Robert Butler - The Hot Country

He slowly turned his hand and put it palm down, on the table between us. He said, “I understand why you reject censorship. But it’s my understanding that among the best of you, there is a code of some sort. When someone tells you something, you can come to a gentleman’s agreement beforehand.”

“Of course,” I said. “We can negotiate the restrictions about how I use what you want to say, and we either come to a binding agreement or I’ll tell you to keep your mouth shut.”

He showed the palm of his hand again.

“Let me ask you a question first,” I said. “And I give you my word the answer will never leave my mouth, much less my fingertips.”

“Yes?”

“Are you a spy?”

“I am.” He hesitated only briefly to give me this answer. He had been thinking about this all along, bringing me into this secret.

“For the red, white, and what?” I asked.

“Blue,” he said. “Not black.”

“That was my own question about the obvious,” I said.

“You had to ask it.”

“You didn’t have to answer it.”

“I trust you.”

“And you think we can help each other.”

“Of course.”

I pulled the letter from my shirt pocket and put it in Gerhard’s hand. I’d brought only the letter, not the envelope. Now that I knew who Gerhard was, I regretted not getting his immediate help on Mensinger’s cryptic notes. But that could wait for another meeting. Soon. I said, “Scarface is a man named Friedrich von Mensinger. He was carrying this letter.”

Gerhard drew it to him but kept his eyes on me.

“Don’t ask how I got it,” I said.

He nodded in assent. He unfolded the letter, very gently. He read, translating with only an occasional pause to parse the German and to say it right:

My Treasure,

You have only now gone from our rooms. On my fingertips I still feel the rough badge of your manhood that you wear upon your face. I remember when that was an open wound and I saw it for the first time. I waited for you at our table in the Stadtgarten, hoping you would come in time for the music. You came at last. I know why you were late. The blood had barely stopped flowing. I wept at the sight of it. You had to strike me then to make me strong. Twice. I know you must be strong now, as you always must, as you always are, though I do not know why it should take you to such a savage and distant place. My heart breaks already, though your footsteps down the hall have barely ceased to echo about me. We belong in Madrid, together, my darling. Or Buenos Aires. Together. Do what you must quickly and come back to me or send for me if you can. I give you my heart and mind to carry with you.

Your loving and obedient and patient wife, Anna

Gerhard folded the letter as carefully as he unfolded it and he was not looking at me and I was looking at him only long enough to see that he was not looking at me and I looked away as well. I was happy to do so. A woman in love had just sat down at this table beside us in the midst of the cheap raggedness and the stench, and with the clank and huff of track-switching, and she had spoken things that we were not meant to hear, things that would profoundly embarrass her if she knew we’d heard them, tender things intended for a man I now both envied and despised.

Gerhard and I sat like this for a long few moments. In my periphery I saw his hand come across the table and place the letter gently before me. I turned. I picked up the letter and placed it in my shirt pocket, keenly aware now that it was pressed there against my heart.

Gerhard and I looked at each other and I figured he was feeling roughly the same things I was about Anna Mensinger. We looked away again. Halfway across the courtyard, near a broken and tumbled fountain, I saw a stirring in the grass. Something moving there.

I said, “So he’s a Spanish-speaking diplomat.”

Gerhard did not respond.

“Without portfolio,” I said.

“But with a mission,” Gerhard said.

I turned to him. He seemed to be watching the same spot in the grass that I was.

“He bought a train ticket,” I said.

Gerhard slowly brought his face back to me.

We looked at each other for a moment. I asked Frau Mensinger politely to leave. I apologized to her. But I insisted.

After a moment of silence, as Anna gradually complied, Gerhard asked, “To where?”

I looked him fixedly in the eyes. “Before you answered me a few minutes ago, when I asked if you’d heard anything about the scar-faced man, you hesitated ever so slightly before saying no. If we’re trusting each other, you need to tell me about that pause.”

Gerhard said, “I was thinking about the whole issue of trust. I had no answer on Mensinger, but I was taking the question seriously. You and I were about to start something.”

I let this sit with me for a moment. It made sense. And this time he answered me at once, though he must have been surprised at my challenge, at what I’d observed of him to make the challenge. But.

I said, “You’re a spy for our country. You’re now in the middle of things. But you’re a horn player, not the booking agent for the band. And even if the President was looking for an excuse to invade Mexico, it can’t be for more than a couple of weeks that he’d think it would focus on Vera Cruz.”

“I understand your suspicion,” he said. “Some bad luck turned into good luck. We were playing in Mexico City. That’s where I was supposed to be.”

I kept my own silence now.

He said, “I was looking for a way back to the capital without causing suspicion. Then this happened.”

“To La Mancha,” I said, offering more to him now.

“La Mancha?”

“The train ticket.”

“Yes,” he said. “I understand.”

“It’s a National Railway whistle-stop in estado Coahuila.”

“On the way to Torreón?”

“Yes,” I said. “Carranza’s home state.”

“But Pancho Villa country now. He took Torreón only a few weeks ago. He might still be there.”

“Or in La Mancha?”

“I can’t imagine why.”

“Would Villa go there for the secrecy of it?”

“It’s not in his nature,” Gerhard said. “He doesn’t sneak around. And why should he do that for a lone German emissary? But this has to be about Villa. The Germans are making an overture.”

My sense of the alto horn player from the Vera Cruz zócalo continued rapidly to change. He was not just a street-level spy from a band shell. He seemed to have a grasp of the bigger picture. You play the reporting game long enough, you learn to make yourself dumb with each new source. You ask questions you think you’ve already gotten the answers for. Then you weigh the discrepancies. So I said, “Why Villa?”

“I bet you already have an idea,” Gerhard said.

Of course. His line of work required the same willingness to play dumb. He was telling me he knew that. I would have expected him to shoot me a little smile, to keep it friendly, since he was the one challenging my intentions. He didn’t. He was acting vaguely offended. I leaned forward. I said, “I’m just putting the obvious question in the center of the table for us both to chip in. We may see things a little differently.”

He didn’t miss a beat now. He acted as if we hadn’t just puffed our chests a bit. “All right,” he said. “Let’s say Huerta’s days are numbered. The Kaiser might try to pick a winner in the civil war.”

“Pick him when it still counts,” I said. “Before he’s truly got the upper hand.”

“Precisely,” Gerhard said. “So we have three major revolutionaries — or four or five, depending on how you sort them. Forget Gonzalez, though. He’s incompetent on the battlefield. Orozco beat him again and again when he was fighting to keep Madero in power. The three then. Villa, Carranza, Obregón.”