The Hot Country (19 page)

“They suffer,” he said.

I put on a sympathetically constricted face. I nodded.

I looked out to the crowd for a moment, to let Mensinger assume a drift in my shallow Canadian mind. Without looking at him I said, “Will these Mexicans ever have a viable government again?”

Mensinger snorted. “They need another Díaz.”

“Perhaps Carranza. He seems keen on taking over.”

Mensinger snorted again. “A weak man. He is no Díaz.”

“Not strong in the bean,” I said. Now I looked at Mensinger, ready to put on a vapid face for him, to keep him off guard.

“Not strong in the bean,” he said. I had him, for the moment at least. He'd bought into the metaphor and was watching the crowd. He was thinking—and not about me. This was good.

“Pancho Villa, then?” I asked.

“He is very strong in the bean,” he said.

“But he seems regional. All the rebels seem regional.”

“It doesn't have to be that way,” Mensinger said.

“What could Villa possibly do to put the whole country behind him.” I didn't ask it, I said it. And I said it with a scornful, dismissive tone. The dumb Canadian coffee merchant. I wobbled my head and smirked, hoping he would see it.

Mensinger looked at me.

I wobbled my head and smirked some more.

He was thinking whether I was worth instructing.

Wobbled and smirked. Though I knew I'd better stop that. I was overacting.

He was thinking I'd never understand. But part of him liked instructing the ignorant in things they could never understand. How superior he was.

I'd stopped wobbling and smirking. “Permanent chaos,” I said.

“Something bold,” Mensinger said.

I held still. I said nothing.

“He is a very good military man,” Mensinger said. “He can do something bold.”

I shrugged. Very very slightly. “They all just fight each other, the rebels.”

Mensinger hesitated again. Those eyes. Pale though they were, beneath their scummy surface, things rose near and then swam deep again. I tried to read those eyes. I was afraid I'd done all I could do. What I had going now in order to induce him to let down his guard: I could see all that dissipating. He had no reason to feel anxious surrounded by mongrel Mexicans. They were beneath him. He had nothing more to say to this idiot merchant from a marginal country. I was beneath him. But his eyes now gathered a focus that you sometimes see in pedants and preachers and the supremely powerful.

He said, “You bring a country together by finding someone you can all agree to hate.”

34

I knew this was the last thing he intended to say to me. And it was. We'd been hat brim to hat brim all this time, me in my gray felt fedora and him in his slouch hat, and now he took his hat off and laid it in his lap and he ran a hand through his hair, as if he'd just wiped me from the surface of his brain like a trivial thought. And he closed his eyes. Ramrod-straight upright he sat, and he slept.

And later we nodded a good-bye as our new train was called and Mensinger headed for the track and his Pullman. But I lingered a few steps behind and then I stopped. I had such fine quotes. I had a mind for remembering quotes—it was like a facility for memorizing lines in a play—and I would shortly write them all down to preserve them, all the things he said for my exclusive interview with a named German secret agent. In spite of its being largely speculative, I longed to file the story now. But I knew it would never get out of the telegraph office. This was becoming a personal thing. Between me and this man. I had to be careful. A good reporter can never let it get personal.

So I took my place in a window seat at the rear of a first-class car. I let myself think of the next major challenge: The character I created for Mensinger in the station was just the right character for the moment, but now that he knew me as Simon Chance, the Canadian coffee seller, how could I get off the train in the tiny La Mancha and follow him without being instantly noticed? This too had to be improvised. I put it out of my mind. The night train began to move. I slid down a little, resettled my feet on my bag, pulled my hat over my eyes, and I slept, fitfully, awaking to undifferentiated blackness out the window and to the sound of snoring and dream murmurings in Spanish and to the smell of cigarette smoke and
pulque
and to the smell of old sweat and the Mexicans' heavy cover-up of soap and perfume, manufactured smells of lilac and rose and jasmine, and I woke to an ache in the side of my neck from the sleeping angle of my head and the ache in my butt and in my back from the rush-work seat.

I stirred. I gently nudged my head upright against the neck pain. I found myself thinking in a new way about how to get this story, in a way that stretched my principles. Why? Mensinger's mission against my country, of course; the nasty smile and the laugh he gave Simon Chance; those eyes; the deception I'd already played on this man I profoundly disliked, and the remarkable de facto interview it yielded; the darkness outside and the sleeping forms all around me. Even his wife's letter, that he struck her twice for weeping over his saber wound. All this made me rise and step over the legs of the man sleeping in the seat next to me and into the aisle. I stood straight, stretched my spine, and shook the last remnants of sleep from my head. I saw my job differently now. This was an important story. Important for my country in a world of countries who would despise us. A timely warning needed to be sounded. I would not fabricate my story. I would not casually speculate on it when there were alternative viable speculations. But if I somehow could break-and-enter, with a reasonable chance of not getting caught, and gain access to his saddlebags, I would see what facts I could find, no matter how I did it.

I moved forward along the center aisle of the car.

As gently as I could, I opened the passage door and stepped out, the train-rush of air whipping through the join of the cars and billowing coldly into my shirt, my jacket. I closed the door behind me. The next car was the Pullman. I pressed through the swirls of air and I crossed the shifting steel plates between the vestibules and I approached the Pullman's door. I put my hand to its handle. I was Simon Chance. I just had to see the Pullman for myself. Perhaps I'd travel that way myself next time. Coffee did well by me, so I should do well for myself. I turned the handle and slowly dragged the door open, but only to the width of my body. I squeezed through sideways and pressed the door quietly shut again. I turned.

A dim, amber-shaded electric light burned to my left, at the beginning of a carpeted passageway along the windows. I stepped beneath the light. The passageway was empty, lined at this end of the car with half a dozen curtained sleeping compartments. Beyond them, the car opened up to its drawing room. I could see only the left half of the room, the ambered electric glow bright upon a setting of overstuffed burgundy wingback chairs. They were empty. The background clack of the rails was the only sound. The Pullman travelers seemed to be sleeping soundly in their affluence.

I moved along the corridor. I paused at each curtain as I passed, listening intently. I could hear a heavy shifting in one. A fleeting basso moan in another. I didn't think it was him. I could lift a hand, pull back a few inches of the curtain, answer the question. But it made no difference which berth held him. I would run too big a risk of getting caught if I entered his compartment and searched his bags with him sleeping at arm's length. I moved on and emerged from the passageway into the fullness of the drawing room.

And there, on one of the wingback chairs on the other side of the car, sat Friedrich Mensinger.

He was asleep.

He was not ramrod upright this time. He had sagged deep into the chair, his head angled against one of the wings. His slouch hat hung on a hook next to the window. A whiskey glass, with most of a double left in it, sat on the arm of the chair, which was just wide enough, flat enough for it to maintain a tenuous balance in a sometimes swaying train car. This was not his first tonight. His hand was vaguely surrounding his unfinished drink, but his fingers were slack. The car swayed slightly and the glass trembled. His hand did not move. Perhaps he'd only recently fallen asleep. His mouth was open slightly, though he was making no sounds. His sleep was not heavy enough for him to be snoring.

Most important, however, beneath his feet were his saddlebags.

I sat down in a chair, facing him from across the width of the car. Did he know this of himself, that he was apt to pass out from weariness and drink? Was that why he'd taken the precaution of having his bags beneath his feet even when he was sitting in an overstuffed chair in the drawing room of a Pullman car? Something important, of course, was inside the bags. The
Papiere
.

I looked at his high-laced boots, his spiral tan puttees lapped over their tops. The boots sat on the flaps of the bags, which were folded tightly together. I looked at his slack-jawed face. His eyes were moving beneath the lids. He was dreaming, Friedrich Mensinger. Of what? The touch of a fencing saber to his face? Himself slicing the mark of manhood into another young man? And another? And another? Each night perhaps he dreamed of a different face, a different stroke of his saber. Or perhaps he dreamed of his wife. His own hand like the sword. He struck her. If he struck her twice for her sympathetic tears, how often had he struck her for other things? Or he dreamed of Pancho Villa. Dreamed of mounting a horse and riding hard across the plateau to his bandit.

The train swayed left, smoothly but clearly, and it held this angle for a time. We were taking a mountain curve. I looked at the glass of whiskey. Mensinger's fingers had closed against it. I looked instantly to his face. I expected the eyes to be open, seeing me. But his head had not moved. His mouth was still slightly agape. The hand had its own reflex, to close on the glass, to keep it from spilling. The autonomics of a lifelong drinker.

The car righted itself.

I rose.

Mensinger's mouth shut. His lips grew restless, pressing ever so slightly and letting go and pressing again. Perhaps he was speaking in his dream. Attack, he was saying to Villa. Take your men and ride to Vera Cruz. Ride hard. Ride through the night and the Americans will not see you and attack them as they are collecting garbage and trapping rats and swatting flies.

I moved to Mensinger. I stepped to his side, careful not to touch the chair, the saddlebags. Nothing to wake him. But I leaned to him, brought my face close to his. His eyes had stopped moving beneath the lids. The scummy pond was still. I could hear him breathing. Steady. Complacent. Arrogant.

And I whispered to him. So softly I could not even hear it myself except in my head. “I will find a way.”

35

I returned to my dark window and I tried to sleep—I needed to sleep—but I could not, and the dawn came and we were in a level run on a wide landscape of wind-whipped young barley, like a vast uncut yard of grass, and then we arrived in Aguascalientes, a major stop under the vaulted glass roof of the station's multitrack shed, and I lingered on the platform, ready to become Simon Chance even if just to nod my head to Mensinger and watch him snub me and pass. I suspected Mensinger would have those saddlebags over his shoulder, though I would wait for him so that I could be sure. But after a few minutes it became clear that he would not even emerge. He was probably back in his compartment sleeping off the whiskey.

So I went into the station, to the communal tables of the restaurant, and I ate eggs and mashed red beans and bits of something that once was an animal, all wrapped in a tortilla, and I drank coffee, and we were on the train again and we were running on the great Central Plateau and I was tired of looking at the Mexican landscape. Nothing was there to keep my mind from teeming with the man in the car ahead of me, and I knew that there was nothing my mind could do with him for now, that my mind could only be a hindrance.

I was glad that I'd packed a book. My typewriter and a book or two: These I have always carried, no matter the weight and no matter where I've gone in the world. A Standard Folding Number 1 in Nicaragua, my Corona Number 3 ever since, and always a new book, but one that would bear several rereadings. Always these things in my life: to write, to read, to be near the clash of arms, near the life and death of men striving for something and prepared to give everything for it. In some ways this man I was following was not so different from these other men I'd written about. But he was drastically different as well. The world that he and I and our countries inhabited was changing.

I opened my book. A collection of stories by Henry James. I once read him for Mother and I have continued to read him for myself. I was drawn to his voice, though it was far from the voice I must take upon myself to write the things I write. But he was a voice inside me as well, a character inside me. And I opened straight to a passage I'd already marked in a story about a writer that I would reread now as I crossed the Mexican plateau. “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

I was not creating art. I was simply writing what was happening in the world for men to read over their eggs and their coffee. But my passion was my task. And now my eyes grew heavy and I slept. And I only briefly awoke when we stopped in Zacatecas, and I hardly woke at all through a subsequent flag stop or two, and I only began to struggle into enough consciousness to decide if it was worth it after the conductor's voice floated into my head with the word “dinner,” and after my brief, veiled glimpse out the window was of cacti and mellowing late-afternoon light and some horsemen standing in the long shadows of the approaching station, I closed my eyes again and I thought I heard the conductor from somewhere forward in the car announce the name of a town called Carlos, and I thought there was nothing that could possibly be cooked in Carlos appealing enough to prevent me from going back to sleep instead.

And then I was surrounded by gunfire and I was fully awake.