She smoothed his hair back gently. There but for the grace of God went Jason. “Don’t blame yourself so. When I left to try to get help in Guadalajara, Jason was innocently telling them everything. He really jolted the general for a moment. I suppose the old boy hadn’t had a chance to talk to either Zaragoza or his own brother.”
“So all three of us are in their hands... God help Mexico.” He sighed again, and drifted off to sleep, or perhaps unconsciousness, Roberta couldn't tell which.
The candle had burned out entirely and she herself was nodding when he spoke again. “Listen to me, querida” he whispered urgently. “I am dying, I know it, but who knows, you may find some way to escape this terrible place.”
“You're not dying, Cristiano. You're badly hurt, but you're not dying.”
“I’m bleeding inside, querida, and why would I wish to live like this anyway, sexless, toothless, crippled. After I tell you what I must, please kill me. I don't care how you do it, but kill me. I don't want to start screaming again.”
She began to protest, but he stopped her with a feeble move of his mutilated hand.
“Listen carefully. When I knew I might have to escape hurriedly and couldn't use the roads, I had a boat built.”
“A boat!” She was startled. He might just as well have said a machine that could fly.
“I once saw a flatboat like those on your big rivers, and I had them build a smaller boat there at the Juanacatlán Falls. If I’d known how near it was to this place, I’d never have dared. I floated it down the Santiago to the first bend after the Zacatecas crossing. It is in a cave half filled with water under the roots of a fallen mesquite tree. I had to swim to get around the bend even several weeks ago, so I don't think anyone's found it. If you manage to get out of here, I want you to take it, querida. You have only to float down the river until you come to the coastal swamps at San Bias. Except with another boat, no one can follow you through those great barrancas on the way to the coast. There is everything you'll need on the boat, enough for two people, and all of the money I’ve gotten as well. I think God is punishing me for what I’ve done.”
“Two people?”
“I thought you might be coming with me.”
“Of course I’d have gone with you,” she soothed him, stroking his hair again.
“I’m going to be sick. Ah God, hold me!”
She held his head in the darkness and afterward wiped his mouth as best she could with the bandanna she still had with her.
He groaned then and whispered, “You promised. Please God kill me, you’ve got to.”
She couldn’t have killed him if she had wanted to. He seemed to go to sleep again, and it wasn’t until hours later when she couldn’t sit still any longer that she discovered he had stiffened. She hadn’t even heard him stop breathing. She thought of him so brave and gay in his gold plumed helmet on the dancing black horse, and she wept, not only for him but for Gavin and the young bandit in the forest and for all the might have beens that she knew would haunt whatever hours were left to her.
She realized at last that there was no shame and no obscenity in nakedness or in making love; the obscenity lay in the mutilation of the human body and the human spirit by man’s cruelty to man, as Jason had put it. She also understood finally Jason’s obsession with the struggle against that very obscenity. She found it now all but impossible to recall — past the broken body that still lay on her lap and the disfigured body of Gavin that she had washed and tended so willingly — the revulsion felt by an ignorant girl against the sight and reality of physical love.
When the key grated in the lock and the door swung open at last, she found that she was blinded even by the candlelight. One of the men prodded Cristiano with his toe.
“Don’t bother,” she told him dully. “He’s dead.”
“What should we do then?” the guard asked his companion.
“The senor said to bring him, so we'll bring him.” One of them slung the body awkwardly over his shoulder, and the other one bound Roberta's hands again and gagged her with her own bloody bandanna. They crossed the cellar once more and climbed the stone stairs to the kitchen. They entered a large room Roberta hadn't seen before where there were numerous candles and a fire snapping cheerfully in the big fireplace. Seated by the fire was Zaragoza with a delicate glass of liqueur in his hand. Standing with his feet shackled, like a trapped animal, was Jason. Though she did not acknowledge his presence by sound or look, Roberta knew then how it felt to die a little inside.
CHAPTER XXV
Jason’s face assumed a look of amused contempt. “Don’t tell me you’re going to try that one on again, Zaragoza.”
Zaragoza laughed, enjoying himself thoroughly. “Ah, but I have some new information, my friend.” He signaled the guard with Cristiano’s naked body. “Drop him there, in front of my guest. A pity he died.”
The guard unceremoniously dropped the mutilated body at Jason’s shackled feet. Fastidiously Jason drew his feet back as far as the chain would allow. Roberta saw then that he was shackled to the wall. “I’ve never seen this creature before in my life,” he said confidently.
“Haven’t you? It seems to me that he visited all of you at your establishment in Mexico City. Does that refresh your memory?”
Jason’s eyes narrowed. “Olmedo? Well, you can’t blame me for not recognizing him, now can you?” he said carelessly.
“I think that Roberta — awkward name for a woman, isn’t it? — recognized him all right. Look at her.”
For the first time she became aware that one side of her shirt and the legs of her pants were stiff with dried blood. She shrugged. She wouldn’t give this monster anything.
“Take a good look at him,” Zaragoza advised Jason, “because you’ll look just like him if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”
Jason laughed. “Really, Armando, I thought you were more intelligent than that. If you tortured me, I’d tell you anything you wanted to know, whether I knew it or not — I’m no hero. The only problem is that you would never know what I actually knew or what I was making up to please you, now would you? Tell you what, you ask me and if I know, I’ll save you a lot of trouble. I’m realistic enough to understand that there is no man who won’t talk given enough encouragement, and I would just as soon stay in one piece.”
“All right, where is Alarcón’s hideout?”
“Why, San Xavier, of course.”
“No, no,” Zaragoza said impatiently. “I mean his Guadalajara hideout.”
“His town house? That’s Section 6, Calle 36, Number 25.”
“No, not his town house. There is another place in town where he goes to earth, and I want to know where it is.”
Jason seemed quite regretful. “I’m sorry, Armando, but if he has such a place, he has never confided it to me.” His eyes were guileless.
“Very well,” Zaragoza snapped, “have it your way. There is someone I should now like to have you meet. He became a very close acquaintance of the late Colonel Olmedo here.” He turned his head and called, “Capitan!”
A short, stocky man with a brutal face strutted in, his uniform looking as if it were several sizes too small for him. “A sus órdenes, senor,” he said in a low, sonorous voice and gave a snappy salute.
“Mr. Whitney, may I present Capitan Damaso Salazar?” Jason’s only reaction was to lift his chin, but Roberta could see the name meant something to him.
“I don’t believe I’ve made the gentleman’s acquaintance,” Jason said coolly.
“Allow me to refresh your memory, sir. He is best known for his part in the march of the Texan prisoners from New Mexico to El Paso. Would you believe it, he never got credit for saving the Mexican Government no end of trouble and funds? He fed the prisoners on an ear of dried corn a day and clubbed to death those who fell by the wayside. His reward was to be placed under arrest and his army career ruined by a dunce of a colonel in El Paso. It seems the colonel took exception to his having collected the ea
rs of those who died as a way of accounting for his dead prisoners.”
Roberta recalled Cristiano’s missing ears and shuddered.
“Ah, the lady seems to be taking it hard,” Zaragoza observed with false concern. “How unfortunate. Let’s change the subject then and allow him to tell you about his earlier career. Captain?”
“I really didn’t accomplish much of note before Goliad, when I was a lieutenant,” Salazar said modestly in that curiously musical voice.
Jason’s face turned to stone.
“The first ones who tried to escape, we hunted down to a man. Unfortunately, while we were after these, some ten or eleven more were able to get away. They hid themselves in brushy ravines, and since we had no dogs with us, they escaped. To make sure no one else would try it, we took the few live ones we had recaptured and either tied them out on anthills with their eyelids cut off — the inspiration for which we have the Apaches and Comanches to thank — or bound them in interesting ways with wet rawhide, which shrinks, if you’ll remember, when it dries. They screamed for days, long after we shot the main group of prisoners.” He chuckled reminiscently.
Roberta winced and closed her eyes against the vision. She wondered what was going on in Jason's head. He had lain as dead during most of that, and she guessed that Dirty Mary had never told him any of it. She knew that his discovery of how his friends died must be a bitter and painful one, yet she couldn't help but wonder if he was having second thoughts about his guilt over making Toby stay behind during that ill-fated escape. There was not so much as a flicker of expression to tell any of them what he was thinking.
“Imagine the intricacy of the chain of cause and effect,” Zaragoza said musingly, “that brought Mr. Whitney, miraculously saved from that charnel house in Goliad, across all of these years and all of these miles to face his tormentor once again. The prospect is positively poetic. You see that scar on Mr. Whitney's face, Captain? He received that at Goliad. His fate slipped him away from your ants and your rawhide.” Salazar’s eyes gleamed, and he shifted his weight nervously. “Where would you like me to begin, senor?” “Oh, not with him,” Zaragoza said carelessly. “You can have him afterward. Let's begin with the young lady here.”
Salazar's face went dark with suffused blood, and he unconsciously adjusted the clothing at his crotch. As he walked past a long table at the side of the room, he picked up a rapier with a long, thin blade.
“I am really in rather a hurry now, Captain, so please don't waste time with ears. Let's see, breasts first and crotch next. And remember, Whitney, in case you're thinking of sending us off on a wild-goose chase, if we return empty-handed, she will be mutilated in ways that you've never thought of.”
Roberta looked at Jason, and tried to tell him both with her gagged mouth and with the force of her mind that he was sacrificing her to a worthless cause. For she had no doubt he would sacrifice her. His love of Alarcón and his obsessive turn of mind together would conspire, she knew, to keep his tongue still. He was absolutely without expression, his face still as if listening to something a long way off.
Salazar whipped the flexible blade through the air several times until it made a singing sound. With the tip of the blade he cut her shirt down the front and flicked it off from her shoulders, where it was held halfway down her arms by her bound hands. The guard behind her pressed so close that she could feel his arousal. This so infuriated her that she forgot all about her bare breasts and lunged back and sideways, catching him by surprise. At the same time the whippet-like blade flashed through the air, nicking her ribs rather than her breast. She felt the blood trickle down her bare skin to the line of her pants, where it pooled before staining the cloth over her hip. She had ceased to watch Jason, having given up on any aid from him, and as Salazar cursed at her guard, she determined to give these brutes the least possible satisfaction for their efforts.
“God help me, I’ll tell you where he is,” Jason said then in a low but clear voice, his face so anguished she could hardly bear to look at him. “It’s at the back of the Sandalmaker’s shop on Calle 17, in the Ninth Section.” He lowered his face to his hands.
Zaragoza jumped to his feet. “Capital, sir, capital. I know you’ll excuse me, for my men and I have a long way still to ride. Captain, if you so much as touch the two of them before I return, I’ll plan something on the order of wet rawhide for you. If the general is not already there, I imagine we won’t have long to wait.” He tossed a bunch of keys to Salazar. “Hasta luego, dear friends.” He strode out, and before long they heard the hooves of horses thudding on the ground, almost drowning out the sound of thunder in the distance.
Salazar smiled at her and with the blade cut her gag.
She spit out the wad of cloth and laughed shakily, in her relief forgetting that Jason didn’t know about Alarcdn. “I - ” She paused to moisten her dry mouth.”1 never thought your fatherly affection would overcome — “ He took his hands away from his face, his eyes blazing in the candlelight.
“God damn you, I’m not your father!” he shouted at her, his face twisted. “For months there’s not been a day gone by but I had to force myself to keep my hands off you. It wasn’t just Toby, but wanting you that made me decide to leave for Texas.” His voice lowered. “For you I have betrayed the man I love most in the world. I couldn’t help myself. Would to God I’d never laid eyes on you, would that I were dead now.”
“When I wanted to die, at least I had the excuse of being drunk as an owl, as you put it,” she snapped at him. His head jerked up in astonishment. She thought of telling ham about Alarcón, but was afraid of risking Salazar’s possible knowledge of French; she was sure he was familiar with English. As long as they thought Jason didn’t know about Alarcón, they might not kill him. She was sure now that she herself would never see the outside of these walls again.
“You can see he doesn’t know,” she said to Salazar in Spanish. “Why don’t you let him go?” It was a feeble attempt, but one she had to make.
Salazar laughed. “And have him bearing tales to Mexico and Washington? You must be joking. He knows enough already to be killed twice over.” Tipping the brandy bottle, he discovered it was empty, and with a curse stormed out of the room in search of another. “Know what?” Jason demanded. “What don’t I know?”
“We’ll never get out of here alive anyway,” Roberta said. “I may as well tell you. Your precious Alarcón is the leader of the bandits. While Cristiano was being tortured to death to pry out of him that not only he but I as well knew all about it, you were merrily talking your head off to the chief villain of the lot.”
“1 don't believe you!” Jason exclaimed.
She shrugged. “It doesn't really matter now. Just try to think of how you got here.”
“Why, the general said - ” He stopped, then began again slowly. “The general said that you were missing, that Zaragoza must have you. He told me where to go.”
“Why in God's name did you come alone?”
“He said every minute counted, that he would send along armed men right away though he himself had to go to ground.”
“This is a long right away, isn't it?”
“He could still come,” Jason said stubbornly, somehow now assuming that Alarcdn would be with his men. “He was about to leave in order to lay up in Guadalajara. He may have had to go there first to collect his men. If he meets Zaragoza on the road,” he went on proudly, “there will be no contest — that weasel is no match for the general.” The color had come back into his face as he thought over this possibility. “He'll come for us, you’ll see.”
“Tell me, Jason,” she said gently, “is he aware that you know the location of his hiding place?”
Jason looked uncomfortable. “I really don't know. A long time ago, years ago, he was joking with Carmelita about his rabbit burrow, as he called it. The idea caught my fancy, and I remembered.”
“How do you know it's the same one?”
“I don't. If it isn’t, Zaragoza
will be pretty angry, but he can't do any more to us than he plans to do anyway. What I can't understand is that if the general is the bandit chief, why does Zaragoza want to know where he is?”
“Ambition, my dear, plain ordinary ambition.” She realized they were making conversation to keep themselves from thinking. “You yourself said that the rioting in Mexico has already begun and that Alarcón had been subverting the Army. If Zaragoza manages to do away with Alarcón, then he'll be head of the outlaws and in a perfect position to usurp the presidency from whatever compromise candidate they find.”
They were silent as Salazar came back triumphantly bearing a full brandy bottle.
“Listen!” Jason said suddenly. “Horses!” His face lit up in a paean of joy. “It’s the general!” he shouted.
Salazar looked alarmed and told the guard to go out and see who it was. He drew his gun, opened the shutters, and peered into the dark where the first spatters of rain had begun to fall. Suddenly it was as if he was flung backward, the back of his head spraying blood as he went down.
“Damn if these here old muzzleloaders ain’t a sight better’n them percussion rifles,” Ephraim said cheerfully as he climbed through the window. He stopped as he saw Roberta and whipped off his manga, fastening it carefully around her even before he freed her hands. “Thank you, Eph. I was feeling a bit chilly.”
“You got a passel of guts, ma’am, and that’s a fact,” he said respectfully and then grinned at her.
“Come on, Eph, see if you can find the keys to these blasted chains,” Jason said testily. “Where’s the general? I want to talk to him.”
Ephraim looked at him unbelievingly. “By God, she said you wouldn’t believe it, and I guess you don’t. You simpleminded half-wit, Alarcón sent you into this, didn’t he, and you got caught at the crossroad same as she did, didn’t you? I had sense enough to go clear around by Jocotepec and Zacatlan, which is what took me so long. You ain’t going to see the general tonight or any other night less you ketches him.”
A Masque of Chameleons Page 31