El Paso: A Novel (33 page)

MEANTIME, FIERRO HAD ARRIVED AT THE MAIN HOUSE
with more of his men. The first person he saw who looked halfway official was Señora Pardenas.

“Where do they keep the money?” Fierro asked.

“Who am I to know?” she replied.

“If you value your life, you’ll take me to somebody who does,” Fierro stated. He was in no mood for word-fencing.

“They all gone away,” said the señora.

Just then Rodriguez turned up with unfortunate timing. He’d come to see if the phone was working. Rodriguez figured since the Colonel had been driving the herd around the clock for two days, he’d probably be about sixty or seventy miles north by now. He was wondering if he ought not send somebody to the telegraph station at Parral, which might get a message through to the Colonel that Villa’s men had returned to Valle del Sol. After all, a herd that size wasn’t hard to spot. In any case, it was worth a try, or so Rodrigez thought, until he stumbled upon the scene between Fierro and Señora Pardenas.

“What’s your authority around here?” Fierro demanded.

With the fate of his predecessor freshly in mind, Rodriguez responded, “I just work here.”

But Fierro had already noticed the notebooks sticking out of Rodriguez’s shirt pockets and he observed that he was of Spanish, not Indian, descent, and didn’t look or dress like an ordinary ranch hand.

“Where do they keep the money?” Fierro said coldly.

“How would I know that?” Rodrigez told him. It was an ill-starred reply, after Señora Pardenas’s earlier demurral.

Without so much as a wince, Butcher Fierro drew his pistol and shot Rodriguez between the eyes. The bullet sent him sprawling in a grisly, bloody heap.

The general then got down from his horse and, brushing the horrified Señora Pardenas aside, strode into the great hall, where so many dances had been held. His men followed, fanning out into adjacent rooms. It wasn’t long before one of the soldiers reappeared before Fierro with a pleased expression.

“General,” he declared, “I think we found it.” He led Fierro through a parlor into some kind of office, where along a wall was a huge safe adorned with elaborate engravings and gold leaf. It certainly looked important. The general tried the handle but of course the thing was locked, causing him to conclude that valuables must be inside.

“Bring me Chavez,” Fierro barked. Chavez was one of the general’s bootlickers who had made an abbreviated career of bank robbery before joining the revolution—abbreviated because on his second outing he was caught and thrown in jail, where he languished until Pancho Villa’s troops liberated the prison and made soldiers out of the inmates.

“Somebody got any dynamite?” Chavez asked after examining the safe.

“I’m sure some of Mix’s people got some,” replied Fierro. He sent a man to find out. They used a lot of dynamite to blow up bridges and trestles, and many people in Mix’s command had come from the mines, where the use of explosives was common. Shortly the man returned with a canvas sack containing the dynamite. Fierro gave it to Chavez, who peered into the sack.

“Well?” the general said impatiently.

“I only used this once,” Chavez said reluctantly. “Actually, the other guy was the one who used it. I just watched.”

“Then you better have a good memory,” Fierro told him, “because I’m going outside, and when I come back, I want to know what’s in this safe. He strode out of the room. Chavez shrugged and began fiddling with the dynamite.

After a while Chavez appeared in the main doorway of Valle del Sol. “General,” he said, “I have lit the fuse. It will be only a—”

Suddenly there was a gigantic, earthshaking explosion belching fire and smoke, followed by a rain of plaster, glass, and wood. A heavy wooden door landed in a fountain in the courtyard.

Chavez was shot through the air and landed facedown in a rose garden. General Fierro was knocked flat along with half a dozen of his men. Everybody’s horses ran off. All the windows in the hacienda were shattered and the whole front part of the building seemed to sag.

“Are you crazy?” Fierro shouted at Chavez. “I didn’t tell you to blow the house up!”

“I guess maybe I used more than necessary,” replied Chavez, who had turned over and was sitting upright in the rose garden. “I figured you were in a hurry.”

“Well,” Fierro said, “let’s go find out what happened.” He stuck his head inside the house, which was still belching acrid gray smoke. They plowed their way through wrecked furniture and cracked beams and broken plaster until they got to the office, a scene of amazing devastation. Burned papers were strewn everywhere. A huge hole was blown in the rug and down through the floor. Draperies were on fire and the side of the building where the window had been was torn away. Desks and chairs were smashed and smoldering. Everything was ruined but the safe, which stood almost untouched. Fierro inspected it, then turned savagely on Chavez, who was cringing in a corner.

“You stinking imbecile!” he hissed. “Where did you place the dynamite?”

“On the floor, by the safe,” Chavez told him.

“Floor!” the general shouted. “Why?”

“It’s where the guy that was robbing the bank with me put it,” Chavez replied.

“So how come it didn’t it work?” Fierro demanded.

“It didn’t work then, either,” Chavez informed him. “That was when we got arrested.”

Fierro lunged as if to strike Chavez, when Mix suddenly stuck his head through the door.

“Everything okay, General?” Mix asked. After hearing the explosion, he’d left Timmy with some of his men to investigate.

“Hell, no!” replied Fierro. “This idiot calls himself a bank robber and can’t even blow a safe.”

Mix looked at the safe, then went over and inspected it closely. “Well, if you want, I could give it a try,” he said.

“You? You are a safecracker, too, I suppose?”

“Long time ago, when I was just a kid. Guy said he was called Black Bart come through town, said for a dollar he’d teach anybody who wanted to know how to pick a lock or open a safe. Couple of us boys scraped up some money and went to his exhibition. I used to do it as a stunt in Wild West shows—getting out of handcuffs and stuff, like that guy Houdini’s doing now.”

“Well, go ahead, then,” Fierro told him. Mix bent down and put his ear to the safe right above the lock. It was still hot from the explosion. He turned the knob this way and that half a dozen times.

“I need a lot of quiet,” Mix said. “See, when I turn this dial, at some spot in the rotation it’s going to pass one of the tumblers and make a tiny little noise. That’s part of the combination. It’s a process of elimination and it takes a while. I might be able to get it open.”

“Well, we’ll leave you alone, then,” Fierro said, scowling at Chavez, who was still hovering in his corner. “C’mon, you moron,” the general said. “Let’s leave this man to his work.”

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Crucia’s steer roundup was in progress, though not without difficulty. For one thing, the fighting bulls had killed several of the soldiers’ horses, and in one case tossed a rider half a dozen feet into the air, then gored him to death on the ground. But finally the men either shot or separated most of the bulls from the steers and were herding the steers out the pasture gate. There was still at least one bull left among them, but no one could get at him or even shoot him without killing steers. He seemed tame enough for the moment, among the steers, and it was decided to move the herd with the fighting bull as part of it.

“General, I have opened your safe,” Mix proudly announced from the hacienda doorway. They all marched inside and Fierro began rooting through the contents. Something in the very bottom caught his eye. In a bin were eight or ten oilcloth sacks. He picked one up and became excited. Its very weight told him something. The bag was tied with a leather string and Fierro opened it and looked inside.

“
Eiyeeeee, caramba!
” he cried. Each sack contained bars of solid gold stamped with the emblem of the mint in Mexico City. “There must be—who can tell? Three, four hundred pounds, maybe more!” Fierro ordered several men to remove the bags and he personally supervised loading it onto their horses. He also emptied into his own saddlebags several dozen of the gold bars. Certainly enough to keep a man wealthy for a while. He wondered why Villa hadn’t thought to pillage the place on their last visit, but in any case he, Fierro, had done a thorough job of it this time, bringing to the army not only the beefs and two valuable hostages, but a hoard of solid gold. So far as the general was concerned, it had become a very good day.

THIRTY-FOUR

S
eñora Gonzales and her cooks tended to Xenia and Beatie. Both had nasty cuts and contusions on their heads.

Bomba appeared worse off. It took four of Gonzales’s men to carry him into the house, where Gonzales put him on a bed and gave him a bottle of tequila, which Bomba declined. Then Gonzales inexpertly probed for the bullet in Bomba’s shoulder. After a while he gave up. He walked out to the Packard and examined the dashboard, in which he found a big hole through the speedometer. It occurred to him that he could have spared Bomba a lot of torment if he had realized from the start that since there were holes in both the front and back of the shoulder, the bullet had obviously exited.

He returned to the house and examined Bomba again. The huge man’s eyes were impassive; Gonzales couldn’t understand why he didn’t cry out. There wasn’t too much bleeding, he noted, so at least an artery hadn’t been cut. And when he moved the shoulder he couldn’t feel any evidence of broken bone, either. Maybe it was a clean through-and-through. In any case, Gonzales swabbed the flesh with iodine and dressed it with bandages and gauze.

Xenia was beside herself when she was told about the children; a horror beyond nightmares. She tried to sort it out rationally but her mind raced so fast she couldn’t think.

How had they let it happen?

She began to blame Arthur and the Colonel, but quickly decided that blame was just a way of avoiding the question of how to get the kids back. She suddenly wanted her father. He might be a dumb Pittsburgh Polack, but for the first time in her marriage—including the terrible business with Mick—Xenia felt completely alone and isolated.

Beatie was plenty distressed herself and could do little to comfort her. Nobody knew what to do. Here they were, in the middle of nowhere, and a bloodthirsty bandit had kidnapped her grandchildren while her husband and son were off on an insane cattle drive somewhere in the wilds of Mexico. What sleep either woman got that night was restive.

Only Bomba had a plan, such as it was.

The ranch hands determined that Fierro’s bunch had headed east toward Valle del Sol, probably for the big hacienda, but didn’t see any sense in giving chase, since they were outnumbered ten-to-one. Bomba had stayed up much of the night, and as the shock of the wound wore off he decided to get in the Packard and head for Valle del Sol himself. He could make a lot better time than men on horseback. Once he got there, he didn’t have a plan at all, but hoped one would evolve. He felt feverish, but was able to move his arm a little.

At daybreak, Bomba put on a pair of jodhpurs and a khaki sweater and set out for Valle del Sol, where he arrived an hour or so later. The household staff greeted him with tears and hand-wringing, all of them vying to tell him what had happened. He couldn’t understand much, but could see some of it for himself: part of the house was destroyed and still smoldering. Rodrigez’s corpse was laid out on a table on the veranda, a bullet through his head. From what Bomba apprehended, the soldiers had taken off less than eight hours earlier, headed toward Chihuahua City, driving steers before them. The tracks led across fields toward a distant woods. The Packard would be of no use to him now.

He went to the barn and indicated to a cowhand he wanted a horse. The cowhand saddled up a big bay. Bomba stepped up to the animal to mount it but the horse tossed its head and sidestepped away.

“No, no,” shouted the cowboy. “You’re on the wrong side. You got to get up on his left side.”

Bomba looked at the man, puzzled. He’d never ridden a horse, but figured there couldn’t be that much to it. The cowhand took the horse by the reins and indicated for Bomba to board on the horse’s left. Bomba tried again but this time put the wrong foot in the stirrup, a mistake he quickly realized even before he hoisted himself off the ground.

“Look here,” said the cowhand. The reins in his left hand, he put his left foot in the stirrup and mounted the horse. Then he got down and handed the reins to Bomba, who nodded back in recognition. This time he got it right. He shook the reins and the horse walked slowly out of the barn and into the road. Bomba’s injured right arm hung limply by his side but he was able to guide the horse with his left. Everything he had become was now lost: his charges, the children, gone away with murderers. All these years he’d been immensely proud that no harm had come to anyone in the Shaughnessy family. But now Bomba felt deeply ashamed and personally humiliated. He looked north, where he could see the tracks of many cattle. Then, as he’d watched the Colonel do many times, he kicked his horse in its flanks. The animal, straining under Bomba’s enormous bulk, reared slightly, then flew into a wild gallop in the direction of Chihuahua City, with Bomba hanging on for whatever he was worth.

THIRTY-FIVE

T
hat same day, Johnny Ollas’s party had seen dust from several miles away, which they mistook for Villa’s army. Johnny sent Julio to investigate but he returned to report it was just somebody moving a lot of cows. Julio hadn’t gotten a look at the whole herd; he’d just topped a ridge when he saw part of the drove in the distance. In any case, Johnny kept on the route to Chihuahua City. By early afternoon they were still about twenty miles away, when they encountered the first of Villa’s retreating troops.

Villa had ordered the withdrawal early that morning when the stubborn Federales refused to budge from Chihuahua City. Indeed, the expedition was a disaster; he’d lost more than half of his remaining army killed, wounded, and captured, and the rest were exhausted and demoralized.