The Wages of Fame

by Thomas Fleming

  General Stapleton led a charge that carried the positions around the gate. But the first Americans to enter the city were shot down by Mexicans fighting from rooftops and windows. George decided his tired men had done enough for one day and brought up reinforcements to solidify their grip on the gate. He sent a messenger back to General Scott telling him San Cosme had been breached. The messenger soon returned with terse orders to stay alert for a counterattack. General John Quitman of Mississippi had captured the Belén Gate and was also being ordered to wait until morning to see whether the Mexicans were going to defend the city street by street.

  George’s head wound still sent slivers of pain through his skull. Maria had poured some wine with a light dose of opium into his canteen, and he swigged it during the long night, enabling him to get two or three hours of broken sleep. Beyond the San Cosme Gate, Mexico City lay dark and silent. In the dawn, General Stapleton strode among his men, warning them to be ready for more hard fighting. The Mexican cavalry had seen no action in the last six weeks. They might be ordered to make a last desperate charge.

  Instead of the clatter of hooves, the shrill bugle calls of attacking lancers, down the empty street plodded a delegation of dispirited civilians carrying a white flag. One of them spoke fairly good English. He informed General Stapleton that General Santa Anna and his remaining troops had fled, and the civilians were here to surrender Mexico City to the Americans.

  George accepted the surrender and rushed another messenger back to Tacubaya to tell General Scott this good news. The messenger returned with orders to march the men to the city’s Grand Plaza, where they would rendezvous with Quitman’s troops, advancing from the Belen Gate. Scott would join them there. With a hundred skirmishers warily moving ahead of his column, George led his men across the great green park known as the Alameda to the vast square, with its immense cathedral and the equally huge National Palace. He and General Quitman went into the National Palace, hoping to find some members of the Mexican federal government. Instead, they found at least two dozen looters going through desks and wardrobes. Most of them fled. But one came at Quitman with a knife, and the Mississippian shot him dead. The knife was gold, with a twisted blade. “Aztec, probably,” Quitman said. “Maybe we should use it to cut the heart out of this goddamn country.”

  Like most of the army, Quitman was bitter about the thousands of Americans who had been killed and wounded thanks to Santa Anna’s stalling tactics. He began telling George that he had become a convinced All Mexico man. George nodded noncommittally. Now was not the time to argue with his fellow Democrat.

  Outside, they ordered their soldiers to form ranks. George’s uniform was splattered with mud. Quitman was minus a shoe. More than half the soldiers were shoeless. Their uniforms, what was left of them, were ragged wrecks. But they had conquered this nation of 8 million people. They were occupying a city of two hundred thousand with a mere six thousand men. The story was an epic, worthy of inclusion in the history books with the exploits of Cortés.

  General Stapleton watched the Mexican flag come down and the American flag rise over the National Palace. Was this symbolic ceremony an augury of things to come? In his aching head, a voice suddenly spoke with remarkable clarity. Not if I have anything to say about it.

  NINE

  “HELP! HELP! OH MY GOD!”

  The cry of anguish roiled the humid air of the bedroom overlooking the Avenida St. Francis, where General George Stapleton cradled Maria de Vega in his arms. They had made exquisite elegiac love again and were whispering fragments of joy and regret, longing and transformation, when reality came crashing out of the darkness. They were no longer lovers in some imagined kingdom of romantic desire. They were a wounded man and a damaged woman in a city clotted with violence and rage.

  General Stapleton sprang from the bed and flung on his clothes. Pistol in hand, he rushed into the street. On the corner he saw a blue-uniformed body in a patch of moonlight. Two men were bending over him. “Put up your hands!” he shouted in Spanish. The men ran in opposite directions. By the time he reached the corner, they had vanished into alleys off the Avenida St. Francis.

  He knelt beside the American. He was a kid—no more than seventeen. They had stabbed him repeatedly in the chest and back. Blood ran in dark rivulets from his body. Out of the darkness clattered a four-man patrol of U.S. Marines. A battalion of these seagoing soldiers had been sent to reinforce the army after the casualties at the Molino del Rey. They had been entrusted with policing the city.

  “Jesus!” one of the marines said. “This is the ninth one they got tonight.”

  “We gotta get tough with these greasers,” another marine said, adding a string of expletives to decorate this opinion.

  “Two of you go for an ambulance,” General Stapleton said. “The other two stay with the body.”

  He returned to Maria de Vega’s apartment. “Madre de Dios,” she murmured when he told her what had happened. “Santa Anna will destroy us yet.”

  The Americans had been in Mexico City for two weeks. The first three days had been a chaos of sniping from rooftops and windows. As he left the city, Santa Anna had opened the prisons and given guns to over two thousand hardened criminals, hoping they would start a popular uprising. The Americans had responded with point-blank artillery fire that soon killed or dispersed most of this impromptu militia. But they, or other Santa Anna operatives in civilian clothes, had continued a haphazard guerrilla war, picking off lone Americans who made the mistake of wandering around the city after dark.

  “It doesn’t make things easier,” George said. “I’m beginning to think we have nothing to rely on but your prayers.”

  “I fear they don’t rise beyond the ceiling of this room, where my heart belongs to no one and nothing but you.”

  “I feel the same way. But we know it isn’t true.”

  “Yes, the pursuit of happiness is forbidden us.”

  He had told Maria everything. George Stapleton could not lie to a woman he loved. He had showed her Jeremy Biddle’s vicious letter and confessed the mixture of desire and revenge that had brought him to her bed. The truth had been a corrosive elixir that had burned away ambiguities on both sides. Between her love of Mexico and his obligations as a Stapleton, they had established a precarious half-real world where love nourished with transcendent intensity, a wild compound of wish and hope and dream and the rueful knowledge that it was temporary, that there would come a day, an hour, a moment, when the bitter word good-bye would have to be spoken.

  At first she was able to accept it better than he, with his stubborn American belief that every problem had a solution. Her Spanish fatalism about life and love saw a darker more tragic world. But lately, as the situation in Mexico City and the rest of Mexico oscillated between peace and anarchy, she had become the tormented one.

  Maria had introduced George to her uncle, Manuel de la Pena y Pena, the president of Mexico’s Supreme Court. He was her father’s opposite, a man of grave but compassionate understanding. When Santa Anna abdicated the presidency after his final defeat at the gates of Mexico City, he had designated Judge Pena as the interim president. Reluctantly accepting the office, he had found himself an executive without a government. The federal congress had vanished, afraid that any man who voted for a peace treaty might be signing his death warrant.

  Meanwhile, letters from a triumphant Caroline reported that the All Mexico campaign was building up irresistible momentum in the United States. Newspaper after newspaper was taking up the cry, as Mexican guerrilla attacks were described—and frequently magnified—by reporters with the American army.

  Last week, George had led a column of fifteen hundred men in pursuit of a fragment of the Mexican Army, operating near Puebla. They had retreated to the town of Humantala. George had sent five hundred Texas Rangers into the town in a headlong charge that had virtually annihilated the Mexicans in a wild orgy of shooting and stabbing. Although the casualties were ten to one in favor of the Americans, the r
eporters had turned the story into a tragic elegy for Jack Hays, the Ranger colonel, who was killed in the opening volleys. Remembering how Hays had turned the Mexican vaquero into a running target on the march into Mexico, George was less inclined to weep. But Hays’s death had aroused the Rangers to wild fury, and they had begun massacring every Mexican in Humantala. George had been forced to send in regulars with fixed bayonets to protect the cowering civilians. The experience had convinced him that a long occupation of Mexico would make the two countries irreconcilable enemies forever.

  But events seemed to be favoring Caroline and John Sladen. The next morning, George went to a council of war in General Scott’s offices at the National Palace. Scott’s expression was a study in disillusionment and dismay. He had won his war and he wanted to go home to garner some plaudits—including a possible nomination for the presidency. But it looked as if he would spend the rest of his life in Mexico City.

  “Nine more Americans murdered in this city last night,” Scott said. “We had twenty killed and a hundred wounded clearing the guerrillas out of Humantala. These people are vastly underestimating our patience. I’m tempted to proclaim martial law, not just in Mexico City but in the entire country.”

  “Humantala was Santa Anna’s last gasp,” George said. “Let’s not lose our heads. Mexico City is settling down. We’ve killed or captured most of the thugs they let out of jail.”

  “Frankly, General,” Gideon Pillow said, “I don’t think your opinion of these greasers is very objective. You’re looking at them through a haze of scented petticoats.”

  “General Pillow,” George said, “I resent that remark—extremely. Unless I hear an immediate apology, my aide will call upon you with a challenge before nightfall.”

  “I can’t officially condone dueling between any officers in this army,” Scott said. “But unofficially, I’m tempted to act as your second, General Stapleton.”

  Pillow’s eyes darted around the table, looking for support from one of the other generals. There was none. Several had acquired Mexican mistresses. All of them despised the president’s former law partner for writing a letter to the New Orleans Picayune trying to claim credit for the strategy that had captured Mexico City.

  “I didn’t mean to make any reflection on General Stapleton’s private life,” Pillow said. “But I think I can say with confidence that President Polk is deeply troubled by Mexico’s continuing resistance and wants us to conquer a peace that leaves us masters of this country for another fifty years.”

  “Do you have a letter from him stating this policy?” Scott snapped.

  “No. But the twenty thousand reinforcements he’s sending us should speak louder than mere words. This is a matter of some political delicacy. If we fail to cooperate with him by publicizing to the fullest Mexico’s intransigence—and by reacting to it with maximum force—I think we’ll all experience his disapproval.”

  “I say we should double the marines’ night patrols—and warn the soldiers never to go anywhere alone after dark,” George said. “I think that will make this city safer than New York.”

  “I’m inclined to agree,” Scott said. “But I’m still at a loss about peace negotiations. There’s no trace of a Mexican government—it seems to have evaporated.”

  “I may have some information on that point in a day or two,” General Stapleton said. “Judge Pena y Pena told me there are signs that the federal congress may reassemble in Querétaro. In the meantime, he’s dismissed Santa Anna as commander in chief of the army. You’ll see it in the newspapers today.”

  “Please be good enough to pass on to me anything else you learn, General,” Scott said with more than a little sarcasm. “Perhaps you could do it before it reaches the newspapers.”

  “I only learned of it last night, General. I have no desire to interfere with your position as our commander in chief. The fortunes of war have given me this opportunity.”

  “I understand,” Scott said. “You have my full confidence, General. Which is more than I can say for other people at this table.”

  Scott looked hard at Pillow and then at General William Worth. “Haughty Bill,” as he was called, had also persuaded some reporters to give him credit for planning the entire campaign. George was discovering that generals, once the fighting war ends, become as hungry for fame as politicians.

  “The regulations of the U.S. Army make it a court-martial offense for an officer to publish anything in a newspaper without the permission of his commanding general,” Scott said. “Remember that, gentlemen. We’ll meet here at the same time next week. Good day.”

  On the way down the hall from Scott’s offices to the grand staircase, George heard a reedy voice call, “General Stapleton.”

  It was Nicholas Trist, looking more eccentric than ever. He had let his hair grow to shoulder length. His suit looked as if he had recently worn it in a rainstorm. In his hand was the inevitable cheroot. “I’ve just received the most dismaying news,” he said. “I’ve been relieved of my duties and ordered to return home.”

  Caroline had told George this was coming. It was another ominous sign that his duplicitous wife, with Sarah Polk’s help, had acquired inordinate influence with the president.

  What to do? Trist was the last man George would choose as a negotiator, if he had any freedom of choice. But there was no time for freedom of choice. In the next mail might come a letter formally appointing him viceroy of Mexico with power to make a peace only at the point of a gun. If he refused the appointment, his opposition would be visible—and subject to savage attack in the administration’s newspapers. General Gideon Pillow or some other deserving Democrat would be given the job.

  “It takes a long time for mail to travel from here to Washington,” George said. “A lot of it goes astray. If I were you, I’d tell no one about the letter. Pretend you never got it. Come to my apartment tonight. I’ll have Judge Pena y Pena there, ready to listen to your final offer.”

  Trist looked confused. He had George listed in his head as a devoted president’s man. He had just been reprimanded and recalled by James Knox Polk. Why was General Stapleton telling him to ruin his career completely by defying the White House?

  George decided to tell him the truth. “I don’t know how closely you’ve been following American politics. There’s a movement building up to occupy all of Mexico indefinitely, the way the British have taken over India. It’s being pushed by Senator Sladen of Louisiana and a cadre of other Southern politicians. They see it as a way to make the South, and slavery, invulnerable. They plan to make Mexico a Southern colony. I think that would be a terrible mistake—for Mexico, and the United States.”

  Trist seemed to recede into himself for a moment. His eyes became opaque. “I’m all too aware of this dream of a slave empire. I was the U.S. consul in Havana for five years. I spent many a drunken hour listening to my fellow Southerners talk about what the South could become if we possessed Cuba and the other Caribbean islands. I suppose Mexico is the ultimate logic of this purple dream.”

  Trist paced the little office General Scott had assigned to him. “I can remember Mr. Jefferson looking out the window at the slaves working in the fields around Monticello and saying, ‘It is written in the book of fate that these people will be free one day.’ I thought it was an old man’s guilty fantasy. I didn’t know then how often he had tried to strike a blow against slavery in the Continental Congress—and when he was president.”

  Trist stopped and pulled savagely on his cheroot. “I didn’t have his kind of courage, General. When I was consul in Havana, I looked the other way and let certain Southerners get rich smuggling slaves from Cuba to New Orleans. They promised to make me secretary of state one day.”

  He paced again. “I’m not a courageous man, General. I don’t have any money, and my wife thinks she should live like Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughter.”

  “Maybe there comes a time in a man’s life when he has to do something because he knows it’s right, even though
he also knows it will probably make him miserable—on a personal level.”

  George realized he was speaking for himself as well as for pathetic Nicholas Trist. So many lives were meeting here in a bizarre confluence. For a man who was not religious, it was confusing, but somehow reassuring. George sensed a presence, perhaps several presences, in this small dim room overlooking Mexico City’s Grand Plaza.

  Heavy footsteps in the hall. General Winfield Scott towered in the doorway, formidable in his gold epaulets and gold-striped trousers. “What’s this? A diplomatic tête-à-tête?”

  Again, the tone was mildly sarcastic. As commanding general, Winfield Scott did not like to be left out of anything.

  Once more George decided honesty was the only policy. “Mr. Trist just received a letter telling him he’s been recalled. The president has apparently decided that his mere presence here encourages the Mexicans to think they can somehow better the terms we’ve offered. Mr. Polk has decided no more offers should come from us. Future proposals will have to come from the Mexicans.”

  “Yesterday a delegation of leading citizens of Mexico City called on me,” Scott said. “They proposed that I resign from the American army and become dictator of Mexico for six years. They guaranteed me ample funds to raise and equip an army.”

  “I’ve just told Mr. Trist I thought he should make one more attempt to get a treaty before he quits the field.”

  Winfield Scott looked long and hard at General Stapleton. The commander in chief was not a stupid man. He saw all the ramifications of George’s words. He was being asked to concur in disobeying, or at least ignoring, the orders of their president. He was being asked, or told, that he should turn his back on becoming dictator of Mexico. Winfield Scott did not like being told to do things. George knew he was risking an explosion.

  “I agree,” Scott said. “The sooner we get our army out of Mexico on honorable terms, the better it will be for all concerned.”