The Hot Country (18 page)

I had no choice. I had to follow this thing all the way to Villa. And then somehow improvise myself across the border.

32

When the train was moving again and I turned my face to the long, flat run of the Central Plateau that would take us to Mexico City, I found the women in the car at the back of the train lingering in my head. And I thought of Luisa. If she had gone off to do what I suspected she had, she was a
soldadera
of quite a different sort. I wondered who she actually went to. Zapata in the south? He just didn't seem much motivated to campaign outside his own state. Or Carranza the alleged thinker? Obregón the tactician? Most likely Pancho Villa. She would be drawn to him for the same reasons I suspected Mensinger and the Germans were drawn to him. He was the boldest rebel of them all, clearly the strongest of them at this point, the one most likely to make a radical change in favor of the vast majority of Mexicans, the poor and disenfranchised. She would go to him.

I realized I was in danger of violating what I'd resolved about staying in the moment, about not looking ahead. Even though this matter of Luisa Morales was simple curiosity; even though I had objectively, analytically assessed
her
next moves, not mine; even though I had not, in that analysis, ever actually summoned up a full-fledged image of her in my mind; even though I was convinced all of this about what I'd been doing was true, now that I'd come to a conclusion and was ready to set her aside, Luisa Morales slipped quietly into me in quite a different way, as if from the shadows beyond the lamplight in a dark street. She appeared vividly, in the flesh, and she was unarmed and her hair was tumbled about on her shoulders, and she looked me in the eyes, and her eyes were as dark as the barrel of a gun. And then she vanished. And so I found myself refusing to operate in this present moment, on this train between Vera Cruz and Mexico City, and instead I was looking far ahead, to the possibility that Luisa, as well, might be waiting at the end of this trail with Mensinger. And the consequent hot twist in my chest made me feel like an incurable damn fool.

I needed to rid myself of all this. Right now. When Dr. Tejeda Llosa sat down beside me after the lunch stop in Esperanza, he rolled his shoulders a little to silently declare that there was nothing more to be said between us. Which was what I'd hoped to accomplish with my bit of willful rudeness. But at the moment I even considered turning to him and engaging him in conversation. Tell me about your time in America. I am a German with a banker uncle in Torreón and I do something or other and I am from somewhere or other.

I glanced in the old man's direction. He was dozing, his head nodding forward and then jerking up and then nodding forward again. Dr. Tejeda Llosa. Doctor.
Dr.
The last little bit of the puzzle of Mensinger's notes. I'd been assuming that
ENP ~ Dr.
involved a medical doctor. Of course not. If it was Wilson who had no balls in the notes, then this might be Wilson as well. The first President of the United States with a PhD. From Johns Hopkins University, in history and political science. Dr. Woodrow Wilson. And it was the PhD part of him that Mensinger wanted to stress to Villa. Villa who was utterly uneducated but was known both to deeply regret the fact and to dream of teaching every Mexican child to read.

So what was Mensinger's point with the tilde? What was similar to Wilson's PhD? What was
EN
P
? And a phrase returned to my mind that slipped through a short time ago, in connection with Luisa's choice of rebels: Carranza, the alleged thinker. And I remembered talking with Gerhard about him. And I was pissed at Gerhard for treating me like a naïf. So when he cited, in English, the “National Preparatory School” as part of Carranza's intellectual resume, I tweaked him by repeating the name of the school in the correct Spanish:
Escuela Nacional Preparatoria
. ENP.

Mensinger couldn't be sincerely suggesting that the two things were, in fact, similar. The ENP was a high school. The most exclusive in the country, but a high school. He could, however, expect it to represent, in Villa's mind, all that he was not. The antithesis of Villa's upbringing. Mensinger wouldn't be rubbing Villa's face in that. But if he was trying to induce an attack on American forces, he'd want to convince Villa that Wilson would never support his larger ambitions.
ENP ~ Dr
. Villa might believe that Woodrow Wilson feels an intellectual affinity with Carranza. That Wilson would be scornful of Villa's lack of education. The note Mensinger made was to indicate Wilson's point of view, the ultimate message being that the United States would never back Pancho Villa as leader of Mexico. Carranza was Wilson's man. So there was nothing to lose for Villa to stand up to America by attacking Wilson's invading army. Though he could be self-deprecating about his lack of education, Pancho Villa was a vain and self-aggrandizing man. The thought of Wilson's scorn would infuriate him. And with the present Mexican outpouring of hatred for the United States, Villa could become an even greater hero. He could unify the rebellion behind him.

And I was simply getting angry. Angry at Mensinger and the Germans, angry at Villa and the Mexicans. I was angry at Wilson already, but once again I was struck by how my anger at him was of a completely different sort, like being angry at a smart but goofy uncle from Virginia, or at your mother, or at the Cubs. Family anger.

I took my hat off the hook by the window and put it on and pulled it down over my eyes and I settled back to make myself sleep. I was still weary enough from the short night. I could sleep if I just put my mind to it. No. I could sleep if I turned my mind off.

And I slept. I knew I'd slept because I pushed the hat up off my eyes and the sun was low, and passing outside was the
pulque
district just east of the capital, vast fields of maguey in dense, even rows of spiky, gray-green leaves as tall as a man with a tip that could cut deep as the bone and sap that could blister the skin, a plant that could produce the wretched
pulque
and the estimable
blue agave
with the effective
mezcal
in between. A complex thing indeed.

We were not far from the city now. Those of us going north would change trains in Mexico City. So I needed to avoid sitting next to him again and he was likely to disembark at the capital anyway, but even if I knew I'd be sitting beside him for another long trip, I would do this anyway: I turned to Dr. Tejeda Llosa. He was reading a book. The
Meditaciones
of Marcus Aurelius. I knew a few words from Aurelius. I remembered my mother quoting him to me when I'd finally calmed down after an early-teenage raging tantrum over something or other. She quietly let the fit run its course. And though
in medias res
I scornfully recognized her portrayal of suffering patience from her role of Marguerite Gautier in
The Lady of the Camellias,
I eventually calmed down and awaited her rebuke. But putting her hand gently and sadly on my shoulder and acting as if I would instantly understand his authority, she said, “The great emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius once wrote, ‘Anger is always honest.
'
” And that was that. She patiently turned my fault into a kind of virtue, thus letting me fill in for myself the fault of it, and I think, as a result, I never overtly lost my temper with her again.

Dr. Tejeda Llosa read on, as I was stuck—though sweetly—on my mother. But now in my head I prepared a Spanish translation of the Aurelius quotation and I said to him, “Forgive me, Doctor Tejeda Llosa.”

He lifted his face from his book and turned to me. He had a look of suffering patience on his face.

I said, “I am sorry to interrupt and sorry for much more than that.”

He closed his book.

Putting just a trace of German into my Spanish pronunciation, I gave him a shot of his Marcus Aurelius. I said, “
El enojo es siempre honesto.
”

He smiled faintly and nodded. “Quite all right,” he said.

“That's from Aurelius,” I said.

He lifted his eyebrows.

“But anger isn't always smart,” I said.

“No offense was taken,” he said.

I said, “The place where you earned your doctorate degree…” But I interrupted myself. I glanced quickly around the car, making sure no one was paying attention to us.

He nodded again, pushing up his lower lip and wrinkling his brow at me as if to say, “You were right to be discreet, señor; at this moment in history, they would not understand either.” Before I could continue, he finished my sentence in a very low voice, barely able to reach me over the clack of the wheels beneath us. “The University of Pennsylvania.”

I spoke low as well. “Ah,” I said. “So. Good. That country you studied in, that is a good country, an admirable country.”

“In spite of this terrible thing they are doing, yes. It is,” he said.

“Created from the wish to be free,” I said. “We Germans are a nation with roots in a barbaric race. I regret my treatment of you on the platform in Esperanza.”

“I understand,” he said.

“I wish I were more like an American,” I said.

“Not at all,” he said. “You Germans are a fine race. But may I offer a respectful correction?”

“Of course,” I said.

“I seek his meditations on every trip and holding the book in my hands is a good thing, but I could probably recite all of Aurelius to you from memory. As I am an Aurelius scholar, he is my passion. The quotation you cite cannot be his. It is very much unlike him.”

“Thank you,” I said, and I knew the sudden stiffness of my voice sounded like my German arrogance reasserting itself, refusing to be corrected.

I turned my face to the window. It was best for the conversation to end anyway.

Of course she made it up. Improvised. Like the patience. Like the gentle hand on my shoulder. But it was the right line and the right gesture at the right moment in the little drama I'd cast her in. I could not be angry with her for that.

33

And Herr Friedrich von Mensinger sat down next to me.

In Mexico City I'd followed him into the waiting room of the National Railway's
Estación de Buena Vista
. I was careful not to be noticed. I found a place at the very end of one of the long wooden benches otherwise packed tight with Mexicans in serapes and
rebozos,
a class of Mexicans I figured would be invisible to Mensinger, as Diego had once observed about him. Being among them, I thought he might not notice me either. I watched him when I could, but there was no pressure to do so. He floated past and out of sight and then floated back again, his head and shoulders sticking high out of the middle of the dense Mexican crowd where he seemed trapped. And he began to float away again. But as he passed this time, he surprised me. I had been imagining him as implacably, aristocratically impervious to anything that did not fit his purposes. But the face that was passing now was pinched in intense discomfort. And for a moment he turned his face in my direction, found me instantly, focused on me as intently as if he were about to thrust with his fencing saber. In the next moment, he was borne away, but I knew he would be back, and when the young man sitting to my right suddenly stood up and moved off, Mensinger was beside me, arriving so quickly and unobserved that I imagined he had somehow scaled the wall and clung to an electric light fixture in the ceiling and had thus dropped down beside me in the instant the space was vacated.

And so here we now were. Shoulder to shoulder. This must have been as discomforting for him as it was surprising for me. That he should have lost his composure in the press of a crowd of heathens. That he felt the compulsion to seek refuge next to the only non-Mexican he could find. And now, to regain his composure, he was not speaking. He was sitting here beside me as if it were simply the only available empty space on the bench. Which gave me time to decide a couple of crucial things.

I found myself calm, though I also found that the impulse to make a wise and prompt retreat was stronger in me right now than on any hot-lead-filled field of combat I'd ever covered.

But I was calm, and it was time to improvise.

I could not be Gerhard Vogel. That much was abundantly clear.

Outside of the occupied zone, it was less likely I'd have to show my passport. And if I did, such a moment would not be in Mensinger's presence. For documents and tickets, he would be in the Pullman drawing room and I would be in a first-class car.

I could be anyone I wanted.

Except German. Except American.

We could speak Spanish. But since I didn't know what else he might speak, I figured I better be English-speaking in my assumed identity.

Mensinger cleared his throat.

I was not ready yet.

I held very still, letting him have no cue to speak.

Could I be English? They were high on the list of Germany's imminent enemies. If I wanted to actually make this a fruitful exchange, I should not be English.

South African. English but not quite English. But possibly a sore point for Mensinger, since the Germans strongly sympathized with the Boers against the Brits, and not so very long ago. Not South African.

Canadian.

Mensinger shifted a little beside me. I could see him enough in my periphery to watch him fake a cough into his fist.

I remained absolutely motionless.

Canadian. The Germans, as far as I knew, never had a thing to do with what was now Canada. The only question was Quebec or Ontario. I could pull off the French. But it was a different French and another layer of complexity. Simple. This needed to be simple. Toronto.

I was ready, and suddenly I was keenly aware of the way things had abruptly changed. The man I'd been observing from afar and delicately following for some days now was pressed hard against my right shoulder and arm and thigh.

I ever so slightly flexed my right shoulder, and with a little head-flip to the left I popped my neck. I glanced for a brief beat in Mensinger's direction. He sensed it and was turning his face toward mine as I looked back to the front again. The afterimage of Friedrich Mensinger was almost entirely his scar, a fibrous white scimitar running along his left cheek from ear to lip, as wide as a pipe stem. Wider than any dueling sword would leave under normal circumstances. He was one of those who packed his wound with horsehair to keep it agape while it healed. A further assertion of Germanic manliness.

I blinked the image away. I waited. I could sense him pondering how to speak, not knowing my language.

After a moment, he said, in a slightly pinched, slightly nasal voice, aristocratic to my ear, “
Sprechen Sie Deutsch
?
”

I looked at him. His eyes were shockingly pale, the gray-green of a scummy pond on a cloudless afternoon. His mustache was his own, not Wilhelm's; it was full and dust-colored but with no uptwirls, no points at all. He was his own man.

“Deutsch?” I said. “No.
Nein
. Sorry. Do you sprechen English?”

He narrowed those eyes at me a little.

“I'm Simon,” I said, thinking Legree, in the spur of the melodramatic moment, staring into this face. Now I needed a last name. Canadian-sounding. “Chance,” I said, drawing on the Cubs of my youth, their peerless leader. “From Toronto.” Simon Chance would do.

He was still not unnarrowing his eyes.

“Canada,” I said.

I lifted my right hand from between us and angled it toward him, inviting a shake of sorts in the tight quarters.

“
Nein
English,” he managed to say. And then, remembering, “No. No English.”

“Do you speak Spanish?” I said in that language.

He nodded.

“No problem then,” I said. And this became our common tongue.

“I am Friedrich Mensinger,” he said, taking my hand and shaking it firmly enough that I was glad I got the crotch of my thumb into his or this would have been painful.

“We are conspicuous here, aren't we, you and I,” I said, nodding my head toward the crowd of Mexicans from whose currents he had just washed ashore.

“Yes we are,” he said, letting go of my hand. “We are different.”

“What part of Germany are you from?”

He hesitated for one brief beat. “The north,” he said.

Though he was vague, he did not look away from me. His pond-eyes showed nothing. They were still. He needed to be sitting here next to me, in our little Aryan corner of this world. So he was more comfortable now. Which meant, ironically, he'd recovered his reserve. He was fundamentally a man of secrets, after all.

I had to be careful if I wanted to work even a little something out of him.

Ask nothing. Give something. It didn't have to be meaningful. “I came up from Vera Cruz this morning,” I said.

He didn't give a damn, of course.

So I matched his mood. And I showed him I expected nothing. I broke off our eye contact and looked out at the crowd.

Mensinger was feeling like himself again, extracted from this mass of his inferiors. What did Richard Harding Davis call these people a few days ago? He was, in effect, talking of their ingratitude for our occupation of a piece of their country. Spigotties and squaws. There was no German translation for that, but I suspected Mensinger had his equivalents.

I needed to make it clear to Mensinger that I was not going to small-talk him. But before I fell silent, I regretted that I needed to play my gambit once again, to set the political mood. “Couldn't be witness to that any longer.
Schweinehund
Americans,” I said. And without looking at him, I added, “I think that's the appropriate German.”

“It is,” he said.

And I said no more. He said no more.

If he was watching the crowd too—which he must have been; he was certainly not staring at me—then eventually he'd want to keep the connection going. Even if just a little bit.

It took a while. But finally he said, “They will not go forward, these Americans, do you think?”

“Their president has no balls,” I said. I did not look at him, but I felt him—what? hard to describe—do something like a faint expansion of his chest to hear his own thought confirmed in the very terms he'd thought it. But I had to be careful. No more allusions to his envelope.

“You are right,” he said. “We have a way of saying that in German.”

He was about to try out his line for Villa. I still wouldn't look at him, though I thought he had turned to me now. I would have trouble keeping the eagerness out of my face.

“
Dieser Nation hat doch keine Eier,
” he said

I clenched the fist that was sitting on my thigh. I'd picked up the critical, unexpected word. The whole
nation
has no balls. The United States of America. Not just Woodrow Wilson. Or
eggs,
actually. The U.S.A. has no German balls, which are rather like eggs. I was tempted to ask him if that was chicken eggs that Germans were proud of having. Goose eggs? Quail eggs?

I bucked up my reportorial objectivity.

I looked at him.

He winked at me. He offered no full translation.

I smiled and nodded and hoped it didn't look forced.

We stayed silent. He looked away. I looked away.

The crowd jostled very near us and a woman's
rebozo
loosened from her chest and an infant's head and shoulders emerged and swayed close to Mensinger, nearly into his face. He recoiled and his hands moved out of sight and I wondered if he still had his pistol on his far hip, if his hand had gone there by reflex. The woman caught up her child and the crowd flowed on, and the space before us, though slight, was clear again. It was enough. Mensinger's hands reappeared and stretched to his knees and settled there, his arms straight and stiff. He was resolved not to be provoked by these people.

But he was. They deeply unsettled him. He needed to talk, to escape inward. “They are full of guile, however, these Americans,” Mensinger said. “We can say they have no manhood and it is true, but they still can cause trouble.”

I turned my face to him. He was not looking at me. He had once again, to my eye, become his scar, upward-bent, like a musing frown. It was all I saw for the moment. He was going on: “They can meddle in things that are not their affair. This much is clear from Vera Cruz.”

He paused. He seemed to be watching the crowd, but he'd retreated into his mind. His scar pivoted away. He fixed his eyes intently on mine. “Is this not so?” he said.

I had an abrupt stopping in me, a hot flush in the face from being caught. I heard this as a direct challenge, as if he knew I was an American. But he said, “I ask for your opinion as one who shares a long and vulnerable border.”

I shrugged, glanced away for a second to recover my composure.

I said, “Their President seems timid.” I believed it. I hated to admit it to this Hun. But I needed to draw him out.

“They are not so far removed from Theodore Roosevelt,” Mensinger said. “He was more like a German. So there is that element in the Americans. This is the trouble with a mongrel country. They are inconsistent. And I do not expect even this man Wilson to be timid forever.”

Mensinger was sounding a little heated now. He seemed to realize it. He stopped abruptly. “
So,
” he said. And he shut up again.

But quotes. Quotes. I already had some very fine quotes for my story, straight from a German secret agent.

“What is your work?” Mensinger suddenly asked. He realized he'd been talking too much, even with an apparently meaningless Canadian. He wanted to know if he'd made a mistake.

“Coffee,” I said. “Mexican coffee. High-mountain, shade-grown, cheap-and-getting-cheaper coffee. Wonderful beans. Did you smell the coffee in the warehouses of Esperanza? Great bouquet. Half those beans will end up in Canadian cups. It's cold and it's dark in Canada. We need to get our blood going and we do it with Mexican coffee, which I export to great profit for the everlasting benefit of my countrymen.”

I had no idea where all that came from. Unpremeditated. Improvised. To be honest, actors—who were, collectively, my aunts and uncles, my older sisters and brothers, my trainers and my professors, my fathers—through all my formative years—actors, I say—including the actor I myself often am—sometimes scare the hell out me.

But Mensinger, who I'd been playing to as if he were the Mayor of New York in a loge box with his party at the Belasco, seemed convinced. He very slightly tilted his head and nodded. “I like a good cup of coffee,” he said. “But strong. Very strong. Your Mexican coffee is not strong.”

“It can be made strong.”

“Very strong,” he said. “Strong in the bean.”

“Strong in the bean,” I said. “Right. Of course. I don't think Mexican coffee is strong in the bean.”

“No.”

“No.”

“Some people cannot take it strong in the bean,” he said. And by “people” I gather he meant “nations.”

“In your country you make sure you buy it strong,” I said.

“In the bean. Yes. Very.”

“And what do you do for a living, Herr Mensinger?”

He did not miss a beat. “I also am a businessman.”

He offered no more.

“What sort of product?” I said.

“Money,” he said. “Money is the product. I advise banks. There are some very powerful German banks in Mexico.”

I was not interested in having him elaborate on his cover identity. So I took the opportunity to chip away at any suspicion he might have had about me. I said, “Can I ask you a question about your German bankers in Mexico?”

He did not answer. His lower lip pushed up into the same curve as his scar.

I said, “What do they do for strong coffee?”

It was not what he expected, of course. The face froze for a moment, and then he actually smiled and chuckled. A creepy smile. His mouth undid its curve, flattened, then spread wide and puckered a little at the corners and opened in a quarter smile with gray teeth. The chuckle was a slow turn of a Gatling gun. None of this, of course, prompted by a sense of humor. I didn't think he was capable of perceiving irony, much less attributing it to a Canadian stranger, much less appreciating it as a subtle joke. This was a smile and chuckle of cultural and intellectual superiority. Prompted by my continuing to think and talk and ask such questions as this about coffee after he had already made the international politics of that subject clear to anyone who had ears to listen.