Robert Butler - The Hot Country

I bent to the folded paper and picked it up. I opened it. And the eagle was American here, an olive branch in one talon and a bundle of arrows in the other. This was the certificate of naturalization making Gerhard Zimmerman an American citizen in 1896, at age twenty. I folded the certificate and placed it back on the floor. I moved to the passport and picked it up. Gerhard Vogel. His assumed name. The first page had his photo. This man was the man from across the courtyard table a few hours ago: dark, wide-set eyes, his curled Kaiser Wilhelm mustaches framing the center of his face like quotation marks. The Kaiser perceiving his false identity and calling out the irony.

I closed the passport.

I had some quick and complicated decisions to make.

Mensinger and his mission were involved in this one way or another. That seemed intuitively clear to me.

There was nothing I could do for Gerhard.

I could only bulldog this story now. Tomorrow morning I would follow Mensinger north.

And that would be the best I could do for Gerhard. To figure out what was going on and to expose it.

I couldn’t travel as myself. Mensinger had not seen me yet, as far as I knew. But I couldn’t travel as an American. I’d never even make it to Mexico City.

I put Gerhard’s passport in my pocket. I looked to his naturalization papers on the floor. Both these things were left in the room, in the open, to tell the Americans that the killers — the Germans — knew who this man was and what he was doing.

I could get Bunky to put my photo in the passport. For the Federales along the route and for any possible bandit ambushes, this would help. I needed to keep away from Mensinger, but he’d be in a Pullman, reclusive, I was sure. I’d be several cars behind. I did worry about an entourage. But I had to risk this.

I’d leave Gerhard’s other papers on the floor. I couldn’t afford to get involved in an investigation, but he needed to be identified.

I took another deep breath. I looked at Gerhard. I nodded him a respectful good-bye. I turned and eased open the door, peeked out. The courtyard was still empty.

I stepped from the room. I approached the front of the hotel carefully. The old man had returned, but he was back on his chair behind the front desk and snoring heavily. I moved quietly past him and I stopped a few steps from the door and watched the street. I waited for a passerby to cross in front of the hotel, heading away from the train station. And I slipped out of the Hostal Buen Viaje, unnoticed. I turned toward the station and moved quickly off, leaving the murder behind but carrying it with me very closely now indeed.

The train station was ahead but I needed to transform the passport in my pocket into my own passport before I could put a name on a ticket. I needed Bunky first. I needed to turn into Gerhard Vogel. I headed for the Diligencias, where Bunk was no doubt by now seeking a remedy with the hair of the mangy Mexican street dog that bit him. I put my head down and walked fast and expected to think about Mensinger’s talking points; the time had come to focus on this story as if I were with the Greeks again at Kilkis and I was ready to go on ahead to Sofia if they beat the Bulgars as badly as I expected. All of which clear, professional thinking was impossible in the present moment. It was not every day you saw the throat slashed of a guy who could admire the way the Cubs turned a double play even though he was a Pirates fan. Or who played a minor horn in a brass band like he actually enjoyed making music. If he was such a bully American spy and he had a build on him, how did he let some Hun feed him to the worms?

I stewed about this till I was coming up on the portales, and the place was not even a quarter full, with the siesta in full snore and the newsmen either adopting that particular local custom or off trying to invent stories. Davis, I’d learn later, was at this very moment with Fred Palmer and Medill McCormick getting themselves arrested up the train line toward Mexico City, asserting their rights as journalists and giving Davis one of his meaningless, self-instigated, derring-do magazine stories out of it. I knew better than that.

And there was Bunky, as I expected, sitting alone at our table nursing a mezcal to ease the pain in his head. As I sat down with him, he was full of avid assertions that it was only one drink so he could actually focus his eyes.

“I know, I know,” I said, and I wasn’t sounding sarcastic. He wasn’t totally out of control yet, old Bunk. He did still know how to arrange for a fairly sober week after a really bad night.

And the bit of mezcal had already done its work sufficiently to let him notice my face.

“What’s happened?” he said.

I told him the whole story.

He listened in focused silence, and then, when I finished, he looked off to the street and whistled, low.

I slid the passport across the table to him. He took it and glanced at the picture page and slipped it into his pocket. “I’ve got a couple of shots of you that’ll work,” he said.

“I need it right away,” I said.

“No problem,” he said.

“You think you can face the smell of the chemicals right now?”

“Two more sips and I can sniff Satan’s butt,” he said.

“Looks like that’s going to be my job,” I said.

“You be careful,” he said. “These guys seem to know what they’re doing.”

I gave him a single nod, like my catcher had just asked for a fastball that I was ready to throw.

Bunky lifted his glass of mezcal to me and took the first of his two-more sips. He said, “You want to try some of those things on me that Mensinger wrote down?”

“Sure,” I said.

I looked away to bring them to mind and I found myself staring into Diego’s face. But from across the street, and he was passing by quickly.

He was cutting across the zócalo at a medium trot, as if he was being chased but didn’t quite want to show it. And he was giving me a look as if he had a little bit of a problem and he was checking to see if there was anything the boss could do. Then he was looking forward again and he vanished behind the trees up the path toward the band shell. I didn’t have time to think about this: Walking briskly across my sight now, unaware of me, seeming to match Diego’s pace for the moment but apparently not ready to catch him, was Kapitän Krüger . For a brief moment I didn’t recognize him. No Uhlan uniform. His outing pants were dark and so was his shirt and he had on what looked like a very dark railroad workman’s jacket, but also vaguely military, with unadorned epaulets, and his head was bare. The clothes, in being so at odds with Vera Cruz weather in their darkness, seemed consciously chosen for some specific purpose; the bareheadedness seemed as if he had gone out in haste. And he was clearly following Diego, who had probably tried to embellish his orders from me about the wallet and of course it had gone wrong.

All this ran through my mind even as I was jumping to my feet and crossing the street as soon as Krüger was past easy head-turning range. I jogged into the path and Krüger was thirty yards or so ahead of me. I reckoned Diego was about that far ahead of the German, so I slowed to their pace and followed. We circled the band shell to the left and headed back toward Independencia. I caught a quick sight of Diego far up ahead. He had come this way to get my attention and to show me, even now, that Krüger was definitely following him.

I did nothing to hide my presence, other than keeping my distance. I was not afraid of Krüger seeing me. If he did and it made him break off, then all the better. But he was not focusing on anything except the boy. This wasn’t going to end well.