The Hot Country (16 page)

29

I hooked my feet in the handles of my bag, pulled my hat down farther over my eyes, and I slept. Dreamlessly, I thought, for I woke with a start with nothing in my head but a feeling of movement and then I thought I was wrong, that
this
was a dream, for I lifted my head and turned to the window and in the pale first light of the day, across a ragged verge of grass and stones, across a wide, dark
calle,
was the low adobe sprawl of the
Hostal Buen Viaje
and I thought perhaps the other Gerhard—for I was Gerhard now to protect my own life—I thought perhaps the
other
Gerhard was still lying in a room off a courtyard behind that hotel facade, he lay there dreaming his own dream from which he would not wake, and then this vision was gone, it floated past and we were curving, curving, and now before my eyes—or perhaps before only my unconscious mind—was
Avenida Guerrero
and a familiar row of warehouse buildings, and flashing past was the very one in whose shadow, just out of sight, a knife was lifted to kill a boy and I fought for him. But these vanished now too. I blinked hard, and still the streets passed by, with the tile-roofed houses and the gray scattered tombs of the
Cementerio General
and the wide
alameda
at the south end of
Independencia
and the great wooden bowl of the bullfighting ring. These were recognizable but irrelevant to me, and I realized that I was not dreaming, that this was Vera Cruz flowing past me, and I settled back again, closed my eyes. But I was awake.

I opened my eyes. I removed my hat. We were running out of the trees of Vera Cruz and the city vanished, replaced by a stretch of marsh, the thin veneer of water among the rushes starting to lighten as the sun cracked the horizon behind us, with a scattering of slow-stalking blue herons looking black in this early light. And now the water vanished too and the sands took up, lifting into minor dunes, and our train slowed abruptly. I pressed the side of my face against the window to look forward. I saw branch tracks heading off south and switching tracks and now a siding and boxcars with uniformed men—­
Federales—
sitting in the doors. Our own train was crying out beneath us, as we ground hard to a stop. The engine pitched low. I understood what would happen now. My hand went to Gerhard's German passport, just to touch it, and I recognized the danger of that thought. I rethought it: I touched my
own
German passport, just to reassure myself it was there. Mine.
I
was Gerhard Vogel.

A low Spanish murmuring ruffled through the car and I looked at my nearby fellow first-class travelers. They all seemed to be Mexicans, well-dressed ones. Sitting next to me was an old man in a cream suit, a
mestizo
with a massive gray Porfirio Díaz mustache. In the seats in front of me were a middle-aged couple, he also in a suit, American-style serge, she wearing a bright blue
rebozo
draped over her head and shoulders. No possible Germans were nearby to find my speech suspicious. In spite of my taste for irony and the impulse to indulge in German double-talk, I decided my best course was to inject a clear undercurrent of an admittedly stage-German accent into a simplified Spanish and fake a lapse into the language of the Fatherland only if absolutely necessary.

Two
Federales
in proper regimental uniforms were beginning to work their way down the aisle, a conductor trailing them. The
Federales
were looking at each passenger intently, asking for papers from some, passing others by with only a single lingering glance, the conductor checking tickets of everyone in their wake. I couldn't clearly see if there were other non-Mexicans farther up, but the two government soldiers did pause, once, and then again, and then once again, to check documents closely, and I turned my face to the window as if unconcerned. But as their voices came near, stopping a few rows in front of me to ask for a
pasaporte,
I thought now it would seem evasive to be looking away from them when they arrived. And if I could, I wanted to see who it was they would expect to be carrying an actual passport.

The
Federales
were several rows down and focused on the seats on the other side of the aisle. I moved my head very slightly to the right, not wanting to seem anxious, and I could see between the couple in front of me and barely through the two people in front of them and then my sight was mostly blocked by a black sombrero with silver trim. The soldiers were soon satisfied, and they moved this way. One was lagging behind a little, deferentially, and the senior man turned to this side of the aisle. He had a dark face, carefully twirled black mustaches, a sharp-scanning eye. I knew I shouldn't be looking out the window but I shouldn't be staring at him either. So I eased back in my seat, waited with a vaguely sleepy stare in front of me, as the soldiers moved closer.

Now I saw them in my periphery as they approached my row, and I looked up, slowly, as if this was all quite routine. And I knew I was thinking too much. What I'd learned about actors—even the hammiest of them—was that they worked out their self-consciousness in rehearsals. In performance, even the broadest, phoniest gestures were actually executed straight from the body. I was thinking too much, and now I was thinking too much about thinking too much, as I stared up at the officer who was clearly in charge. His mustaches were so black and the confluence of lines converging on the outer corners of his eyes were so deep that I wondered if he rinsed indigo and henna into his
bigote grande
like a fading leading man.

“Good morning,” he said to me in English, going straight to the top of his list of targets.

My head cocked slightly in brief incomprehension—which I was pleased to note had occurred by an actor's reflex—though I also needed to stop noting my own performance, even when good, as that was the time when actors tended to muff their lines.

“
Guten Morgen,
” I said, not really capable of going very far past that if this man happened to know any German. His uniform was far too correct for the conscript
Federales
Maass had been able to gather to fight for him. He even had pips on his shoulder that I could read: a captain. A real soldier. Not an inflated
rurale
. Not a field captain ele­vated in battle from corporal with all the officers around him shredded by bullets and shrapnel. These onyx-stone black eyes had a legitimate
Kapitän
behind them, lately arrived from the capital and tasked with finding guys like me. He could even have known some real German. That was the great risk of this moment.

A beat of silence passed between us. Even a German would have reasonably understood the words “Good morning” in English. “
Buenos días,
” I replied, offering this to the officer as our common language, but pushing the pronunciation to the back of my throat, tightening my cheeks, applying my mimic's mouth for German to my fluency in Spanish.

He looked at me for another silent moment, and I could feel him hanging on the edge of belief, still not convinced, but not unconvinced either, as he did not move his eyes from mine for even the briefest moment. I waited, fearing actual, knowledgeable German from him. The Germans had a major presence in Mexico City. This was a smart man. But instead, he said, “
Pasaporte.
”

I pulled my new self from my inner coat pocket without even glancing at it, and I handed it to him, holding my eyes steadily on his. He broke off. He opened my passport to the picture page, as I put my ticket in the conductor's outstretched hand without a word, without shifting my gaze from the captain, who looked at my image. He lifted his eyes to me directly and then lowered them back to the page. He looked at me in the flesh once again. I very casually took off my hat to reproduce the picture.

I saw his eyes move to the facing page, which had some descriptive information. “You've lost some weight,” he said, without looking up. We were speaking Spanish now. That much, at least, seemed to have been established.

I said, “If you would control the rats and the flies and . . .” I paused as if looking for a word. And then, quite heavily guttural and loud, I finished my thought: “. . .
die Scheisse
in your streets, I would not catch the dysentery and lose my weight.”

The captain lifted his eyes to me. Slowly. It was meant to be faintly ominous. But the look was also clearly defensive, prideful, a challenge to my criticism of Mexican sanitation. A rebuke. Good.

I rubbed it in. “We are meticulous about these things in my country,” I said.

He took my ticket from the conductor and gave it a very quick glance. “And why are you going to Mexico City?” he said. This was a cheap little trick, and he no doubt knew it, because the smolder in his eyes was no longer suspicion. It had become a look that said: You arrogant German jackass.

“I am not going to Mexico City,” I said. “I am going on to Torreón.”

“And what takes you to Torreón?”

“I am going to wait there with my uncle the banker,” I said, starting to raise my voice, “until fine Mexican soldiers like you,
Kapitän,
can figure out how to throw the invading American
Schweinehunde
out of your country.” I was nearly shouting now.

And the captain's eyes shifted away. He conceded the skirmish, as the train car filled with the responsive cries of “
Viva Mexico
!
”
and “
Mueran los gringos
!
” and even a soft “
Olé
!
” from the man with the Díaz mustache sitting next to me.

The captain shut my passport and handed it back to me with my ticket. “Our country has many enemies to fight,” he said.

“None of them are German,” I said. I regretted it at once. I was afraid I was pushing my fake attitudes too far when I'd already said enough. But the bigger regret was still brewing in me, as the captain managed an almost respectful nod of the head. He turned away and led his subordinate and the conductor out of first class and into the second-class car behind us.

When he was gone, the real regret played like a brass band inside my head, made even worse by the admiring looks I was still getting from a dozen Mexican faces wrenched around in my direction. The faces turned away one by one and I was left with that band doing a rendition of “It's a Grand Old Flag” with all the trumpets and trombones and tubas and one sad alto horn variously playing flats and sharps. A cacophony of Cohan mocking my betrayal of my country in a sordid little play in a first-class car outside Vera Cruz, Mexico. Those Americans I'd publicly called invading
Schweinehunde
were my pals and drinking buddies and fellow baseball fans and hot dog lovers, and they were lovers of free speech and the free press and freedom of religion, and for them and for me, everybody was welcome and nobody was turned away and anyone had the chance to make himself a millionaire or a doctor or a general or even maybe President of the United States, and anyone could be my pal and my drinking buddy and a Cubs fan no matter where he came from, and damn if I don't know we fail at all that now and then, and sometimes we fail badly and maybe way too often, but that's what we believe, and no man has walked the face of the earth who didn't sometimes fail to live up to what he believes, but we do believe it, we do really believe all that, and now I'd cried out insults to my country in a foreign public place and inflamed hatred for my country in a train car full of people who didn't truly understand us.

I turned my face to the upswoop of a sand dune out toward the horizon, and right in front of me a wide-winged, ugly-mugged, shit-eating
zopilote
floated past, and as far as I was concerned at the moment, he could come land on my chest and eat out my traitorous heart if he wanted to, and I wouldn't even push him away.

But this passed. Pretty quick, though that didn't mean I was insincere in my guilt. But I figured I'd just played Iago for one performance to a small house in Vera Cruz. And for bigger stakes than applause. I saved my own life, or at least my freedom. And I saved my chance to figure out where this German agent a couple of cars up ahead might be going and what he might be doing that could pose a possible danger to the country I love.

30

Before we left the federal checkpoint, the captain and his aide stepped back into our car and stopped at the doorway, just beyond arm's length to my right. I found I was confident now in my role. I looked up at him easily, without any thought that he was here having been nagged by a suspicion about me. He didn't even glance my way. He said in a loud voice, “Attention. Attention, travelers.”

All the faces in the car turned in his direction.

“For your safety from the foreign invaders and from the bandits who masquerade as so-called Constitutionalists, we will be adding a car of federal soldiers to the back of the train. Please accept our apologies for the brief delay.”

He paused, turning his head slowly, with a faint bounce, to each part of the car, seeming to study every face. He ended by looking across his shoulder and down at me. I gave him an approving nod, which he acknowledged by making no apparent acknowledgment at all. He returned his attention to the car in general.

“
Viva Mexico,
” he said, without raising his voice but with a firmness that filled the place. And like a church congregation, the Mexican travelers answered as one: “
Viva Mexico.
”

Then he strode up the aisle.

I was placid through all of this. But I was glad when, after a few clanking and jostling minutes, the train was moving again and I was officially just one passenger among many, checked and authorized, on his way toward the city of Torreón in the state of Coahuila.

And we began to climb. I leaned my head back against the seat and turned my face to the treetops and the bright morning sky, and I was suddenly alone. I was a man inside a man, Christopher Marlowe Cobb inside Gerhard Vogel, and I was rising high into the air and there was a landscape around me through which I moved and it was real to me but if I put out my hand to actually touch it, I would have been blocked by an invisible barrier. I was contained. I thought this was what the actors felt, all the actors I'd known—the good ones—from before I could remember, this was what they felt inhabiting a role on a stage. This. And it felt safe inside here. And since what my role involved for now was to be silent, I simply watched and waited and prepared for the scenes to come. I drifted inside this space. I prepared.

We crossed the
Río Jamapa
on a narrow steel-girdered bridge four hundred feet above the ruins of a Spanish causeway, and on we continued to climb, more steeply, ever more steeply, the forested ground tumbling away beside us. And the experienced travelers of this route opened the windows from the top to let the cool of the air and the first scent of pine into the car. We were nearly two thousand feet above Vera Cruz and the sea, with another mile to climb to Mexico City. Up here, the decorative birds and the exotic birds, the fragile birds and the peasant-fishermen birds—the heron and the egret, the grebe and the kingfisher—these had all vanished. Now the eagles and the hawks and the ospreys had taken over the sky, and I thought on this. I thought, but not thoughts exactly. I looked at the birds circling inside my head the way I read faces and gestures and tones of voice when I am working a new source for what he knows about a story I want to write. And sometimes the source doesn't even know that he knows this thing. The birds circled in my head above Vera Cruz, above all that had happened these past few days.

I thought about the birds even as the locomotive, which was made for climbing mountains, pitched its voice from its huffing on the flatland into something deep and strong and tremulous, like an operatic bass who was finished with his warm-up humming and lip-trilling and now at last was singing his aria, fully, opening his lowest register, unloosing his vibrato. Even the great-taloned birds outside veered away from this voice. This was an oil-burning engine, this mountain locomotive, so as it labored, there was little smoke and no grit, there was a taint of the smell of oil exhaust but mostly there was the smell of pine forest filling the car and a smell that seemed to be the chilled sunlight itself. Many of the hot-country trees had fallen away—the palms and the palmettos and the Spanish bayonets—but the banana trees were still here even as the pines densely mounted the peaks above us, the broad banana leaves dipping by the tracks at our passing, flashing glimpses of the glossy-green leaves of the coffee trees they shaded.

And we turned. And through a cut in the mountain, I had a sudden view of tableland covered with cane fields. And above these, the hawks and the ospreys and the eagles were circling. And they kept circling in my head as well. I thought of the aggressor birds with talons for grabbing and beaks for tearing flesh, and I thought of the long-legged, long-billed birds wading in the marshes of Vera Cruz, who would not dare go near these birds of the high mountains. I thought of the birds. How the birds of the marshes would themselves dip those flat bills into the water and they would grab a passing fish and swallow it and dissolve it inside them. These birds who would be snatched by the talons and torn apart and eaten by the great circling raptors: They found their own place to hunt and kill. You were a bird of prey or you were its food. And I thought:
Entweder Hammer oder Amboß.
Either a hammer or an anvil.

The German agent, mounted on an exhausted horse and soaked in his own sweat and covered in Mexican dust—as if he were an intrepid man of hot-country action—would ride into Pancho Villa's camp near Torreón and he would sit with the rebel he wished to make into an ally and he would remind him that Germans have long ­believed—they even had an old saying for it—that you have to be either a hammer or an anvil. And Mensinger intended to tell Villa—having noted to himself:
Kein Einmarsch. Nicht nach T
—that Woodrow Wilson would not invade any farther than Vera Cruz, would not even go to Tampico to grab the oil fields. Because Wilson had no eggs. No balls.
Keine Eier
.
Ningunos cojones
. And Villa would laugh with this man at the American President. And Villa would feel close to this man who said these things. He would understand from his German friend that Woodrow Wilson and the United States were not a hammer. They were an anvil. Waiting to be struck by a hammer. Germany would encourage Pancho Villa to launch an offensive against the Americans.

I remained sitting very still, though I had a strong urge to leap to my feet. Indeed, I was rendered near perfectly still by that very urge, which was the way any good reporter has learned to respond when someone has just said a thing that suddenly opens a view into your story as if into a deep mountain gorge. I was keenly aware now of the man who sat in his Pullman suite, just two cars forward, looking at these same circling birds of prey.

And the question I had to ask myself was this: Did I have enough —right now—to step off this train in Córdoba or Orizaba and write this story and telegraph it to Clyde? Every enterprising, competitive, big-city newspaper in the United States of America had gone with big-splash front-page stories on fewer actual confirmed facts and more speculation than this. And this would be a pretty big one. Headlines and subheads and bits of story started gabbling at me.
German secret agent makes covert trip to rebel enclave, urges Pancho Villa to launch counterattack against American forces. Agent tells Villa: “You're either the hammer or the anvil.” Brave American secret agent murdered trying to foil German plan.
And so forth. As I was imagining the way this story would play in print if I were to file it now, one thing did establish itself as part of my still totally speculative but instinctively probable assessment: Mensinger would not be going to Villa empty-handed.
Envoy promises German support, German arms.
I was sure the offer of arms was part of his message. Maybe that was the
Papiere
. Maybe the “paper” on the list of Mensinger's talking points was some official document pledging arms to Villa. Maybe even a pledge of support for him as the future president of Mexico. He was the odds-on favorite at this point. All of which, however, was just seductively plausible speculation in my own head. As for dispatching my speculations as reportorial truth, by the second day either Nash or Svoboda, without even leaving his desk, could write a “sources say” story about the
Ypiranga
itself and its cargo being part of this whole plot. Those arms were poised to go to Villa for his commitment to push Funston and our boys into the Gulf of Mexico. Nash, of course, would be Svoboda's unnamed source, or vice versa. And who knew where they would go on the third day.

And all of that stank. Sure the free press of my beloved country felt so fully and comfortably free that it routinely ran unverified stories, half-assed stories, or even outright lies to sell their goods. But that had never been done under my byline. All I had for sure was a secretive German official in a riding outfit on the way to a nothing town in a rebel province, a dead German-American who played a minor horn in a minor brass band who made some pretty extravagant claims about himself, a few cryptic words on an envelope and my own puzzle-page answers for a few of them. There could be less to this story. There could be more. But the only thing for sure was that I could not be legitimately sure about anything yet. The movements of armies, dead men in a field, advance and retreat and surrender. These were the sure things. These were facts. That's the reporter I had been. As for the reporter I'd suddenly become, the man I'd become, in a suit I'd never wear, with a phony passport in my pocket, tempted to write a newspaper story that had not been confirmed to be true: I didn't like any of this.