The Hot Country (8 page)

“He's your guy. Don't look at me.” I realized I was sounding snide again. I thought to try to back out of it a bit. “I said he's yours since you're playing in a German band in Mexico instead of going back home to a band shell in Pittsburgh.” Which maybe didn't quite sound snide but sure wasn't a backpedal.

In fact, he should have gotten wired up by that. But he didn't. He just seemed to get quieter.

So I said to him, “I'm sounding like a Cub fan ragging a Pirate fan. You and the boys make good music in a warm climate. It's not my place . . .”

He waved off the half-assed apology. “You're doing your job,” he said.

I nodded at him. A thanks-for-understanding nod.

And he said, “I should get back to the boys.” He dragged out “the boys” enough to let me know he was quoting me. He did it without cracking a smile. Okay. I deserved that.

“Maybe we'll have another drink sometime without all the racket,” I said.

He said, “If I hear anything about the tall man I'll let you know.”

“Good.” And if he was serious about that offer, I had a thought that might help him get me what I wanted. Better him with this approach than me. I said, “Maybe your bandmaster knows something.”

Gerhard gave me another thoughtful but unreadable look.

Then he said, “You mind doing the same? If you hear something? You've got me curious.”

I didn't answer right away and he laughed the closest thing to a real laugh I'd heard from him, though it left a faint afterclap of irony.

“I promise I won't scoop you,” he said.

I lifted my drink to him.

He lifted his and said, “ I have a room at the
Hostal Buen Viaje
. On
Calle de Montesinos
near the station.”

I nodded a thanks at this. “I'm beneath the
portales
of the
Diligencias
every morning,” I said.

We touched tankards and they clanged like a distant fire bell.

16

When I stepped out of the
pulquería,
leaving Gerhard Vogel with his German buddies and his secret
Scribner's,
I was not aware that something had happened one stop up the trolley line, wouldn't learn about it till I was drinking my morning coffee in the
portales.
I took a few paces toward the center of the cobbled street, out almost to the trolley tracks, just to get away from the stink of the
pulque,
which was stronger now because I was carrying traces of it in my mouth. The more or less full moon was high, and spotted along this block of drinking joints were a few electric lamps, one of them across the street and thirty yards or so down to my right. I was lit up by the moon, with more light just down the street. And things were quiet. Even the
pulquería
behind me was keeping its sounds tight to itself now. Or maybe it had fallen silent in there. Maybe Gerhard chilled down his friends. I bet he had that effect.

The trolley lines suddenly sputtered and sparked above me. It happened, and it was over. Just a brief surge of electricity. The electric demons muttering in their sleep. There were no trolleys in sight. A dog barked somewhere. The night wasn't anything you'd call cool, but its mitigation of the heat felt good and I turned in the direction of the harbor and my bed, and I started to walk.

From the first step, my mind began working on the tall man with the fencing scar, and the thought I had was that I was a war correspondent without a real war who was trying to make something out of nothing just to keep himself from going crazy. But that guy had been sitting out there on the German ship for a few days, and then he came in like a sneak thief in the night. And yet, less than twenty-four hours later, he was willing to be seen in the center of town. All right. So he couldn't stay hidden forever. So maybe he promenaded in the
zócalo
so he wouldn't seem to be a suspicious figure. There he was in the open. He came in secretly simply to avoid an association with the
Ypiranga,
so nobody would have a reason to think he had a special mission of some sort. Without that association, he was just another German at the consulate. Overlooked heretofore, but nobody to lift an eyebrow about.

These were quick thoughts, and with another little crackle of electricity overhead I came up out of them. I was passing the streetlamp and maybe I saw a little something in my periphery. A little bit of movement. Not enough even to make me turn my head. I kept taking steps, that next one and the next and I passed from the piss-yellow lamplight and into the moonlight white as a corpse, and it was only now that my defenses started prickling up my skin. I'd been away from battle too long. But here I was with the instinct to duck.

I didn't. I stopped. I turned.

At first I saw no one. Because I was looking into the spill of light around the lamp. It was the area where I thought I saw movement a few moments ago, so it was where I was inclined now to look. Once again I was about to curse the jumpiness induced by inaction in Vera Cruz, but something registered on me. Beyond the far fringe of lamplight I dimly made out a figure. Facing this way. The figure moved toward me. The clothes were black: jacket and pants tucked into high, laced boots. A black sombrero. A slim young man, to my eye.

If I knew at that moment what I would know not very many hours later, that a Bluejacket in his tropical whites coming out of a bordello up the trolley line had only a short time ago been shot in his left buttock by a sniper with a Mauser, I would've figured out a few beats sooner who this was before me.

As it was, this slim young man reached up with his left hand to his sombrero, and the gesture made me notice that his right arm was pulled back behind him. And the sombrero came off and out tumbled lovely thick coils of a woman's hair, falling over her shoulders, and she lifted her face a little to the light, and it was Luisa. I took a step toward her and even as I began my next step she dropped the sombrero to the ground and brought that right arm out from behind her and her Mauser went up to her shoulder and she angled her head to put me in her sights.

Her rifle was not pointed at some darkly whimsical, nonlethal, but appropriately chosen part of my body, as had been her pattern, but rather it was pointed at the center of my chest. And I had no gold-plate crucifix to absorb the round and simply knock me on my ass. I did not take that second step but planted the foot and stood straight and still before her. She'd had this chance once before and she did not take it. Since then, however, she clearly had come up with some other agenda. I could dodge, I could run, but she was a crack shot and it would do no good. But it was not the futility of evasion that kept me standing there. I found myself still trying to impress Luisa Morales. I had a strong hunch that she respected courage, even in a masher of a
gringo
with imperialist politics and moral indifference.

She let me stand there for a long few moments with her rifle barrel dead-still in its aim, as befitted her expertise with that instrument. I wondered who taught her, and I wondered if that would be the last thing I ever wondered. Or rather—correcting myself—I wondered if wondering about whether that would be the last thing I wondered would be the last thing I wondered. Bravery affects me like this.

Then the rifle slowly came down.

“Luisa,” I said and the rifle popped up again, right back into the killing zone, though I hadn't even taken another step. I slowly spread my arms, palms toward her, saying with the gesture: Okay, you're the boss. Whatever you want.

And still she did not move. The rifle was not coming down. I waited. And then, without lifting her head from her sights, she said, “Good-by, Mr. Christopher Cobb.”
Adios
.
Adios,
Señor Christopher Cobb,
she said to me with her eye still sighting along the rifle barrel, and I expected to die. I expected she was bidding me farewell as she would send me on my way to whatever was next. She was not yet pulling the trigger, and I wondered if she believed in hell, seeing as she did not believe in the priests. And I wondered if that would be the last thing I wondered. Or, rather—here I went again—I wondered if wondering about whether that would be the last thing I ever wondered would be . . . But I didn't get to finish that thought. Her rifle quickly came down and she faded straight backward into the dark and was gone.

I would come to understand in the next several days, as they passed without another sniper incident, that it was her own good-bye she was speaking to me. It would make me think—and I'd feel foolish even as I thought it—that she had an affinity for me after all.

17

But I've always been a fool about women. Made only more awkward by the fact that they seem, not infrequently, to be fools about me. I walked away from my encounter with Luisa and followed the trolley tracks back toward the
zócalo,
at one point stepping aside for, but otherwise ignoring, a trolley heading in my direction. I needed to walk.

When I reached the Plaza, the sound of a salon orchestra playing a
danzon
was wafting out of the
Diligencias,
but I did not go into the
portales
to continue drinking, even to get the taste of
pulque
out of my mouth. Instead, I went straight toward my rooms to work on my story—for it was time to write about the female sniper of Vera Cruz,
La Nueva Soldadera Vera Cruz
—and I found the washer girl of the afternoon dalliance curled asleep beside my courtyard door, in the midst of being a fool about me.

“What are you doing here?” I asked as she was knuckling the sleep out of her eyes.

She looked up, and those eyes were unreadable in the dark, though it was all too familiar to me. She did not reply.

“I'm very tired, young girl,” I said, this time using
muchacha
instead of
señorita,
though gently.

“I wanted to make sure I did your laundry okay,” she said.

“You did excellently,” I said.

I gave her my hand and she rose.

“Go home to sleep now,” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“You do have a place, don't you?”

“Yes.” And her face was down, embarrassed.
I know how you're feeling,
muchacha
. This
muchacho
has to turn a girl with a gun into a headline for Chicago to be able to lift his own face.

Then she was quickly gone, this washer girl whose name I should at least ask for the next time I saw her, and I thought how, in spite of the discomfort of being a unilateral fool about somebody, the real trouble came when you both were fools about each other.

I closed my door and I sat down at my desk and I rolled a piece of paper into my Corona Portable Number 3. I typed my byline.
Christopher Cobb
. And the lead came easily:
If you invade a country with a tyrant for a president, you make some new friends but you also make some enemies. The streets of Vera Cruz have felt the wrath of a lone sniper in the first week of the U.S. occupation, and she's angry at just about everyone. Yes, it's a woman. And she's a crack shot.

And I did my eight hundred words and I told Luisa's story, though I didn't name her, and I was lucky the next morning over coffee, before I headed to the censor and the telegraph, to hear from Bunky about the shooting of the Navy man. The Bluejacket gave me three examples instead of two, which was a great deal better. And the victim broadened the targets of her anger to explicitly include Americans, which I was already suggesting in the lead. I realized I'd written that lead knowing more than I could say in the story. The pistol to my temple and the lecture by candlelight. The encounter beneath the streetlamp.

I finished the story at my table in the
portales,
writing it directly onto cable blanks, and it was a perfect ending, the Bluejacket's backside. I wrote it as it was, though I knew Clyde would euphemize the redlight district for our family readers, perhaps even so much that it would be unrecognizable to anyone other than a fellow newsman. No matter. The more immediate problem was the Army censor. But there was nothing about troops in the story, nothing strategic or even tactical revealed, and I figured the political subtleties hadn't made it onto the forbidden list yet. There was always a little time before those refinements occurred.

And I was right.

The next morning, it went through without a cut.

And I ended up, in exchange, with a telegram from New Orleans. That was quick. This is a wondrous electrical age we live in.

I didn't open it right away. I returned to the
portales,
as I'd promised Bunky, who was spending more and more time there. But the most pressing reason I headed back to the
Diligencias
was that I expected the enterprising young Diego to show up soon. I had an important job for him.

I sat down with Bunky, and he had already shifted from coffee to beer. He was starting light with
El Sol,
but there was still a long way to go, even till noon, and he'd be picking up the pace, moving on to serious drinking. I was about to call him “Pops” and tell him to slow down, but both those things were a mistake with him, so I kept my mouth shut for the moment, and I dropped into the flow of his talk when he turned his face to me and asked me a direct question. “You know who the first war correspondents were?”

“Russell and some of the others in the Crimea?” I said.

“Ancient,” Bunky said. “Try the Peloponnesian War. Those boys that ran between the battlefield and the brass for the Greeks and the Spartans. They were really the first. And you know what happened when their audience didn't like the news? The real news, the real truth? They'd kill them. Kill the messenger. Kill the newsman. Same thing.”

He looked sharply away from me.

“You okay, Bunk?” I asked.

He didn't answer.

If he went back to the beer and clammed up, I'd read what Mother had to say. He was keeping quiet and I was reaching into my pocket for the cable. But now I saw Diego coming up
Independencia
and I left the telegram where it was. Diego noticed me. He brightened and sped up.

“I'm okay,” Bunky said.

I looked at him. He still had his face turned away from me, watching the street with a little slump to his shoulders.

“I don't want to have to worry about you, B. F.,” I said. “If the snaps aren't holding your interest, let's get you back to reporting.”

He acted like he didn't hear me. Maybe he didn't.

And Diego pulled up beaming in readiness before me.

“
Mijo,
” I greeted him.
My son
. Casual. Like “sonny boy.”

His head snapped a little in surprise and his smile flared even brighter.

“You been picking pockets this morning?” I said.

He put on a pout and shrugged his shoulders. “Only the Americans,” he said.

“I'm an American.”

“Only the Americans who deserve it,” he said.

And he shocked the hell out of me by climbing up on my lap.

He was terribly thin. I realized this for the first time. A small bag of bones on my lap. He threw one arm around my neck like we were old pals drunk on a sidewalk somewhere.

“You in the process of picking my pocket?” I said.

“You don't deserve it.”

“You'll get it from me anyway.”

“I'd rather work for it,” he said.

“Picking pockets is work.”

He laughed. “I'd rather do secret stuff.”

I glanced at Bunky and he'd turned his head to watch us. I couldn't figure out his expression. In all his writing and all his talk, he was a put-it-out-there-straight kind of guy, B. F. Millerman. I'd never sensed a shred of irony in him. But I'd swear this look was ironic. Maybe it was me without a father fussing after childless Bunky like he was my old man while this Mexican kid sat on my lap like he was mine and with Bunk the de facto grandfather forced to look on when he'd rather just drink beer at nine in the morning. Maybe that was enough to make a plain-facts newsman find his hidden sense of irony.

Diego still had his arm around my neck and was patiently waiting for an assignment.

And for all my reportorial thoroughness, I realized I was missing a piece of information. So this seemed like the time to ask for it. I looked at the boy in my lap. “What's your last name?” I said.

He had his own sense of irony, this kid. Irony and larceny. Before he could speak, I added, “Don't say ‘Cobb.'”

“You don't love me anymore,
Papi
?” He said it with a straight face and then he laughed.

His calling me Spanish for
Pops
was one thing too much, after all this. I grabbed him up under the arms, though gently, and I lifted him off my lap and stood him before me. Even when I'd withdrawn them from him, my hands still felt the stark boniness of his ribs.

“Okay. Okay,” he said in English.

“Time to get serious,” I said in Spanish.

“You bet,” he said in English.

“You're my employee, right?” I said.

“You bet.” Again in English.

“So first, I want to know who you are.”

“Your employee,” he said, speaking Spanish now.

“Name.”

“Diego. This you already know.”

“Full name.”

“I am Diego Cordero Medina Espinoza.”

“You've got four names.”

“You can call me that if you like.”

“I don't think so.”

“Hey,” he said, imitating me, flapping his fingers at the street. “Diego Cordero Medina Espinoza, my employee, come here to me.”

“Diego,” I said. “Pay attention.”

He turned to me. But he was not ready to let all this go. “And you,” he said. “You are my employer. I want to know who you are.”

“You know my name.”

“Only two of them. Who are you?”

“Christopher Marlowe Cobb.”

“Only three?”

“That's plenty.”

“Christopher Marlowe Cobb,” he said, grandly.

“Call me ‘Kit,
'
” I said.

“Kit?”

“Kit.”

“That's very small,” he said.

“Like the point of a very sharp knife,” I said.

Diego Cordero Medina Espinoza laughed.

“Serious now,” I said. “Business.”

He wound the laugh down and waited.

I looked around. The nearest reporter was Davis in his usual spot, out of earshot several tables away, writing furiously onto cable blanks.

I lowered my voice and said to Diego, “There's a U.S. silver dollar in it this time.”

“All right, boss,” he said, sounding like my employee, and since I considered myself as devoid of sentimentality as Bunky was of irony, I was surprised to feel a beat or two of regret at this.

But at least before I spoke to him, I flagged a waiter and ordered a couple of boiled eggs. Then I said, low, “The Germans have a special place on
Cinco de Mayo
just off
Esteban Morales
.”

“I know this place,” Diego said, in a near whisper. “I saw the flag there. Black stripe, white stripe, red stripe.”

“Exactly. That's their consulate. Where the German government is represented.”

“That man from the ship is there?”

I was about to confirm this—I even opened my mouth to speak—when it struck me that he had no way of knowing about the man if he had, in fact, beat it up the
calle
at the harbor, like he made a show of doing, and stayed there. He came back and shadowed all of us.

I closed my mouth without making a sound. Diego had been watching me closely. He knew what just dawned on me. Of course he did. I suddenly doubted if this kid made any slips. He'd deliberately let me know that he knew. And that he was good at all this.

“Yes,” I said. “The tall man. He has a scar on his cheek.”

“I should come get you when he goes out?”

“I bet you're good at following people as well.”

He smiled.

“Follow him around and tell me where he goes, what he does. I don't want him to see me yet.”

Diego gave a quick, deliberately sloppy salute. His body made the little flex and lift as if he was about to turn and dash off.

“Hang on,” I said. I pulled out a handful of pesos. “I want you on the job, so if I give you these, do you promise to use them to eat?”

“Sure, boss,” he said, grabbing the money.

“We'll start in a couple of minutes. Go on out there where I can see you till the waiter comes. Those eggs I ordered were for you.”

He looked me in the eyes very steadily for a moment. And I didn't have a clue about what was going on in his head. Ten years old tops and he could make himself unreadable. I thought:
He'll be a dangerous adult, this kid. Or a great one. Or both.
Then he nodded and slipped out to the sidewalk.

Bunky had propped up his head with an elbow on the table and his palm to his cheek.

I pulled out Mother's telegram.

So I warned her in my last cable to be very careful about working in a Storyville brothel, no matter how swank. Even though I did it mostly in the subtext, quoting Marlowe, I was expecting a hard pinch on the cheek from her in one way or another. And Mother delivered.

She wrote:
Dearest Kit. Like untuned golden strings all women are, which long time lie untoucht will harshly jar. Vessels of brass oft handled brightly shine. You live your life and I'll live mine. Your loving mother

This was also Christopher Marlowe, except for the salutation, complimentary close, and the line about minding my own business, which she'd even improvised into rhyme from her onstage talents. That was good advice, minding my own business. I did not want to ponder the subtext of this quote and what she might be doing in New Orleans. That was a story I would not cover.