Louise, however, could pose a problem.
To solve it, Navarro looked around for a hotel. Turning left around the regal old Palacio Federal abutting a new mercantile store, he led his two companions and their packhorses down a dark side street and reined up before a two-store adobe bearing a sign reading HOTEL GRANDE DEL ORIENTE. The dirt-streaked hotel had a second-story balcony with a scrolled wrought-iron railing. The building was fronted with columns supporting an arched ceiling over a tile-floored front ramada, where a rain barrel sat against the wall and shipping crates were stacked.
“What are we doing here?” Louise asked.
“We’re getting you off the street,” Navarro said, slipping down from his saddle and approaching the hitch rack.
“I didn’t come here to sleep.” Louise kept her vehement voice low. “I came here to find Billie.”
“You’re not gonna find anything in this town but trouble. I’m gonna hole you up in a room. Then Mordecai and I are gonna peruse the saloons.”
“While I’m doing what?”
“Playing fiddlesticks, for all I care!” Navarro looked around, wincing, hoping no one had heard his explosion. This strong-willed woman reminded him of another—whose pigheadedness got herself and him into this mess in the first place. And two good men dead.
“I can’t just lounge around a room while Billie is—” Louise cut herself off, shaking her head. “I’ll go crazy!”
“Well, do it quiet-like.” Navarro reached up, brusquely pulled her down from her saddle, and mounted the porch.
Behind him Mordecai said quietly, “He’s right, Mrs. Talon. You—”
“Oh, I know!”
Inside, an elegant old Mexican with close-cropped gray hair stood at the front desk, reading an Illustrated Police Gazette laid open beside a water glass half-filled with habanero, a Cuban-style rum that was probably less toxic than the local aguardiente.
“Buenas tardes,” the old man greeted. “Qué quiere?”
“A couple of rooms,” Tom said. “One for my foreman there”—he canted his head to indicate Hawkins before planting a hand on Louise’s slim shoulder—”and one for myself and my lovely wife. We’re down from Arizona on a horse-buyin’ expedition. It’ll be nice to finally sleep in a bed, won’t it, honey?”
Louise didn’t miss a beat. “It sure will, my love.” To the old Mexican she said, “Could we get one of those rooms up front with a balcony? I get a little tight in the chest when I can’t see what’s happening on the street.”
When they’d secured the rooms and were heading up the stairs lit by too few smoky candles, Louise turned to regard Navarro coming up behind her. “You’re taking quite a bit for granted, don’t you think?”
“I’ve seen how you look at me.”
Hawkins snorted.
Louise asked Tom, “Why is it that you get to play my husband, and not Mr. Hawkins?”
“For the simple reason that you and I are closer to the same age. We can switch when we get to the rooms, though, if it’ll make you feel better.”
Louise stopped before her and Tom’s door and stabbed the key in the lock. “No, we might end up with a snoopy chambermaid.”
When Navarro and Hawkins had hauled their gear to their rooms, both men took a whore’s bath in Hawkins’ room, cutting through the thick layers of dust on their faces, then headed back downstairs. They stopped at the front desk, where the old Mexican was pouring himself a fresh drink from a crock jug, his brown eyes looking bleary.
When Tom had inquired about a good livery barn, he poked his hat back on his head, feigned a bashful expression, and rested his arms on the native-wood desk. “Senor, one more question, if you don’t mind.” He looked around the lobby as if to make sure no one was eavesdropping, then jerked a thumb at Hawkins flanking his right. “My foreman here has a lusty streak. He’s wondering where he might find some women of the sporting variety.”
“Ah, putas.”
“Yes, putas.”
“You are in luck, senor,” the old Mex told Hawkins thickly. “Baconora is—how do you say?—rife with putas.” He threw his head back and laughed, showing a gold front tooth. “You need not walk too far. They will find you.”
Tom again leaned forward to speak confidentially with the old Mexican. “Now would there be Norteamericano putas here, as well as Mejican? We’ve been away from home a long time, and my foreman’s a little homesick. He has nothing against the lovely Mejican putas, for sure, but tonight he would like to lie with a Norteamericano.”
“Ah, Norteamericano,” the old Mexican said, lifting his glass of clear liquid and stroking his imaginary long hair. “Sí. Our Lady of Sorrows.”
Frowning, Navarro glanced at Hawkins, then turned again to the old Mex. “Pardon?”
“Try Our Lady of Sorrows. The catédral.” He crossed himself soberly, shaking his head, then lifted his jug. “A drink for the road, senors? It has been a quiet evening on this side of town, and I have nearly finished my periodico.”
Navarro wanted that drink about as badly as he wanted his fingernails torn off in the slow Apache style, and he could tell that Hawkins felt the same. They needed to get after the girls. But both men, not wanting to look too eager, sat down in overstuffed chairs by the chaparral fire on the other side of the lobby, and had their drink. The Mexican railed in his slow Spanish-spattered English about how the town had changed for the worse since the gold mine came to town, with a dandified Englishman named Blane Ettinger at the helm.
Navarro wanted to know more about this Ettinger but the man clammed up when Tom started to probe, a fearful light entering his rheumy eyes. When he and Mordecai had finished their drinks, they said that, like them, the night wasn’t getting any younger. They shook the old Mexican’s hand and strode out the heavy double doors into the torch-lit side street.
“What in the hell are we looking for?” Hawkins asked as they turned before the Palacio Federal and entered the boisterous main drag.
“Some place they call the cathedral, I reckon. More of this Ettinger’s influence, no doubt. Leave it to a Protestant-raised Brit to open a saloon in Mexico called Our Lady of Sorrows.”
Keeping to the south side of the street, they threaded their way through clumps of loud, drunk miners of both American and Mexican persuasion, heading eastward, peering into every saloon and cantina they passed. The music had gotten more raucous since they’d entered the town, as if the mariachis were openly competing with the American piano bangers and fiddle players one or two doors down or directly across the street.
All seemed to be competing with the occasional bursts of celebratory gunfire and the ubiquitous thunder of the stamping mill.
Navarro and Hawkins were waylaid twice by fist-fights, which were quickly broken up by big men armed with double-barreled shotguns and wearing the badges of mine company constables on their jacket lapels.
When they were returning westward along the other side of the street, Navarro stopped suddenly when someone shouted above the crowd’s din, “Edgar, you old dog! I woulda bet my right oyster you couldn’t fill a straight from that hand! Ha!”
Navarro grabbed Hawkins’s arm, canting his head to indicate the saloon they were standing in front of. Hawkins nodded and followed Navarro through the crowd bunched along the boardwalk, and through the batwings. They stood among the sitting and standing miners, Navarro sweeping the crowd with his gaze.
“The more liquor you force down his throat,” the same voice rose again, “the better he gets. I just don’t understand it!”
Navarro settled his gaze on the yeller—a slender unshaven lad sitting at a table with seven others. Playing cards, shot glasses, and beer mugs were strewn before them. To the young man’s right, and scooping up a pot of greenbacks and silver coins, with a round-faced Mexican girl perched on his knee, sat a man with a battered derby pulled down over blond curly hair. He had dark-ringed, crazy-looking eyes, and two gold rings looped through his ears.
“Son of a bitch.”
> “What’s that, Tom?”
Navarro turned. Hawkins was looking at him curiously. Tom hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud. Turning, he bulled through the batwings and pushed through the crowd. When they were alone he said to Hawkins, who was shuffling along behind him, half running to keep up, “Did you notice the pilgrim with the two gold earrings?”
“How could I help it?”
“That’s Bontemps.”
“You don’t say!” Hawkins wheeled, one hand going for the .36 Navy Colt conversion on his hip. “Well, I reckon we can find out right quick where he’s stashed them girls!”
Tom grabbed the man’s arm. “Don’t be a fool. You seen all the men surrounding him? I’d bet my front teeth they’re all part of his bunch. One I recognized as Sam ‘The Dog’ Calvino, a Confederate guerrilla like Bontemps, who rode with Sibley’s West Texas Raiders. To a man, they’re shooters with a capital ‘S’.”
“What do you propose we do?”
Navarro was walking forward along the boardwalk, Hawkins again half running to keep up. When an isolated drunk approached, staggering, Tom tapped the man’s shoulder and asked where a place called the Cathedral or Our Lady of Sorrows might be.
“Well, shit, amigo,” said the sour-smelling Irish-man, “where it’s always been. Right there at the other end o’ the square. Say, you couldn’t help a mick out with a drink, could ye? Snodgrass and Thorndike just cleaned me out over at said house of worship—though it ain’t like any churches we have back home in sweet County Cork!” The man winked and held out a big pale paw, palm up.
When Tom had given the man some silver, he and Hawkins stood staring across the square. Fifty yards up the street, beyond a large dry fountain, was a giant adobe cathedral behind a low wall. It was a cathedral like any other the Jesuits and Franciscans had long ago erected in every little town within a year’s ride of Mexico City, north and south of the Rio Grande.
Hawkins said, “He can’t mean the real Lady of Sorrows, can he?”
Tom stared at the big structure, with its wooden cross stabbing starward from the square bell tower high above the big double doors.
“Why can’t he?”
As Navarro and Hawkins approached the building, they saw the saddled horses standing before the three hitchracks fronting the seven-foot-high wall.
“Whoa, boys,” said one of the two guards smoking before the open wrought-iron gate. “No guns inside. House rules. You wanna go in, you leave the hardware in the box here. Pick ’em up on your way out.”
When Tom and Mordecai had set their pistol belts in the apple crate, atop a dozen others, the two guards, armed with shotguns and bung starters and with cartridge belts crossed on their chests, frisked them thoroughly before letting them head across the tiled courtyard to the four stone steps rising to the pair of open front doors. Fluttering torches flanked both doors, as though marking the entrance to purgatory.
If he hadn’t been looking so hard for Karla, Navarro would have chuckled when he saw what the church had become. As it was, he swung his gaze left and right across the great hall before him, at the swarthy smoky-eyed Mexican miners sitting on the couches and fancy chairs and at tables with light-haired, light-eyed girls on their laps, their hands on the girls. He felt a big gray cat swish its tail down deep in his belly. That cat got up, stretched, and swished its tail again when Tom spotted Karla.
Chapter 23
Tom hadn’t spotted Karla on his first glance around the room, because she was dressed in a low-cut, impossibly short yellow satin dress, with black net stockings and purple high-heeled shoes. She wore three purple feathers in her upswept hair and a black choker around her neck.
She sat with three Mexicans on a couch beneath a staircase angling down from the second story. One of the Mexicans had his hand in her dress. Karla gazed off into space, glassy-eyed, as though drugged, quirking a vacant smile when the Mexican whispered in her ear.
The other two Mexicans sat with their high-crowned hats in their laps, feet on the floor, grinning stupidly as they watched the other man’s hands rummaging around in Karla’s dress.
Karla’s indolent gaze slid toward Navarro. He turned away abruptly, hoping she wouldn’t recognize him and call out. His back to the girl, he said softly to Hawkins, managing a smile, as though he were quite taken with the place and thoroughly enjoying himself, “Let’s sit.”
Most of the tables in the place were occupied, but Tom and Hawkins found a small one against the left wall, before a stained-glass window depicting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The men sat down across from each other. It wasn’t long before a pretty Mexican in a dress similar to Karla’s wandered up and took their orders.
This girl’s eyes were not glazed. She appeared to be one of the few willing girls in the room. Most of the half dozen others, sitting on knees or laps or surrounded by admiring miners or rurales in their stitched whipcord slacks and boots, were stoned on something stronger than alcohol.
“That’s your girl over there, ain’t it?” Hawkins asked.
“Any sign of Billie?”
“At the table by the bar. The little hazel-eyed girl sitting on that dandy’s knee.”
Tom swung a glance to the girl with the elfin face sitting on the knee of a fat-faced, blond-mustachioed gent in a panama suit and a planter’s hat. He was playing five-card stud with four other men, lesser lights allowed well-oiled Colts and Remingtons on their hips.
The four wore the white shirts, whipcord trousers, silver-tooled belts, and hats of the border buscadero. Probably body guards. The man in the silk suit was rambling on in an exaggerated British accent while taking frequent sips of sangria from a cut-glass glass decanter and puffing on what appeared from this distance to be a genuine Cuban cigar.
Navarro felt that lightness in the fingers he felt on the rare occasion he wanted to shoot someone. He wanted to shoot this bastard in both arms, both legs, and his belly. . . . Let him die slow. . . .
“Tom, you’re staring,” Hawkins said, smiling across the table at him. “Have some beer.” He raised his mug and sipped, keeping his eyes on Navarro.
“Ettinger?” Tom said.
“I would imagine. I’m glad they took our guns. If I had mine, I’d kill that son of a bitch and probably get Billie and us killed in the process.”
Tom flicked another glance at Ettinger, then quickly raked his eyes across the room. Several men had left, several more had entered, and a beer keg- sized Mex in a red straw sombero had started pounding away on a piano near the confession booth, which had a padlock on its door.
Hawkins took a long pull off his beer, licked the foam from his mustache. He shook his head as he set the beer back down in the ring the glass had left on the table. “This doesn’t look good.”
When Navarro didn’t say anything, Mordecai said, “Tom, I don’t like that look in your eyes. Last time I seen that look in a friend’s eyes, I woke up in a basement jail in Deadwood. . . .”
Navarro tempered the steely determined glint in his gray eyes with a festive quirk of his lips, showing the pearly tips of his teeth. He’d turned in his chair to face the room, his right boot resting on his left knee. Just a drifting horse seller or buyer enjoying the way the church had been redecorated and maybe thinking of counting out some change for a whore.
He had to raise his voice to be heard above the piano. “I thought when we first walked in here without our hardware that this was gonna have to be a scouting mission only.”
“And now . . . ?”
“Now I’m thinkin’ tonight’s as good as any to make our move. Both girls are here in the room with us. It ain’t gonna be any easier to get in or out, and the more time we have to think about it, the more time we have to knot it up.”
Sweat ran in rivulets down Hawkins’ face. “Shit, we don’t even have our guns.”
“Those men over there have hoglegs,” Navarro said, sliding his eyes to the border bucks at Ettinger’s table.
“You’re talkin’ suicide now, my
friend.”
“Their tonsils are pretty well oiled.”
“What about the guards outside?”
“They’re up to you, after you’ve fetched Louise and the horses.”
When Tom laid out his plan, which wasn’t really much of a plan, Hawkins finished his beer and looked over the table at him. “You think we can pull it off?”
“I came down here for that girl over there. I ain’t leavin’ without her.”
“I’m thinkin’ the smarter choice might be to head home and report this wasps’ nest to the territorial governor and, hell, to good ole Rutherford B. Hayes himself. The feds won’t have any choice but to take action against Ettinger’s company when they hear what he’s pullin’ down here.”
“Yeah, they’ll close down the mine and free the girls, but how long do you think it’ll be before we see ’em again? And is there any guarantee they’ll still be alive?”
“You’ll grab both girls?”
Navarro nodded.
“What about the others?”
“We’ll have to settle for freeing our girls, and let the so-called authorities free the rest.”
“If we get the girls outta here, Ettinger’s men are gonna be after us like possums after persimmons.”
“Hope the horses are well-rested.”
Hawkins regarded Tom soberly, lifted the mug again to his mouth. Realizing he’d already finished the beer, he set the mug back on the table, stood, and stretched, as though he’d had enough fun for one evening and it was time to locate a mattress sack.
“Good night, amigo.”
Tom watched the bandy-legged old hide hunter saunter through the handful of men dancing with a couple of drugged-looking Mexican girls and the one white girl who seemed to be enjoying her job. Hawkins strode through the double doors and disappeared into the night.
With occasional glances at Karla, who had now been forced to sit on the lap of one of the other miners, Tom finished his beer, ground his teeth, and rubbed his gun hand on his thigh.
He had another twenty minutes before Hawkins and Mrs. Talon would show with the horses. He ordered another beer, and when one of the bright-eyed Mexican whores came around, smiling coquettishly, he pulled the girl onto his knee. He made a show of being interested, running his hands down her bare thighs and nuzzling her neck, keeping one eye on the room.
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