Bride of Fortune (7 page)

      
“Single-minded bastard, aren't you,” Nick said with false geniality.

      
Lucero grinned with typical Hispanic grace and replied lightly, “I'm not the one who's a bastard—not literally, at least.”

      
Nick's eyes narrowed at the insult, but then he realized he'd set himself up for it and shrugged. “I've shot men for calling me a bastard.”

      
“My dear mother believes my father and I are far worse,” Alvarado said.

      
Fortune grinned. “Really?”

      
Lucero threw back his head and laughed in earnest, exactly the same way Nicholas Fortune had always laughed when something suddenly struck him as funny. The two men laughed together briefly, then the humor died as they studied each other again. The bright morning light revealed their amazing resemblance even more clearly.

      
“You're slightly taller, and there is that scar on your cheek,” Alvarado said appraisingly, noting the thin white line that ran just below Nick's left cheekbone, a tiny flaw marring the perfection of his features.

      
“A saber graze taken in Sebastopol. Women tell me it adds to my charm. I have more all over my body, some not nearly so neat, depending on who the surgeon was at the time.”

      
“You can't be much older than me.”

      
“Twenty-nine.”

      
“And you've been a soldier all your life?” Lucero was fascinated.

      
“I learned to fight at an early age. A survival skill in the New Orleans slums.”

      
“Tell me about your mother.”

      
“Not much to tell. She was a whore. Worked in some of the best fancy houses in the city—that is until she began to lose her looks and took to the bottle a little too regularly.”

      
“My father had a cousin in New Orleans. I understand he used to visit him occasionally before I was born.” Alvarado looked at Fortune speculatively. “She was very beautiful, your mother?”

      
“Like I said, until the life and the liquor caught up with her,” Nick replied cynically, turning his back on Lucero.
My brother.

      
“Aren't you interested in our father? He is still alive, you know.”

      
“Why should I care? He obviously never knew I was alive and wouldn't have given a damn if he did. I'm just a scarlet poppy's bastard to a rich don like him.”

      
“He has only one heir. Perhaps a spare wouldn't be amiss, who knows?” Alvarado said cavalierly.

      
“I don't want to see him any more than he'd want to see me.”

      
“He looks exactly like you—even the harsh expression around his mouth,” Lucero taunted silkily.

      
Nick swore a particularly obscene oath and ground out his cigarette. “I don't give a damn if they stamped us out of the same bloody mold and then broke it! You're the heir, rich boy. Leave it at that.”

      
His angry outburst was interrupted by the sound of hoof beats. At once both men dropped to the ground and reached for their weapons, peering down the cliff. Sean O'Malley rode out of the trees leading their horses, calling out for his captain. The expression on his face when he saw Lucero Alvarado standing beside Nicholas Fortune was so goggle-eyed it was comical. Every man in Nick's band was equally as amazed, as were the two other men from Alvarado's unit when they located them.

      
The men burned with curiosity over the next few days, but it was apparent their captain was not going to discuss the appearance of his seeming twin. Sensing Nick's reticence, Luce, as his comrades quickly dubbed him, did not speak of their relationship either, except when the two of them were alone.

      
In spite of himself, Nick was curious about the life of luxury his brother had led and Luce was most obliging in describing Gran Sangre in all its splendor, as well as his family, the servants, even the blooded livestock. It was a world out of a Dumas novel to Nick, who found himself drinking in the stories like a starveling.

      
In turn, Luce was fascinated by the mercenary's life his half brother had led since he was a boy, a life that he had only discovered over the past few years. Alvarado was a natural-born soldier, uncomplaining about long hard rides, sleeping on cold ground, and eating short rations on horseback. He was eager to learn from his brother all the tricks of the killing trade. And Luce was an excellent pupil.

      
In one particularly vicious hand-to-hand fight, he had dispatched a brute of a man with a knife trick that Nick had taught him. As they were cleaning up after the skirmish, Luce had murmured to Nick, kneeling alongside him at the stream's edge, “You're a good teacher, brother. In fact, you've taught me more in a few brief months than I learned in years with tutors who didn't give a damn about me. That particular lesson just saved my life.”

      
Then he chuckled. “The grammar of the knife is far more entertaining than Father Salvador's Latin lessons.”

      
Entertaining.
Yes, that was what all this amounted to for Don Lucero Alvarado. Entertainment! He especially enjoyed masquerading as a Juarista to ferret out sympathizers in the various towns and hamlets they passed through.

      
They had been sent by Colonel Ortiz on just such a mission one rainy afternoon in October. “Serving with Marquez was the first time I really felt alive, you know?” he said as the two of them rode into a small village in Tamaulipas suspected of supporting the rebels. “Two years with the imperial army was little more than a continuation of my old life. I was posted in the capital with the empress' entourage. Lots of balls, dress uniforms, rules. God and all his saints, the damned rules.”

      
“And Marquez, he was different?” Nick asked casually, wondering about the rumors he'd heard about
El Tigre.

      
Luce laughed as he took a long pull on his cigarette. “The man is truly a tiger. Cunning, deadly. He takes what he wants and makes his own rules. And he rewards his men generously. When we sacked San Dimas there was a wool merchant's daughter...” His eyes glowed as he remembered her wildness and the pleasure he had taming her. “We drank the bishop's whole wine cellar dry—and a very large cellar it was, too. I rode off with enough silver to weigh down even a mount as strong as Peltre. My companions and I spent it all in Vera Cruz.”

      
He shrugged carelessly in a way Nick understood. Men in their line of work quickly adopted an easy-come-easy-go attitude toward money, spending it profligately on the fleshly pleasures it could buy, for who knew if one would live to drink another bottle of whiskey or caress another woman's soft body?

      
They dismounted in front of a small adobe cantina and walked inside the smoky room, which was crowded with armed men who eyed the damp muddy strangers suspiciously. A sultry looking barmaid approached Fortune, hips swaying seductively. Leaning forward to reveal the bounty spilling from her low-cut
camisa
, she smiled.

      
“What do two such pretty men want—
pulque
? Or perhaps something stronger...?” She wet her carmined lips suggestively. “I have fine
aguardiente
for only thirty centavos.”

      
“Bring us
pulque
. Do we look like rich men?” Luce said dismissively, his eyes scanning the room surreptitiously. She left in a huff to fill their order, angry at his curt manner. Then he leaned over to Nick and said, “The two by the window are carrying new Yankee rifles.”

      
“Springfields, .58 caliber.” Fortune's eyes narrowed. Shipments of American arms were finding their way across the border to Juarez's forces at Matamoros, then being sent south to arm Escobedo and Diaz's armies. The
contre-guerrillas
had been assigned to intercept just such a shipment. “Keep them entertained here while I see what there is to see around the plaza.”

      
''The
puta
favors you. I'll do the searching,” Luce replied as she returned, her eyes riveted hungrily on Nick.

      
After buying several rounds of drinks, Nick had become the hero of the day. The men swapped stories of how they had routed the cowardly traitors who served the Austrian emperor. After a couple of hours had passed everyone was exceedingly drunk and Lupita was growing insistent in her advances to Nick.

      
Although taking care to hide the fact he was the only
 

sober man left in the place, he was beginning to grow concerned that Luce had not returned. Had he been caught snooping? Surely there would have been an alarm raised. An outbreak of gunfire would bring his men riding in, weapons blazing. He would prefer to seize or, if necessary, destroy the shipment of rifles before the fighting broke out.

      
Finally he excused himself to answer the call of nature and staggered out the back door, leaving Lupita sulking at the bar. A few quick steps down the street away from the noise of the cantina, he heard the sounds of a scuffle coming from a small adobe building. Drawing his Remington, he quickly kicked open the door and stepped inside. Luce was straddling a slender dark-haired girl whose torn clothing and wide terror-filled eyes clearly indicated she had not encouraged his advances. He held her wrists pinioned above her head with one hand while his other was poised at his belt buckle. Her skirts were already bunched up, revealing slender pale thighs which he had pried apart with his legs.

      
Alvarado looked up at Fortune, a grimace of lust hazing his vision. “The guns are there.” He gestured to the back of the room where several crates were stacked. A man's body slumped in front of them, his throat cut. “Her father was guarding them. She brought him his dinner. He can't eat and my appetite runs in a different direction tonight,” he muttered, running his hand over her mound and feeling her quiver.

      
“The cantina has women eager for your company. Use them when this is over,” Nick said tersely. “This isn't the time or place for sport. Besides, this waif is far too skinny for your taste.”

      
With a disgusted oath Alvarado got to his feet and started to yank the girl up with him, but she twisted away with ferret like speed and darted toward the back of the room, now screaming at the top of her lungs.

      
“No need to give the signal. Let's just hope we can hold them until our men get here,” Nick said, seizing two of the rifles from the crates.

      
“At least we're well armed,” Luce countered, doing the same.

      
Both men flattened themselves against the thick adobe walls as a hail of bullets flew through the window and door. They returned fire, taking turns reloading until O'Malley's familiar yell sounded from the plaza. Fortune's men poured into it from every direction. Schmidt and Lanfranc rode up the narrow backstreet, cutting down all resistance while O'Malley gave commands from the roof of the cantina, using the height to oversee what had quickly turned into a rout. Men and horses slipped and slid in the yellow-brown mud. The big Irishman picked off two Juaristas who were attempting to reach the corral, then yelled for Nick and Luce.

      
Within ten minutes it was over. The rain had stopped, as if it had surrendered like the village. The unarmed people filed into the square. Most were frightened, their eyes huge as they stared at the hard-looking band of imperial mercenaries who spoke in a polyglot of Spanish, French, English and German. Women clutched crying babies while children hid in the folds of their skirts. Men, some stoic, others unable to mask their blazing hatred, walked into the plaza with hands raised, prodded by the rifle barrels of the victors.

      
“Do we shoot them,
mein herr
?” Schmidt asked, his small blue eyes moving across the lines of prisoners.

      
“I doubt there were two dozen able-bodied men in the whole village and most of them are lying dead in the mud,” Fortune said, surveying the carnage. In fact, lots of the bodies in the muck were far from able-bodied and some not even male. “Bust up what rifles we can't carry with us and we move out.”

      
“They're our prisoners,” Lanfranc protested in rapid French. “They were hiding a shipment of weapons for Escobedo's army. You know the decree—”

      
Luce's bark of laughter interrupted the fat little Frenchman's tirade. “Our commander here doesn't approve of the emperor's Black Decree. Thinks it breaks all the rules of civilized warfare.”

      
“There is no such thing as civilized war,” Nick snapped, “but butchering prisoners wholesale only creates more resistance.”

      
Maximilian had promulgated a decree giving official sanction to what had already been a common practice, the execution of all men caught bearing arms against the empire. The so-called Black Decree stated there was no legitimate republican government, hence no republican army, only bandits. Considering how Marquez and other
contre-guerrillas
operated, Fortune thought it an irony that several of Juarez's regular army generals had been executed as brigands. Such mindless brutality only increased the ferocity with which the enemy fought.