Hazards (21 page)

And sure enough, all five of ’em had sunk into the muck and mire past their knees, and they were stuck there.

Suddenly I saw the Uruguayan infantry break cover and race over toward the bus.

“Take us back to Montevideo,” said one of ’em to the driver.

“Don’t you want to save your fearless leaders?” I asked.

“They aren’t fearless, and they’re not our leaders. We only came with them because they told us Madame Fifi had opened a new branch here.”

I turned to my army. “How about you guys?” I said. “You want to save any of these here colonels?”

“No!” they said in unison.

“You sure?” I said. “After all, you won a whole country for ’em. They might want to give you a slice of it.”

“They would, too, the bastards!” said Pablo passionately.

“I’m not quite sure I follow that particular line of reasoning,” I said.

“It’s hard enough just to keep our block clean,” he said. “Who wants to be in charge of cleaning a whole country?”

I could see where his sentiments lay, so I didn’t try to talk him out of it. Then I took one last look at the combatants. Hans was explaining that the mud wouldn’t hamper three guys as much as two, and José was answering that any mathematician would know that two guys were one-third less likely to be hampered, and then Wilhelm said he hadn’t eaten all day and Miguel said that as soon as he got loose he’d cut Guenther into pieces and feed him to Wilhelm, and Hans snickered and said that his knife would be so rusty by then that it wouldn’t cut through Wilhelm’s flesh, and pretty soon they were back to yelling and cursing at each other, and I noticed that all their noise had attracted a bunch of curious spectators, most of which had four legs and long whiskers and were covered with spots, and that seemed like an appropriate time to leave all them would-be conquerors behind, because the real conquerors had just showed up.

We dropped the Uruguayan army off in Montevideo, then turned the nose of the bus back to Buenos Aires. We stopped by Salto, but there wasn’t no sign of none of the colonels, though we did see some mighty fat, contented jaguars.

Me and the Argentine army got off in the middle of town, they decided to go back to their jobs and their womenfolk, and as for me, I’d had my fill of conquering countries and decided it was time to start plundering them. I’d heard of some forgotten kingdoms off to the west that were filled to overflowing with priceless gems and liberal-minded high priestesses, and I decided then and there to go grab my share of both. But as you will see, it wasn’t quite as easy as it sounds….

A Four-Sided Triangle

There wasn’t a whole lot of white folks in La Paz back in the spring of 1937, but them what was there all remember what happened, all the romantic intrigues and double crosses and blazing guns and the like, and they’ve codified it in song and story what’s come down to their descendants and a bunch of scholars who ain’t got nothing better to do with their time, and it’s gotten so famous that these days I think they’re even talking about making a movie or two about it.

So before you get any further misled, I want to tell you
my
side of the story.

As readers what’s been breathlessly following my heroic exploits and encounters in South America will know, I’d just finished waging a secret war of conquest against Uruguay. (In fact, it was so secret that not a single history book even mentions it.) I’d tooken my leave of Buenos Aires and the passenger bus from which me and six street cleaners (well, five active, one unemployed) had launched our lightning strike across the border, and I heard talk of some hidden city called Macho something-or-other up in Peru.

Well, right off I knew it was my kind of place, since the one thing a city named Macho figgered to have in abundance was a bunch of scarlet women what was there to help all the men kind of exert their machoness. I figgered I was less than a thousand miles from it when I ran a little short of funds. Now, I could see that the locals was mostly uneducated peasants and probably couldn’t count up to twenty-one if I was to introduce a complex game like blackjack, so instead I taught ’em how to play a sporting game with a pair of six-sided cubes that only required ’em to count up to twelve.

Turn out that at least it was right in theory. To this day I don’t know if any of ’em could count to twenty-one unless the Good Lord guv ’em an extra finger or toe, but they sure could count up to three, which was how many dice hit the ground when my spare accidentally tumbled out of my sleeve.

Which is how I came to spend the next six nights in the calaboose at Cochabomba, which sounds like Bubbles La Tour’s specialty dance at the Rialto Burlesque back in my home town of Moline, Illinois, but was actually this here village what lay directly between me and paydirt, which is to say Buenos Aires and Macho-whatever-its-name-was.

Still, the grub wasn’t all that bad, especially if you had a taste for dirt-flavored salamanders and warm water with stuff floating in it. At least the salamanders was mostly dead and the water was mostly wet, which was better than a lot of hoosegows I’ve been in.

I was still planning on heading to Peru to find a lost empire or two when I sat down to play a game of checkers through the bars of my cell with Diego, who was the sheriff and cook and janitor all rolled into one fat old man with a droopy mustache. He wasn’t no happier hanging around the jailhouse than I was, but he looked a lot better fed.

“You know,” he said, as he moved a checker, “this jail has sat empty for three years.”

“You don’t say,” I answered. “No wonder all the snakes and rats are so lonely and rarin’ for a little companionship.”

“Then,” he continued, “all of a sudden, three men in three weeks—and all of them English speakers.” He lit a cigar and looked like he was thinking of offering me one, and then decided not to. “It would be bad for your health.”

“Ain’t it bad for yours, too?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “But then, I eat a diet that is not guaranteed to kill me, my poor
amigo
.”

“Getting back to them two other English speakers…” I said.

“It is most unusual,” he said. “Not only that I have had to arrest three in a row, but also that you all practice honorable vocations—a military man, a gentleman farmer, and a minister.”

“What in tunket was an English-speaking military man doing here?” I asked.

“He threatened to kill another man,” said Diego. “I gather it was an affair of the heart.”

It’s been my long and interesting experience that affairs of the heart usually start about two feet lower, but I didn’t feel like getting into no esoteric philosophical argument, so I just allowed that affairs of the heart could be mighty heartfelt and that I hoped he hadn’t been busted a rank or two in his outfit.

“Oh, he is retired,” said Diego. He rummaged in his pocket for a minute, pulled out a crumpled business card, straightened it out, and read it: “Major Theodore Dobbins, late of His Majesty’s armed forces.”

“You want to say that name again?” I asked.

“Major Theodore Dobbins.”

“Got a mustache?” I said. “Always dresses in black—shirt, pants, jacket, tie, socks, probably even his shorts?”

“That’s the man!” said Diego. “I take it you know him?”

“Truth to tell, I’d kind of wished I was all through knowing him. What’s he doing here?”

“He is engaged to marry the Baroness Abigail Walters.”

“That don’t sound like a name what goes with that title,” I noted.

“She uses her maiden name, but in truth she is the widow of the Baron Gruenwald von Schimmelmetz,” said Diego. “That makes her the richest woman in Bolivia, and the biggest landowner as well. They say she is worth eight hundred million American dollars.”

“Now ain’t that amazing?” I said in wonderment.

“That a woman could be the richest citizen in Bolivia?” he asked.

I shook my head. “That Major Dobbins could sniff her out all the way from South Africa,” I told him.

“He is a fortune hunter?” asked Diego.

“He’s kind of like Frank Buck,” I said. “He finds a rich widow and he brings her back alive. To start with, anyway.”

“I strongly disapprove of that,” said Diego, with a frown that wrinkled up his big bushy eyebrows. “Perhaps it is just as well that he has a rival for the Baroness’s hand.”

I was about to ask him how he’d figgered it out so fast, since I hadn’t known myself until maybe half a minute ago, but he kept right on talking.

“Yes,” he said, “at first I thought the Australian interloper was a fortune hunter himself, just out to make trouble. After all, when I queried Interpol I learned that he’d been a jewel thief in Hong Kong, a gigolo in Rajasthan, and the owner of a house of ill repute in the notorious Reeperbahn district of Hamburg. Still, he behaved with a courtesy befitting a gentleman of his social class while he was my guest here, and I feel he was genuinely sorry for shooting those three men in a fit of pique.”

“I don’t want to start no argument with you or ruin your high opinion of him,” I said, “but most gentlemen of Rupert Cornwall’s social class spend their last few minutes on earth dancing at the end of a rope.”

“Then you know this Cornwall too?”

“We’ve run across each other a few times,” I allowed. I hoped Diego had confiscated Cornwall’s gun, since I couldn’t be sure he’d forgotten our last couple of encounters, and he’d never struck me as the kind of man what hankered to be first in line to let bygones be bygones.

“Well, since arriving, he, too, is paying court to the Baroness.”

“What does she look like?” I asked, since a man always ought to know that about the woman of his dreams.

“Ah, Señor,” he said sadly, “Nature has not been kind to her. Her eyes do not always look in the same direction. Her nose…well, it reminds one of the proboscis monkey. She is missing her two front teeth on the top, and the Baron shot the only dentist in La Paz six years ago.”

“And the rest of her?”

He shook his head. “She is hard in all the places a woman should be soft, flat in all the places a woman should be round, and soft in all the places a woman should be hard.”

“But besides that, she’s okay?” I said.

“I do not believe you have been listening to me,” said Diego.

“Eight hundred million dollars buys a lot of make-up and padding and corsets,” I said.

“It can’t cover the wart on her nose, or the shrillness of her voice or the evil glint in her eyes (whatever direction they happen to be looking),” he said.

“Tread easy, there, Diego,” I warned him. “You are speaking of the woman I intend to love.”

He just shrugged. “You world-traveling English speakers are all alike. Show you the richest widow in the country, and you descend on her like…”—it was his turn to search for the right word—“like a pack of tarantulas.”

“I didn’t know they traveled in packs,” I said.

“Until recently I didn’t know
you
did either,” he replied.

“You got it all wrong, Brother Diego,” I said. “I’m the only one what’s descending on the poor loveless lonely widow woman.”

“What about Major Dobbins and Señor Cornwall?” he asked.

“They’re belly-crawling scum what would have to
ascend
on her.”

“I suppose that makes all the difference,” he said without much sincerity.

“Sure it does,” I said. “Besides, them two ain’t got a chance next to a handsome young buck like me.”

“Young?”
he said, cocking a bushy eyebrow.

I thunk about it for a minute.

“Well, I was young when I started out on this here odyssey,” I said. “I was only twenty-two when I was kind of forcibly asked to leave the U.S. of A.”

“It took you a long time to get here,” said Diego.

“I stopped at a few places along the way,” I allowed. “I think I hit fourteen countries in Africa, before I was invited to depart and never come back. I guess I must have been twenty-six then.”

“Which country asked you to leave?”

“All of ’em,” I said.

“
All
of them?” he repeated.

“I don’t play no favorites,” I told him. “Anyway, I tried my hand in Asia next. China, India, Japan, all them other foreign places.”

“How many?” he asked.

“Oh, maybe seven or eight. Could have been ten. Converted a lot of yellow and brown heathen before I left. Hope they stayed on the straight and narrow path I set ’em on.”

“You could always go back and see,” said Diego.

“And when eight or nine more judges and a couple of kings and sultans and maybe an emperor or two die, that’s just what I plan to do,” I said.

“They kicked you off the whole continent again?” he asked in amazement.

“Nobody kicked nobody,” I said. “They just guv me a train ticket, pointed a battalion’s worth of rifles at me, and wished me Godspeed on my way to Europe.”

“How long were you there?”

“Five years.”

“So you were thrown off three continents by the time you were thirty-one?” he said. “How about Europe?”

“Nice place,” I said. “I was even king of my own country for a few days. I guess I must have visited, oh, maybe eleven or twelve countries. Real nice folk, except for them what wasn’t. Most of ’em didn’t speak no civilized language, and they were all godless sinners, but except for that we got along right well.”

“And you were there for…?”

“Three years.”

“It only took them three years this time?” he said, his eyes wide with wonder, and I could tell that even a man of the world like Diego was impressed.

“A series of minor misunderstandings, nothing more,” I said. “One of these days I plan to go back and straighten them all out.”

“And where have you been in South America?” asked Diego.

“Well, let’s see,” I said. “I landed in San Palmero in 1934, and then I hit Brazil, and Argentina, and the Pampas (wherever that is), and, let me see now, Uruguay…oh, and Columbia, and the Lost Continent of Moo, and…”

“The Lost Continent of Moo?” he interrupted.

“Well, it ain’t as lost as it was,” I assured him. “And now here I am in Bolivia, and I was on my way Peru before I heard about the grieving widow woman and my soft Christian heart just went out to her.”

“But you haven’t been to Chile?”

“Nope. Never felt any inclination to go there.”

“You’re sure?” he insisted.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I said. “Why?”

He mopped the sweat off his face and leaned back, suddenly all relaxed. “I have family in Chile,” he said.

“Well, I suppose me and the bride could take our honeymoon there, if you got any notes or parcels you want me to deliver,” I said.

“NO!”
he shouted. I just kind of looked at him. “I would not want you to go to the trouble, Reverend Jones,” he added quickly. “They say that Venezuela is beautiful for honeymoons this time of year.”

“That’s right generous of you, Brother Diego,” I said. “And me and the little lady’ll sure consider it. I also want to thank you for this little chat, because if we hadn’t had it I’d never have realized I was getting on to thirty-seven, and while there ain’t no question that I still look like a twenty-four-year-old movie star in his prime, I figger it’s probably time to settle down, build my tabernacle, marry my heart’s desire, and spend my next eighty or ninety years managing her money so she’s free to do the dishes and wash the clothes and slop the hogs.”

“What about your two rivals?” he asked.

“I’m a generous winner,” I said magnanimously. “They can help with the hogs. What’s the minimum wage in these here parts?”

He told me, but it was so small it didn’t translate into dollars and cents, and then we finished our checkers game, and he checked the time—he didn’t have no watch, but when the church bell rang fourteen times he knew it was either two in the afternoon or the bellringer was drunk again—and I’d served my time and I was a free man.

“So where is the Baroness’s house?” I asked.

He pointed off in the distance. “On the other side of La Paz, Reverend Jones.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Next time me and the Good Lord are having a pow-wow, I’ll put in a good word for you.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Remember: my name is Alejandro Sanchez.”

“I thunk it was Diego something-or-other,” I said.

“I changed it,” he replied quickly. “Remember, when you are talking about me with God, I am Alejandro.”

“Got it, Brother Alejandro,” I said. “And good day to you.”

I headed off toward La Paz, but we was at about ten thousand feet of altitude, and I found that even though I’m a natural athlete what’s in great shape and smack-dab in the middle of his physical prime, I started getting leg-weary.

“Hey, Brother Alejandro!” I called. “I’m exhausted!”