The Shadow of the Shadow Read Free

empty.

    He dropped anchor at a little juice cart near the bandstand.
"What'll it be today, boss?" the vendor asked him. "I'll have a glass
of lemonade, Simon."
    The vendor, wagging his little goatlike beard back and forth,
poured out a glass of lemonade and made another mark on a
wrinkled piece of paper. He had agreed to pay the poet twenty-five
glasses in exchange for the lines that graced the front of his cart in
a multicolored gargoylish script:

    The poet took a sip of lemonade and glanced at the band as
it hurried through the final strains of the Alvaro Obregon March.
A sudden movement caught his eye. A man whose face the poet
couldn't quite make out was climbing the stairs at the back of the
bandstand. He approached the trombonist from behind, pulled a
small gun from his vest pocket, and without the slightest hesitation
held it to the musician's temple and pulled the trigger.
    The killer looked out into the crowd and for a moment his
eyes met with the poet's myopic gaze. Fermin Valencia rubbed his
hands vigorously over his face while the band played on unaware of
what had just happened in the back row. The murderer jumped over
the bandstand railing and ran off through the groups of Sunday
strollers. The poet brought his hand to his waist, confirmed that he was unarmed, and watched as the man crossed the avenue and
disappeared into a side street. The music stopped and the startled
cries of the crowd rose to replace it. As the shocked musicians
hovered around their murdered comrade, the poet tried to get a
grip on what he'd seen. A man had climbed onto the bandstand,
approached the trombonist from behind, and shot him through
the head. He was wearing a vest, the poet remembered that much.
And his face? There wasn't any face, just the vague image of a
peaked cap, the kind a rich man's chauffeur might wear. And he'd
held the gun in his left hand. A southpaw. Wouldn't this be a hell
of a story for Pioquinto Manterola, the poet thought. If only his
eyes were better...

    He approached the bandstand and climbed up through
the crowd, swinging his elbows to clear the way. In spite of his
diminutive size, the poet commanded respect, maybe because of
his magnificent mustache or the look of uninhibited desperation
burning in his eyes.
    He saw how the blood oozed from the small black hole in the
dead man's temple, pooling up on the bandstand floor. He stared
for a long moment into the dead man's wide-open eyes-"the stare
of death." How many times had he seen it before? He'd never been
able to decide whether that look reflected the final brutal pain of
death, the slipping off of the mortal coil as it were, or whether
it was the first glimmer of what lay beyond. In the face of this
uncertainty the poet had become an atheist: something told him
the blank stare of death corresponded to the first glimpse of God,
and if that was the case, he'd decided long ago he didn't want to
have anything to do with Him.
    "Stand back!" he shouted at a pair of grief-stricken trumpet
players. "What's the dead man's name?"
    "Sergeant Jose Zevada," answered the captain and conductor,
savagely twisting his baton between his hands.
    The poet leaned over the dead man and pulled his eyelids shut.
Then he stuck his hands into the dead man's pockets and emptied out the contents, naming each item out loud as he sorted through
them:

    "One snotty handkerchief, one photograph of a beautiful young
woman, one darning egg, one peso, fifty-five cents in change..."

     

"... O N E S I LV E R FORK, one bundle of newspaper clippings
held together with a rubber band, one sapphire ring, two diamond
rings with silver bands, and two large turquoise rings..."
    "This trombonist of yours sounds like a walking jewelry store,"
observed Verdugo, setting the two/three onto the marble tabletop.
His plan was to force the Chinaman to play the antepenultimate
six, so the journalist could crucify the poet on the double-sixes.
    The