The Hot Country (14 page)

I heard screaming. Distant screaming.

I stopped. I was on both my feet. He was down against the ground.

I heard screaming. Nearby now. Very loud. Krüger was screaming.

I looked at his arm. I'd let it go. It was lying nearly flat across his back.

I looked down along his body and I saw his right leg splayed out from under him, the angle all wrong at the knee.

I was breathing fast and heavy and it was like I wasn't breathing at all, my lungs felt utterly empty, and I slowed it down, slowed it all down. I thought about what this all was. I started to actually feel the air I was drawing into me. I was breathing. I was slowing down.

I could hear Krüger struggling to control the screaming, struggling to be a man, though the low sobbing moan that abruptly took over for the scream must have embarrassed him just as much.

I turned to Diego, who was pressed back against the warehouse wall. His eyes were wide.

“Are you okay?” I managed to say, though my voice was thin and soft.

He nodded yes.

Krüger had gone quiet. I looked down at him. He was lying face forward, his head turned to the side, his face pressed against the dirt, his mouth gaping. I thought he'd passed out from the pain. But his lips seemed to be trying to move and he was starting to moan again.

He'd chosen this.

Diego and I had to go.

But before we did, I had to understand for certain what my instincts had told me a short time ago.

I leaned down and grabbed Krüger's torso and I tried to turn him over onto his back. He moaned loud as he turned, and his arm stayed twisted and vanished beneath him, keeping him from going flat, but I could see his dark shirtfront. I clearly made out a darker, faintly glistening stain there, a great dark stain splashed upon his chest. Krüger had known that he would be covered in Gerhard's blood and that his dark clothes would hide the stains for his return to the consulate.

I looked back to Diego. He had not moved. His eyes were not quite so wide now, but he was still frozen there.

I took a step toward him. My legs were unsteady. But I focused. I took another step.

And for a moment Diego pulled away from me. Ever so slightly. But I could see his shoulders go back, his face tighten, his eyes freeze.

It made no difference that my violence was in his defense. For one terrible moment—as terrible for me as for him—I was his
papi
coming for him.

I stopped. And the moment flickered and passed. The moment passed. He was looking at
me
again, not at his father. He knew it was me again.

“You sure you're all right?” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“You caught him outside, coming back to the consulate,” I said, more a statement than a question, though Diego understood that I was asking.

He nodded yes.

“You tried to hit him up for a reward for finding the wallet.”

He nodded yes.

“Will you ever learn to do what I say?”

He nodded yes.

We just looked at each other. For one breath, and another.

Then I said, “Thanks for the stone.” He'd probably saved my life. And he could not have known that I'd thrown one only a few moments before.

Diego said, “David and Goliath. I am a good Catholic son.”

I turned back to Krüger. He murdered Gerhard. I had no doubt. I thought to kill him. Right now. Take his own knife, which was lying a few feet away, and do the justice that, in this time and place and circumstance and considering the victim's secrets and the killer's diplomatic status, I knew would not be done.

The part of me that sounded so reasonable making this case but raged wildly beneath, that part wanted to do this thing, wanted to kill this son of a Prussian whore. But the other part of me that trembled now in muscle and nerve from what I'd done so far and yet was calm beneath, that part wanted me to live my life the way I'd always lived it, at observant peace amid war, watching, writing, taking care. Gerhard and Krüger could eventually come to justice through my printed words. Let God be God; I'd be Christopher Marlowe Cobb.

I knew I was being watched. Not from heaven. From a few feet away.

I turned again to Diego. My high-energy little street punk was still pressed against the warehouse wall, had still barely moved a muscle. His eyes had grown wide again, as if he knew what I was considering.

Krüger was beginning to moan once more. I turned back to him. I took a step. Diego gasped a little. I did not stop. I would not kill Krüger, but if he was going to live, then he had to understand.

I stood over him. He was still partly on his back. His eyes fluttered open now. I bent near his face. His eyes closed and then opened, not in a flutter but in a single, waking gesture. I waited. I waited for his eyes to fix on me.

I watched something surge silently in him. He cut off a moan. He was fully conscious. He knew who was before him.

I said, “The next time I see you.” And I paused to let it sink in. His eyes focused, flared. “The next time,” I said, “I will kill you.” And I meant it.

I straightened up. I turned to Diego. I gave him a snap of the head toward the light at the far end of the corridor between the warehouses and he was off at once, at a run, and I was following him.

25

Diego led me to a tiny, cobbled-together hovel—once fully adobe but now
el Norte­-
ravaged and patched with smears of cement, a panel of scrounged wood, a rusted sheet of tin. I could hear a woman's voice—a sweetly wavery woman's voice—singing within. I looked at Diego, who heard this too, and he shot me a brow-furrowed glance. His mother. He was embarrassed.

“It's good,” I said, meaning something that Diego surely didn't get. This neighborhood of hovels was piled everywhere with great heaps of long-rotting garbage. The smell was a different kind of putrid but just about as intense as the next-afternoon smell of untouched carnage on a Nicaraguan battlefield, and the slop beneath our feet had run straight from the waste buckets of these households. But she sang. I was instantly sure that some of the good I saw in Diego was due to his mother singing in the midst of all this, and my little
chulo callejero
didn't get it. Maybe he would someday.

She sang that her lover should not give the mole next to his lip to anyone's mouth but hers and she moved into the refrain:
Ay, ay, ay, ay, Canta y no llores, Porque cantando se alegran, Cielito lindo, los corazónes.
Sing and don't cry, was the message. Singing gladdens the heart.

Diego flung up the palm of his hand at me and darted ahead through his door and out of sight. I stopped and waited. All right. Not quite the verse of the song he might have liked me to hear from his mother. There was singing and there was singing. And I thought of my mother singing in Storyville, and I preferred to just take a deep breath of this neighborhood and clear my head of that.

The singing stopped. The hut was quiet. Diego appeared in the doorway and motioned for me to enter. It struck me now: He never questioned that he would bring me along to where he lived. We didn't say a word about it, but after he and I, together, lived through the moment when he was to be knifed to death as a child, after we caught that particle of time and deflected it elsewhere, this was where we needed to go. Together.

I moved to the door and I stepped in. His mother was sitting cross-legged on a rush mat in the center of the floor, a dark shirt I recognized as Diego's crumpled in her lap, a needle and thread placed upon it so she could receive me. The walls of the one room were bare and there were half a dozen sleeping mats around the edges of the floor, one with about a six-year-old girl, cornstalk-thin, asleep on her side, one with a half-naked toddler boy who looked like he was on the verge of tears but did not make a sound, one with a chicken picking at it, having wandered in through the open back door, where I could see other dwellings like this one arranged around a common ground with a stone washtub and pump in the middle.

Diego wasn't clean. Never had been. He was smudged and he was ragged around the edges, but he always looked better than this place. He hadn't prepared me for this.

His mother was probably not much past thirty but looked to be fifty. She was mixed dark, Aztec but with some evident Spanish blood in her from randy hacienda owners having their way with various generations of her grandmothers. She wore a faded green sleeveless dress. A brown scapular on a cord hung around her neck.

She lifted her round face to me—I could see Diego there—and she smiled. “You are good to my boy,” she said.

“He is a good boy,” I said.

And she straightened at this, lifted her eyebrows.

I felt Diego rustling next to me. I wondered if it was at my praise or at his mother's resistance to it.

“He is a thief,” she said.

“He does what he needs to do,” I said.

And now she sank a little into herself, her eyebrows fell, her eyes went dark.
Yes,
she was thinking.
And is that not my fault?

“He would have it another way,” I said. I looked at Diego, who startled me slightly in his face already being lifted to mine, as if it had been there all along, and he had that intense attention of his focused on me. I said, “Isn't that right, Diego Cordero Medina y Espinoza?”

“Yes sir,” he said.

“I was married to his father,” his mother said.

I knew that from Diego's two last names. Most couples among the urban poor of Mexico did not formally marry. The State required both civil and religious ceremonies, and the custom when they went through these formalities was for the children to take the surnames of both parents. But the formal marriages were too expensive for the poor. And when the man and woman didn't marry, their children could take only the father's name. Diego's parents somehow managed to have the ceremony. If they had not, he would simply have been Diego Cordero Espinoza.

“I understand,” I said. “You both have done what you need to do.”

She smiled at me. “You will drink with us? Some
pulque?
And there is some fruit.”

“Yes,” I said, “thank you.” And I sat on the floor before her, and Diego sat beside me, and we ate figs and bananas, and the mother looked at her son when she served the figs and she said “These are stolen,” and I said nothing, but Diego stirred beside me and I knew he was looking at me and I thanked his mother for the fruit and then we drank
pulque
together, Diego and his mother and I. And though I knew I hated the stuff and though the air around me stank from the way of life in this place, I touched her tin cup and Diego's and I drank, and the
pulque
tasted okay. The
pulque
tasted pretty damn good.

26

Diego's mother rose when I rose to go and she held my offered hand with both of hers. I put my other hand on top and squeezed very gently. Though I expected him to get pissed at me for doing it, I said again to her, “You have a good boy. He will make you proud.”

I was happy to see not a single flicker of surprise in her face.

“Thank you,” she said.

Diego walked with me away from his house, and we stopped and faced each other. We both knew that tomorrow I would slip onto the train to follow Mensinger far up-country, and it was unclear where I would end up and when I might see Diego again. I put my hand inside my shirt, opened a flap of the money belt and I found a certain sort of coin by shape and heft. I pulled it out and bent down so I was eye-to-eye with Diego. I held up the coin between us.

His eyes went wide and I was feeling bad—more than bad, very uneasy—about maybe not seeing him again. I was glad to be doing this for him and for his brothers and sisters and for his singing mother, and I was very glad to see his eyes widen over a good thing on this day, for I wouldn't soon forget the wideness of his eyes after he was nearly killed and after I ripped Krüger's arm out of its socket. In my hand was an Indian Head Gold Eagle coin. I was looking at the Indian himself, in profile with war bonnet. I wanted Diego to see the Indian. I turned the coin, and the standing eagle on the other side, also in profile, made me think of the thing I told Gerhard and he told me. We are Americans. Together. But go far enough back and Americans have all come from somewhere else. And this kid before me had the heart of an American. The coin was 90 percent gold, worth ten bucks. Which would go a long way in Vera Cruz, Mexico.

“This is to stay away from the Germans while I'm gone,” I said.

He nodded, without ever letting his eyes shift from mine.

I offered him the coin.

He struggled a little with his face now, trying to keep his eyes dry and his mouth firm, but I had to look very closely to see it. He was a good kid. He put his two fingers on the top of the coin and we both held it for a very brief moment. Then he gently extracted the coin from my hand. “Thanks, boss,” he said.

And he turned and he was gone.

I knew what he meant. Just as briskly, and with just as much control of my feelings, I stood and I turned and I walked away.

It was mid-afternoon and there was much to do.

Bunky first and it was not till I was up the steps of his
casa de huéspedes
and heading for his door that I realized how I'd been trusting him till this moment. I did glance as I trotted past the
Diligencias
and I noticed he wasn't there, but the alternative didn't really register on me. Only now did I wonder if he was drunk again and I'd be in Dutch on the train tomorrow, trying to travel as myself or with no documentation. I knocked.

Bunky answered at once. “Enter.”

I went in. The room was heavy with the smell of sulphur and bromine. Bunky sat at his table. The tan, wooden Kodak developer box with the roller handles had been pushed away from him and he was hunched over the open passport, smoothing a page with his thumbs. He was coming through for me. He knew what was at stake now and he could do this.

“Just in time,” he said.

“Bunk, would you do me a favor?”

He looked up at me.

I said, “Keep a chair wedged under your doorknob when you're in here.”

He straightened up, sat back.

“Are they after us too?” he asked.

“I wouldn't be surprised.”

He nodded.

“And keep an eye on the kid,” I said. “Give him some things to do but keep him away from the Huns.”

“I'll do the best I can.”

We looked at each other for a long moment. He knew and I knew, but I needed to say it. “You need to keep off the juice,” I said. “At least while I'm gone.”

The nod of assent he gave me was so minute I could barely see it from across the room. But it was more believable because of that.

He looked back down to the passport and took a cloth from beside him on the table, put his forefinger in it and began to wipe. I crossed the room and stood beside him. He was tracing the pasted outer edge of a photo of my face. Gerhard had vanished beneath me. I'd taken his place. I put a hand on the old man's shoulder. “Thanks, Bunk.”

He nodded. “And what about you? Do you have a plan?”

“Follow him.”

“And?”

I shrugged. He waited. “Get the story,” I finally said.

“At least I know to put a chair against the door.”

“At least you know there is a door.”

He nodded. We both understood. Even covering a real war, every­thing is always new. But you know to find the high ground or the top of a building or a place beside the artillery unit or along the lines or with a certain officer at general headquarters. You have people to walk up to and ask how it is and what's next. You can simply go out and dodge bullets and say how that felt. It's a drama and each set is a little different, but you know the theater. You know your way around. Everything before me now was improvisation. And this had better be the last I thought about that. I had to anticipate some things, but only my next move or two. There were too many unknowns, and as for any good reporter on any story, you keep your mind wide open for surprises.

Bunky handed me Gerhard's passport. My passport. “Take care of yourself,” he said.

“You too,” I said. “And the boy.”

We shook on that.

And I found a clothes store around the corner from the
Diligencias
. The fawning shop owner made suits to order but he also had racks of rentals for occasions and he was only too happy to sell me a used one. I passed over a linen suit that looked too much like Mensinger and I ended up with a light gray mohair that more or less fit me. I added a gray felt fedora and I was ready to be Gerhard Vogel. I paid, and as I put the brown-paper parcel under my arm, I thought of packing and I thought of my rooms and I thought of Gerhard dead in his and of my warning to Bunky.

Krüger might have somehow made it back to the consulate by now, though given the shape he was in, maybe not yet. He was going to need some help. But it was quite possible they would come to find me. I needed to pack my things and vacate my rooms and I needed to stay public for a while, act normal, and then lie low till the train left in the morning.

I beat it back to my room and found the lock secure and the room untouched. I followed my own advice and pulled the wooden chair from the small desk and wedged it under the knob of the outer door. I packed my valise. And as I did, I heard a woman's voice, reedy and light, singing in the courtyard. I went to my courtyard door and opened it quietly.

She was unaware of me, my laundry girl. She stood beside a low, rickety wooden table with a man's shirt spread out on it. She was bending to a tin of hot coals beside her, pulling the iron from the handle, straining hard to lift it. Her arms were bare. Her throat was bare. She turned to the table and began to press the iron onto the shirt.

I crossed the courtyard and she didn't hear me till I was very near. The song was familiar. Very popular, but still odd on this day: from Diego's mother's voice to this señorita's. She sang from a later verse:
De tu casa a la mía, Cielito lindo, no hay más que un paso
. From your house to mine, darling one, there is no more than a step.

The señorita sensed me and stopped singing and she turned her face to me. Her forehead and the bridge of her nose and her upper lip were beaded with sweat. I was close to her now and she smelled of musk and starch and I passed the palm of my hand over her forehead, my hand going moist and cool and I grabbed her by the ear and I pulled her and she dropped the iron in the coals and I dragged her by her ear, though not hurting her, quite, and she yielded enough, as I knew she would, and she moaned a little at the pressure on her ear, but it was a familiar moan, something like the moan we both now sought, and by the time we were in my room we were fierce—she as much as me this time—and it was over, and we disentangled and we lay beside each other for one moment, and another, and I had to leave this place, and I said to her, “I am going away now.”

She said nothing.

“I'm not sure when I will return,” I said.

Still not a sound from her.

“I will leave you a little something in the desk drawer,” I said. “Not for this. For my clothes, how nicely you did them.”

She touched my hand.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “For not asking sooner. What's your name?”

She took her hand off mine and she rose and she drew her underthings up upon her and she smoothed down her skirt, and she was another one, on this day, who was not going to show feelings. She moved past me toward the courtyard door. I even thought she had somehow not heard my question. But as she put her hand on the doorknob, she paused, and she said, in a barely audible voice, “It is not important,” and she was gone.