The Hot Country (5 page)

10

I'd had too much of the
aguardiente
,
of course, and so it took the boy's actually coming into my room and shaking me by the shoulder to wake me, which I'd instructed him to do.

“Señor, señor,” he was saying to me as I struggled up from a dream about Mother, who was kneeling on the pavement on the far side of
La Parroquía,
her head and shoulders shrouded in a
rebozo,
lifting her bloody hands before her, Señora Macbeth, claiming that it would take but a little water to clear her of this deed. But with the boy's shaking of my shoulder, she melted, thawed, and resolved herself into a dew, and I snapped fully awake. Even the hot bloat in my head dissipated as I threw on my clothes, and the boy said, “Some small boat is launching from the ship you have me watch.” I grabbed my binoculars and I followed him out the door and into the street and we beat it east on
Calle de Benito Juárez,
along the northern edge of the
zócalo,
and we were approaching the docks pretty quick.

The harbor and the ship weren't visible yet as we came up on the wide, stone-columned Custom House and, beyond it, the back of the massive, monolithic row of pitch-roofed storehouses along the waterfront. I reached out and put a hand on the boy's shoulder and stopped him.

He turned to me. There was nearly a full moon, and he was a good boy, Diego, the eyes of his upturned face bright in the moonlight. He was ready to do whatever I needed him for, and not, it seemed to me, just for the money, but for the boy's sport of it. A good boy, this one. I pulled out his silver half-dollar, and as I gave it to him, I put my forefinger to my lips. He nodded at me, my wee conspirator.

“Another time I'll have more for you,” I whispered to him.

He gave me a second nod and vanished in a flash back up the
calle
. I turned toward the harbor.

I figured it was best to stay out of sight: In spite of our military trying hard now to make the city seem as normal as possible, whoever was coming in from the
Ypiranga
had decided to do it at the most inconspicuous time possible, and they would not give up their story just because a reporter had the enterprise to be waiting for them.

I circled the Custom House to the right and moved into the dark moon-shadow behind the storehouses. The air was full of their smells—coffee and ginger and the musky smell of uncured tobacco leaf—and I kept on heading south until I reached the building's edge, at the back end of the Customs Pier. If the party from the
Ypiranga
was heading north instead, to Pier Four at the train terminal, I'd have to hustle. I came around the corner of the building and moved up slow and easy into clear sight of the harbor and the pier, keeping close to the storehouse wall.

The Customs Pier stretched a good five hundred yards into the harbor. I lifted my binoculars, a swell pair of German Fernglas 08s I got in the Balkans last summer. It took me a few moments to locate the launch from the
Ypiranga,
and I was grateful for the moon or they would have gotten by me. Out beyond the pier and off to the left, crossing the broad white field of reflected moonlight, was the silhouette of a four-oar rowboat, sliding dark and quiet. I could barely make out the low hunkering of three figures. I'd seen enough and I stepped back away from view.

By their angle, they were not heading for the Customs Pier but not for Pier Four either. They were planning to put in at the more-likely-to-be-deserted Fiscal Pier, about a hundred and fifty yards to the north. Two storehouses up the way. I jogged back inland and turned and I made good time behind this storehouse and spanked across the opening and along the back of the second storehouse, and I pulled up at its northern edge. I moved slowly to the corner and looked toward the harbor. No sign of them yet.

I'd been winging it okay so far, but I needed to figure out my part from this point on. Given their obvious secrecy, if I was going to get a beat on what the boys from the
Ypiranga
were up to, I needed to do this indirectly, keep my distance and figure it out bit by bit. The shadows were deep between the two storehouses and I had a good view of the whole Fiscal Pier, so I crouched low and waited. Tonight I'd be content to follow them.

They took their time, but two figures finally appeared halfway down the pier and I put my binoculars on them. The sight of them startled me. Something seemed to glow there. I lowered my binoculars and cleared my sight and then raised them once more. One of the two figures was small and dark, blending into the night. The other was much taller and bright white. His size and his glow from the moon were still a little unnerving, out of proportion and startlingly visible, especially given this middle-of-the-night secrecy. But it was just a man, dressed in white. I watched as the small, dark one turned and motioned off the side of the pier to someone down below. I assumed one of the three men I first saw was left in the boat and he was returning to the ship.

These two headed this way, and I eased deeper into the shadows. I tracked their approach up the pier, and as they drew nearer, I could see that the shorter, stouter one was dressed in a pea coat and watch cap. He was probably part of the ship's crew, and he was hanging back half a step from the other man, in obvious deference. The bag the crewman was carrying no doubt belonged to the important man, who was quite tall and angular and whose suit should not have seemed so odd. He was a German of importance coming to tropical Mexico in a tailored white linen suit and a Panama hat. A German of arrogant importance, given his carriage, and given his white suit when he obviously intended to arrive without being observed. I couldn't see his face in the dark, but I wouldn't have been surprised if he had a monocle and a fencing scar on his cheek. In my 6-power binoculars, the two men were getting close and I suddenly had a little twist of panic. They were heading into the city and they might have been thinking to cut straight between these two storehouses.

I rose, repressing the impulse to leap and bolt. They were close enough now that quick movement might have been seen, even in the shadows. I backed up as slowly as I could make myself to begin with, and I increased the speed as I got deeper into the shadow. Now I was matching their speed and they were passing between a couple of processing sheds that flanked the back end of the pier, and when they came into the shadows of the storehouses themselves, which they would in just a matter of moments, and when their eyes adjusted to the shadows, they might see me. I looked over my shoulder and I had only a few paces to go, but smooth movement was even more important now and I looked at them again and they were veering off south.

Now it was a matter of my sprinting toward the south side of the customs building before the two men from the
Ypiranga
emerged from the far side of the storehouses. I took off. I made it to the Custom House and around to the southern edge facing the city, and I took up a spot behind the man-high plinth at the base of one of the front decorative columns. I had a good, mostly hidden view down
Avenida Zaragoza,
which they would have to cross.

And soon they emerged, less than a hundred yards from me. I picked them up in my binoculars. They didn't cross
Zaragoza;
instead they turned south on it. I came out of the shadows and followed well back. When they stopped up ahead, at the corner of
Esteban Morales,
I stopped too, and I was worried about them seeing me standing here, fifty yards back and all alone in the street, but they seemed sublimely, obliviously confident in their secretiveness. The talk was apparently about directions, because they pointed up
Esteban Morales
and conferred and pointed on down
Zaragoza
and talked some more, and then finally they headed up
Esteban
. As soon as they did, I figured I knew where they were heading.

This was confirmed a few blocks up when they vanished south on
Cinco de Mayo
. I came up quickly to that corner and I took the last step carefully to pause and watch. As I expected, halfway up the block the two men stopped in front of a wide, two-story brick-and-adobe house of the sort that had a deep back gallery of rooms around a courtyard. I'd noted the place on my basic lay-of-the-town reconnoiter on my second day. This was the German Consulate. The small man knocked, and when the door opened, he handed the bag inside and the tall man did a simple aristocratic bow of thanks—no handshake—and he went in and the door shut in the small man's face. Before he could even turn to head back to his ship, I was hustling down the street to get out of sight.

The tall man was clearly someone very important. Straight from the Fatherland and keeping a low profile. I could smell a story here as sure as I could smell the old-fish-and-salt-wind smell of the harbor before me. This wouldn't be an easy one, but I always had half a dozen tough stories kicking around in my head at any given time. This one sure couldn't be any tougher to deal with than an invasion that stopped a mile inland and promised to turn into civic planning and sanitation work. Not any tougher, either, than a girl sniper with a roughhouse sense of humor.

11

A very few hours later I was in the
portales
of the
Diligencias
having my morning coffee straight and sludge-thick to wake up from my little stroll in the middle of the night, thinking about how to get at the tall man sequestered in the German Consulate, when there was a lone gunshot straight across the
zócalo
. Somehow I knew it was her. The
Palacio Municipal,
City Hall, another symbol of corruption to the revolutionaries, sat massively over there beyond the trees and just the one shot was fired. And though I was sure of the direction, the shot sounded farther away than the edge of the Plaza. I gathered up the cable blanks I'd been filling with nothing-happening tripe and I put down some coins, and I saw Davis, a few tables to my left, standing too. He was ready for a new day as Richard Harding Davis, crack but elegant War Correspondent, in starched and pressed field togs and gray felt hat with a blue polka-dot puggaree, symbol of the Rough Riders, of which he was an honorary member for having turned them and their Hearstian war into romantic heroes to be heralded by every newsboy on every street corner in America. He was putting the proper tilt to the hat as I looked at him, and he picked up his riding crop, the final touch. He glanced my way. He nodded at me and I nodded at him, and by the time we hit the
avenida
we were shoulder to shoulder and moving briskly together, heading for City Hall.

“Cobb,” he said.

“Davis,” I said.

“You understand my usually keeping my distance?”

“Of course,” I said.

“Out of respect,” he said. “Your work in the Balkans—and in Nicaragua before that—was splendid. Did you get my notes?”

“I did,” I said. And though Davis's style irritated me, I had his lengthy handwritten notes tucked in a drawer in my desk in Chicago. This was true of the man: He was famous for his frequent, generous, handwritten praise of his colleagues, be they newsmen or novelists. Though one of my criticisms of him was that he played a little too frequently at being the latter, the excesses of novels too often finding their way into his work as the former.

“Ironically,” Davis said, “if I didn't have good reason to write those notes, I would be more inclined to dine with you. We do find ourselves working for the same beats.”

“How sad,” I said, “that we now find ourselves chasing single gunshots.”

“Though at least it sounded like a Mauser,” Davis said.

To an attentive ear, quite a different sound from our boys' Springfield 03s. A sniper, he was suggesting. I kept my mouth shut.

“No matter,” Davis said. “We'll all be in Europe soon enough, I wager.”

“I wouldn't wager against that,” I said, and we both seemed to realize that we were losing our focus. If we didn't pick up the pace, we might as well go back to our coffee. So we fell silent and pressed on faster, around the band shell and through the trees and across the pavement before City Hall, an old Spanish building with its
portales
occupied now by cookstoves of the Second Infantry regiment.

“He's got guts, plugging away at our boys where they camp,” Davis said.

Though most of the regiment at this hour was out patrolling at El Tejar, our western perimeter, what Davis said made me doubt for a moment that this was the woman sniper, a doubt that recurred when we came around the corner of the
palacio
. I saw a dozen or so of our boys on the case, a few in the street pointing toward the bell tower of
La Parroquía,
a few breaking off in both directions to circle the church and maybe catch the shooter coming out, a few others surrounding the victim. This was some local
hombre
gunning for an American soldier.

But when Davis and I arrived at the victim, I figured I better rethink things. It was the utility commissioner who'd decided to work with the Americans. He was sitting there on the pavement in his serge suit and with his Panama hat upturned a few feet away, and he and one of our boys were both pressing a wad of bloody cloth to the center of his face, the commissioner gasping his breaths through his mouth.

“What happened?” Davis said.

A sergeant standing next to us said, “Somebody shot the guy's nose off. Clean as a whistle.”

Davis humphed. “You boys were hunting a man with a Mauser and a message.” With the alliteration, he turned his face and looked me straight in the eyes. He was already shaping his lead and he had just staked his claim to the phrase.

I, however, was in the midst of realizing that I'd once again under­estimated our local
soldadera
. This clearly bore her signature. If Davis filed a piece on the guy with the Mauser and the message, I could beat him quite handily with my girl and a gun.

But I suddenly found myself concerned for her. I moved off quick to trail one of our little search parties around the church. By the time the two parties of infantrymen met up on the opposite side, on
Calle de Vicario,
almost in the exact same spot where the plugged priest lay yesterday, I was thinking these boys were wrong about where the shooter was. The angle from the bell tower was too difficult to shoot off a man's nose. And shooting off his nose was exactly what she'd intended to do. I didn't know where she was, but it wasn't the
campanario
.

Our boys were huddled to confer. They'd drawn a little crowd of locals across the street. At a quick glance, I saw them as basically the same neighborhood women who gathered around the priest yesterday. My glance was quick because I was intending to draw near the soldiers and listen in, get a quote or two just in case I did a little story, make an acquaintance or two I might glean a bit of information from someday. But I was suddenly having another one of those little afterimage experiences over a certain señorita: I thought I'd just seen her.

I looked back to the women. She was not there. I stepped into the center of the cobbled street. I could clearly see both ways, up and back down
Calle de Vicario,
and she was not walking off in either direction. I moved to the women. Some of the faces turned to me. Familiar from yesterday. Blank. They stayed shoulder to shoulder, though I was acting as if I intended to move past them. I kept coming, scanning the faces behind the ones in front and the faces behind those. She was not there. They knew I was coming through and finally, as if reluctantly, they parted.

To the left behind them was a door into a milliner's; to the right, another opening, a passageway leading between shops, no doubt to a back courtyard and beyond. I could have plunged into either one and gone after her. But the vision I had of Luisa could have been my imagination. And if she was real, she was fleeing me again. And if she was the shooter, she might just add a
gringo
journalist to her list of rapacious priest and collaborating local official. I shuddered to think what body part of mine she'd shoot off.