A Masque of Chameleons

by Joan Van Every Frost

  “They hide them in the underbrush until night.” “Cristiano, for God's sake leave them while there's still time. They'll find you out and kill you for sure.” “I can't do that now. We're going to Morelia for some kind of meeting, and I have a feeling that I'm about to find out something really useful.”

  “How can you watch them slaughter innocent people? What will you do when they start killing women and children?”

  “I keep saying to myself that these few must be sacrificed to save the many. When it comes to women and children, I don't know, I really don't know.” “Don’t go through with it, Cristiano. Even if you're not killed, you’ll feel defiled for the rest of your life. Surely there is someone in authority in Mexico who will believe you now.” She took him by the shoulders and shook him a little, trying desperately to find the words to persuade him.

  He covered her hands with his. “No, querida, not even for you. This conspiracy — if it is indeed a conspiracy — is a spreading stain on my country's future. Mexico was once proud, a nation of honor. Now she is run by a pack of thieves who steal as surely as do these outlaws with whom I ride. I may come out of this feeling defiled for the blood on my hands, but I would feel even more defiled were I to give up rather than to risk my life in such a cause.” His stilted, formal phrases had a curious dignity.

  Dear God, she thought in desperation, another fanatic. She knew from her experience with Jason that there was no use trying to persuade him further. The least she could do was to try to keep him practical, something she had never managed with Jason. “What do you want me to do?” she asked.

  “Write down everything I’ve told you. Near Guadalajara is San Xavier, the hacienda of General Ildefonso Alarcon. See that he gets it — he will know what to do with it.”

  Coincidence on coincidence, as if a random number of spools of different-colored thread were being woven into an intricate and meaningful whole. “What do you know of General Alarcon?” She was genuinely interested in his opinion since he was an army man and yet without reason to be blind.

  “He may be the only honest man left in Mexico.” He gave the ghost of a smile. “Always excepting myself, of course. You may rely on him absolutely.”

  There it was, the confirmation she had wanted more than she would admit to herself, that she and Jason were not playing with fire for a dubious cause. “I’ll get it to him,” she promised.

  He pulled her to him. “For luck, querida. I’m counting on you.” He kissed her thoroughly, a kiss of tenderness and desperation all at once. Then he was gone.

  She turned to go herself and looked up to find a figure outlined in the kitchen door at the back of the inn. Though she could see no features, she noted the glow of a cigar and guessed who the onlooker was. With a sigh she walked across the stable yard and came up to him.

  “Did we amuse you?” She didn’t like the idea of his spying on her.

  “You certainly do get around, Robbie. I’m beginning to think you aren’t as naive as I thought. Would you like to tell me what you’re up to with your renegade colonel? He seems to pop up more than sheer coincidence would indicate.”

  “Is it any of your business?”

  “Whatever has to do with the safety of my traveling companions is my business.”

  “You seem to be taking quite a lot on yourself.”

  “Do you expect Hugh, or Guy, or your drunken Will to assume the responsibility?”

  “Italian opera companies seem to have no problem wandering all over Mexico.”

  “Some of them are robbed and murdered, too, even without our particular added risk from Zaragoza’s secret police. Since I’ve helped to endanger them all, I should be the one to try to ensure their safety, don’t you think?”

  “Colonel Olmedo is not what he seems,” Roberta began to explain.

  “Now tell me something I don’t know!” Jason snapped. “Your turncoat colonel has, like many others, joined the outlaws he used to pursue. When all is said and done, a soldier’s pay is not very generous here. I don’t care what cock and bull story he’s given you, he’s no better than a traitor. Stay away from him, or you’ll betray us all. We were fortunate once — we may not be so fortunate a second time.”

  His refusal to hear what she had to say infuriated her. “If you know it all, why are you asking me then?” she flared. “You are an insufferable prig.”

  “And you, my dear, are an unmitigated slut.” His cigar arced in a trail of sparks out into the courtyard, and he left her standing there shaking with rage.

  *

  For five more days they continued on, once staying at a mine where the roar and light of the smelting furnaces went on all night, once at a gloomy large hacienda house whose solitary occupant, a filthy old man, was obviously mad. They crossed a barren marshy plain in a fog so thick they had to hold their horses nose to tail so as not to become separated, climbed over spectacular pine-covered heights Jason called the Mil Cumbres, and at last descended into a lush warm valley as great thunderheads roiled overhead and brilliant blue zigzags of lightning limned themselves against the boiling black clouds above.

  Though they pushed the now tired horses unmercifully trying to reach Morelia by dark, they were caught in a drenching downpour. After a miserable hour they could see by the fitful lightning several large buildings of some sort about a mile away, and they doggedly headed for them, only to find when they were nearly there that their way was cut off by a deep stream that had become a nasty brown torrent even in the short hour since the rain had started.

  “If we don’t cross it now, we may not be able to at all tomorrow,” Jason called.

  He put a thoroughly frightened Bolero at the current, only to have him bog down in deep mud along the bank. Cursing, he got off and finally managed to back the horse half rearing out of the sump. He walked up and down the bank a little way, testing the ground underfoot, and shook his head. He and Ephraim then began to cut bushes with machetes in the pouring rain and pile them at the crossing. Jason took off his cloak, jacket, and shirt, then mounted Bolero again and forced him over the branches that had been laid down. The horse sank nearly to his hocks, but managed to lunge into the water, now up to his belly, and come dripping out the other side.

  “The footing’s good everywhere but on that bank!” Jason shouted.

  While Jason and Ephraim, drenched and plastered with mud, coaxed the horses and mules across the rising stream, the rest as they arrived on the opposite side made their way to the buildings, which they found to their dismay to be another deserted hacienda. All of them had allowed themselves to envision hot food and drink and warmth in place of these great gloomy damp piles of stone.

  “Jack! Guy!” Will yelled from around at the side. “Come look at this!”

  A wooden balcony that had once extended the length of the building had rotted and fallen against the side of the house, above which a tile overhang kept off the rain. In back, a roofed wooden porch faced out across the extensive ruined gardens with sodden roses gone half wild and vines rioting over everything. The men began to break up these structures for firewood.

  By the time the weary, mud-covered horse coaxers came in loaded with food and extra clothing after putting up the last of the animals in what had once been a stable, there was a roaring fire in the great fireplace in the sala. Everything was on such a grand scale they could almost believe they had been set down in Gulliver's Brobdingnag, a place inhabited by giants.

  Still stripped to the waist, the three horse handlers stood dripping and shivering in front of the fire, steam rising from their wet pants. Roberta took one look at Jason's white exhausted face as he stood favoring his leg, his teeth chattering, and walked unnoticed from the sala. The men had left a mountain of extra wood out on the back veranda, and she took an armload of it into what had apparently been a sitting room. She crossed her fingers that the chimney hadn't been stopped up by swallows' nests, and after seeing the first eager fingers of flame licking at the wood, she found in the kitchen a larg
e iron soup caldron. A return trip produced from the back scullery a tin washtub.

  When she returned to the sala, she saw that Jason and Sid and Ephraim had glasses in their hands and no longer shivered. It was late afternoon, and the sun would have still been up had it not been for the storm that continued to drive curtains of rain against the wooden shutters at the front of the house. In the light of the oil lamps it was easy to see that the entire company was in a reveling mood. Will pressed a glass into her hand.

  “Drink up, lass. ‘Tis a wicked night out without a drop for comfort to keep out the cold rain.”

  Jason lifted his newly refilled glass, his eyes bright and his face now flushed:

  “Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,

  That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

  How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

  Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you

  From seasons such as these?”

  “I once played Lear in Shanghai,” Sid laughed. “We were pelted with garbage for our pains.” He sighed luxuriously, turning his not inconsiderable bottom this way and that in front of the fire. “By God, it was almost worth it to get that cold and wet just to feel the warmth arrive inside as well as out.” He took another swallow of his drink.

  When Roberta thought the water would be hot, she went out into the hall where the men had dumped clothes, food, utensils, and pallets, and extracted dry clothes and a pallet to take to the sitting room. As she returned once again to the sala, she realized they would all soon be totally drunk if she didn't get some food into everyone. Even the usually staid Rosemary was giggling overloudly with Jack, who guffawed in earnest.

  Just then Jason staggered out through the hall dragging his leg but laughing and undoing the front of his trousers as he disappeared through the kitchen. She waited until he returned, and before he could reenter the sala, stopped him with a hand on his arm.

  “Who’s it?” He peered at her in the dark hall. “Oh, it’s little Miss Free With Her Favors, whadda you know?”

  “Jason, I've got something to show you, something you'll like,” she wheedled.

  “Oh me oh my, do I get seduced, too? How perfectly splendid! Lead the way, fair maiden.” He put his arm across her shoulder and leaned on her heavily.

  Once in the sitting room, “Get undressed,” she ordered as she ladled the steaming water into the wash-tub. Then into it she added cold water from a cracked leather bucket.

  “You know, you never fail to amaze me,” he said in a suddenly perfectly sober voice. “You can be such an absolute little bitch at times, and yet right now I feel like asking you to marry me.”

  “That would be incest,” she replied flippantly. “There's soap there and a rather grimy towel.”

  “Do me a favor, love?”

  “What is it?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Bring me another glass of brandy, there's a good girl. I deserve it after spending the afternoon in all that icy muck.” As he pulled off his pants, slabs of dried mud dropped to the floor and broke.

  “Oh, all right. Everyone else seems to be getting drunk, I don't know why you shouldn't.”

  When she came back with a bottle, a glass, and a tin plate of smoked meat, he was in the tub soaping himself happily. As she set the things down on the floor and turned to leave, he put a wet hand on her wrist.

  “Don't go, Robbie. Stay and talk to me. If you go in there, you'll just be pawed by Will, and Gavin as well, if he has his way.”

  She sat on his pallet. “What will we talk about?”

  “You didn't used to have to ask that. Are things really that bad between us?”

  “You said a rather unforgivable thing.”

  “All right, I'm sorry. I've no right telling you what to do. Christ, I’ve mucked up things for myself enough that I shouldn't be one to be handing out advice and judgments to others.”

  “Do you really think I’m a slut?”

  He looked at her steadily for a moment. “You know I don't. I was angry because I — Oh, never mind.”

  He poured the glass full of brandy and handed it to her, then put the bottle to his mouth. “Salud, my dear.” He took a large swallow and shuddered, the clear blue of his eyes softening and going opaque. “Turn your back, Robbie. I’ve got to get out while I still can.” When she turned back, he had wrapped one of the two blankets she had brought around him and was sitting on the pallet. He sank down and closed his eyes. “I'm just going to lie down for a bit,” he murmured. “Be right with you.”

  His breathing became almost immediately deep and even, and she covered him gently with the other blanket, tucking it carefully under his feet. She kissed him lightly on his scarred cheek and silently left the room to the sound of his slow breathing, the snapping of the fire, and the dripping of the rain in the wet darkness outside.

  CHAPTER XV

  Brilliant slivers of light sliced into the dim shuttered room, across the tiled floor, and over the blanket-enshrouded bundles that were sleeping people. Roberta unlatched and threw open the heavy wooden shutters, allowing the light to splash into the room like water released from a dam. Outside, the sky was cerulean blue, the air as soft and sweet as warm milk. A golden light laved everything, turning even the dark cypresses a brilliant, gold-edged green, still sparkling with drops of water from the rain. Already a few tiny spears of green pushed up through the earth under the old dry grass. Poor things, she thought, they came too soon. They will die long before the real rains begin in May.

  As if reading her mind, “A pity that green grass won’t last,” Jason said as he came up to the window and stood beside her. “Things that come too quickly never do.”

  It was most of the morning before the last bundle stirred and they were all sitting around miserably cupping their hands around pottery mugs of hot coffee that were at the moment their sole comfort. Sid and Will and Jessica put generous dollops of brandy in their coffee, but the others could only shudder queasily at the thought of anything alcoholic.

  Roberta stirred the great pot of chili and beans she had made, stirring in the uneaten smoked meat from the night before. “How far are we from Morelia?”

  “Not more than a couple of hours’ ride,” Jason said. “What do you think, Epifanio, qué tan lejos está Morelia de aquí?”

  “Dos horas, quizá,” the arriero agreed gloomily. Ephraim was definitely not his old jaunty self this morning.

  By early afternoon they were on their way once again. They were a sorry spectacle, the horses’ coats lying in curls of dried mud and more of it on boots and tack. The prospect of the end of this long leg of their journey relaxed them, and they rode slouched and uncaring of the beautiful fertile wooded country through which they passed, nor noticed the many birds, especially the brilliant blue guardabosques, woods guardians, that scolded them from the trees.

  Whenever, later, Roberta thought of Morelia, it was with the golden light of their afternoon arrival, a light that softened the old stone and threw mottled sun like coins through the trees onto the shaded pavement of the Alameda. The thirty-foot-high arches of the old aqueduct laid bold curving shadows across the open paving below.

  They traversed the entire city, stopping only briefly at the small but clean and pleasant theater to reassure themselves that the main part of their baggage, costumes, and props had arrived. They climbed up a steep slope to the northeast of the city and found themselves looking into a valley shadowed from the flattened rays of the setting sun. Off to one side of its green dimness lay the country house that was their destination, the peak of its tiled roof still bathed in sunlight.

  The first performance night they did Othello and The Robbers' Roost, and as a large enthusiastic group of playgoers swarmed backstage after the final curtain to congratulate the actors, Roberta felt a note pressed into her hand, but could see no one familiar about her. The note said, “Meet me immediately at cathedral. 0.” The old twin-spired cathedral was only minutes from the theater, but ev
en Roberta hesitated to walk it alone. If Morelia were like Mexico, there were footpads everywhere, and a lone woman on foot made a temptation that was all but irresistible. She gritted her teeth and set off, however, going not half a block before being dragged struggling into a narrow alley. “Cálmete, cálmete, querida. It is I, Cristiano.”

  “I hope you realize you nearly frightened me into an early grave.”

  “You didn’t really think I would let you walk alone to the cathedral in the middle of the night?” he asked incredulously.

  “It did seem rather odd,” she admitted.

  “We haven’t much time, so listen carefully. This man Whitney in your troupe is close to Alarcon, right?”

  “But how - ”

  “Never mind how I know. Late tomorrow night there will be a meeting here in town of all the organized outlaw bands between Toluca to the east and Zamora to the west. I want Whitney to come in disguise with me. Too much depends on all this for me to be the only one who knows what is going on. I must have someone whose word Alarcon will trust.”

  “All right, I’ll try. What do I do if Jason can’t or won’t come?”

  Cristiano shrugged. “Then I must continue alone.”

  “There is the account I am writing.”

  “That is still my unsupported word. I must go now. Tell him to meet me in the West Portales right after he gets out of the theater. Adios” He squeezed her arm and was gone.

  Somewhere in her sleeping hours that night she came to a decision: she would go herself to the meeting of the outlaws. There would be no time to convince

  Jason, she rationalized, and he disliked and distrusted Cristiano anyway.

  Here was a new danger far more immediate than the now tame political meetings she had attended where discovery would only spoil an already doomed plan. Discovery in the meeting tonight would mean death, however, she was certain of that. She was just as certain with the confidence of the sheltered young that death could never happen to her.