Free The Shadow of the Shadow by Paco Ignacio Taibo II Page B

captain's name was?"
    "It's colonel, Colonel Gomez. He was in the bar with a couple of gringos, and when the police arrived he came over to see what
was going on..."

    La mia chiave, per favore. "
    "Much obliged," said the journalist, bowing slightly to the
fat-cheeked gentleman and stepping away from the door. But his
thoughts were already miles away.
    When he walked back out onto the street, he was dizzy from
so much thinking. He could almost feel the smoke drifting off
the top of his bald head. For appearances' sake, and to conceal
the nonexistent smoke from any nonexistent observers, he lit up a
cigar and crossed Avenida Juarez. On the other side of the street
he bumped into his friend Tomas, struggling under the weight
of two enormous boxes of paper and with a very beautiful young
woman hanging on to his arm, dressed in a sky blue cheongsam
embroidered with the image of a dragon.

     

IT WAS GETTING HARDER and harder to keep their minds
on the game, each time the strange plot closing in around them
surrounded the marble tabletop with words, impeding their concentration. Dominoes is a game that's meant to be played with its
own special kind of banter, full of barbed but imprecise allusions
to the game at hand. You shoot the breeze, you joke around, you
bluff, but you never say anything to guide your partner, to reveal
your hand, to send a hidden message. You talk but you never really
say anything, so as not to break the cardinal rule of silence. So
there was no way to play a decent game of dominoes with the
shadows of three murders, a rescued Chinawoman, an unnatural
liaison, and the sound of the rain in Madero Street dancing over
the bones.
    The characters were doing the best they could, trying not to lose
the thread of that schizophrenic night. The bartender noticed their
uneasiness, the tension in the game, and put it down to the rain,
the rent strike that was shaking the city, the rising unemployment,
the day's results at the racetrack, the flu epidemic...
    "Without wanting to know anything, we know too much already. So why don't we try and see what else we can find out?" said
the poet.
    "It's your turn, my friend."
    Manterola, who'd been playing it close to the chest through
the first two rounds to see which way the wind was blowing, now
attacked with the double-fours. Tonight he was partners with Verdugo.lhey all knew how the game would turn out: it was the
aggressive play of the Chinaman and the poet against the lawyer's
and the reporter's no-holds-barred brand of wily malice. In a
normal night, the lawyer and the reporter would win six out of
ten. Tonight, however, was anything but normal, and they'd been
losing ever since they sat down.

    "It's not that I want to defend normalness, Bakunin help me,
as Tomas would say, but that was one of the strangest liaisons I've
ever seen in my life. And I wasn't born yesterday... Now, I'll admit,
I haven't exactly had the opportunity to observe the sexual habits
of too many of my fellow citizens at such close quarters. My own
seem normal enough to me, and maybe that's my problem... But
picture this:' here they are, the two of them, screwing with a good
three feet between them, and me stuck in the closet like a peeping
Tom."
    "Maybe she doesn't love him, or maybe the Spic doesn't wash
his hands," suggested the poet, meeting Manterola's fours with the
double-twos.
    "No. Nobody said anything about hands. It was just that the
Spic had a thing about not taking his shoes off."
    "It's deal as a bell," said Tomas with a smile. "If you don't take
off youl shoes, at least one yald."
    "I hope they didn't splash you," said the poet, trying to knock
Verdugo off balance. Despite his sardonic tone, the lawyer still
hadn't quite recovered from his strange vigil.
    "Only in a moral sense, my dear bard, only in a moral sense."
    Manterola hesitated, then played another four, hoping Tomas
wouldn't close the hand and leave him with the six/five and