The Creed of Violence (3 page)

He smoked as he looked out toward the bladed hills that preceded
El Paso. On that day in the year of our Lord, Rawbone was forty-five
years old. On the truck seat was a photo he'd taken from the driver's
wallet. He and his wife were posed on the platform of the Stanton
Street Depot with their blank-faced kids.

He knew the depot well from that other life. He'd met his wife just
blocks away on the Lerdo Tramway. Mules pulling the streetcar in the rain. Her voice like candlesmoke when he asked could he sit beside
her. He swore his youth belonged to someone else, not him. Though
he closed his eyes, the stillness of distance did nothing to strip the past
away. It was there yet, forsaken but not forgotten.

There had been a city attorney in El Paso. A more corrupt or kinder
man he'd never known. Wadsworth Burr would tell Rawbone, "Things
happen that cannot be explained by any laws we know and they carry
the damn secret with them all the way to our oblivion."

RAWBONE DROVE TO the barrio he'd known when married, only to
find it gone. In the oppressive heat he walked a block of brick storefronts that had once been the adobes he frequented. The alley where
they had lived was now a routeway for telephone poles cluttered with
wire. His wife had been dead years, this much he knew. His son ...
was a ghost.

He lit a cigarette and surveyed what once had been. On the corner
of the alley where the sewing factory had stood was now a pawnshop;
opposite was a gun seller where in one window was an ad that featured
Bat Masterson with a Savage .32 automatic ... the ten-shot quickie ...
A TENDERFOOT, read the ad, WITH A SAVAGE COULD RUN THE WORST SHARPSHOOTER IN THE
WEST RIGHT OFF THE RANGE. In the other shop window was another advertisement. This depicted a woman in bedclothes aiming a Savage at the
viewer: THE BANISHER OF BURGLAR FEAR ...

The barrio hadn't changed, he thought, it's only been dry fuckin'
cleaned.

OVERLOOKING DOWNTOWN WAS the Satterthwaite Addition. There
was a dreamy tranquility to those manicured estates as the sun fell away
beyond the far mountains. Wadsworth Burr lived in a huge Missionstyle house near the corner of Yandell and Corto.

Rawbone was shown to the den by a young Oriental girl, who
moved with an airy silence over the tiled floor. The high ceiling kept the
rooms cool just as he remembered.

Burr sat at a campaign desk before a grand bay window from
where one could see the Rio Grande wend its way through a withering
sweep of desert.

Burr was not much older than Rawbone, but to see this once-noted attorney now was a study in startling contrasts. He had just begun the morphine shortly before that July Fourth Rawbone abandoned his family.

"You look like something straight out of Dickens, or at the very
least, Hugo," said Burr.

"I'm in dire need, if that's what you're saying."

Burr motioned toward a serving cart with its chorus line of liquors.
Rawbone tossed his derby aside. As he poured he saw Burr's wrists
were mere belt widths and his scooped-out cheeks and boned-down jaw
more likely features you'd see on a slumworn tramp.

Rawbone took a drink. Passing around the desk, he shook Burr's
hand and noticed a hypodermic waiting on a white dinner napkin.

"You should have stuck to whiskey."

"But I had such an overwhelming need to express my character
flaws."

As Rawbone walked over to the window, Burr asked, "What
brought you out of exile?"

"I stumbled upon a business opportunity."

"Ahhh. I'll curb my curiosity."

Rawbone kept looking out the window as the earth began to tint
under dusk. "I see the Addition is called Sunset Hills now."

"Yes ... it has a certain cemeterial ring, doesn't it? It seemed Mr.
Satterthwaite suffered a reversal of fortune, which is something, I think,
you should particularly note."

Burr reached for a sheet of letter paper and an ink pen.

"I see you still prefer them Chinese," said Rawbone.

Burr wrote something on the sheet of paper, folded it, then set it
like a pup tent on his desk. "There has always been a place in my heart
for deviance and passivity."

"I walked the barrio. Adobe Row is gone."

"It was a reasonable eventuality. All cultures prefer to replace
someone else's vanities with their own."

Rawbone came around the desk again. He took from his pocket a
bill of lading and handed it to Burr. "It's from an import-export shipper
here in El Paso. What do you know of it?"

Burr studied the piece of paper. "I don't know the company. But I
see these are items for building an icehouse." He handed it back. "You
and the makings for refrigeration tests the limits of the imagination."

"There's a revolution coming," said Rawbone.

"It's here."

"Weapons will sell for a premium. As will three-ton trucks."

"Leave the city tonight," said Burr. "Go to Juarez. I'll arrange introductions to some very private people."

Rawbone's attention seemed to have drifted momentarily. "What
do you know about the boy?"

Burr studied his friend carefully. "He wouldn't be a boy now,
would he?"

"Is he here?"

Burr pointed to the paper tent on his desk. Rawbone took it
up between two fingers and read: Wk,a4 can'4 be for-o44en, mvs4 remain
forjo44en. Rawbone then folded and refolded the paper and put it in a
coat pocket.

"You can take up in the apartment above the garage. I have plenty
of clothes. Some will fit you. Look the part."

"Thanks, Wadsworth."

He poured another glass and reached for his derby. As he started
out Burr, upon reflection, said, "Consider your options but don't get
lured into some lost cause." Rawbone stopped partway across the room
and looked back. "You were always at your best," said Burr, "when
you were selfish and remorseless, with just a hint of humor."

"I'll note it, friend."

"Note it well. The city is not like it was. There's violence at hand.
Undercover agents everywhere. More sheriffs, more law enforcement,
more Rangers. And now the Bureau of Investigation."

"It's good to know we're in such efficient hands."

"There's a new law . . . the Mann Act. It gives the BOI a wide
latitude when it comes to national security investigations. They have
offices in the Angelus Hotel. And you know who's in charge ... Justice
Knox."

3ERE WAS A phone in the theatre next to the building where
the girl was. John Lourdes called the BOI office at the Angelus
Hotel. His field commander, justice Knox, was out, but an operative
wrote down Lourdes's observations and requests.

The girl remained overnight. She slept on a flimsy sofa bundled up
like a child. A single candle burned on a table nearby. Shadows bore
out the window in that room was barred.

John Lourdes took up on the stairwell at the end of the hall so he
could watch any comings and goings from that office, but there were
none. He balled up his coat to use as a pillow and played the role of bum
stealing a place to sleep off the street. The building grew dark and empty.
Any vague and distant sound was like the fleeting tone of dreams.

As he waited for daylight to continue his surveillance, he could not
get the girl out of his mind. She seemed to touch certain inarticulates within him. He also found that she and the conversation with the
Germans, if you could call it that, seemed entwined, as if they were part
of one single experience.

He had always been at his investigative best when details were
studied at a distance. He was at his most comfortable with the world
when that too was experienced at a distance.

He approached what he was experiencing with the same cool eye.
As for the girl, it was in great part her silence that affected him. The
silence she exuded as she crossed that bridge and walked alone almost
otherworldly from all that was going on around her, while at the same
time being intensely on guard.

Now, the Germans and their comments about the "unclean" left
him trussed up with his past openly exposed. What they said had infuriated him not only for its degrading and racist implications but because
he, in fact, felt in some way "unclean."

Neither the BOI nor justice Knox had any idea the criminal and
murderer called Rawbone was his father. He'd relegated that detail of
his heritage to the trash heap of history, inventing a story about an
Anglo father, now deceased, named Lourdes. John Lourdes had done
so not only because he felt unquestioned shame, but because he was
also driven by aspirations of career and betterment and knew this crime
of chance would not play to his favor.

That was the term a friend of his father's used, a man his mother
thought to be "unholy and unsavory." The friend was a disgraced attorney named Burr. As a boy he'd been to the great white house in the
hills above El Paso with his father. Often it was at night, often the men
spoke in secret, often afterward his father would disappear for days at
a time.

One night, before leaving, Burr had slipped some paper money into
the boy's shirt and told him, "See your father there? You can thank him;
your birth is a crime of chance ... but all birth is a crime of chance."

Burr's manner was such that even the very young John Lourdes
knew the statement was meant in a malicious way to taint him. And
now, all these years later, beyond the restless hours and mysteries that
afflicted him, beyond all aims, objectives and intentions there was this
need as final as final could ever hope to be, that he, John Lourdes,
would be the one to bring about his father's bloodletting, that he would
be the cause hand behind his death.

As DAWN BEGAN to seep across the building doorway, there came the
sound of distant and sporadic gunfire. It was not a good sign. Not much
later the girl came out of the office with a man. He must have been in
there all night because John Lourdes had not seen him enter. He was
a small fellow, bespectacled and Mexican. He was neatly dressed and
rather unassuming except for the knife sheath hanging from a pistol
belt under his green felt coat.

They made straight for the Santa Fe bridge with Lourdes following,
but this was no ordinary morning. The street was spilling over with
people. Pamphlets were being passed out urging the citizenry to take
up arms against the Diaz government. There was a rabble atmosphere
of anger and retribution for the overturning of free elections. Making
it through the chaotic foot traffic was near impossible. Everywhere
weapons were being brandished and fired off with wanton disregard. A
government flag was burned in the street, its smoking ashes singeing the
air. Up ahead, at the hipodromo, the racehorses had been loosed from
their stables and were being stampeded down the Paseo.

It was then President Diaz's mounted shock troops appeared far
up the Paseo, their columns re-forming to become a phalanx across the
boulevard. When the commander ordered lances readied, his troops
answered crisply.

They held there with the sun to their backs, and their battle line
shimmered in the heat. The commander demanded the crowd disperse, but it remained defiant. The Mexican with the girl in tow shouldered
his way through the shouting insurrectos toward what he assumed was
the safety of the sidewalk buildings. Again the commander shouted his
orders and again the crowd answered in a fanfare of epithets and arms
held aloft with clenched fists.

The command was given, the surge of troops immediate and brutal. Most of the citizenry fell back in a panic; some stood their ground
and fired. The street became a pall of yellow dust and screams. The
ensuing pandemonium swept over the Mexican and the girl. They were
lost to each other. He was taken in a wave of humanity down the sidewalk while she was trampled over.

John Lourdes managed to hold ground then shoulder his way forward. He reached the girl, who lay on the sidewalk trying to protect
herself. He pulled her up and into a doorway. She was bloody and
frightened; she was trembling. He held her by the arms till she calmed.
She thanked him with a nod and by putting a hand on his heart. His
thought: Get her back across the border and somehow question her.
Suddenly the Mexican punched his way through a wild frieze of bodies
in headlong retreat. He had a revolver drawn and pointed. He threatened John Lourdes in no uncertain terms to be away, now, be away.

THE SOUND OF gunfire was evident as far as the Rio Grande.
Word quickly spread about the noonday assault at the hipodromo.
Americans gathered along the riverbank. The air above the buildings
along the Avenida Paseo de Triunfo was heavy with smoke. By the
time the Mexican herded the girl to the bridge, John Lourdes was there
waiting.

He watched her descend the weathered planking to the quarantine shed. The Mexican kept her under steady surveillance until she
disappeared within that grim-faced building. He then looked over to the American side and seemed to acknowledge someone. John Lourdes
scanned the crowd along the river to see who it might be.