The Cry of the Wind

by Kurt R A Giambastiani

  These were the luxuries of his office and they measured the height of his rise from the disgrace of defeat at El Bracito to the photograph of himself and the Lord Viceroy, taken just a few months ago in San Francisco. His return to Spanish society had been long and arduous, but he had returned, and whatever that pouch contained, it could not be worse than the obstacles he had already overcome.

  He walked briskly back to the desk and grabbed the letter knife. Its edge glinted in the sunlight as he used it to cut the satin cords that bound the flat pouch. Grabbing the seal on the other end, he pulled the cords out of their seams, opening the pouch. Within was a letter, folded and sealed much like the one he had just addressed to the viceroy. Without further hesitation, he cracked the seal and unfolded the thick parchment and read.

  It was not a rebuke. Nor was it a reprimand. It was a dismissal.

  In cold, emotionless terms, the viceroy’s edict dismissed him from his post as the Ambassador to the United States, and instructed him to prepare for his replacement, due to arrive in two months’ time.

  Dismissal! A heavier sentence than he had imagined. But a dismissal based on what? No one knew anything; no one could prove anything about his involvement in the failed assassination. A summary dismissal based on guess and conjecture? It was an outrage; a slap across the face!

  He stared at the document, and then he knew what was really happening. The viceroy did not know—no one in New Spain even guessed—but the failure of his mission to assist the Cheyenne Alliance in negotiating a peace with the United States was the excuse that those Madrileños needed to once again put the ambitious Creole back in his place.

  Again he was fighting them! He had been forever fighting them for respect and position. As if it was his fault that he was colony-born and not a “true” Spaniard. As if he had been the reason that control of New Spain had slipped out of Royalist hands. As if, by fighting with the Federalists against Custer and his Americans, Alejandro had endorsed the idea of a Republic.

  “¡Dios mío!” he cursed. “I, who have yearned for the royal favor all my life, to be painted as a rebellious Creole. It is...I cannot....” His rage finally came to a boil, setting his hands to shake and peeling his lips back from his teeth in a sneer of hatred. With a growl that rose from the pit of his belly, he reached over the desk and grabbed the brass base of the unlit oil lamp. The growl became a shout, and he hurled the lamp into the fireplace. Cut-crystal shattered against the burning logs, and flaming oil spattered across the hearthtiles, rushing up the flue in a roar that echoed his own.

  “Damn you all!”

  The door banged open and Enrique and one of the household guardsmen ran inside. Enrique ran to the spatters of burning oil that still burned on the tiles, trying to stamp out the flames.

  “Get out!” Alejandro shouted.

  “But Excellency,” Enrique said, even more flustered now that the toe of his shoe was covered in burning oil. He tried to put out the flames on the tiles, the flames on his foot, and question Alejandro all at the same time. “Is... is there anything...ai-ai-ai...is there anything wrong, Excellency?”

  “You everlasting fool, I said get out! Now go!” And when he still did not move, Alejandro pointed to the guard. “Get him out of here!”

  The guard grabbed Enrique by the arm and pulled him quickly from the room. The door closed with a boom that filled the tall room. Alejandro saw his assistant’s oily footprints on the stone floor, outlined in guttering flame, and outside the door he heard Enrique’s hotfooted complaining echo down the long hall.

  He couldn’t help it. He began to laugh. The whole of it—Enrique’s clownish incompetence, the viceroy’s brutal dismissal, and even his own failed vengeance against the man who had started his downfall—it was too much to be borne. Laughing, he staggered to his desk and collapsed into the chair, and when his giggling began to subside, the image of Enrique holding a flaming foot in one hand while stamping at flames with the other sent him upward again into hilarity.

  “I have failed,” he murmured as his laughter turned toward tears. “More completely than if I had tried.” He picked up the viceroy’s letter. “With a wink and a blind eye you watched for a decade as my Castilian predecessor whored his way up and down the Eastern Seaboard, but now, on the mere hint of failure, it is I who must retreat in shame.” His laughter died and his throat tightened. “And with my wife and child within these walls, here to witness my dishonor.”

  A firm knock sounded at the door.

  “Leave me be!”

  The knock was repeated.

  “Vete al carajo!”

  A guard opened the door. “Your pardon, Excellency, but there is a carriage at the gate. You have been summoned to the White House.”

  Alejandro exhaled. “Summoned?”

  The guard was embarrassed to say it. “Yes, Excellency.”

  The parchment of the viceroy’s note was rough against his fingertips, and the broken wax of the official seal gave literal weight to the import of the words it sealed.

  “Not altogether unexpected, I suppose.”

  The White House was a short ride from the embassy. Alejandro took it as a condemned man takes the walk up the scaffold steps: silent, unopposing. He brought no valise with him, and did not ask Enrique to come along. He wanted no more witnesses to his disgrace than were necessary. The carriage circled around the equestrian statue of Washington and headed down Penn’s Sylvania Avenue toward the north entrance. They were waved through the gate and drove up the curved driveway. The northern entrance of the White House, with its forty-foot, Ionic columns, towered above the snow-covered grass. Alejandro descended from the carriage and climbed the white stone steps—steps so similar to those on the south entrance but steps that had not, as those others had only a few weeks before, been stained with blood.

  He wondered after young George Custer, Jr., the man the Cheyenne called One Who Flies. Alejandro was glad that, at the very least, he had been able to help free the young man from his imprisonment. He liked One Who Flies, and had come to respect him in the few months they had known each other. He had only wanted his death as a vengeance against his father, President Custer, and as a tool to drive deeper the political wedge between American business interests and the labor unions. With the railroad and steel industries blamed for young Custer’s death, the unions would have gained the upper hand. Costs would have shot up, profits shrunk, and tax revenues dwindled. The idea of selling the American plains back to the Indians would have been more than palatable; it might even have been desirable. And an independent Indian nation bordering on New Spain? Well, that would have opened quite a door.

  But the wrong blood had been spilled that day. It had been the President who had fallen and not the son and, as a result, the stakes rose incomparably and the stench of involvement, unlike the blood from the stone steps, became nearly impossible to remove.

  Alejandro was ushered inside and up the twisting side staircase to the right of the entry hall. On the second floor, where most of the business of the Executive Branch was carried out, he was taken down the cross hall to a well-lit room on the southeast corner, a few doors down from the office where he and President Custer had been acrimoniously reintroduced.

  The walls of Morton’s inner office were yellow, and the translucent voile drapes glowed white with the afternoon sunlight, giving Alejandro the immediate impression that he was stepping inside of some giant egg. The men in the room, however, quickly dispelled that image.

  There were perhaps a dozen men present, two thirds of whom were in the dark blue wool of the military, gold braid shining on their shoulders, brass buttons bright on their chests. The few other men were in dark suits. Alejandro recognized William Hawkins, the Secretary of the Treasury, and Harrison Strong, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Among these solid men of power, aides wove and whispered, carrying papers or coffee, attending to the power that inhabited the room.

  And in the far corner, backlit by the tall, br
ight windows, and flanked by two American flags, was a large desk behind which sat a small, pale man.

  Levi P. Morton, Vice President of the United States of America, sat in a large, leather chair. His white hair and squinty eyes gave him the appearance of a mole, but Alejandro knew Morton’s reputation was more that of a badger: tough, aggressive, and capable of turning around in his own skin to bite his attacker.

  “The Ambassador from New Spain,” the usher announced.

  The guests rose as he entered, though by their faces he could tell that it was formality and not courtesy that brought them to their feet. Morton remained seated.

  “Mr. Vice President,” Alejandro said as he walked forward into the room. “You asked to see me?”

  Morton did not speak right away, but instead studied Alejandro with a narrow gaze. After a moment, he stood and leaned forward, fingertips resting on the desk blotter. “Yes, Ambassador. I asked to see you. I wanted to tell you this in person.”

  Morton’s desktop was neat, everything in its place. Letters to the right. Pen and inkwell in the center at the edge of the blotter. A tidy stack of bound reports to his left. A bust of Jefferson at one corner, and a small lamp at the other. Only one item was askew: sitting diagonally on the blotter between Morton’s tented fingers was a creased piece of parchment. Alejandro recognized at once the heavy paper, the floral script, and the cracked red wax seal of the viceroy’s stamp.

  He steeled himself, knowing what was to come. “What was it you wanted to tell me, sir?”

  “I wanted to tell you, to your conniving face, that we know everything.” Morton’s voice was small and biting, like the edge of a saw, cutting with sharp, offset teeth. “We know what you were planning, we know with whom you planned it, and we know what foiled it. The magnitude of your treachery astounds me, and apparently—” He held up the parchment. “It apparently astounds your viceroy as well. He has written to tell me that he’s recalling your miserable hide back to New Spain. If I had enough evidence, I’d send you back in a box, sir, after hanging you as a spy. As it stands, however, I can only honor the viceroy’s request, a request with which I cannot comply quickly enough. I want you out of this country as soon as your replacement arrives.”

  Alejandro looked slowly at the faces ranged against him, matching them fury for fury. To call him here to disgrace him, to vilify him in this fashion, where he could neither defend nor protect himself, it was just another example of the uncouth and pugnacious American character.

  “Mr. Vice President,” he said, letting his distaste for this little man seep into his tone. “You do not tell me anything of which I am not already aware.”

  “Oh, no?” Morton seemed amused by Alejandro’s impudence. “Then shall I tell you that the alliance you were working to forge between us and those savages is as dead as the assassin you and your confederates hired? That is, if you really were working to forge an alliance, which I doubt.” Morton walked around from behind the desk and into the center of the forest of blue and black wool suits that stood to either side. He walked up to Alejandro and looked up at him, hands on hips.

  “The interior of this continent, Mr. Silveira, is United States territory, and shall remain so. I am instructing General Meriwether to expand his efforts against the Indians, to constrain them within borders of our delineation, and to support and protect the expansion of our rail roads and our settlements within that territory, by any means necessary.” He took a step closer, so close that Alejandro could smell the coffee and cream on his breath. “I wanted you to know,” he said in a softer voice, “just how completely you had failed.”

  He turned and walked back to his desk. “Now get the hell out of my office,” he said. “And if you step foot outside your embassy gates, I’ll clap you in irons, lack of evidence or no.”

  Once more Alejandro studied the generals and statesmen in the room. Anger and loathing was plain on their faces, so there was no reason for Alejandro to hide his own disdain.

  “The pup barks bravely from within a pack of dogs,” he said.

  Morton looked up with a shocked stare. One of the generals stepped forward but was held back by another.

  Alejandro chuckled. “And dogs that are afraid to bite, at that.” He took a step backward and bent in his finest, deepest courtly obeisance. Then he turned his heel on the assemblage and walked out of the room, leaving a tumult of outrage in his wake.

  At the embassy, Alejandro went immediately to his office and slammed the door so hard as to make the paintings dance against the walls. The lamp he had thrown that morning had been replaced and all evidence of his earlier temper was gone, and only that silent, invisible efficiency of his staff kept him from repeating his outburst. But still, the effrontery! The complete lack of diplomatic etiquette! He held out his hands in the last of the evening’s light. His fingers shook with unspent emotion. As a growl built in his throat, he clenched his hands into fists. He walked out of the light and sat in his chair, deep in the shadows, pressing his fists into his temples, trying to squeeze the rage from his mind.

  It is my fault, he told himself as he fought the tears. My fault and no other’s. How could I have been so wrong? How could I have brought this down upon us? To Victoria?

  The door to his office opened and he turned away to hide his face. “I do not wish to be disturbed!”

  The sound of stiff fabric whispered through the room and he turned to find his wife standing there, her back to the door.

  “Victoria,” he said in surprise. “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to talk to you,” she said, her voice soothing and calm despite the concern—no, the fear—that he saw in her eyes.

  “Talk to me?” he said, regaining his composure. “Why certainly, my dear. What is it you wish to talk about?”

  Slowly, she came forward into the room. Her dress was of a deep Dupioni silk, almost black except where the sun fired it to maroon. Her belted bodice was stitched tight and her sleeves full. The starched cotton at collar and cuffs was simple and reserved, as were the wrapped braids of her black hair. As she came forward into the light, rubies glinted from her ears, but her eyes were made of onyx, and Alejandro felt that they could see through the sunlight and into the shadows where he sat hiding.

  “I want to apologize,” she said.

  Her admission took him aback. “Apologize? What for?”

  “For not being a good wife,” she answered him. She stood in the sunlight, hands clasped before her waist, her back stiff and erect, her head high. Alejandro had always considered her beautiful, but never before had he seen her like this: a stately noblewoman, regal in surrender.

  “Victoria,” he said as he stood and walked around the desk to take her hands in his. “My love, you have been a good wife. Always you have been a good wife; better than I have deserved. There is nothing for which you need apologize.”

  She looked up into his eyes, and he could see the darker pupil amid the darkness of her iris, black with flecks of gold. “I have not done anything for which I need to apologize, yet. But I will. I am about to.”

  He released her hands. “What are you saying?”

  “I am saying that I am about to do something that a good Spanish wife does not do, and I wish to apologize for it beforehand.”

  “What is it you are about to do?”

  “I am about to contradict my husband.”

  “Victoria. I do not care for this game you are playing. Please, I have much to attend to. Please, leave me alone so I can work.”

  “No,” she said. “I will not leave you alone. Not now. Not anymore.” She came forward and grasped his arm. “My lord, my husband, I can see what is happening. I can read the American newspapers. I can hear what the staff are saying. I can read your moods and predict your rages. And I will not stand by while you spin yourself down into the depths.”

  She had never spoken to him in this manner, had never been so forthright with her opinions. He knew well how she had been able to manipulate him d
uring their decades together—with her softness, and with a gentle, steady pressure like water against a stone, she could maneuver him in a thousand tiny ways. But never had she challenged him so openly, and it completely unbalanced him.

  “Victoria, I...”

  “You are in trouble. We are in trouble. Am I right?”

  “My darling...”

  “I am Victoria Isabel Baca de Silveira. I am your wife. I am mother to your only daughter. And I have asked you a question. Am I right? Are we in trouble?”

  He looked into the face of the woman before him and saw the same high cheekbones, the same dark-winged brow, the same Amor’s Bow lips that he had first seen forty years ago. And those eyes, those dark, bottomless eyes, they were the same, too.

  So many other men of his rank had taken mistresses, but he had never felt the need or the want. His love and his respect for Victoria, and for her steadfast support of him during his years of servitude to his degenerate predecessor, the former ambassador, demanded that he respect her now. The world settled again beneath his feet. His universe now contained a wife who could speak to him so, who could challenge him as an equal.

  “Yes,” he told her, “we are in trouble.”