by Jack Higgins
The triumph on Jurado’s face was there for all to see. He laughed out loud and then his smile slipped completely as his hand was forced upwards again, straight over the top and down to the other candle in a single smooth motion that told us all that van Horne had been playing with him.
He held the hand against the flame and Jurado’s face twisted in agony, sweat standing out on his forehead in great drops and yet he would not cry out, teeth clenched and in the end, van Horne released him and stood up.
‘A great French king once said: “Let any man who says he has not known fear try snuffing out a candle flame between his finger and thumb.” Of course it all depends on how you do it.’
He licked his finger and thumb and nipped both candles quickly. Jurado stood staring at him, pain on his face, nursing his injured hand, then turned and stamped out, followed by his two friends.
Van Horne picked up the image of St Martin de Porres, wrapped it carefully during the silence which followed and went out through the door which Moreno held open for him.
Conversation burst through to the surface with a vengeance after that. I leaned forward and said to Janos: ‘What in the hell was he up to?’
‘God alone knows, but he’ll need a gun next time.’ He gathered up the cards. ‘Enough excitement for one night. I’m for bed.’
I watched him go, then got to my feet and moved out to the porch. There were two or three men sitting there who fell silent at my approach. As I moved to the edge of the step, there was the rattle of wheels over the cobbles and a handcart came round from the rear of the building pushed by Moreno. Van Horne walked at his side.
I went down the steps and called to him. He paused, then told Moreno to continue. ‘What do you want?’
I said, ‘What were you supposed to be playing at in there?’
‘Establishing my authority, that’s all. When the woman recognized the image this morning and told me its history, I knew at once that I was on to a good thing, but it had to be exploited. I think I’ve managed that very satisfactorily, don’t you? I’ll see you in the morning.’
He walked away into the darkness after the handcart and I stood there listening to him go, wondering again which one of him was the real Oliver van Horne, but that was a puzzle to which I might never get an answer.
I felt restless and ill at ease, certainly in no mood for sleep. I went down through the main street, such as it was, aware of the foul stench of the open drain and moved quickly to the main gate in the wall. Outside the air was fresh and sweet, stars strung away to the horizon, snow on the high peaks glittering in the moonlight.
Higher up the slopes in the cottonwoods by the stream a fire glimmered in the night in the centre of a small encampment and horses and mules grazed peacefully, hobbled for the night. I heard the faint tinkle of an ornamental bell round one animal’s neck, gentle on the night breeze and the heart in me seemed to stop beating.
I passed one guard and then another and neither challenged me. One man slept beside the fire rolled in a blanket. Nachita sat cross-legged on the other side smoking a pipe, his Winchester across his knees.
His face seemed ageless in the flickering firelight as he looked across at me, but not as timeless as hers when she raised the tent flap and stood watching me calmly. As old as time, every woman who had ever lived rolled into one and in that moment I could understand those people in other days who had worshipped a goddess instead of a god.
She smiled and that smile was for me alone and I went past her into the tent. A storm lamp hung from the ridge pole and she pulled down the flap, closing out the world and dropping to her knees.
I squatted in front of her, watching as she unbraided her hair expertly until it hung in a dark curtain below her shoulders. Then she did a thing which surprised me. She opened a flat wooden box, took out a pad of writing paper and a pencil and wrote something quickly.
It was in Spanish, of course, and in excellent handwriting. It said quite simply: Did you think I could ever leave you?
A difficult thing to answer, but there was no need for she stood up and blew out the light.
9
For years I had lived a life in which everything had, of necessity, to be sacrificed to the Cause. There had been no room for honour, friendship, love or any kind of human response that might be considered a weakness.
I was not used to involvement and the responsibilities that came with it. I was a solitary lonely man and content to be so mainly because of the fact that for so many years I had not expected to live beyond the day after tomorrow.
But now there was Victoria, had been from that first moment at Tacho’s when she had run to my side, clutching at my jacket like a lost child recognizing a loved one in a crowd.
She is in your care now, señor. Tacho’s words came back to haunt me, but I was beginning to wonder if it wasn’t the other way round. She had changed considerably since choosing sides. Had become all Yaqui. Van Horne had once said that she would take a knife to me in bed the first time I displeased her. More likely on last night’s performance, that she would take a knife to anyone who harmed me.
So she was wholly in my mind as I drove the Mercedes out through the gate on the following morning, van Horne beside me and Janos in the rear as usual and when I saw the encampment still there by the stream, smoke rising from the fire, I was filled with a feeling of real and conscious pleasure.
She was standing by the fire, leaning over a cooking pot. Nachita spoke to her and she glanced up, shading her eyes from the morning sun. Then she did a strange thing. She ran across to the nearest horse, swung up on its bare back and urged it into a gallop.
There was only the rope halter to hang on to, but she was a marvellous rider and was beside us in a moment, her face turned towards me. She was laughing, perhaps at the very joy of living on such a morning although I like to think it was because of me. I waved and as we drew away, she pulled her mount round and went back towards the camp.
Van Horne said, ‘I told you she wouldn’t let go, Keogh.’
‘Did I ever say I wanted her to?’
He seemed surprised, but said simply, ‘You go to hell in your own way, boy.’
‘Exactly,’ Janos said patiently. ‘Could we now discuss the day’s plan of campaign?’
‘Simplicity itself,’ van Horne said. ‘I came here to get de la Plata one way or the other as Bonilla suggested, not to commit suicide.’
‘I could have taken him yesterday,’ I said. ‘And dead meat after, his men would have seen to that.’
‘Exactly, so we have to draw him into some kind of direct confrontation, either alone or with the kind of backing we can take care of.’
‘And how do we manage that?’
‘We play it by ear and hope. I suggest you make your inspection of the mine this morning, then tell the girl and the old man you’ll consider all the relevant facts, compile a report on the situation this afternoon. She’ll ask you back for a meeting to discuss things this evening, nothing is more certain.’
‘And you think Tomas will put in an appearance?’ Janos asked.
‘There or at the hotel. He’ll want to know what’s in that report. Wouldn’t you agree, Keogh?’
I nodded slowly. ‘I’d be surprised if he didn’t. The thing is, will he turn up on his own?’
‘We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?’
He lit a cigarillo, leaned back cheerfully, took a book from his pocket and started to read. It was a copy of St Augustine’s City of God in Latin, but I had ceased to be surprised at anything now where van Horne was concerned.
As we drove into the courtyard and came to a halt at the bottom of the steps, Chela de la Plata appeared in the doorway. She was dressed for riding as she had been the previous day in leather breeches and boots, the Cordoban hat tilted over her eyes. The riding whip in her left hand tapped nervously against her leg and she seemed tired and drawn, the pale skin stretched tightly over the cheekbones.
She came down to meet us, a
manilla folder in one hand bound with red tape which she handed to me. ‘You will find assay reports in there for the last five years the mine was fully operating and other information which I presume you will need.’
Janos removed his hat. ‘May I inquire how your father is this morning?’
‘Not well, I’m afraid. He is confined to his bed.’ She hesitated, then turned to van Horne. ‘He is in no condition to see visitors, father. I am sorry to have wasted your time in this manner.’
‘I understand perfectly,’ he told her, and for a moment, there was that strange quality of intimacy between them that I had noticed during their first meeting at the church.
She brightened suddenly. ‘Perhaps you would care to accompany us to the mine? Many of the village men are working there at the moment. You might find it of interest.’
‘I’d like nothing better.’
‘You ride, father?’
‘I’ve been known to.’
She smiled in a way she hadn’t smiled in a long, long time unless I was mistaken. Strange, but they had talked together as if Janos and I had ceased to exist.
The trail was difficult, mainly because of the kind of terrain it had to cross, but it had also deteriorated due to neglect over the years. It was obviously the first matter that would require attention if the mine was ever to become fully operational again.
Van Horne and I followed Chela in single file, allowing our mounts to pick their own way and Janos toiled along behind in a buckboard hauled by two horses, one of the hacienda’s peons at the reins.
We ascended into a country of broken hills and narrow, twisting watercourses. The slopes were covered with mesquite and grease wood and as we climbed higher, a few pinons rooted in the scant soil, pushing their pointed heads into the morning.
We went over a rise to a small plateau and found half a dozen men ranged across the path, each with his reins in his left hand, his rifle in the right. All very military, but as I remembered, Tomas de la Plata had been an army officer.
He appeared from the pinons above us, a sombre, rather clerical-looking figure in his black clothes. Chela was angry and frightened at the same time.
‘What is it?’ she called. ‘What do you want? You gave me your word. You promised two days.’
One of his men urged his horse in close, reached inside my coat and plucked the Enfield from my shoulder holster, had obviously been told beforehand exactly where to look.
‘Tomas!’ Chela cried, a kind of agony in her voice.
‘I gave my word,’ he said. ‘Now carry on to the mine. Your friends will follow when I have finished with them.’
She knew him, I suppose, well enough to know the futility of arguing, but her face was white and angry as she hauled her mount round viciously and rode away.
The buckboard was still some considerable way down the trail behind us and Janos was well out of things. Tomas pushed his hat back to hang around his neck and stood looking down at us for a while. He had pale flaxen hair, strange for a Mexican, blue eyes and the aesthetic face was calm, empty. Yes, empty was an excellent word to describe it.
‘Come up here, Señor Keogh,’ he said. ‘And bring the priest with you.’
We did as we were told, not that we had any option in the matter, dismounted and scrambled up the bank to find him leaning against a tree smoking a cigarette.
He behaved at first as if van Horne didn’t exist. ‘When will you be ready with an opinion on the mine?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to look at the place this morning, go through the figures your sister has given me this afternoon, then prepare a report.’
‘You have arranged to see her and my father this evening?’
‘No, I understand he’s not too well. He’s confined to his bed.’
‘I wish to see this report when it is finished, you understand me?’
‘I would have thought that your sister’s business under present circumstances, not yours,’ van Horne told him quietly.
Tomas de la Plata said in a voice of dreadful calm, ‘I was not aware that I had given you permission to speak, but now I have started let me make one thing clear. I allow you to survive at my sister’s urging for two days only and in that time, no preaching, no approaches to the people, no priest’s tricks. Two days, then you go. If you break my conditions in the meantime I shall kill you.’
‘And that would give you some kind of pleasure?’ van Horne said.
‘No more than to put my foot on a beetle.’ He turned and looked at me speculatively. ‘You saw Colonel Bonilla in Huila. He warned you against coming here?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And what did he tell you about me?’
‘He said that the people had had their Revolution. That what they and the country needs now is stability and order which means there can be no room for men like you.’
Why I had said it and in quite that way, I do not know, but the words were out and impossible to retrieve. It didn’t seem to matter for only one aspect of what I had said registered with him.
He turned to look at me and his eyes seemed to have changed colour, glittering like pieces of ice in the pale face. ‘The people,’ he said. ‘You speak to me of the people? Shall I tell you what they are? Dung on the face of the land. I went to prison for them, spent three years in a penal colony for political offenders in the jungles of Yucatan. Suffered every conceivable degradation. I gave my life to a struggle whose one ideal was to win them their freedom and freedom they took. To murder, to rape and burn and turn this land into a charnel house.’
‘They were under the boot for a considerable time,’ I reminded him. ‘A reaction that might have been expected.’
‘You think so?’ He shivered as if suddenly cold and stared out over the mountainside and it was as if he was speaking to himself. ‘Not by me, señor. I came home after ten years of fighting the people’s war to find my father a broken old man more out of his wits than in them, a sister who cried out in terror if a man even brushed her sleeve in passing.’
There was a stillness, only the slightest of breezes through the pinons and for a moment, it was so quiet that I could hear the wheels of the buckboard on the hillside below.
‘They came to my home one night in the last months of the war, soldiers of the ranks of the Revolution and their commanding officer, an animal named Varga, military governor in the area. My father, they beat half to death, left him for dead after defecating on his body as he lay there. As for my sister, Varga took her for himself, abused and degraded her in every possible way, then gave her to the men.’
The story was such a commonplace one, that was the dreadful thing, for I could have capped it with accounts of a score of such incidents known to me, the details of which were even more horrifying.
It was van Horne who spoke then, his voice harsh and angry. ‘And no one did anything to prevent this? No one stood by them?’
‘The people of Mojada stayed home like whipped dogs and the priest of that time, their spiritual adviser, had room in his life for only two things each day. At least one full bottle of tequila and the stinking bed of the widow who kept house for him. A father to his people as you can see.’
‘And for this you became the enemy of all the world?’
‘Once I believed in reason and the intellect, señor, but I learned better. I learned the true worth of men. I cut Varga’s throat with my own hand, hanged the priest and the one who came after him and as for the people? They would eat their own dirt if I ordered it.’
‘And this makes you a happy man?’ van Horne asked.
Tomas de la Plata glared at him and the eyes seemed to enlarge, grew darker. When he extended two fingers of his left hand, that hand was shaking. ‘Two days, priest. Two days.’ He turned and in the same breath added, ‘And you, señor, will be hearing from me at the appropriate time. Now go.’
As we scrambled down the bank his men urged their horses up to join him. There was a brief flurry and they were away t
hrough the pinons. The Enfield was lying on top of a boulder. I picked it up carefully, checked the loading and pushed it into the shoulder holster.
Van Horne’s face was grey. He said, ‘I don’t know about you, but he scared the hell out of me. He’s over the edge, that one.’
‘And beyond,’ I said.
The buckboard came over the rise below us and rolled to a halt. Janos called, ‘I thought you’d be there by now. What happened? Did you run into trouble?’
‘Oh, I think you could say that,’ I told him and van Horne started to laugh, but it was flat, cold stuff, no mirth in it at all.
Our final destination proved to be a small plateau against the great rocky face of the mountain. Chela de la Plata had ridden down to meet us, reining in her horse beside van Horne who led the way. I didn’t hear what she said, but he reached out to take her hand and smiled confidently. ‘Everything is fine, I promise. He has no intention of breaking his word.’
The relief in her face was there for all to see and she pulled ahead to lead the way up on to the plateau, reined in and dismounted. It was a drift mine, the entrance, a large irregular hole in the cliff face and nearby an old steam engine, obviously the major source of power, puffed smoke into the still air.
Water had been channelled down the face of the mountain in several places, running finally into a wooden conduit that emptied into a large, dilapidated shed, open at both ends and used to process the ore.
It was a scene of great activity. Periodically, a truck laden with ore emerged from the mouth of the mine pushed by a couple of sweating peons stripped to the waist. The rusting rails took this down a short incline into the ore shed where the processing took place.
Inside the shed, the only piece of machinery was a steam-operated crusher and the heat from its furnace made working conditions almost unbearable. The water ran into a tank lined with clay against leakage and there were the usual cradles and puddling troughs. Perhaps half a dozen men worked in there, all stripped to the waist and a young boy spent his time dousing them with buckets of water when called upon to do so.