Jim Harrison - Legends of the Fall

"I am sorry to say that the woman you are looking for was kept in a whorehouse for a month, shot up with smack. Now Señor Mendez has removed her from the whorehouse and taken her God knows where. I've not found out yet."

Cochran was suddenly wet from head to toe. He gazed at the green fertile valley and brown mountains beyond. He forgot to breathe and felt vertigo to the point that the car seemed to float.

"I must tell you that you'll be shot like a dog unless you are careful and probably shot like a dog anyway."

In the hotel suite at the El Presidente Amador ordered up some food and drink. He told Cochran that he had found a house because a hotel was too public to be suitable. Señor Mendez, or Tiburón as he was known locally, was at his mountain ranch but there were a dozen men in Durango in his employ. Cochran should move to the house in a few days when it became available, meanwhile there were necessary meetings with políticos under his guise as a film and land investor. They both relaxed a little over the meal and Amador spoke of the Aeromexico pilot and his brother in Mexico City, for whom his mother had served as a nursemaid in their youth. Then Amador lapsed into silence, drew inward and his face became impassive.

"The truth is she stabbed a man while he made love to her. This man has announced he will strangle her. So she is in double danger. I would think Tiburón would put her in a place where no one could reach her but I have no idea where. I know you must do nothing without me."

Amador left early in the evening after elaborating on possible plans and accepting a large amount of money to be used as bribes for information. Cochran lay on the bed feeling waves of nausea roll through his soul, shaking him until the bed rattled, clenching his fists and his legs cramping in a rage far past weeping. He had been foolish enough to believe that as he recovered over the past few months the world might be recovering with him, that in the back of his mind Miryea might be found in reasonably good health and he could convince Tibey how hopeless it was and he and Miryea would fly off happily as if in some tragic but pleasant-ending movie. But now he felt murderous and at the same time without hope. He touched the small pistol strapped to his calf, then got up and put on the shoulder holster with the .44. He put on his suit coat and checked himself in the mirror. He had visibly aged a half-dozen years in a few months. He poured a glass of tequila and sat down out on the balcony sipping at the bittersweet liquid and watching the full moon of late September cast sweeping shadows through the scudding clouds. The shadows swept intermittently across the courtyard of the hotel which was an elegantly remodeled prison. The moon shone white on the back wall where prisoners had no doubt once been lined up and shot for reasons too simple to be worth remembering. He thought of Tibey in the distant mountains in the direction of the moon, then wondered if Miryea could see the moon. All three of them were, in fact, watching the moon in their separate agonies, all of them envious of the moon in its aerial distance floating so far above earthbound agonies. He remembered a hot summer night in Tucson when they turned out the lights and took an air mattress out to the balcony and made love under the full moon. Both the moon and their entwined bodies had been hot and still, and the sheen of Miryea's damp neck had caught the moonlight. There had been people below them in the distance drinking wine on a blanket on the lawn and listening to classical music on a radio.

He grew restless and went downstairs to the hotel lobby and bar. The actress-model was sitting with two producer types parodically dressed in pressed denim and lavish Indian jewelry. Cochran pretended not to notice her but she jumped to her feet and approached holding her cat. She thanked him profusely for helping her recover the cat. Cochran glanced around at the dozen pairs of watching eyes, bowed and said something polite in Spanish and walked away. She stood there puzzled for a moment and shrugged. He had a drink and thought about the woman whose photo he had seen so often in magazines. In person she glistened with her cold, hard classical features becoming more angular and rough at the same time. She had glittery cocaine eyes and the low husky voice of a pissed off barmaid.

After a sleepless night Amador picked him up for a meeting with the local governor and a member of the film commission. The provincial government was headquartered in a huge palace once owned by an eighteenth-century duke. Cochran paused to look at some splendid imitation of Diego Rivera murals, a colorful agitprop display rendering rather honestly the torments of the peónes and campesinos. The head of the film commission met them in the hall and seemed very nervous about Amador, which pleased Cochran who knew it was best to have a badass on your side. Amador waited in the hall as he and the film man had a polite cup of coffee with the governor who made him nervous with his florid reminiscences of Barcelona.

Cochran and Amador were escorted to a limousine for a trip to an active movie set on the property owned by John Wayne, who had made a number of westerns in the area. At the last moment the film man was called to the phone and he asked Amador why he made the man so nervous. Amador told the chauffeur to stand outside and laughingly said that the film man was a gentleman while he, poor Amador, was responsible for the security of a number of big American-owned ranches and mines and his methods were occasionally a bit crude.

Out at the movie set, which had absurdly tight security, Cochran noted the huge size of the crew. It never occurred to him that it took so many people beyond those you saw on the screen. He had been distracted on the way up the valley because the corn crop looked so rich and green that if you squinted to block the mountains you could have been in Indiana. He remembered the boredom of cultivating corn on the rickety old Ford tractor. His brother had been much better at farming though he had been glad to move to San Diego. Indiana farmers made good Navy men and good fishermen. In his youth his father and uncles had gone on fishing expeditions up in Michigan returning severely hung over but with coolers full of bluegills, bass and trout. He had been taken on the last trip before the move and had been allowed to drink cut-rate A&P beer and play poker, though in recognition of his low status he cleaned fish far into the night.

He ordered the car stopped when the chauffeur said corallo. Amador wanted to kill the snake but Cochran said no, and followed it off the road and into the dry grass where it wriggled under a rock. Once when he was at Torrejón he had taken a hop on a C5A down to Nairobi. They only had a twenty-four-hour layover which had limited his view of Africa, other than from the air, to a long night of gambling, and later, the company of a Galla woman from Ethiopia, a tribe legendary for the beauty of their women. But he had a few hours to kill the next morning and had taken a taxi to the Nairobi Herpetarium where he wandered slowly among the tourists looking at the snakes in the glass cages. His favorite had been the green mamba—long, thin, a translucent green resembling a green buggy whip with motions so abrupt and quick one backed away from the cage. He reflected on the beauty of threat: the fatal equipment of the mamba owning a beauty shared by the grizzly, rattler, hammerhead shark, perhaps even the black Phantom he flew—an utterly malign black death instrument.

Two guards at the cattle gate had waved them on. The guards stooped in the hot dust watching a scorpion they had dropped on an anthill. Beyond the fence a mare watched with her ears tilted back while her foal pranced sideways, then was still in the shimmering heat. He turned to watch the brown cloud of dust from the passing car float over them. This idiotic charade increased his taste for the kill.