The Hot Country Page 15

  I signaled the waiter and he brought me cable blanks. I checked my pocket Elgin, which I was back to carrying, now that I expected to avoid trouble, at least for tonight, and I had a little time to get to the telegraph office. So I also ordered an aguardiente. I wrote to Clyde: Got a big whiff. Will be out of touch for a while. Bunky will handle VC inertia.

  I figured that would boost Clyde’s coffee intake 30 percent, his sleeplessness a similar amount. But I laid the cable blank before me on the tabletop with a tiny nod to Clyde Fetter. Clyde did not doubt that I knew what I was doing, and he let me do it.

  As did my mother. I wished I knew what it was she was doing and could happily let her do it. Not that I had any choice but to let her, whatever it was. I picked up her wire and put it down and picked it up and put it down and drank some of the aguardiente that had just arrived and then I picked the wire up and held it. She was capable of hinting further about her “golden strings” being tuned or her “brass” being handled. I don’t think she even understood how I didn’t really want to hear about that. To be fair to her, as I grew up with my mother, when she was being a woman, she rarely could do anything but simply put me in the hotel hallway and regretfully expect me to now and then put my ear to the door. For her to have had no passion or, worse, for her to have it and never act upon it were her only realistic alternatives. And her genius as an actress meant she must, by her very essence, live her life openly, always upon a stage, even if it was in a play called Life.

  I didn’t respond to her last wire. And though it’d been but a relatively short time since she sent this one, it likely had already registered upon her that I was not giving her my blessing for whatever golden-string-tuning she’d decided to do. I was providing her with no end-of-the-act curtain. So the play had to go on. She felt she had to further explain. I opened the telegram.

  We have always quoted the Elizabethans to each other, out of context, for our own purposes. And in her new message, after her Dearest Christopher Marlowe Cobb—her use of my name in its fullness reflecting her irritation—I recognized a tiny pastiche of The Winter’s Tale: ‘Tis hoped his sickness is discharged. To see his nobleness conceiving the dishonour of his mother! Go play, boy, play. Thy mother plays.

  And her closing words worked roughly upon me: Love et cetera et cetera, Thy mother. She could do better than that, I felt, in emoting her annoyance, but her uncharacteristic lapse made it all the worse, for the realness of feeling behind it. Though she could feign realness as well, I realized.

  I put a cable blank on the table before me, took a bolt of aguardiente, and I wrote: Discharged it is. Play on, Mother. My own play enters a new act. Love et non cetera. Kit

  The first sentence was a lie. And so was the attitude of the second. But I could not board the train in the morning and ride it wherever it would lead me without making this thing right between us.

  28

  I woke before dawn. The red-crowned parrots had started to chatter in the treetops of the zócalo outside my open windows, harsh, grating voices, speaking the German of bird languages. I was definitely awake—and even thinking already about Germans on this day of the pursuit of Mensinger—but now, abruptly, before I could rise, a memory began without an antecedent I could identify. But this was memory, certainly.

  I was a boy. Seven years old. Maybe eight, tops. I’d come upon some local boys in a vacant lot, and they had a pocketknife. They were older than me—maybe ten or twelve—and they were playing mumblety-peg, going through the progression of trick throws. Spank the baby. Tony Chestnut. They didn’t like me watching and they tried to chase me away and I challenged the boy doing the best, who happened also to be the biggest boy, to a game of Flinch. Or so I called it. Simple. We faced each other and we threw the knife as hard as we could toward our own foot, trying to miss but progressively throwing the knife closer and closer to our foot, and we kept doing it till one of us flinched, backed off, quit, or one of us buried the knife in the ground flush against our skin without drawing blood. It was summer. We were all barefoot. I was little, he was big, and he couldn’t back down.

  We started. I’m good with a knife. I was good as a kid. I put one about three inches from my foot. Suckered him in. He was a little hesitant at the start of this, but he suddenly smiled and figured he could show off and beat me easy. So I walked him in closer on our next two throws, but still not severely, and then on my third throw, I put one a thumb-width from the outer edge of my foot. He was scared now.

  I took him off the hook. I uprooted my knife immediately and I threw it again, with all my might, and I felt it pop coolly against my skin and nuzzle there. I didn’t even have to look down. The big boy’s eyes went wide and they all took off, thinking me a dangerous boy.

  But I realized now, remembering this, that the game itself wasn’t about these other boys. Not them at all. It was about my mother. And though she was offstage in the memory, as she was in the game, it was about Mother in my room at the Diligencias: I went out into that vacant lot because I chose not to linger beside her door in the hotel hallway.

  And realizing this, I could push it away. I rose from my hotel bed and I changed into the mohair suit and the fedora. I became Gerhard Vogel. I closed my bag and lifted it off the bed. The heft of it reminded me that I was bringing my Corona Portable Number 3. It was only a little over six pounds, but the bag was heavy already, and I hesitated. I could have left it with the waitstaff for Bunky to take care of. But no. When a story is big and complex and has life and death and much in between brimming out of it, I need my Corona to think straight. I need to see the words before me shaping themselves not in the personal quirks of my hand but in the uniform surety and clarity of actual type.

  I went out. And from the south, coming up Independencia, was a heavy, cobbled rumble, the sound of what I took to be caissons. I paused, I moved a few steps down the avenida, wondering if Woody was going to make a move at last, a predawn deployment of cannon to begin an offensive. A foolish, wishful thought. What I saw coming up the street was a caravan of horse-drawn supply carts stacked high with nested, silver-metal, corrugated 42-gallon garbage cans. Today was the day the city of Vera Cruz, the United States of America’s little piece of Mexico, would begin its struggle against street trash, the day the U.S. Army turned into garbagemen.

  I backed away from the onslaught. I did a sharp about-face and retreated from the advancing regiment of garbage cans. I headed for the train station with an odd little ripple of something akin to respect for Friedrich von Mensinger and the men who had dispatched him. They seemed to have a much clearer grasp than my own president on what was at stake here.

  As I anticipated, at the station, though it was still a couple of hours before departure, the Mexican travelers were already gathering and flowing down the platform to clamber on board to claim seats, dragging bags and baskets and birdcages and bundles of pots and pans and bedding, some traveling with the intention of returning and some taking whatever they could carry as they abandoned an occupied city. I followed them. Up ahead, all along the platform, in the wide cones of piss-colored electric light, the Mexican travelers were pressing into passenger cars. I strode on more quickly, past second class, where all of the early seat-grabbing hubbub was going on. I arrived at the rearmost of the two first-class coaches and there were only a few figures in the windows. I moved along nearly a car’s-length farther and stepped away from the train to view the Pullman up ahead. The windows were dark. No one was near the car but a sentinel conductor smoking a cigarette.

  I went up the forward steps into my coach and headed for the rear. The last row was empty. I sat at the train’s left-hand window, where, just outside, a wide, jaundiced beam of electric light illuminated the platform like an upper-balcony death-scene spotlight. From here I would be able to see Mensinger pass by for his car. There was a possibility he had changed his plans, particularly after his train ticket disappeared for twenty-four hour
s. Though I had to admit that Diego was right: The risk he took to extort money from the Germans could help to ease their suspicions. My showing up to defend the kid would itself be suspicious, certainly. But that could well have been unrelated. Krüger surely sensed I didn’t like him, and so if I happened to notice him ominously following a boy, I might well have meddled. Would the Germans accept it as a coincidence, my noticing the situation? It was, after all, unfolding in plain view in the zócalo. Was I more likely to have a Mexican kid steal the wallet and then give it back to him to extort a few pesos for the thing, private letter and train ticket and all? Mensinger would arrive, I told myself. They would stick to their well-made plans.

  I settled in, but I kept my hat on for now to minimize the view of my face. Krüger was the only one of the Germans who could directly recognize me, and he was in no shape to go anywhere. He likely had already spoken of me as his assailant. I had to hope they didn’t have one of a few specific old issues of Scribner’s or Pearson’s or The Century around the embassy to show Mensinger my mug. Which was a reasonable hope. And perhaps it was not so likely that Krüger told the truth about what happened to him. I took him for an arrogant man, a man proud of all his manly skills as a soldier. That he could have been physically overwhelmed by a mere journalist, an American journalist at that, would be humiliating. What was, in fact, likely was that he made up some other explanation for his injuries. Still, I needed to be cautious. And my main challenge now was to stay awake before dawn, on short sleep, till I verified Mensinger’s arrival.

  And it was not long before he arrived, briskly moving past, dressed in high boots and puttees, khaki pants and shirt, and wearing a slouch hat. A pistol sat on his right hip. And over his shoulder he carried a pair of outsized saddlebags. He passed quickly out of sight.

  I tried to hold the image of him in my head. To figure this out. Dressed for the field as he was, he looked incongruously clean and pressed and crisp. But certainly ready to ride. His clothes and their pristine condition seemed familiar to me: He was in costume. It was theater. It was pure theater. I thought of La Mancha as his destination. And I understood. Mensinger didn’t have a rendezvous there with Villa. He had a rendezvous with a horse. It made sense if he wanted to impress the bandito-turned-rebel leader. Villa was where everyone thought he was, in Torreón. But Mensinger would get off at La Mancha to ride those last fifty miles on horseback, far enough to break a real sweat and gather some trail dust. He was a German aristocrat. He’d gotten his combat scar within the stone walls of an ancient university from another aristocrat with whom he then went out drinking. Mensinger was approaching a volatile, emotional, suspicious, uneducated, thieving, cavalry-charging, war-seasoned Mexican, and he had to convince this man of his own credibility.

  29

  I hooked my feet in the handles of my bag, pulled my hat down farther over my eyes, and I slept. Dreamlessly, I thought, for I woke with a start with nothing in my head but a feeling of movement and then I thought I was wrong, that this was a dream, for I lifted my head and turned to the window and in the pale first light of the day, across a ragged verge of grass and stones, across a wide, dark calle, was the low adobe sprawl of the Hostal Buen Viaje and I thought perhaps the other Gerhard—for I was Gerhard now to protect my own life—I thought perhaps the other Gerhard was still lying in a room off a courtyard behind that hotel facade, he lay there dreaming his own dream from which he would not wake, and then this vision was gone, it floated past and we were curving, curving, and now before my eyes—or perhaps before only my unconscious mind—was Avenida Guerrero and a familiar row of warehouse buildings, and flashing past was the very one in whose shadow, just out of sight, a knife was lifted to kill a boy and I fought for him. But these vanished now too. I blinked hard, and still the streets passed by, with the tile-roofed houses and the gray scattered tombs of the Cementerio General and the wide alameda at the south end of Independencia and the great wooden bowl of the bullfighting ring. These were recognizable but irrelevant to me, and I realized that I was not dreaming, that this was Vera Cruz flowing past me, and I settled back again, closed my eyes. But I was awake.

  I opened my eyes. I removed my hat. We were running out of the trees of Vera Cruz and the city vanished, replaced by a stretch of marsh, the thin veneer of water among the rushes starting to lighten as the sun cracked the horizon behind us, with a scattering of slow-stalking blue herons looking black in this early light. And now the water vanished too and the sands took up, lifting into minor dunes, and our train slowed abruptly. I pressed the side of my face against the window to look forward. I saw branch tracks heading off south and switching tracks and now a siding and boxcars with uniformed men—­Federales—sitting in the doors. Our own train was crying out beneath us, as we ground hard to a stop. The engine pitched low. I understood what would happen now. My hand went to Gerhard’s German passport, just to touch it, and I recognized the danger of that thought. I rethought it: I touched my own German passport, just to reassure myself it was there. Mine. I was Gerhard Vogel.

  A low Spanish murmuring ruffled through the car and I looked at my nearby fellow first-class travelers. They all seemed to be Mexicans, well-dressed ones. Sitting next to me was an old man in a cream suit, a mestizo with a massive gray Porfirio Díaz mustache. In the seats in front of me were a middle-aged couple, he also in a suit, American-style serge, she wearing a bright blue rebozo draped over her head and shoulders. No possible Germans were nearby to find my speech suspicious. In spite of my taste for irony and the impulse to indulge in German double-talk, I decided my best course was to inject a clear undercurrent of an admittedly stage-German accent into a simplified Spanish and fake a lapse into the language of the Fatherland only if absolutely necessary.

  Two Federales in proper regimental uniforms were beginning to work their way down the aisle, a conductor trailing them. The Federales were looking at each passenger intently, asking for papers from some, passing others by with only a single lingering glance, the conductor checking tickets of everyone in their wake. I couldn’t clearly see if there were other non-Mexicans farther up, but the two government soldiers did pause, once, and then again, and then once again, to check documents closely, and I turned my face to the window as if unconcerned. But as their voices came near, stopping a few rows in front of me to ask for a pasaporte, I thought now it would seem evasive to be looking away from them when they arrived. And if I could, I wanted to see who it was they would expect to be carrying an actual passport.

  The Federales were several rows down and focused on the seats on the other side of the aisle. I moved my head very slightly to the right, not wanting to seem anxious, and I could see between the couple in front of me and barely through the two people in front of them and then my sight was mostly blocked by a black sombrero with silver trim. The soldiers were soon satisfied, and they moved this way. One was lagging behind a little, deferentially, and the senior man turned to this side of the aisle. He had a dark face, carefully twirled black mustaches, a sharp-scanning eye. I knew I shouldn’t be looking out the window but I shouldn’t be staring at him either. So I eased back in my seat, waited with a vaguely sleepy stare in front of me, as the soldiers moved closer.

  Now I saw them in my periphery as they approached my row, and I looked up, slowly, as if this was all quite routine. And I knew I was thinking too much. What I’d learned about actors—even the hammiest of them—was that they worked out their self-consciousness in rehearsals. In performance, even the broadest, phoniest gestures were actually executed straight from the body. I was thinking too much, and now I was thinking too much about thinking too much, as I stared up at the officer who was clearly in charge. His mustaches were so black and the confluence of lines converging on the outer corners of his eyes were so deep that I wondered if he rinsed indigo and henna into his bigote grande like a fading leading man.

  “Good morning,” he said to me in English, going straight to the top of his list of tar
gets.

  My head cocked slightly in brief incomprehension—which I was pleased to note had occurred by an actor’s reflex—though I also needed to stop noting my own performance, even when good, as that was the time when actors tended to muff their lines.

  “Guten Morgen,” I said, not really capable of going very far past that if this man happened to know any German. His uniform was far too correct for the conscript Federales Maass had been able to gather to fight for him. He even had pips on his shoulder that I could read: a captain. A real soldier. Not an inflated rurale. Not a field captain ele­vated in battle from corporal with all the officers around him shredded by bullets and shrapnel. These onyx-stone black eyes had a legitimate Kapitän behind them, lately arrived from the capital and tasked with finding guys like me. He could even have known some real German. That was the great risk of this moment.

  A beat of silence passed between us. Even a German would have reasonably understood the words “Good morning” in English. “Buenos días,” I replied, offering this to the officer as our common language, but pushing the pronunciation to the back of my throat, tightening my cheeks, applying my mimic’s mouth for German to my fluency in Spanish.

  He looked at me for another silent moment, and I could feel him hanging on the edge of belief, still not convinced, but not unconvinced either, as he did not move his eyes from mine for even the briefest moment. I waited, fearing actual, knowledgeable German from him. The Germans had a major presence in Mexico City. This was a smart man. But instead, he said, “Pasaporte.”

  I pulled my new self from my inner coat pocket without even glancing at it, and I handed it to him, holding my eyes steadily on his. He broke off. He opened my passport to the picture page, as I put my ticket in the conductor’s outstretched hand without a word, without shifting my gaze from the captain, who looked at my image. He lifted his eyes to me directly and then lowered them back to the page. He looked at me in the flesh once again. I very casually took off my hat to reproduce the picture.