Free The Shadow of the Shadow by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

Verdugo could see part
of the woman's body, the nightgown rolled up around her hips, an
exposed breast, her thigh with the scar of an old wound.
    "I don't like to do it this way. Let me get on the bed with you,"
whined Ramon.
    "Shit and double shit," thought the lawyer. "Complete with
ideological discussion and everything. By now they could have
done it like any normal person and had it over with."
    The woman stood up. Even barefoot she was still several inches
taller than the Spic.
    "'here, you're fine right there," she said, keeping a couple of
feet between herself and her lover.
    "'Ihe things a guy has to put up with in this life...," the lawyer
thought, trying to adopt the contemplative attitude of a monk and
letting his curiosity deflect the guilt he felt as the hidden witness
to a scene that didn't belong to him.

     

MANTEROLA LOOKED AT THE BODY, reread the suicide
note, and decided to invest a few pesos and take the forensic
specialist out to lunch. This was no more a suicide than Rudolph
Valentino was Manterola's uncle.
    "First of all, you've got the downward trajectory of the bullet,"
said the doctor.
    "Either that or he was sucking on the gun like a lollipop."
    "That's what I was thinking. He had scratches on his lips and
a cut on the palate made by some sharp object..."
    "The barrel of the revolver."
    "Naturally."
    "That's what I've been saying all along," said Manterola,
carving away at his steak. The forensic specialist had already
finished his some time ago, and now busied himself gobbling up
all the scraps of bread left on the table. Pioquinto looked at him
with annoyance.
    "Come on, Doc, leave me a piece a bread for the salsa, will
you?"
    "Sorry, I didn't think you wanted any more."
    Well-dressed waiters bustled past their table balancing large
trays above their heads-"just like in Paris"-dodging customers,
lottery ticket vendors, cigar hawkers, a pair of charros with their
oversized guitarron, a variety singer, and the children running
underfoot.
    "Let me guess, Doc. There was a fight, someone stuck a pistol
in the guy's mouth and pulled the trigger."
    "Obviously," said the doctor, who had started out his career as an army veterinarian under General Francisco Coss. His years in
the service had left him with a preference for dead bodies.

    Pioquinto Manterola wiped the sweat off his forehead with a
white handkerchief The city suffocated in the afternoon heat. The
rains were late this year, maybe they'd never come at all.
    As they were leaving the Sanborns, Pioquinto glanced at his
watch. He had two hours before his deadline. Hoping he could
find a few more details to fill out his story, he headed off with
quick steps back toward the Hotel Regis.
    As he walked, Manterola thought deep and hard. He needed
to know more about the dead Englishman. He needed the ideas
to turn into questions, the questions into words, the article to
start pulling itself together along a single thread, complete with
headline, paragraphs, and punctuation marks.
    If he hadn't been hurrying along with his head down and his
eyes pegged to the ground like someone looking for spare change,
he would have seen his friend Tomas Wong crossing the street
between a pair of shiny Lincolns and an old hackney pulled by a
rust-colored horse. Tomas was humming an old Irish ballad his
friend Michael Gold had taught him several years ago in Tampico.
Gold, a New York Jew, had come to Mexico in 1917 to escape the
war. Now Tomas was on his way to Chinatown to buy a couple of
reams of paper for Fraternidad, the union's weekly newspaper.
    Tomas was a stranger to Chinatown. Orphaned when he was
five years old and living with a mestizo family in Sinaloa until he
was ten, he'd never learned to speak Chinese. Growing up among
Mexicans and gringos in the oil fields of Mata Redonda and Arbol
Seco, he'd never known the great Chinatowns along the Pacific
Coast, and he'd moved through the Chinese ghetto in Tampico
like