The Hot Country (7 page)

14

Sundown this same day and I'd filed my corpse-burning story and I'd sent my cable to Mother and I was at my table in the
portales
taking my first
aguardiente
slow. I was also wondering if we'd hear from our girl sniper again before the day was done. Bunky showed up and sat. He and I and all the other veteran newsmen had our routines now. Your little routines are a hedge against the madness of the job. But when it's
all routine and no madness, that's the worst for a war correspondent, when you're in a faux war and you end up trying to create stories out of something other than real battle that you're in the middle of, stories without real artillery and real gunfire and the movement of troops and without men dying for causes or for politicians or for both. And yes, without the possibility of your own death right there at your elbow
all the while.

“Evening, Pops,” I said.

“That going to become a habit?” he asked.

“The
aguardiente
at sundown?”

“Calling me ‘Pops.'”

“That was just the second time, I think.”

Bunky leaned toward me, which was his way of showing he was serious about something. “Twice in two days,” he said. “Three time's a pattern. Four's a habit. I thought I'd intervene now, if we were heading there.”

“‘Bunky' then. Forever.”

“Bunky's good.”

I found myself with an odd little twist in the stomach. I told myself it was the
aguardiente,
not this thing about “Pops,” but I took another drink to make sure the feeling went away, and it did.

“You find out about Davis and the sniper?” I said.

“He can be sly, but from all I can make out, he didn't file a story.”

“He wouldn't be sly on this one,” I said. “He probably just tucked it away as local color for a magazine feature.”

So Bunky and I drank for a little while, and I only half listened to his familiar monologue about the way the censors have ruined war, from a newspaper's point of view, and if the government was going to lie, then the newspapers should also feel free to lie, though I knew Bunky didn't mean that, and then I wasn't listening to him at all so I could just drink
aguardiente
and not worry about a thing for an hour or two.

Before you knew it, the night had come upon us and the near-full moon was perched on the mountaintops, bloated and yellow, and the German band had been playing beyond the trees for quite a while already. Bunky had fallen silent, the effect of his own drinking. He'd gotten to his silent stage. And suddenly I was aware of the music in the air. I recognized Richard Wagner. Something from
Lohengrin,
I thought. Not that I'd been following their whole program carefully these past couple of nights, but this was the first German music I'd heard the German band play.

And then they played the
Kaisermarsch
,
also Wagner. Mother had a fling in New York with a German orchestra conductor at some point when I was still around, and I got to know Wagner's music a little too well for my taste. This piece honored a Kaiser of about forty years ago and usually had a German men's chorus going
Heil! Heil! dem Kaiser!
The horns were doing that part from the band shell. And it struck me as odd, two German songs in a row all of a sudden, and I was on my feet and crossing the
avenida
.

I entered the
zócalo.
Up ahead, the band shell was lit by incandescent lamps. The rest of the Plaza was in darkness and the angle of the moon was still low, so we were all just dark shapes moving about or lined up on the benches. Only a few figures were standing in the light from the
kiosko
. Many of the moving figures were heading away from the music now. The concert was almost over, certainly, but these were not tunes for them.

That suspicion was what stood me up and brought me quickly here. And sure enough. Three figures were standing shoulder to shoulder in the light up ahead, apart from the locals, and as soon as I saw them I stopped, while I was still well-shrouded in the dark. I did not want to be seen by these three: Captain Krüger; a stout man in shirtsleeves, unfamiliar to me but who I'd have been willing to bet was the head of the consulate; and my man from the
Ypiranga,
the tall man with the fencing scar, wearing his white linen suit. They were standing stiffly, facing the
Kaisermarsch
as if they were all about to salute in unison. I moved off the path and leaned against a tree, effectively hidden now, though still able to observe.

The
Kaisermarsch
ended, and the three men did indeed touch their right temples in precise military salutes, the two apparent civilians as meticulously correct in the execution of the gesture as
der Kapitän
. They released the salute, and they stepped forward as the musicians began to put aside their instruments. The bandmaster came to the edge of the stand to greet them, and more salutes were exchanged. Krüger hung back a little as the two civilians worked the front edge of the bandstand like politicians, shaking hands with the musicians for a time.

When the three were done with all this, they bowed and saluted and made a fine Germanic fuss of respect for the whole band, and they turned and started up the path. I slid a little farther behind the tree as they strolled past, talking low, moving casually. I considered following them, but I was certain they would simply lead me back to the consulate. I looked toward the band shell. The musicians had known from sight to crank up the Fatherland's Favorites. Krüger and the head of the consulate could easily have been familiar to them. But maybe the man with the scar was too.

They were all on their feet now, packing their instruments, at least some of them ready, I suspect, to head somewhere to drink. I figured I could do with a drink myself and maybe a little manly shoulder-clapping and drunken song-singing. I might even find a long-sought pal who knew something useful.

15

A few of the dozen or so band members headed off separately, and the rest stayed together till they got to
Independencia
. Then the group broke in two, with one part heading toward the
portales
and the other part, four of the musicians, including the bandleader and the alto horn player who seemed to recognize me, hopping a trolley south. It was an easy choice: I lagged behind the four, who boarded and moved to the front of the car, and I stepped up with the clang of the bell and I sat down at once on the right-hand, straw-seated, lateral bench. They were in twos now, facing each other on the opposing benches, talking volubly in German, their cased instruments standing on the floor between their feet. The alto man was pretty much out of sight, on my side of the car and beyond the trombonist. The bandmaster sat directly opposite him. I'd wait till we were all in the same place, drinking, to make a point of my presence.

Across from me at this end of the car were a couple of hayseed-blond Bluejackets, who could have been brothers, dressed in their tropical whites and looking antsy. I realized I'd been assuming the Germans were just going somewhere to drink together, but this was the route to the red-light district, and for a moment I was afraid I wouldn't have access to them. But the evening, though not quite young, wasn't yet middle-aged, so if they wanted girls—and even if they wanted to impress them with their uniforms—they probably would have at least unloaded their instruments before heading off. This still felt like some guys heading straight for a drink.

And I was right. They rose from their seats one stop short of the girls, and I followed them off the trolley, leaving my fellow Americans to go on along the line to a little Navy-sanctioned, country-boy sin. I hung back a bit and watched these four enter a
pulquería,
a one-story adobe house a bit larger than the usual, identifying itself by the bands of brightly colored tissue paper strung over its open doorway. They were four Germans with a taste for
pulque
. This was a quick-fermenting drink from the maguey plant, the Mexican national working-man's drink with about the same mild kick and certainly the same ubiquity as the band members' lager.

I gave them a few minutes to settle in, and then I entered the place, which stank sourly of the
pulque
. The boys from the band were at a back table with tankards of this stuff. The front tables were full of locals, mostly with dark, angular Aztec faces, the ones drinking
pulque
talking, the ones doing the distilled version, which was basically
mezcal,
looking glum. I went to the wooden counter that was not quite a bar but offered a place to stand if you were of a mind to, and I got my own tankard. I stared at it a little while before drinking, as if I could change how it would taste. I needed to drink some before looking at my Germans, just to make all this seem to have been casual when I started asking questions.

The
pulque
was just as I remembered from my days hanging around this country in '04, on my own, glad to be away from an endless succession of theaters, even Mother knowing it was time I went out and found a different kind of life, a life of my own. To her credit. You'd think with me being twenty years old, dreaming of becoming a newspaperman like B. F. Millerman, writing stories on cable blanks in Mexican cantinas with no one to send them to, and then finally writing a real story about the madman Nicolás Zúñiga in his third futile run against the tyrant Díaz and mailing it to the
Post-Express,
which started my career, you'd think whatever there was at that point in my life that served the function of beer, that stuff would strike me as swell. You'd think so, but that would be wrong. The
pulque
still looked like watered-down wallpaper paste and tasted like sour milk and yeast and faintly like something dead, just as it did a decade ago. But I kept a straight face.

I looked toward the Germans. And the alto horn man was looking toward me. He nodded very slightly. I nodded very slightly. The other three were in voluble conversation with each other, and this one guy seemed a little apart from them. The obvious thing would have been to use this as an invitation to go over and join the Germans. Buddy up with all of them at once and prep them for a few questions. But this one man, catching my eye on two different occasions: My instinct told me to deal with him individually first. Then if I decided I needed them all, he could be my way into the group.

There was a scraping of a chair nearby, and I turned to see one of the
mezcal
drinkers at this end of the room rise from a small table where he was alone. He wobbled there for a moment and then weaved his way to the door. I glanced at Alto Horn and he was still looking at me. I angled my head very slightly to the empty table and headed for it. I sat. He arrived and sat across from me. Nearly in unison, we set our tankards of
pulque
before us. He was older than his thinness made him seem from a distance. Beside his eyes were fine webs of lines and between his brows were two permanent furrows. He was probably pushing forty. Or, if he was younger, he was a serious worrier.

We offered our hands and shook. “Gerhard Vogel,” he said.

“Christopher Cobb,” I said, and then, in German: “I don't speak German.”

He nodded at this and did not answer. He was looking at me closely. Very briefly I thought my German was even worse than I'd realized. But it was not incomprehension in Gerhard Vogel's face. There was something about the eyes that a reporter learns. But how do we read eyes? Part of this man was studying me closely and that should narrow his eyes. Part of him sought to open up to me and that should widen his eyes. These things canceled themselves out, and by rights, by an objective glance at him, his eyes should have seemed neutral. But you learn to feel this opposition of forces, and so his eyes were telling me: I want to reveal something but I don't know if I can trust you. If it was something critical for a story and he wanted me to forget it utterly after he said it, he couldn't trust me. As for some other conditions—keeping his name out of it, for instance—I was his man. I waited.

He made a decision. He lowered his voice and leaned a bit toward me. “I speak English,” he said in English.

I glanced over his shoulder. The other three Germans were still involved in an animated conversation. They seemed not even to be aware that Gerhard was across the room.

“They don't know,” he said.

Hell's bells
was my first thought. If that made him nervous, I was unlikely to get anything important out of him. “That's a secret?” I said.

Gerhard shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”

“That you were an American?”

“Yes.”

“Then it's just between us,” I said.

“I know who you are,” Gerhard said.

“Don't worry,” I said. “Your speaking English wouldn't exactly be a story for the
Post-Express
.”

“From your Balkans pieces in
Scribner's
.”

“Which you read in secret?”

“From a couple of pictures of you there, one with the Greek dead at Kilkis and one in Sofia,” he said, finishing his thought. And then: “I play in the band. I live in Germany. But I do have a private life.”

I heard myself, how I'd sounded with him for the past few moments: snide. I wasn't sure why I was disliking him.

“Your writing style is very clean,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said, trying to turn up the warmth in my voice.

“Very Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance,” he said.

And now I liked him. A lot. To compare my writing to those boys turning a slick double play? How could I not? “Man oh man,” I said. “You a Cubs fan?”

“I hate the Cubs. But I appreciated the way they played.”

“You do have secrets.”

“The Pirates were my team,” he said.

“Keep that one strictly to yourself.”

He shrugged.

“You from Pittsburgh?” I asked.

“Eventually,” he said.

“When did you leave the States?”

“'07.”

“Couldn't handle the Cubs winning the Series?”

“My new wife hated being away from Germany. We went.”

I was thinking more clearly now. Trying to figure this guy out. I flipped my chin to gesture over his shoulder. “They don't know about her?”

“She died the next year.”

“I'm sorry.”

He shrugged again. Indistinguishable from his shrug over my ragging him about being a Pirates fan. Maybe I was better at reading eyes than shrugs, but his voice carried a little tremor of actual feeling about that turn of events, so the sameness of the shrug seemed very sad.

“You stayed,” I said.

He didn't seem to understand.

“In Germany after she died.”

“I stayed,” he said.

I watched him reading me the way I just did him: He thought I wasn't understanding. “By then,” Gerhard said, “I was in the
Hüttner Kapelle
. A very good orchestra in Dortmund.”

That was all he said. I didn't press him about the leap from a good orchestra in a concert hall in Dortmund to a brass band in a public park in Vera Cruz. With a potential source you have only a certain amount in your reporter's goodwill bank account. You can press him only a finite number of times. I'd keep something in my account for later, for more important questions.

But I did say, “That wasn't such a long time ago.”

He didn't understand.

“Seven years. You said it was a long time ago that you were an American.”

He gave me a faint, ironic smile. “It seems long.”

I could have grilled him more. How if it seemed like a long time that he had not been an American and if he was no longer in the very good German orchestra and if the woman who caused him to leave America in the first place was dead, why the next move was Mexico with a German brass band and not back to the States. We've got plenty of band shells in plenty of parks in the U. S. of A. But it was not his story I was interested in.

As his odd little smile faded, he took a drink, his tankard rising high as he drained the last bit.

“Let me get you another of those,” I said.

I didn't wait for an answer but grabbed his empty and headed for the wooden bar, where the tankards were topped off and lined up ready, and I brought a full one back to the table.

He took it with a nod as I sat. His “thanks” felt almost like an afterthought.

“You like this stuff?” I said.

“No.”

“If you're going to hate the taste anyway, you can try the
mezcal
.”

He shrugged again. All the shrugs were alike. “Wherever I want to end up by drinking,” he said, “I need to get there slow.”

“Or else you might start talking English.”

He flipped his head in a little laugh that sounded more like a snort. He took a sip of the
pulque.

“It's not just your style,” he said. “You dig up the dope and you write it straight.”

He caught me off guard with one of my own tricks. Get a thing halfway into the conversation and leave it, and then, when it is mostly forgotten, abruptly return to it. Not that it made me say anything, not that he was even trying to get me to, but I leaned back in my chair and he'd gotten me off my own tack.

Then his use of “dope” registered on me. “So you played the horses before you took off for the Fatherland,” I said.

Now he was the one to sit back. After a few beats of silence, he said, “She saved me from that.”

It was the right thing to say to shut me up for a while.

I lifted my tankard to him.

He lifted his, and we touched them.

We drank.

The tankards went down to the table.

The Germans at the back of the room brayed in sudden laughter. Anyone watching Gerhard and me would have thought we never even heard it.

We drank again and we both seemed to be waiting for something.

I said, “For a German band, you boys play a lot of American music.”

“Ragtime and Broadway,” he said. “That's our colonial empire. We'll rule the world.”

“We?”

He looked at me like I was a damn fool. “Red, white, and blue,” he said. “Why do you think I'm sitting at this table?”

“So what's what with the Wagner tonight?”

There was a stopping in him. But not like I'd caught him in something. He pulled in a breath and held it and nodded very faintly, like he'd been waiting for it to get around to this. But he said, “I don't know.”

This guy was like reading a book in bed by candlelight and you're getting very sleepy. You run your eyes over words that seem familiar, but they're not sticking together to make sense.

“You figure it was for your visitors?” I said.

“Obviously,” he said.

So I threw the fastball down the center of the plate. “Who's the tall man?” I asked.

You keep looking for little clues in the people you work on for the dope. He was giving me plenty of them, but I couldn't quite put them together. He'd suddenly gone very quiet. Whatever stopped in him when I asked about the Wagner was going again, but he was quiet. His hands were still. His eyes were steady. If anything, they were looking at me like he was disappointed. He just wanted an American drinking buddy, one who also happened to be in the magazines, and I was grilling him. After a few beats of silence that felt much longer, he said, “I don't know.”

I wanted to ask him what took him so long to come around to saying that, if he didn't know. Normally I wouldn't have believed him. But I did, somehow.

Especially when he added, “He was striking. I wondered myself.”

“
‘Striking' is a good word for him,” I said.

“You have any ideas?” he said.