The Hot Country (6 page)

12

I walked away, telling myself to get my story priorities straight. The sardonic sniper was marginal as war news, even if I could figure out a way to identify her and even if it turned out to be Luisa Morales, which I remained unconvinced of. The mystery German had the whiff of something important. But at least the directness of the sniper's approach to collaborators led me now to a simple, similarly straightforward plan.

So I found myself on the doorstep of the German Consulate on
Avenida Cinco de Mayo
. The door quickly opened to my knock and revealed a blond young man in a field-gray Uhlan uniform with captain pips on his tunic shoulder boards. A cavalryman on consular attaché duty. He had steely blue eyes and a Kaiser Wilhelm mustache so pale it felt as if I were looking at the ghostly specter of a dark mustache that had died and refused to move on along to its eternal fate.

Living the early life I did with my mother, traveling with her always as she toured not only the United States but South America and Europe and beyond, I eventually learned good Spanish, passable French, and workable parts of other Romance languages, but I also picked up strange rudimentary bits—more sounds than words—from the Germanic and Slovak linguistic cousins of those others. My German was more double-talk than anything, more an acting talent, absorbed from all those years at the backs of theaters or in the wings and from hanging around dressing rooms and eating and drinking and sleeping in boardinghouses with actors and actresses and with the voices and dialects they put on. So I greeted this young man in Spanish, which I figured he would know, given his posting.

“
Bitte reinkommen,
” he said, stepping aside and motioning for me to come in even before I said what it was I wanted. I figured he hadn't had the time or the imperial inclination to learn the local language. My little bit of German would make me sound like a madman. I didn't know what our common ground might be, but I wasn't intending to pretend to be anyone other than who I was, so I said in English, slowly pronouncing each word, “I am a newspaperman.”

“
Ach, so,
” he said, seeming to understand.

“I write for the
Chicago Post-Express,
” I said.

He nodded.

I offered my hand. “I am Christopher Marlowe Cobb,” I said, the Germans I'd known in America loving the long elaborateness of names.

He took my hand and shook it, looking me steadily in the eyes.

Though he did not speak his own name in return, I continued to sense he knew what I was saying. Just in case, to establish German-friendly credentials, I said, “I also write for the
Post-Express
syndicate, which includes the Chicago
Abendpost
. They translate my . . .”

The young man cut me off by speaking pretty damn good English. “I have some family in Milwaukee Avenue, one uncle and three
Vetter
. . . Sorry. Cousins. I have three cousins also. They read the
Illinois Staats-Zeitung
. A more powerful newspaper.”

I was not sure what unsettled me most: his nearly perfect English, his relatives in Chicago, or his tightly clenching his right fist as he stressed the word “powerful.”

Perhaps the hand was the most unsettling, since as soon as it finished clenching, it shot out to me, demanding mine, which I offered and which he shook firmly with the announcement, “Captain Hans-Peter Krüger.” He let go of my hand, clicked his heels, and bowed ever so slightly at the waist.

“
Kapitän
Krüger.” I bowed as well.

“
Bitte,
” he said, motioning to a pair of armchairs facing a dark wood desk to my left. And then instantly, as if correcting himself: “Please.”

I headed for a chair as he circled the desk. “Your uncle's also probably a Cubs fan,” I said, the Cubs being the more powerful Chicago team. I didn't expect him to hear the little bit of a needle I was giving him, or even understand the reference. Indeed,
Herr Kapitän
Krüger
simply ignored the comment. Meanwhile, I was taking in as much of the place as I could without seeming to.

This front room was large and sparsely furnished, with everything made of the same carved mahogany. Out the far door was a sun-filled courtyard, which was, at the moment, empty.

I sat, though I angled myself slightly to keep the courtyard in the periphery of my vision. Krüger was already stiffly upright in his chair.

Behind him hung a large, framed, color lithograph of the Kaiser, beribboned, bemedaled, and with a massive eagle sitting on his helmet.

“Have you spent time in Chicago?” I asked.

“Spent?” I could see his brain sorting through his American idioms. “Ah. Yes. I am in Chicago for one year when I am a boy.”

“Good.”

“It was not the Fatherland,” he said. I got the feeling he had just clenched that right fist under the desk.

“Not yours,” I said.

“Not the Fatherland for my uncle and my aunt.”

“I understand,” I said, filling a brief pause.

“Not for my three cousins,” he said, not wanting to let any of his family escape his disapproval.

“They were your
drei Vetter,
” I said.

I was aware that sometimes my reflex, low-grade sarcasm undercut my full effectiveness as a newspaperman. I should have wanted to smooth this guy's Germanic feathers, not ruffle them. This remark could go either way. But almost at once he smiled. “Just so,” he said. “Just so.”

Captain Krüger was without irony.

We looked at each other a moment. I was still improvising here, as I often did when I was seeking a thing in someone's head and I wasn't quite sure even what category of thing it might be.

“How may I help you, Herr Cobb?” he asked.

“Your country is a good friend to Mexico. For my readers—­Germans in America and all my other American readers as well—I would very much like to get the German point of view about my country's invasion of Mexico.”

It is important to stress at this point that I am an American, through and through. I am a patriot. If I think Woodrow Wilson and William Jennings Bryan are a couple of ninnyhammers, they are our democratically elected and legally appointed ninnyhammers, respectively, and my right to think and say these things about them is part and parcel of my being a patriotic American. But I am also a reporter. I would not normally have been speaking loosely about the ninnyhammerness of my country's leaders to a foreigner, especially a German, but there was a journalistic goal here that could eventually better inform my fellow patriots, which is also part of being an American, having the right to be well and openly and vigorously informed.

So I leaned hard on the word “invasion” in spite of Woody's sudden disavowal of further hostile intentions, which, actually, was a worse sin in the opinion of a lot of patriotic Americans, which was, indeed, the reason he had every American military man—not to mention all us news boys—fidgeting and fretting and fuming in Vera Cruz. Wilson's public pose was that this was a simple operation to stop the German ship from unloading its munitions. But I figured every German official in Mexico thought otherwise. Krüger eyed me carefully for a moment. Finally he said, “You should be speaking to the embassy in Mexico City.”

“No American can go farther than El Tejar without being arrested,” I said.

“Or shot.” Krüger surprised me with this addendum, delivered quickly and with a little too much intensity, accurate though it was. A very faint smile brisked across his lips and vanished. He may have had no irony, but he thought he had a sense of humor.

“You understand the problem,” I said.

“I am not authorized to speak,” he said.

“Forgive me,
Kapitän,
for not knowing your chain of command. Is there no one here to consult?”

I knew, in fact, that there was a civilian consular officer at the end of that chain.

Krüger looked me in the eyes for another long moment. I returned the gaze steadily. If I flinched, if I looked away, I suspected he would say no. He might have anyway. Our gaze went on for another beat and another.

Then he rose from his chair.

“Wait, please. I will inquire,” he said.

He did a crisp left-face and moved across the room and through the open door into the courtyard, turning at once to the left and vanishing.

I waited a few moments and then rose from my chair, slowly, casually, as if I was being observed. I might have been. I looked at Wilhelm for a few moments. And I thought of Wilhelm and Wilson. Wilhelm and Wilson and Asquith and Poincaré. And Czar Nicholas. And Sultan Mehmed and Count Stürgkh. And, since I was standing where I was standing, I wouldn't let myself forget Willie's right-hand boy Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. Leaders of the world. What a bunch. A good war correspondent's ardent employers. And I thought they would soon figure out how to find us more work. Quite soon.

I'd stared at the lithograph long enough. I drifted, quite nonchalantly, to the doorway leading to the courtyard. The blue and white pavement tiles were faded from decades of sun. The rosebushes were severely pruned and the stone fountain in the center was dry. There were voices from one of the doorways along the upper-floor gallery. To my left. A distant churn of guttural German sounds. Krüger and his boss. I didn't expect anything from them. And then a door was opening on the right-hand upper gallery. I took a small step back, without losing my line of sight.

It was the tall man from the ship in the night. I could see his face for a brief moment, which moved me instantly farther backward, totally out of sight. I really didn't expect anyone to reveal himself here. Or speak to me. I just needed to get near all this, put details in my head that might be useful. I certainly didn't want to be seen by the tall man. If eventually I had to follow him, I did not want to be familiar to his eye. But I now had a clear image of his face, from the flash of it before me, and that much was valuable. Deep-set eyes. I did not catch their color, from this distance, but they certainly were not dark. Probably good, standard, Aryan aristocratic blue. And yes: His left cheek had the livid curve of an old fencing scar, his
Schmiss,
his smite, his medal of academic honor.

I sat down once more in my chair before the desk, and soon Captain Krüger returned. He did not sit. He stood behind the desk, his arms stiff at his sides. “I am sorry, Herr Cobb. We have nothing to say.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,
Kapitän
Krüger,” I said.

I rose. I added, “It was only from respect for your country's opinions that I have sought you out.”

“We are aware of that,” Krüger said. “And we offer to you our thanks.”

He bowed at the waist. I bowed at the waist. I repressed the impulse to ask the reporter's classically abrupt, unexpectedly knowledgeable question, in this case something like: Oh, and one other small thing,
Kapitän,
what is the mission of the important German official who snuck in here in the middle of the night from the
Ypiranga
? But I could think of nothing Krüger might say in flustered response worth my revealing that I knew something was going on.

13

Almost as soon as I was on the street again, heading back toward my rooms and a siesta, which was a local custom I'd quickly taken to, I knew the story I'd file later today. West of the city, out in the Fourth District, a thick column of velvety black smoke was billowing up. I could feel the smoke in my nose, even from this distance, and in it, playing a feature duet downstage of the backup band of Vera Cruz street-carrion and sewage, were two distinct smells: crude oil and burning flesh. I'd known this moment was coming since after the first couple of days, so I'd already done the story's back-matter reporting in preparation. Most of the locals continued to refuse to step up and claim the dead bodies of their countrymen. So the time had come for the Marines to burn the corpses. A nasty little story with popular appeal that would glide through the censors pretty much untouched, given a developing theme of our boys doing the necessary dirty work of civilization for a semi-savage people. A theme that had its own smell, to tell the truth, but the Army had its message and we had our papers to sell.

It's funny how fast you can stop noticing a smell. Even a strong one. This is fortunate for a war correspondent. If you're in the right places most of the time, it's a foul-smelling job. There is always something dying or burning or exploding, and there are always newspaper-selling twists to put on stories. So by the time I got to my rooms and closed the door and found my clean laundry on my bed, my nose had calmed down, and I stepped away from my job and this town and the war, and the thought of Luisa came back to me, pretty much instantly, prompted by the American newspaper assumptions about Mexicans—how she'd hate that—but mostly prompted by my pants and shirts lying neatly folded there on my bed. It was like when I first saw her, sassing me in this room, and then a little later. I stepped to the doorway to the courtyard, half expecting to see her lounging once more under the banana tree, having reconsidered her new life, knowing I'd overlook the pistol to my head and welcome her back, even if she wouldn't jump into bed with me.

She wasn't there, of course. But the other two girls were. They were curled on pallets in the shade of the banana tree and they were fast asleep. Slim, sweet-faced girls, their arms bare in their work blouses, their knees tucked invisibly up under their skirts so only their bare feet showed. One of the girls arched her feet, flaring her toes from whatever it was that she was dreaming. I stepped quietly into the courtyard and took a few steps toward them, not wanting to disturb them, just being drawn in a tender way to their vulnerable obliviousness.

And now I was in a boardinghouse. Where? Providence maybe. Or Boston. It was noon and the sunlight was so bright outside that it illuminated the bed through the lowered, foxed window shade. Mother had a matinee in a couple of hours and she was taking her traditional fifteen-minute “goodly nap,” and perhaps on this afternoon she was playing Kate in
Shrew,
where the “goodly nap” comes from. Whatever the play, whatever town this was, I watched her lying there on top of the covers, clutching the pillow to her bosom, as she always did, and I was not yet a teen, not yet able even to grow chin-whiskers, but I stood beside her bed on this day for every one of her fifteen minutes of sleep and I watched her dark-stockinged right foot tap briefly in her dream, tap upon the air, though in her dream upon some floor, I thought, and I watched her foot stop and she pressed the pillow tighter against her and her eyes moved beneath her closed lids. I watched her eyes move, as she saw someone or something that I could not. And I felt very close to my mother in that moment, and I felt very distant from her. I felt I could never really know her. Ever.

The washer girl who flared her toes suddenly opened her eyes. And they widened as she found me looking directly at her. She sat up abruptly, too quickly for having just awakened: Her eyes closed again and she tilted a little to the left, but then she straightened and opened her eyes once more and rubbed them briefly with the knuckles of her forefingers, and she looked at me steadily, clearly.

“I'm sorry, miss,” I said, making my Spanish soft and precise. And I was aware now that I instinctively called these girls “señorita” and not “
muchacha,
” which was the overtly patronizing mode of address that you were expected to use with a washer girl, and I thought how my doing this was something Luisa might have found to my credit.

“It's nothing,” this girl before me said. Her eyes stayed fixed on mine and were softly inquiring in a way that told me something I was reluctant to hear, given my recent track record. Reluctant but also eager, I realized, my eagerness likely to quickly prevail.

“You need your sleep,” I said.

“I have had enough,” she said. “Are your clothes okay?”

“I haven't examined them yet.”

“I am the one doing your clothes now,” she said.

“I am glad it's you,” I said. I almost asked her if she owned a pistol—in the spirit of flirting banter—I felt with some confidence now that we were flirting—but I was not sure she knew the whole story of Luisa's departure, and if she didn't, this would be the wrong approach altogether.

“I am glad you are glad,” she said and her eyes had not moved from me for even a second, and now she smiled.

“I am glad that you are glad that I am glad,” I said. It was not very original, but it survived the translation into Spanish quite well, it seemed to me.

“I am not like her,” she said.

And she wasn't.

I offered my hand and she took it and she rose and we went to my bed.

I am aware that I am not a subtle man in these matters. I am far more subtle with words, though I am a man of almost no words in these matters. Something urgent and quickly commenced and not a little brutal-seeming comes over me with a woman who is willing to offer her body, and most of these bodies seem actually to appreciate the urgency and the simplicity and the ersatz violence. Not that I fail to be knocked out with a different sort of feeling by watching, from a few steps away, their eyes moving in sleep or their toes flaring. But to then get much closer to them brings on another, quite different, contradictory mood. And isn't the stuff of my career a darker variety of this human contradiction? The men across the field in battle were often men we could, in other circumstances, clap upon the shoulder and have a tankard of ale with and sing a drunken song with and in doing so become long-sought pals. But in this circumstance, across the field, all of us on both sides being patriots, we kill them. And they would kill us. Toward the very same people we can, at turns, feel tender and we can feel hurtful. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.

These are things I know about myself and sometimes think about and they were things I thought about even in the midst of what I was doing with this washer girl. When we were done, she and I, and when my thoughts ceased wandering, I did kiss her sweetly on the lips and I said I hoped she was all right, and she kissed me back and said she was fine. Then she rose and smoothed down her skirt and she went away.

I too rose, and I put my pants on, but I lay back down on the bed, and I clasped my hands behind my head, and I found myself worrying about my mother. She was singing for rowdies in New Orleans. I had not let myself think past that fact, and now I was wondering which rowdies they might be. She might have been singing in a nightspot in any of several parts of town where the crowd could get rough, in any number of saloons in the French Quarter, for example, but I was suddenly worried that she was singing in Storyville, that she had somehow been drawn into Storyville and her employers were playing on her stage fame, which lingered around her, of course, playing on that and her vanity, and on her liberal attitudes about women and their bodies. For going on two decades, prostitution had been legal from Basin Street to Robertson, from Iberville to St. Louis Street, twenty square blocks just north of the French Quarter, and this place called Storyville, or by the locals “The District,” was packed not just with quick-time cribs but with fancy mansion bordellos and saloons and dance halls and cabarets, all of which featured the very best music, not only in New Orleans but pretty much in the world. They had ragtime, and even newer music than that, the new jazz, and there were singers, too, singing for the men packed in and drinking hard and getting rowdy, a few of them maybe there for the music but most of them just working up to sex. And not just in the bordellos but in the other places too; no matter if their front-of-the-house business was dancing or drinking or singing, they all had a covey of girls, upstairs or in the back rooms or in your lap ready to take you around the corner to their cribs.

And Mother had said in her telegram that she was watching over those who could use watching over, and my remembering that remark made me sit up quick here in my bed in Vera Cruz, where I'd just made it rough and good with a Mexican washer girl, and I knew what my mother was talking about. She was talking about the girls upstairs in some mansion in Storyville, and of course she had a soft spot for them. She was an actress, after all. My mother was the finest actress who ever trod the boards, but every church pastor in the country who wanted to mealymouth around the word “whore” declared that the dreaded white slavers were turning girls into “actresses.” The country loved their actresses and in some intense ways admired their actresses, but at the same time most of the country had it in the back of their minds that these women were all, more or less, whores. And wasn't that contradiction, in its own way, like the contradiction shared by both sex and war?

And I was lying in my bed in Vera Cruz, but I was also out in the hallway where Mother had put me. I was a kid and she'd kissed me on the forehead and promised that it wouldn't be too long and this was in a rooming house somewhere near a good theater in a big city, and all through rehearsals she'd had the leading man wrapped around her finger and finally it was their opening night. They were thumping and shouting in there, and I worried now, in Vera Cruz, for her weakness and for how she was afraid of getting old and how she was fighting that. She walked off the stage and maybe she walked into a high-class whorehouse where she sang and she took care of the girls and she felt young. Trust her in this, she'd said in her telegram.

But I didn't. I could only think:
Sorry, mother of mine. You need to be helped, whether you are able to realize it or not.
But I was out doing my job, and so I had no choice but to trust her to get through whatever this was.

I did, however, rise from the bed in Vera Cruz and go to the rickety desk in the corner. I took Mother's cable from the drawer. Western Union via New Orleans Central. The main office on St. Charles and Gravier. I could write her a cable care of St. Charles and Gravier, and if I couldn't tell Western Union how to go find her, maybe she would at least think to come see if I'd sent a reply and she would find it.

My eyes fell now to the text of her cable, and her comment about playing a “dark role” leaped up at me. This was another of her weaknesses, though it went with her profession: She saw everything she did, even off the stage, as playing a role. Everything was always bigger than life, which made everything not quite real, made everything feel familiar in a professional way, in a way you'd spent your life masterfully controlling. You were just acting, grandly, for the back row of the balcony. Always. And that made most things feel safe. Which was fine if you were just unreasonably scared of the dark. But if there was a real danger, if someone bad had slipped into the darkness of your room and was just out of sight, this weakness of my mother's could be very dangerous indeed.

But I needed to make things a little safer for myself now. I always did that by writing words. So I rolled a cable blank into my Corona Portable Number 3, which sat in the center of the desk. I could dash off quick stories by hand in the
portales,
but my real writing was done with my friend, my pal, my typewriter. He went to the Balkans with me. Before that he went to Nicaragua with me, when he was brand-new, new to me and new to the world. The marvel of the age, the six-pound Corona 3. With his carriage folding forward over the keyboard, he fit into a case smaller than a bread box. But he took my words and made them real.

I put my fingertips upon his keys and I would write my mother a cable.

I didn't know what to say.

I knew many things that it would be useless to say. Advice and warnings and cajolings. Many things that she would sniff at or turn from or—if I were in her presence and said them—that would cause her to take a bit of my cheek between her thumb and forefinger and pinch it hard, very hard, even though I was thirty years old. “My Kit,” she would say, “my silly sweet Kit Cobb, mind your own bloody business.”

My fingertips sat on the keys for a long while until I thought to interpret for her a passage from my namesake. From his
Jew of Malta
. I wrote:

Dearest Mother. Though he freely admits to the friar that he hath committed fornication, Barabas, who if he were not a usurer would be a rowdy man, quite easily can say “But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.” Take care you understand your unconventional audience. Love from your Kit