Aztec Fire

by Gary Jennings

  We took a walk in the moonlight to give the count and his newest paramour-of-the-night privacy.

  “What if the woman’s husband shows up?” Maria asked.

  “Hopefully he’s dead and buried. If not, you inherit Luis’s coach, become a countess, and I’ll be your servant.”

  She stared at me with fixed curiosity. “Who are you?” she finally asked.

  I stopped and took her in my arms. “What do you mean? Who do you want me to be?”

  “I want to know: Who are you?”

  “A man who has always loved you. Always. Even when you mocked me.”

  I kissed her cheek.

  “I only resent the way you’ve wasted your talents.”

  “I have a talent for love, too.”

  She squirmed out of my arms. “I don’t need to get pregnant while I’m on the run.”

  “And when we’re not on the run?”

  “We can make love after we’re married. When you prove your loyalty to the Cause.”

  “I see … it’s my talents you love, not my person.”

  “Of course. Men are found everywhere. But gun-makers are a rare breed.”

  I grabbed her and kissed her as my hands worked inside her clothes.

  “Get moving.”

  I jumped away from Maria.

  “Get the carriage moving,” the count said. He looked at us—his two footmen—and shook his head. “You indio brothers have strange customs.”

  The woman was gone. I didn’t know what caused his haste. The prospect of the woman’s husband returning … or the woman’s discovery that her jewelry was missing …

  “He must be in trouble if he’s having us move the coach at night,” I said to Maria. “Pray one of our horses doesn’t break a leg.”

  “Did you notice that he doesn’t care what route we take?” Maria asked.

  “Yes, he does. He wants us to take him to places where he can gamble and meet rich women.”

  “What a pathetic way to live. Spending his time playing cards and telling the fortunes of stupid women before bedding them as easily as putas, which is all they seem to be.”

  “Putas who pay him,” I pointed out.

  “We can’t trust him,” she said.

  “That’s all right. He can’t trust us, either.”

  PART IX

  THE COUNTERFEIT COUNT

  THIRTY-FIVE

  YOUR EXCELLENCY, PLEASE have another one of these exquisite bonbons.” The woman leaned forward to put the chocolate in Luis’s mouth.

  He let his hand brush against her bountiful bosom as she leaned toward him. Her apple cheeks reddened, and she smiled with pleasure.

  “Did your husband suffer much in his last illness?” he asked.

  “No, the Lord was merciful and took him right after the evening meal. He was in pain at first, then emitted several massive belches and broke wind like a mule and died … with a look of great relief.” She popped another bonbon in her own mouth.

  Given the ripe rotundity of her bosom, her waist was surprisingly narrow, Luis noted. Moreover, the ample décolletage of her low-cut white evening gown showed her curvaceous cleavage off to maximal advantage. Tonight, Luis decided, he would blend the business of acquiring a new gambling stake in exchange for satisfying the widow’s desperate needs while pleasuring himself.

  He seldom allowed himself that luxury.

  Glancing around the spacious living room, Luis noted that like the hacienda walls outside, these living-room walls were gessoed a dazzling alabaster. The only adornment on the walls were two small crucifixes and a large rectangular mirror in an elaborately carved teak frame. Scattered around the spacious room were four octagonal tables of matching teak, each surrounded by a trio of straight-back armchairs upholstered in soft jet-black leather. A matching leather couch faced a long low narrow table also of teak. Against each of three walls stood an ebony chest featuring a dozen small drawers with brass handles. The fourth wall opened into a vast dining sala at the center of which was a spectacularly long mahogany banquet table and matching straight-back armchairs upholstered with leather seats and backs.

  Luis wasn’t impressed with the woman’s house or her jewels, but the cards had been against him earlier—they usually were—and he had latched on to her at the party because she appeared vulnerable and available.

  He desperately needed another stake.

  He preferred women who could provide a good brandy and fine Cuban cigars. He didn’t see a humidor of cigars, but a filled crystal brandy decanter, surrounded by eight crystal goblets, stood in the middle of a round silver serving tray in the center of the long narrow teak table.

  Luis filled two of the goblets to the brim and handed one to the widow. He clinked her glass in toast.

  “Salud,” she said softly.

  “Y dinero,” he added.

  He took a large mouthful, swirled it around his tongue, then savored the fine brandy as it burned its way down his throat. It was the best brandy he’d had in at least a month. The widow’s late husband had enjoyed superlative taste in fine liquors.

  “My priest was wondering where Santa Barbara de la Sierra Madre is located. He said he had never heard of your estate.”

  As if to confirm his doubt, the sleeping priest—passed out on a chair from too much holy wine at the card game—broke the metronomic cadence of his snoring with several short snorts.

  Luis waved his hand in the air as if to push away the priest’s ignorance. “I have no doubt that a small-town priest is ignorant of many things.” He leaned closer, subtly pulling out a deck of tarot cards. “A woman who so recently found herself alone in the world must be interested in knowing what the future holds for her.”

  With a surprised widening of the eyes she looked on the cards … and smiled.

  Glancing disdainfully at the besotted, snoring priest, Luis sighed wearily to himself and began to lay out the woman’s future. If the priest woke, he would cause trouble, perhaps even putting the local constabulary or, even worse, the regional representative of the Inquisition onto him. A realist, Luis understood that the issue was not that he employed devil cards to summon the occult art of tomorrow-telling. The priest would instead turn Luis in for swindling the widow out of her inheritance—money that the priest had no doubt earmarked for himself.

  Luis had learned tarot from his gypsy mother—the woman who had taken him in as a foundling. She had not brought him up out of motherly love—as a professional con artist, she found small children useful as shills in her various confidence games—and as light-fingered thieves. Louisa had taught him well as they worked the towns of Toledo, Madrid, Barcelona—all the countless cities where she and her ward plied their deceptive trade.

  During one surprisingly long sojourn in Toledo, a city along the Tagus River in the Castilla la Mancha providence of central Spain, she had taught him the black art of the tarot-reading. She had seduced a wealthy city father and was planning to relieve him of most of his considerable fortune before taking French leave of the old man in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, the old man saw through her scheme and at the last second he denounced her trickery and sent for the police. Luis and his mother had fled in the middle of the night—not with the old man’s loot but with the clothes on their backs and the Toledo constables on their tail.

  He looked back on that period with some nostalgia. He missed Toledo with its ancient Roman and medieval Moorish architecture and traditions.

  That stint in Toledo, however, and Louisa’s tarot-card mentoring had served him in good stead over the years, supplying him with a steady stream of revenue when times were hard. As long as he had a reliable retinue of rich widows and a deck of devil cards—with which to charm their fancy and captivate their wits—he would not starve.

  Plying that trade was not without its risks. More than once, the devil cards—and the profits they reaped—had brought the law down on him as well. On one such occasion he had employed the devil deck to rob a woman of both her wits and
a huge diamond ring that her late husband had lovingly bestowed on her. In that instance so many constables and Inquisitors had descended on him he had actually sought military service as a way out of his mess. Joining the army under an assumed name, he had entered the lists as a cannoneer against Napoleon.

  He trained in the army as a cannoneer and because he was intelligent and had a good eye and brain for calculating trajectories, he soon rose to master gunner on a Spanish warship. He had enjoyed the action and excitement, the blood and violence, the thrust of the blades and the thunder of the guns. He was forced to jump ship in Cadiz, however, after knifing an officer over a card game. The officer had claimed Luis had been cheating. Luis counter-claimed that the officer was the cheat. Both accusations were true, but when the officer reached for his blade, Luis proved the superior swordsman as well as the more dexterously deceptive cardsharp.

  To avoid the hangman, he crewed on a vessel headed for the colony. By the time he jumped ship in Veracruz, he had cleaned out most of the officers and crew during the all-night shipboard card games. He was ready to set himself up as a New Spain grandee.

  Only recently had he managed to pass himself off as a count. His purported coat of arms—adorning his carriage door—announced his nobility everywhere he went.

  He had misappropriated the carriage in the silver mining town of Guanajuato after the dice had divested him of everything but his charm. After an all-night orgy of drinking, dicing, debauching, and devil-card-reading, he had borrowed the carriage from the wife—not the widow—of a silver-mine owner with which to return to his inn. Her husband, the count—who’d bought his title—had emblazoned his crest upon the coach doors. Luis learned from a passerby, who had mistaken him for the count, that constables waited at the inn for the gambling, drinking, debauching tarot-reader.

  He was not discomfited.

  In truth, he had admired the coach and four—and particularly its courtly escutcheon—with such invidious rapacity that he had quickly summoned the coachmen down from their box, ordered them to examine the rear axle, and when they turned toward the rear wheel, he had brained them with his wrist-quirt’s leaded butt stock.

  Commandeering the coach and four, he had skipped out on the inn and his bill, flagrantly forsaking the concupiscent countess.

  He didn’t know how long his nobleman’s ruse would last before the authorities would be after him in force once more.

  But Luis knew no other way to live.

  THIRTY-SIX

  AT TOLUCA, WE set out south for the China Road.

  At the town of Ixtapan de la Sal—famed for its mineral waters—I knew I should reach out to the guerrilla leader Vicente Guerrero. We were in the region where governmental authority was often nonexistent. When the government troops came to town, the local government paid its taxes to the viceroy; when rebel troops arrived, the taxes went to them.

  From what I heard, the rebels were currently in the area, which suited me perfectly.

  Count Luis had not heard of the town named as a place of “salt.” He was pleased when I told him many rich women come to the spas here because the water was known to cure arthritic and rheumatic conditions.

  After the count left to look for wealthy widows and games of chance, I told Maria to watch the carriage. It was stabled by the inn where the stable boy watered, fed, and rubbed down our stock.

  I then made the rounds of the pulquerías. I had a message system for contacting the China Road rebels: a note left at pulquerías with three words on it: Alquimista y Guerrero.

  The message would tell them that the Alchemist needed to talk to the rebel chieftain.

  I chose only taverns where I felt comfortable with the bartenders.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THE COUNT’S LUCK at cards seemed to be holding up for a change and so was mine. After three days a man strolled up to me in a bar and said “Vicente wants to talk to you. Go to the baño.”

  The outhouse was in the back twenty paces from the pulquería. I was still five paces from it when men came out of the bar behind me. They were dressed in plain white shirts, trousers, and rope sandals. They had grim faces and brandished machetes.

  Rebels, for sure. But which group was the question. Rebel leaders often fought among each other as bitterly as they battled the royals.

  “The viceroy sent you to murder the general,” said a tall man with hard dark eyes, long hair, and a mean face so sharp and angular it reminded me of the machete he shook at me. “You will die instead.”

  “No one sent me. I’m the Alchemist, amigo.”

  “You’re a lying killer.”

  “Take me to General Guerrero.”

  “Your eyes will never see him and your lying tongue will never speak of him because they will be cut out.”

  “The general must be told I’m here.”

  The door to the outhouse opened behind me and a man with a clear commanding presence stepped out. He was of medium height with a broad nose framed by piercing wide-set eyes and a glittering smile filled with white teeth. His dark features contrasted his dazzling smile, accentuating it.

  The Spanish were wrong about blood. Mixing blood created men and women with exceptional powers. General Vicente Guerrero was the proof of that.

  I gave him a polite bow. “General. We have never met, but we have communicated many times. I am the Alchemist.”

  He raised his eyebrows and a pistol. “If you really are the Alchemist, then you can tell me something.”

  “Sí, señor, what is it you want to know?”

  “Tell me the formula for gunpowder.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  WHAT ARE YOU telling me?” Maria demanded. “That you personally spoke to General Guerrero and he invited the two of us to join his staff?”

  “Have I ever lied to you?”

  “You are lying right now. Tell me the truth.”

  “I spoke to Guerrero—”

  “That much I believe. What I don’t believe is that you are as innocent as you say. There’s something you haven’t told me.”

  There was plenty I had not told her. Guerrero was happy to get Maria as a pamphleteer and printer. And ecstatic to get a man capable of repairing firearms and making gunpowder.

  I had to tell Maria the whole truth, but I didn’t have time. I told her where she was to meet Guerrero’s forces outside of town.

  “Why can’t you come with me?” she asked.

  “I have to tell the count we’re leaving so he can replace us.”

  “Why? He can find coachmen.”

  “Not if he’s on the run from a jealous husband or cardplayers he cheated. He’s helped us. I can’t go without warning him.”

  I left Maria and went to where the coach was parked at a stable hoping that the count had left a message about his whereabouts.

  The count came rushing into the stable as I looked for the stable man.

  “We have to get out of here. Get the horses harnessed.”

  “I can’t, Your Excellency. My brother and I are leaving your employ—”

  Galloping horses came into the stable yard.

  “Run for your life!” Luis yelled. He drew his sword.

  I pulled both of my concealed pistols.

  Luis gaped at me.

  “You run,” I shouted, “I’ll cover your back.”

  But I couldn’t. More horsemen had arrived at the back of the stable building. They had us front and back—a dozen armed men at least, wielding swords, knives, pistolas, muskets, whips, and ropes.

  Hangman’s ropes knotted with nooses.

  Mother of God, Luis had incited a mob.

  Luis threw down his sword. “Put down your pistols, amigo. You can kill a couple of men, but they will kill us. I’m not ready to die.”

  Twelve angry men with hell in their eyes and blood in their mouths descended on us with flailing fists and gun butts.

  THIRTY-NINE

  AYYO … LUIS WAS one bad hombre. Bad at cards, at telling fortunes, at sleeping with other
men’s wives, at taking their jewelry … worse, at ransacking the purses and pride of their husbands. The only thing Luis had going for him was his fast escapes.

  Inevitably the day would come when Luis ran out of fast escapes.

  And I would be standing next to him.

  They took my special pistolas and beat me to the ground.

  And then beat and stomped me some more.

  I expected to be killed outright—or perhaps dragged to the nearest tree and hung.

  I was surprised that after an hour Luis and I were both alive. Bound, for certain, hand and foot, though the bleeding had subsided for both of us. The pain was still there.

  What we didn’t know was exactly who held us prisoner. Luis had offended many people with his usual bad behavior. But there was some controversy about what to do with us. My impression was that some of the men wanted to give us summary justice—dragging us to the nearest tree—while others wanted to profit off of us.

  Luis said they hadn’t turned us over to constables since all the royal authority had fled because the rebels were operating in the area.

  “What are they going to do to us?”

  “Shhh.”

  A man with a broad black mustache and fiery eyes arrived on horseback. He dressed as a caballero and had a brace of pistolas strapped to his waist. More intense discussions took place.

  After a moment, I realized something important. “They sound like a bunch of merchants trying to get the best price for cattle.”

  Luis muttered a prayer under his breath.

  For the first time I felt fear.

  I could face a firing squad, hangman’s rope, perhaps even to be drawn and quartered but not without fear … Luis, on the other hand, was not a man to fear anyone or anything—not even the devil. Especially not the devil. When he got frightened, it scared me.

  “What’s wrong? What are they going to do to us?”

  “Take us to Acapulco to the Manila galleon.”