The Hot Country (9 page)

18

The story I did cover the next day was for a whole pack of us to cover. A selective pack, however. The big dogs of the war correspondents. Davis and me and London. Arthur Ruhl from
Collier's
and Frederick Palmer from
Everybody's
. Lou Simonds from the
Atlantic
. A couple of the anonymous smaller dogs from the big-circulation outlets, the Associated Press, the United Press. We all ended up at the dinner table of General Frederick “Scrapping Fred” or “Fearless Freddie”—take your choice—Funston, lately installed as the man in charge of U.S.-occupied Mexico and lately installed in the house of General Maass near the Mexican barracks on the south end of town, with the Maass family stuff still around, from the piano to the matching pair of rocking chairs, from the couch-arm doilies to the white coral centerpiece on the dining table, from the bead curtains dividing the room to the dishes laid out for dinner to the parrot in the back room calling out drill orders in a man's voice that had to be an imitation of Maass himself.

Funston's first declaration when we all sat down was “I'm packing up General Maass's things at the first opportunity and sending them along to him.” Like Funston needed to make it clear that our grabbing a Mexican city didn't mean we'd grab some Mexican general's dinner china as well. Funston paused for a moment to allow this declaration to register on us with all its ethical gravity, and in the silence, the parrot cried in Spanish, “About face. Forward march.”

We didn't laugh. Funston was a little man, as small and thin as a teenage girl, and he was fidgety, with a little man's exaggerated derring-do, and famous for bragging, after he made his mark as a general in the Philippines, that he personally strung up three dozen Filipinos without a trial and he suggested we do the same with all the Americans who had petitioned Congress to sue for peace in the Far East.

He laughed, however, at the voice from the other room. And he said, “As for the general's parrot, he'll be dead before tomorrow's sunrise.” And he laughed again. An I-really-mean-it sort of laugh.

Richard Harding Davis laughed too, that companionable manly-man's laugh of his. Most of the rest of us mustered an echo of it, from politeness, though Jack London just dropped his head and smirked at his dinner plate.

And we ate a meal from home—ham and cream gravy and boiled potatoes and macaroni and snap beans and pickles—and we were lectured by the general about our responsibilities to America and its righteous efforts here in Mexico. Knowing his reputation and hearing him lecture, I couldn't help but think that it was a good thing a certain sniper I knew wasn't aware of this man. Good for him, and good for her, too.

Later we sat on chairs in the courtyard and smoked cigarettes and drank coffee until we had the option of drinking a pretty swell Scotch, an option we all exercised, and Funston passed around editions of the big Mexico City newspapers from a few days ago. And in a collegial but grave tone he declared, “Read what your Mexican counterparts are saying, gentlemen.”

Those of us who knew Spanish translated in low voices for those around us who didn't, creating an intense, low babble of vituperation in the room, which was no doubt part of Funston's rhetorical plan. The headline in
El Imparcial
was “The Soil of Our Homeland Is Defiled By Foreign Invasion!” with a sub-head of “We May Die, But Let Us Kill!”
El Independiente
assured its readers “While Mexicans Were Massacring
Gringo
Pigs, Church Bells Rang Out Their Glory!”
La Patria
took a cleaner, more Hearstian approach in its headline: “Vengeance! Vengeance! Vengeance!” And there were half a dozen more of this ilk.

After we finished with the newspapers, spending less time with each one, Funston said: “You see, boys, what you've got to counteract? And I have to admit, from all our own reports, these papers accurately reflect the attitude of the Mexican people as a whole. An attitude that's typical, in my experience, of uncivilized people. Our fellow Americans need to know what the reality is down here.”

And the extra dose of reality that all us boys were hearing in these words was that our stories were now going to follow the Army's agenda, Funston's agenda, or they wouldn't be allowed out of this town. We passed the newspapers back to Funston and he accepted them in silence while the parrot screamed wordlessly in the background.

When he had all the papers again, Funston said, “Not from my mouth, boys, but you can find the President on the recent record saying how the Mexicans would certainly welcome us with open arms if we ever intervened. How they'd all understand that we were actually saving them from their latest tyrant. How in no time at all they'd create their own little old democracy down here and be grateful to us for giving them the chance.”

The parrot began to sing “La Cucaracha,” the stretch of lyric he'd learned coming from the pre-revolutionary version, which was still, in fact, about a cockroach.
La cucaracha, la cucaracha,
ya no puede caminar
. The cockroach can't walk anymore.

Funston seemed to ignore this. “Not that these folks don't deserve a democracy,” he said. “Everyone does. But they don't understand what we're offering. We learned in the Philippines that you can't create a democracy for savages unless you have complete control over them.”

The bird started over and got farther into the lyric:
porque no tiene, porque le falta,
las dos patitas de atrás.
Because he's lacking his two back legs.

Funston may have been ready to spell it all out: that we were expected to rally the United States to a major military action, total invasion. Maybe not. This may have been his intended stopping point anyway. The implication was inescapably clear as it was. But after his declaration about how to bring democracy to savages, he paused for a moment, and then he said, “Pardon me, gentlemen.” He rose and vanished into the other room and very briefly the parrot fell silent. Then the parrot cried, “About face.” Then there was only the faintest sound of a fluttering of feathers. And then silence.

We did not hear the bird again for all the rest of the time we lingered, milling about the courtyard with more Scotch and more cigarettes and a more relaxed General Funston. He made a point of working his way around the room to each of us.

When he got to me, he said, “Glad you've come down here, Cobb.”

We were standing near a dry fountain in the center of the courtyard and the other reporters were out of earshot, talking and laughing among themselves, more than halfway vanished into a good-Scotch ground fog. I could have asked questions now, could have found out if Funston knew who the new German in town might be. But I felt certain this would be news to him. He just didn't seem useful to me at the moment. And till I had this story, whatever it was, I wanted to keep it to myself as much as possible.

“I'm not sure I'm glad,” I said.

He cocked his head slightly at me. Why did it remind me of a parrot cocking its head? Hearing words and being interested in them but not understanding.

“Like you,” I said, “I came for a war.”

He cuffed me on the shoulder. “There you go,” he said.

We each had a Scotch in our hand. We each took a sip.

“You know, I adore your mother,” he said.

This happens to me quite often. I've generally gotten used to it. I learned long ago how to prevent even the first little sharp-toothed nibble of a troubling thought from getting at me, learned to assume that such declarations as this by a man are simply from an ardent fan on the other side of the proscenium. “Fearless Freddie” Funston, however, his face looking up into mine almost dreamily, his beard and mustache trimmed tightly close in what was neither a man's shaved face nor a man's proper beard, this man Funston troubled me. “Scrapping Fred” was an actor in his own way, and on a very big stage, and with an impressive costume. My mother could have fallen for him because of all of that.

“I saw her at the Morosco in San Francisco the year before the earthquake,” he said.

I was gone from her daily life by then. I needed to stop this line of thought or it would drive me nuts.

“What was the play?” Funston was thinking aloud.

“Were you stationed there?” I asked him, trying to divert the conversation.

“
‘
The Eternal Feminine,
'
” he said.

“The Presidio?” I asked.

“That was it,” he said.
“
‘
The Eternal Feminine
.' Your mother was splendid.”

“You served there?”

“The Presidio,” he said. “That's right. I was commander.”

“This is good Scotch,” I said, starting to lift my glass, intending to take the rest of whatever was in there as a quick bolt and excuse myself from him to get some more.

“My wife and I loved the theater in Frisco,” he said.

I pulled my glass down for the moment.

“But your mother was the highlight. For both of us.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“So sad, the next year,” he said. “The Morosco and all the rest were rubble.”

Mother was long gone from Frisco by then. She was back in New York.

“I took over in the aftermath, you know,” Funston said. “Ran the show.”

I'd read about the downright admiration San Franciscans developed for Funston. With the water mains broken, he created a successful firebreak by dynamiting the homes of the city's elite. He fought the rats and disease. And he had looters shot dead on the spot.

“My task here is not dissimilar,” he said. “The streets are open sewers. Insects and vermin live with these people unchecked. For every thousand Veracruzians, fifty die each month and more than half of those are infants. It breaks my heart. They're dying of dysentery, malaria, TB, meningitis, smallpox. I'm going to fix that. America is going to fix that.”

And I knew we would. I took the bolt of Scotch. I let this complicated little man blur before me.

19

It was darkly shadowed at the doorway to my rooms and I'd had too much Scotch and too many cigarettes and too much war-correspondent gab and too much military point of view but especially too much Scotch and too much darkness and so Diego startled the bejesus out of me when he slipped from the shadows and slid something smoothly leathery into my hand and said, “He never felt a thing.” He tried to vanish again but I recovered quick and though my reflexes may have been a little dulled by the Scotch I still caught him by his collar and hauled him back to me.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Now you got me, you can give me that silver dollar. Scarface's wallet with his train ticket is worth a dollar.”

“His wallet?”

“In your right hand.”

My right hand was actually still holding Diego's collar. He realized that.

“Wait,” he said. “Your left hand? Maybe your pocket? You're quick with your hands, Kit. You said I can call you ‘Kit,' right? I remember my dad being quick with his hands.”

His
papi.

“How is it I've turned you into a little smart-ass, Diego Cordero Medina Espinoza?”

“You think it took America invading to make me a smart-ass? I am my own smart-ass, Kit.”

“Don't call me that,” I said.

“Mr. Cobb.”

“Don't call me that.”

“
Papi.
”

I still had him by the collar and I opened my door and pulled him inside and shoved him—though gently—in the direction of the desk chair.

“Don't call me that,” I said.

I turned on the overhead electric light.

“Okay, boss,” he said in English.

Now he was sitting in the chair like an obedient kid in the front row at school.

It was in my left hand, actually. “You nicked this from the man with the scar?” I used the English verb from the street in the midst of the Spanish question.

“
‘Nicked'?” he asked.

“A little American language lesson,” I said. “Pickpockets,” I said slowly, clearly, in English, “nick leather.” And I held up the wallet with the last word.

“Diego Cordero Medina Espinoza nick leather on Scarface,” Diego said in English.

“I think he's a dangerous man,” I said, returning to Spanish. “I don't like you trying this.”

“I am a sly one,” Diego said.

“I don't want you dead.”

Diego reared back a little. Like this was a surprising thought.

“I'd have to find a new boy.” I added this in the offhand, tough-guy way we'd put up between us. But then, as gently as I'd shoved him to the chair, I said, “I don't want you to steal for me, either.”

Diego shrugged. “Wallets are a good way to understand.”

As far as he knew, I ignored this. I'd said the right thing to him. But damnation, I was glad to have this wallet. I sat on the side of the bed and looked at it.

It folded in thirds and was made of good oak-brown leather. Full grain from something young. He'd had it a long while, the patina of years upon it, including a rubbed wedge of darkness from the oil of his skin every time he grasped the wallet in the same place and pulled it from his pocket.

I looked at the wallet and then at Diego. Scarface was tall.

Diego looked at me looking at him. The boy was shrewd. He knew what I was thinking. “He put it here,” he said, motioning with his hand to where the lower outer pocket of a suit coat would be. “For just a moment. When he changed some money at the post office window. I could not help but steal it.”

“He was alone?”

“Yes.”

“He didn't notice you?”

“No.”

I opened the wallet.

“I nick very good,” he added in English.

I reminded myself to remember where things were, to return them to their exact positions after I handled them. I was already thinking that some anonymous, honest Mexican needed to return this to the doorstep of the consulate pretty quickly, without it appearing to have been thoroughly searched.

The wallet was clearly on Scarface's person a great deal. But he used it simply for basic things. In one compartment was the ticket. A Pullman car reservation for day after tomorrow. For Friedrich Mensinger. The National Railroad via the capital to a city named La Mancha,
estado
Coahuila. Outside of Cervantes and Spain, the city name wasn't familiar to me.

“La Mancha?” I said, mostly to myself, but the kid was quick.

“What is the state?” Diego said.

“Coahuila.”

“That's up north,” Diego said.

“I wonder what he wants up there.”

Diego shrugged. “I couldn't hear much of the talk with the ticket clerk. Do I get my dollar?”

“You'll get it.”

“For this?”

“I'm still trying to see what we have.”

“The trains aren't regular going up north these days,” he said. “I think Scarface wanted to go sooner than three days.”

Three days: Diego had already looked at the ticket. Of course he had.

I slipped the ticket back into the compartment. I put my fingertips inside the middle compartment and felt an envelope. I pulled it slowly from the wallet, noting its orientation, though Diego had already no doubt disarranged everything.

The address side up. Stamp lower right. It was out now, and I rotated it to look at the address, which was written in a tight, small, neat hand:

Herr Friedrich von Mensinger

Deutsches Konsulat

Vera Cruz, Mexico

He had the “von” of nobility in his name. But Mensinger didn't use the “von” for his train ticket. The postmark was from Berlin. The writer knew he was coming to Mexico well before Mensinger boarded the
Ypiranga.
I turned the letter over. It was neatly knifed open at the top edge; the flap was still glued down. And Mensinger had used the back of the envelope to make what looked like random notes to himself, each item marked with an initial dash.

kein Einmarsch. Nicht nach T

ENP ~ Dr.

C u. W keine Eier

Papiere

entweder Hammer oder Amboß

I could figure a little of this out.
Kein Einmarsch.
I wasn't entirely sure, but it had something to do with
not
something, and the cognate would suggest marching.
Nicht nach T.
Not a T. On the next line I didn't know what
ENP
represented. An acronym no doubt. The tilde was from mathematics. Meaning the acronym was similar to the next thing.
Doctor
. Between the two initials at the beginning of the third line, the
u.
was an abbreviation for
und
.
And
.
Keine
is “
none.
” But I didn't know
Eier.
Papiere
is “
paper
.” The last phrase, I wasn't sure of either. I thought the construction was “
either…or
” and one thing was obviously a hammer. All five notes, separately and together, seemed meaningless. Certainly notes to himself. He knew what the blanks were, what the context was.

I pulled the letter out of the envelope and unfolded it.

It began:
Mein Schatzi.
I knew this phrase. From a German girl in Chicago.
My Treasure
. It went on for two pages in German and I knew I would be at a loss. I needed some help with this, and I thought of Gerhard. I slipped the letter back in the envelope and returned the envelope to the center compartment. I found myself stuck on the writer, a woman—the hand was clear to me now as a woman—a woman who would call Scarface—Friedrich von Mensinger—her “treasure.” He was wealthy, of course. Maybe it wasn't tender at all. Maybe it was “Dear Moneybags.”

Which made me move on to the third compartment, where his money would be. It was empty.

I lifted my eyes to Diego.

His own eyes were fixed on my hand, which still held open the empty money compartment. He looked up at me.

“Give me the money,” I said.

He said nothing.

“All of it. We have to get this back to Scarface.”

Diego still wasn't talking.

“You've earned your silver dollar.”

“Okay,” he said, almost inaudibly.

I said, “I want to put him as little on alert as possible. We need to get this back to him, like someone found it.”

“Found it? He won't think he lost it. He is a careful man.”

“Found it discarded after it was stolen.”

“You want him to believe that?”

“Yes.”

“Then the money will be gone.”

Diego was right, of course.

“I'll split it with you,” Diego said.

“Are you sure he didn't see you when you nicked it?”

“I'm sure,” he said. “He never looks straight at any of us.”

I believed this. Which made it even more striking that Mensinger dropped his nominal sign of nobility for his train ticket. Wherever he was going, whatever he was up to, he was taking care not to emphasize that.

I pulled Diego's silver Liberty Head dollar from my pocket and held it up in front of his face between my thumb and forefinger. I was unaware of how similar this gesture was to something else until he opened his mouth and stuck out his flattened tongue and he crossed himself. Like he was about to take Catholic Communion.

He had that narrow little look of Diego sass in his eyes, which had come to be familiar to me.

I thought of Luisa and her hatred of the priests.

I did not put the dollar on his tongue, as he no doubt expected me to do.

I lowered the coin. “I bet this attitude makes your mother sad,” I said.

He withdrew his tongue and snapped his mouth shut. “I am a good Catholic son,” he said.

“As far as she knows.”

“I love my mother.”

I reached out and took his right wrist and I lifted his arm and I put the coin in his palm. It disappeared into a tight fist. I let him go.

“How much money did Scarface have in his wallet?” I asked.

“Not nearly as much as he's got with him,” Diego said.

“You didn't keep the ticket to sell.”

“I thought you'd want to see that,” he said, and paused so that, for at least a few moments, I'd think he sacrificed something for me. But then he said, “Besides. You get arrested for using a ticket with someone else's name. No market for it.”

“So you do still know how to confess.”

“Never to a priest.”

“Go home now,” I said.

“What's next?”

“Find me in the
portales
later in the day. I need to hold on to the wallet for a little while. But continue to keep an eye on our man.”

Diego saluted me and was up and across the room.

“Diego Cordero,” I said, stopping him as he opened the door. He turned to face me.

“Good job,” I said.

“I am a thief,” he said.

“You are forgiven,” I said.

He crossed himself and vanished into the night.