he were waving away the smoke or shooing
away a persistent mosquito. Then he asked himself what was really
going on. During the two hours he'd spent driving around in the
Packard, he'd found out about so many things that he felt truly
incapable of putting them all together. The appearance of new
characters in the story, Rosa's abduction and rescue, the comatose
Dutchman, and the incorporation of San Vicente into their little
club-the same anarchist who, if he remembered right, had been
deported by Obregon in May of `21.

The reporter smiled. He could have written a hell of a story
if he wasn't already up to his neck in the whole tumultuous affair.
The truth was that Mexico City was paradise for a journalist who
considered his profession to be the finest of the fine arts, and his
personal specialty the best of them all. "It's the real poetry of the
twentieth century," he told himself out loud and then went inside
to look for a place to sleep.

San Vicente snored away in one of the rooms, revolver in
hand, the armchair pushed up against the door. The Dutchman
lay unconscious in the bed with the poet balled up at his feet, his
boots still on. Manterola stepped through the door that led to the
next room, where Tomas lay on one bed, smoking, with a bloody
bandage wrapped around his head, a protective arm around Rosa
lying at his side. Verdugo tossed and turned in the other bed.

"Evelything okay, inkslingel?" asked the Chinaman in a
whisper.

"As good as can be expected. Not sleepy?"

"I've got too much on my mind."

Manterola took off his boots, folded his socks inside them,
threw his jacket on the floor and unbuttoned his vest. Then he
dropped down on the bed next to the lawyer, tugging a corner of
the pillow out of Verdugo's viselike grip.

"How's she doing?" he asked.

"She'll be okay. The doctol said the bulns welen't too bad.
Cigalette bulns, the sons of bitches."

Manterola turned over in the bed, leaving the Chinaman alone
with his anger, and found himself staring into Verdugo's vacant
eyes.

"Alberto, what's the matter?" he asked, but he realized that the
lawyer couldn't hear him and that his eyes, although they seemed
to stare fiercely into his own, were fixed on something far beyond:
his own little private piece of hell.

Verdugo pushed back in the bed and brought his hands up to
the reporter's throat.

"Hey, I'm Pioquinto Manterola,your friend,"said the journalist
soothingly; without trying to evade the hands tightening around
his neck. "Have you got so many friends that you can afford to
strangle one of them?"

Verdugo's hands squeezed tighter. Manterola stared urgently
into the lawyer's deranged eyes.

"Alberto, it's me, Manterola," he said, raising his voice. Tomas
jumped out of bed with a shout: "Hey, take it easy!"

"I'm...your ...friend," gasped Manterola, feeling the first
effects of asphyxiation. Tomas repeatedly struck the lawyer's wrists
with the side of his hand, but Verdugo refused to let up.

"No, man, no, don't let him," shouted the Chinaman. "Don't let
him do it." Manterola finally reacted, grasping the lawyer's hands,
trying to pry them away from his throat.