The Hot Country (15 page)

27

I slipped into the
Diligencias
through the back veranda door. The first wave of American refugees had recently shipped off to New Orleans and I was able, without drawing any attention, to get a room for the night. A good one, on the upper floor looking over the
zócalo
. I dropped my bag on the bed and went out and hustled to the train station, watching my back carefully. And I had to think the next step through. I was going to end up on the train with Mensinger. His ticket terminated at a strikingly obscure destination. Even if I followed him off the train in La Mancha, I didn't want my own ticket to make anyone suspicious. An inquisitive and talkative conductor, for instance. I'd buy my ticket for a stop somewhere up the line. Torreón. One of the ironies of the civil war was that the trains did run from one rebel's jurisdiction to another's. From the
Federales
' jurisdiction to a rebel's and out again. The rebels allowed it for the sake of occasionally waylaying a train and robbing it, certainly. But also to avoid simply shutting the country down. The rebellion had gone on for more than three years already and showed no signs of stopping.

And so, a short time later, a certain Herr Gerhard Vogel pointed at Torreón on the train schedule, fifty miles north of La Mancha, and he asked to buy a “
Zugkarte der ersten Klasse für Morgen,
” which was about as much as I could expect to effectively say in this situation without resorting to double-talk faux-German. But the Mexican clerk had plenty of German travelers pass through, so in a mixture of Spanish and hand signals he verified if it was a first-class ticket I wanted, for tomorrow, and I was able simply to nod. And Bunky had done swell. The passport itself would work at customs in Hamburg. I gestured effectively enough to get the first-class car as far back of the Pullman as possible.

And it was not long before I was sitting at my table in the
portales,
breathing a little easier as the end-of-the-afternoon sunlight stretched out across the rooftops of Vera Cruz. The waiter, who knew me by now, immediately delivered two telegrams. There were only two people wiring me in Vera Cruz. I put the one aside with an unpleasant fizzle in my head. I opened the Chicago wire. Clyde wrote:
Girl sniper great. Sold out Bulldog in half an hour, boosted Daybreak 30 percent, Morning similar. Too bad she didn't nick you. Dope on your man FVM vague. Some sort of government banking official. You got a whiff?

I was glad his Bulldog edition sold out quick and carried into the next day. Our big bosses loved that. And as for Scarface officially being an economics guy, Clyde might as well have wired that he'd confirmed Friedrich von Mensinger as a high-ranking German Secret Service officer.

I signaled the waiter and he brought me cable blanks. I checked my pocket Elgin, which I was back to carrying, now that I expected to avoid trouble, at least for tonight, and I had a little time to get to the telegraph office. So I also ordered an
aguardiente
. I wrote to Clyde:
Got a big whiff. Will be out of touch for a while. Bunky will handle VC inertia.

I figured that would boost Clyde's coffee intake 30 percent, his sleeplessness a similar amount. But I laid the cable blank before me on the tabletop with a tiny nod to Clyde Fetter. Clyde did not doubt that I knew what I was doing, and he let me do it.

As did my mother. I wished I knew what it was
she
was doing and could happily let her do it. Not that I had any choice but to let her, whatever it was. I picked up her wire and put it down and picked it up and put it down and drank some of the
aguardiente
that had just arrived and then I picked the wire up and held it. She was capable of hinting further about her “golden strings” being tuned or her “brass” being handled. I don't think she even understood how I didn't really want to hear about that. To be fair to her, as I grew up with my mother, when she was being a woman, she rarely could do anything but simply put me in the hotel hallway and regretfully expect me to now and then put my ear to the door. For her to have had no passion or, worse, for her to have it and never act upon it were her only realistic alternatives. And her genius as an actress meant she must, by her very essence, live her life openly, always upon a stage, even if it was in a play called
Life
.

I didn't respond to her last wire. And though it'd been but a relatively short time since she sent this one, it likely had already registered upon her that I was not giving her my blessing for whatever golden-string-tuning she'd decided to do. I was providing her with no end-of-the-act curtain. So the play had to go on. She felt she had to further explain. I opened the telegram.

We have always quoted the Elizabethans to each other, out of context, for our own purposes. And in her new message, after her
Dearest Christopher Marlowe Cobb
—her use of my name in its fullness reflecting her irritation—I recognized a tiny pastiche of
The Winter's Tale:
‘Tis hoped his sickness is discharged. To see his nobleness conceiving the dishonour of his mother! Go play, boy, play. Thy mother plays.

And her closing words worked roughly upon me:
Love et cetera et cetera, Thy mother.
She could do better than that, I felt, in emoting her annoyance, but her uncharacteristic lapse made it all the worse, for the realness of feeling behind it. Though she could feign realness as well, I realized.

I put a cable blank on the table before me, took a bolt of
aguardiente,
and I wrote:
Discharged it is. Play on, Mother. My own play enters a new act. Love et non cetera. Kit

The first sentence was a lie. And so was the attitude of the second. But I could not board the train in the morning and ride it wherever it would lead me without making this thing right between us.

28

I woke before dawn. The red-crowned parrots had started to chatter in the treetops of the
zócalo
outside my open windows, harsh, grating voices, speaking the German of bird languages. I was definitely awake—and even thinking already about Germans on this day of the pursuit of Mensinger—but now, abruptly, before I could rise, a memory began without an antecedent I could identify. But this was memory, certainly.

I was a boy. Seven years old. Maybe eight, tops. I'd come upon some local boys in a vacant lot, and they had a pocketknife. They were older than me—maybe ten or twelve—and they were playing mumblety-peg, going through the progression of trick throws. Spank the baby. Tony Chestnut. They didn't like me watching and they tried to chase me away and I challenged the boy doing the best, who happened also to be the biggest boy, to a game of Flinch. Or so I called it. Simple. We faced each other and we threw the knife as hard as we could toward our own foot, trying to miss but progressively throwing the knife closer and closer to our foot, and we kept doing it till one of us flinched, backed off, quit, or one of us buried the knife in the ground flush against our skin without drawing blood. It was summer. We were all barefoot. I was little, he was big, and he couldn't back down.

We started. I'm good with a knife. I was good as a kid. I put one about three inches from my foot. Suckered him in. He was a little hesitant at the start of this, but he suddenly smiled and figured he could show off and beat me easy. So I walked him in closer on our next two throws, but still not severely, and then on my third throw, I put one a thumb-width from the outer edge of my foot. He was scared now.

I took him off the hook. I uprooted my knife immediately and I threw it again, with all my might, and I felt it pop coolly against my skin and nuzzle there. I didn't even have to look down. The big boy's eyes went wide and they all took off, thinking me a dangerous boy.

But I realized now, remembering this, that the game itself wasn't about these other boys. Not them at all. It was about my mother. And though she was offstage in the memory, as she was in the game, it was about Mother in my room at the
Diligencias:
I went out into that vacant lot because I chose not to linger beside her door in the hotel hallway.

And realizing this, I could push it away. I rose from my hotel bed and I changed into the mohair suit and the fedora. I became Gerhard Vogel. I closed my bag and lifted it off the bed. The heft of it reminded me that I was bringing my Corona Portable Number 3. It was only a little over six pounds, but the bag was heavy already, and I hesitated. I could have left it with the waitstaff for Bunky to take care of. But no. When a story is big and complex and has life and death and much in between brimming out of it, I need my Corona to think straight. I need to see the words before me shaping themselves not in the personal quirks of my hand but in the uniform surety and clarity of actual type.

I went out. And from the south, coming up
Independencia,
was a heavy, cobbled rumble, the sound of what I took to be caissons. I paused, I moved a few steps down the
avenida,
wondering if Woody was going to make a move at last, a predawn deployment of cannon to begin an offensive. A foolish, wishful thought. What I saw coming up the street was a caravan of horse-drawn supply carts stacked high with nested, silver-metal, corrugated 42-gallon garbage cans. Today was the day the city of Vera Cruz, the United States of America's little piece of Mexico, would begin its struggle against street trash, the day the U.S. Army turned into garbagemen.

I backed away from the onslaught. I did a sharp about-face and retreated from the advancing regiment of garbage cans. I headed for the train station with an odd little ripple of something akin to respect for Friedrich von Mensinger and the men who had dispatched him. They seemed to have a much clearer grasp than my own president on what was at stake here.

As I anticipated, at the station, though it was still a couple of hours before departure, the Mexican travelers were already gathering and flowing down the platform to clamber on board to claim seats, dragging bags and baskets and birdcages and bundles of pots and pans and bedding, some traveling with the intention of returning and some taking whatever they could carry as they abandoned an occupied city. I followed them. Up ahead, all along the platform, in the wide cones of piss-colored electric light, the Mexican travelers were pressing into passenger cars. I strode on more quickly, past second class, where all of the early seat-grabbing hubbub was going on. I arrived at the rearmost of the two first-class coaches and there were only a few figures in the windows. I moved along nearly a car's-length farther and stepped away from the train to view the Pullman up ahead. The windows were dark. No one was near the car but a sentinel conductor smoking a cigarette.

I went up the forward steps into my coach and headed for the rear. The last row was empty. I sat at the train's left-hand window, where, just outside, a wide, jaundiced beam of electric light illuminated the platform like an upper-balcony death-scene spotlight. From here I would be able to see Mensinger pass by for his car. There was a possibility he had changed his plans, particularly after his train ticket disappeared for twenty-four hours. Though I had to admit that Diego was right: The risk he took to extort money from the Germans could help to ease their suspicions. My showing up to defend the kid would itself be suspicious, certainly. But that could well have been unrelated. Krüger surely sensed I didn't like him, and so if I happened to notice him ominously following a boy, I might well have meddled. Would the Germans accept it as a coincidence, my noticing the situation? It was, after all, unfolding in plain view in the
zócalo
. Was I more likely to have a Mexican kid steal the wallet and then give it back to him to extort a few pesos for the thing, private letter and train ticket and all? Mensinger would arrive, I told myself. They would stick to their well-made plans.

I settled in, but I kept my hat on for now to minimize the view of my face. Krüger was the only one of the Germans who could directly recognize me, and he was in no shape to go anywhere. He likely had already spoken of me as his assailant. I had to hope they didn't have one of a few specific old issues of
Scribner's
or
Pearson's
or
The Century
around the embassy to show Mensinger my mug. Which was a reasonable hope. And perhaps it was not so likely that Krüger told the truth about what happened to him. I took him for an arrogant man, a man proud of all his manly skills as a soldier. That he could have been physically overwhelmed by a mere journalist, an American journalist at that, would be humiliating. What was, in fact, likely was that he made up some other explanation for his injuries. Still, I needed to be cautious. And my main challenge now was to stay awake before dawn, on short sleep, till I verified Mensinger's arrival.

And it was not long before he arrived, briskly moving past, dressed in high boots and puttees, khaki pants and shirt, and wearing a slouch hat. A pistol sat on his right hip. And over his shoulder he carried a pair of outsized saddlebags. He passed quickly out of sight.

I tried to hold the image of him in my head. To figure this out. Dressed for the field as he was, he looked incongruously clean and pressed and crisp. But certainly ready to ride. His clothes and their pristine condition seemed familiar to me: He was in costume. It was theater. It was pure theater. I thought of La Mancha as his destination. And I understood. Mensinger didn't have a rendezvous there with Villa. He had a rendezvous with a horse. It made sense if he wanted to impress the
bandito
-turned-rebel leader. Villa was where everyone thought he was, in Torreón. But Mensinger would get off at La Mancha to ride those last fifty miles on horseback, far enough to break a real sweat and gather some trail dust. He was a German aristocrat. He'd gotten his combat scar within the stone walls of an ancient university from another aristocrat with whom he then went out drinking. Mensinger was approaching a volatile, emotional, suspicious, uneducated, thieving, cavalry-charging, war-seasoned Mexican, and he had to convince this man of his own credibility.