The Hot Country (3 page)

6

Not that my lead paragraphs over the next couple of days were any different from what they would have been. A handful of cadets and civilians with some fatally big
cojones
sniped our boys from the Naval Academy near the waterfront and got broadsided into the next life by the five-inch guns of the
Chester
and the
San Francisco
. The Marines came ashore and pummeled their way from house to house and secured the city. We had a nifty American flag raising ceremony at the
Palacio Municipal
and suddenly our fighting boys were all done up in clean dress whites. The local officials refused to come back and govern their city, and Vera Cruz was put under U.S. martial law with us vowing to be benevolent as hell. A 7:30 evening curfew went into effect, but we lifted it within forty-eight hours. And all the while, the
Ypiranga
just sat out there in the harbor. A German ship full of arms for Mexico with the Kaiser rattling his saber in Europe. I tried to hire a launch and go out to her once things settled down, but the Bluejackets intercepted me before we could even cast off. The
Ypiranga
was unapproachable, but she was still hanging around, and the other newshounds seemed unconcerned, expecting our Great White Fleet to finally just escort her out to sea and on her way back to the Fatherland. But if we were not going to roughride our way to Mexico City, then she still felt like the best story brewing.

One potential story did come along, however, that got Luisa talking again, low and angry inside my head, even as I eventually wrote it strictly by the standards of a wrongly-assaulted, badly-misunderstood-but-still-proudly-waving Old Glory. It started to shape up soon after the last American refugee train out of Mexico City finally made it to Vera Cruz, the one safe town in the country for Americans. And there were about five hundred of our countrymen jammed into it, the most visible ones in the capital, the bankers and the major shopkeepers and most of the embassy people. The bankers who weren't on the train were in jail and the shops had been looted and the embassy had been stoned and torched, and all of Mexico was suddenly united in its hatred for America and Americans. Even our ambassador and his wife snuck into town and ended up comfy in Admiral Mayo's quarters on the
Minnesota
.

Not that any of that hatred dared to be openly shown around Vera Cruz. Nothing like an occupying army to straighten things out. Though the local Mexican government boys were lying low, after a couple more days people were free to come and go, and the shops and markets and
burdeles
reopened pretty quick. The band shell in the Plaza even got back to nightly business with a German band playing American tunes. The well-off Mexican couples returned to the ballrooms at the bigger hotels and they promenaded to the Cuban
danzon
. I thought about Luisa several more times, but what she taught me grew a little fuzzy. Not that any lesson you learn is simple. The first Mexican president of the revolution, the one before Huerta, a former big landowner, foresaw his revolutionary future in a Ouija board. And the peasants who rose up on his behalf did so because they were convinced Halley's Comet had been a sign from God to change their government.

And maybe Luisa did affect the idle track of my thoughts once more, near the end of that first week, as I sat at my table in the
portales
of the
Hotel Diligencias
. I was facing the
zócalo,
and I was in nodding distance of Richard Harding Davis, who was sipping a good wine in his evening clothes as the sun was bloodily vanishing beyond the mountains to the west. There was still a bouquet of death in the air from the unclaimed Mexican bodies. A Marine swaggered by with adobe dust on his clothes from pounding down the walls of people's houses in his search-and-clear frenzy. Though I admired the man, I did find myself being a little critical, thinking that probably going through the doors would have worked for our boys just as well. And I realized that a good many of these leathernecks were hard-ass combat veterans from what William McKinley, Jr., had called our “benevolent assimilation” of the Philippines fifteen years ago. McKinley had the foresight to have no middle name at all, but it did him
nada
in the end.

Bunky abruptly appeared and he nodded his thickly-silvered head at me, once, emphatically, as economical and dramatic with his hellos as he was with his news leads in his heyday. He moved the second chair around to the side so he could watch the street, as I was doing. He laid his Kodak 3A folding camera in the center of the table and it was still unfolded, with its red bellows stretched out straight from the black case.

I said to Bunky, “You know that thing looks like a dog's dick when he's got your leg on his mind.”

He was too much of a gentleman and too much in love with his Kodak to act as if he heard me.

“A
big
dog,” I said.

He reached to the camera and collapsed the bellows into the case and snapped it shut. “Down, Rover,” he said, but very quiet, almost to himself.

I've always liked Bunky. He was B. F. Millerman for nearly four decades, mostly when the
Post
was the
Post
and the
Express
was the
Express
and Bunky was the latter's man at the front lines in the Franco-Prussian War and in Cuba with Teddy and in South Africa when the Brits and the Boers went at it. He did good work. I read his every word in the
Express
in the spring of '98 when I was fifteen years old and Mama was dazzling Chicago as Cleopatra. B. F. Millerman was my Cap Anson, my Cy Young, and backstage at the Lyric Theater I charged up San Juan Hill with B. F. and Teddy. Bernard Francis. I finally wheedled the full moniker out of him a couple of years ago when he was drunk, and he was properly offended that I did so. Bunky took up the camera when he'd finally had a bellyfull of governments and their armies censoring and manipulating the news.

“What are we doing here, Kit?” Bunky said.

“You and me?” I said.

“You and me and all the rest of us red-white-and-blues.”

“If we all head on up the road to Mexico City . . .”

“We won't.”

The German musicians were tuning up across the street, in the band shell behind the almond trees at the center of the Plaza, and the tuba was struggling to find a B.

“I made up a postcard for you,” Bunky said, and he took out the picture of me and Luisa and the dead locals.

I looked at it. “I should send this to Clyde,” I said.

And we heard a gunshot off to the right, down
La Avenida de la Independencia
. The shot was nearby but oddly muffled, so I figured it was on the far side of
La Parroquía,
the great, gray,
el Norte
-blasted parish church, which also fronted the
zócalo
and took up the next block south along the
avenida.

“Sniper?” I said.

A second shot. It sounded like a Mauser.

“Or a drunk,” Bunky said.

“It's too early for the drunks to start shooting and there's barely enough light for a sniper.”

Bunky shrugged.

“But still,” I said, concluding the debate with myself, “it's enough.” I listened for another shot. There was only silence.

I stood up. “I think I'll take a stroll to see if he got his man.”

Bunky put his hand on his Kodak.

“This enough light for you?” I said.

He took his hand off the camera. “I'll hold the table,” he said.

I headed south on
Independencia,
making it more than a stroll. I hustled along pretty quick, waiting for more gunfire, though there was still just silence. I was starting to doubt that it was a sniper. But the news had slowed down pretty dramatically in Vera Cruz and I could use a little exercise.

7

There was a high-voiced racket all around, the
zopilotes
in their twilight wrangling over their spots on the roof edges and on the bell tower and even on the high cross itself, where they would settle down to sleep. But when I turned the far corner, at
Calle de Vicario,
and faced along the street at the south side of the church, some different, agitated voices joined the din. Fifty yards ahead was a little gaggle of women hovering around something or someone on the pavement that I couldn't see. I strode on, expecting, briefly, to find a plugged fellow
gringo
,
probably in uniform. But even before I arrived, I'd adjusted that expectation. The Veracruzanas wouldn't be making over an American like this.

I gently elbowed the women into opening a space for me, and I was right about the victim. It was not an American. It was a Mexican priest in a black cassock. He was lying flat on his back on the pavement, his right arm straight up in the air, and he was grasping his right wrist hard. The palm of his hand had a major bloody hole blown in it and it had already sent the priest into shock. Or, to take up the likely point of view of everyone on the street but me, it had sent him into a state of religious ecstasy: He was staring at the hole and talking to it, saying over and over, “I'm martyred. I'm martyred. By the wounds of Christ I'm martyred.”

I almost pointed out the obvious to everyone assembled: His stigmata was actually from a rifle slug. But I figured most of these assembled señoras already knew that. I looked over my shoulder and up to the roof of the two-story row building across the street, where the sniper must have fired his two shots. If he was still up there, I figured I'd be next. But I didn't see anybody. Two shots to the priest and that was it, it seemed. I looked back at the
padre.
He was a slick-haired, corpulent, middle-aged man, and he was still clutching and waving his wounded hand and proclaiming his Christ-like suffering. The woman next to me said it was a miracle. I thought she was talking to herself and about the bleeding palm. But she was talking to me and she was about to answer the question that was now in my mind. She nudged me and bent to the priest and lifted the massive gold cross that hung on a chain around his neck, even as the priest yammered on, unaware of her.

The cross had been plugged right at the intersection of the upright and the crossbar. This was heavy gold plate. The Mauser slug had buried itself in the metal and it no doubt knocked him on his ass, probably right after the shot to his hand. Under his cassock he'd have
another memento that I was sure he'd figure out how to exploit: the image of the crucifix imprinted on his chest in black and blue. The cross saved the priest's life, but it wasn't a miracle. The guy on the
roof clearly knew what he was doing: sending a message. If this shooter wanted the priest dead, the priest would be dead.

I was taking all this in pretty quick, but meanwhile the priest was doing more than claiming martyrdom. He was bleeding. I knelt beside him. He had a hemp rope wrapped around his cassock as a belt. I undid it and pulled it off him. “Did someone go to find a doctor?” I asked the ladies.

“Yes. Yes, señor,” a couple of them said.

“We need to stop the bleeding,” I said, and I took hold of his lifted arm. He did not resist. He turned his face to me as I wrapped the rope around his forearm above the wrist.

“Did you see who shot you?” I asked him.

He just stared at me.

I cinched the rope tight and laid the arm across his chest. He kept it there and seemed ready just to pass out for a while.

I looked at the women gathered around me, seeing in their eyes that moment you learn to sense, the moment of the most trust you're going to get from people you want to get information out of. “Did any of you see the shooter?” I asked.

I got a little chorus of
No, señor
with a trailing
No vi nada
or two. They'd all seen nothing. As they spoke, I scanned the dark, round faces wrapped in their
rebozos,
and I noticed one woman, indeterminately old but older than the rest, who didn't say a word. As I looked her in her eyes, they shifted away. She was the one who knew something.

I needed to make another gesture. I looked at the priest, whose head had lolled to the side on the pavement. “We should make him comfortable,” I said. “May I have something for his head?”

One of the women crossed herself and unwrapped her
rebozo
and rolled it and kneeled next to me. She lifted the priest's head very gently and slid the cloth beneath it. Though I was interested in the tenderness of her gesture and how she might have always longed to touch him like this, I put that aside, and instead, I looked up at the silent woman, who was watching. She felt my eyes on her and she looked at me.

“What did you see?” I asked her, with just a little bit of firmness, catching her by surprise.

“
No la vi,
” she said, and I could see in my periphery another woman's face turn sharply in the older woman's direction.

The older woman seemed to catch herself. “
No lo vi,
” she said. And then, “
No vi nada
.” “I did not see anything” is where she'd ended up. And just before: “I did not see him.” But the first thing she said, the unedited thing, the true thing, was: “I did not see her.” Her.

“The sniper was a woman?” I asked, looking hard at the older woman.

“No, señor,” she said, lying in every little way a reporter is trained to see, by a blinking of the eyes and a slight fidgeting of the shoulders and a pinching of the voice. “I do not know who shot.”

I looked at the other faces. “Was the sniper a woman?” I asked them all.

They weren't talking, even if they knew.

I'd done all I could do for the wounded man and this was all I was going to get from the women. I rose and said good night to them and they were polite and a couple of them were nervous, and I moved off.

And moving slowly back north on
La Avenida de la Independencia,
along the face of the church, I had the obvious crazy thought. She hated the Mexican priests. She had a thing to do before she got out of town. She was a pretty damn good shot, which wouldn't surprise me. It was Luisa. That was an intriguing little page-four-or-so story I didn't intend to file.

Overhead the great bronze bells in the
campanario
struck the half hour—six-thirty—and almost instantly up ahead, from the belfry of the
Palacio Municipal,
a tenor of bells ecohoed the church's bass. I could use a drink. I was trying to put Luisa out of my mind once again, but she was resisting. I tried harder: It might not even have been her; it probably wasn't her. Even if the sniper were a woman, an urban
soldadera,
Luisa was a washer girl. Where could she have learned to be a crack shot? But there was a simple answer to that: She could have learned the basics from a dad or a brother, and the rest you've either got or you don't. And I walked faster.

By the time I reached the edge of the
zócalo,
the band had started playing. I hesitated a moment under the coconut palms at the edge of the Plaza. My table in the
portales
was calling me, but I looked down the path to the band shell. Not only was a German ship sitting in the harbor with sixteen thousand cases of ammunition for Huerta or whoever else, there were upward of fifty thousand Germans in Mexico, many thousands fresh from the Fatherland and carrying the Kaiser's stamp on their passports and operating the banks that held a big chunk of Mexico's international debt, all this while Herr Wilhelm was clearly working himself up for some kind of war in Europe. So a German band playing “Give My Regards to Broadway” in a
kiosko
in Vera Cruz while under American occupation flared my journalist's nostrils.