Robert Butler - The Hot Country

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.

I slipped into the Diligencias through the back veranda door. The first wave of American refugees had recently shipped off to New Orleans and I was able, without drawing any attention, to get a room for the night. A good one, on the upper floor looking over the zócalo . I dropped my bag on the bed and went out and hustled to the train station, watching my back carefully. And I had to think the next step through. I was going to end up on the train with Mensinger. His ticket terminated at a strikingly obscure destination. Even if I followed him off the train in La Mancha, I didn’t want my own ticket to make anyone suspicious. An inquisitive and talkative conductor, for instance. I’d buy my ticket for a stop somewhere up the line. Torreón. One of the ironies of the civil war was that the trains did run from one rebel’s jurisdiction to another’s. From the Federales ’ jurisdiction to a rebel’s and out again. The rebels allowed it for the sake of occasionally waylaying a train and robbing it, certainly. But also to avoid simply shutting the country down. The rebellion had gone on for more than three years already and showed no signs of stopping.

And so, a short time later, a certain Herr Gerhard Vogel pointed at Torreón on the train schedule, fifty miles north of La Mancha, and he asked to buy a “ Zugkarte der ersten Klasse für Morgen, ” which was about as much as I could expect to effectively say in this situation without resorting to double-talk faux-German. But the Mexican clerk had plenty of German travelers pass through, so in a mixture of Spanish and hand signals he verified if it was a first-class ticket I wanted, for tomorrow, and I was able simply to nod. And Bunky had done swell. The passport itself would work at customs in Hamburg. I gestured effectively enough to get the first-class car as far back of the Pullman as possible.

And it was not long before I was sitting at my table in the portales, breathing a little easier as the end-of-the-afternoon sunlight stretched out across the rooftops of Vera Cruz. The waiter, who knew me by now, immediately delivered two telegrams. There were only two people wiring me in Vera Cruz. I put the one aside with an unpleasant fizzle in my head. I opened the Chicago wire. Clyde wrote: Girl sniper great. Sold out Bulldog in half an hour, boosted Daybreak 30 percent, Morning similar. Too bad she didn’t nick you. Dope on your man FVM vague. Some sort of government banking official. You got a whiff?

I was glad his Bulldog edition sold out quick and carried into the next day. Our big bosses loved that. And as for Scarface officially being an economics guy, Clyde might as well have wired that he’d confirmed Friedrich von Mensinger as a high-ranking German Secret Service officer.

I signaled the waiter and he brought me cable blanks. I checked my pocket Elgin, which I was back to carrying, now that I expected to avoid trouble, at least for tonight, and I had a little time to get to the telegraph office. So I also ordered an aguardiente . I wrote to Clyde: Got a big whiff. Will be out of touch for a while. Bunky will handle VC inertia.

I figured that would boost Clyde’s coffee intake 30 percent, his sleeplessness a similar amount. But I laid the cable blank before me on the tabletop with a tiny nod to Clyde Fetter. Clyde did not doubt that I knew what I was doing, and he let me do it.

As did my mother. I wished I knew what it was she was doing and could happily let her do it. Not that I had any choice but to let her, whatever it was. I picked up her wire and put it down and picked it up and put it down and drank some of the aguardiente that had just arrived and then I picked the wire up and held it. She was capable of hinting further about her “golden strings” being tuned or her “brass” being handled. I don’t think she even understood how I didn’t really want to hear about that. To be fair to her, as I grew up with my mother, when she was being a woman, she rarely could do anything but simply put me in the hotel hallway and regretfully expect me to now and then put my ear to the door. For her to have had no passion or, worse, for her to have it and never act upon it were her only realistic alternatives. And her genius as an actress meant she must, by her very essence, live her life openly, always upon a stage, even if it was in a play called Life .