A Masque of Chameleons

by Joan Van Every Frost

  “How ironic,” Zaragoza mused. “You seem to be fraught with poetic nemeses, don't you, Whitney? Well, my — um — irregular cavalry will arrive at any moment; they should have been here two days ago. Failing that, I’ll form an honor guard of the locals.”

  “I don't think your irregular cavalry are going to show up at all,” Jason remarked. “You should have stayed in Guadalajara and minded the store, Armando. I imagine that quite a bit of controversy must have attended the general's assassination.”

  “Ah, but that won't help you, will it?” He pulled his pocket watch from his lilac vest and regarded it thoughtfully. “The comandante and his men are due in seven minutes. You see, I'm taking no chances.”

  Roberta had been thinking furiously during this exchange, as she knew Jason was as well. If her attempt was to have any chance of success, she would have to get Zaragoza to his feet. She threw her hand dramatically up to her forehead. The sudden movement not only brought Zaragoza to his feet, but he moved several steps toward them, the gun pointed now in earnest.

  “Oh, Jason, I'm feeling faint,” she sighed, and instead of gently crumpling to the floor in a ladylike fashion, measured her full length with a thump, thus putting her head and shoulders behind Zaragoza's legs.

  When Zaragoza immediately made to step back, a quick hand movement from Jason stopped him. Before Jason could think through how to guard them both, Roberta grabbed Zaragoza's leg, simultaneously sinking her teeth into it. He let out a roar of pain and outrage, swung the gun to point at her and pulled the trigger. There was a loud explosion and she felt a red-hot sliver of pain across her cheek.

  Jason meanwhile lunged at Zaragoza, plunging the knife he held into Zaragoza’s lilac-colored vest. He gave a vicious jerk upward before pulling it out. Zaragoza looked unbelieving at the long tear in the elegant vest. He dropped the useless pistol and cupped his hands under the wound as he slowly sank to his knees, a bubble of blood staining his mouth. Jason knelt beside Roberta, now white with shock, blood trickling down her own cheek.

  She could feel Jason trembling as he pulled her to him. “My God, I thought he’d killed you,” he breathed. “What a damn fool thing to do!”

  “I — I’d gotten rather attached to my breasts, and I didn’t want to lose them if you must know,” she managed shakily.

  “Listen!” he said suddenly, then, “Quick! Under the bed!” She opened her mouth to speak, but Jason cut her off. “Don’t ask questions, get under the bed!” and he literally pushed her underneath the large old double bed.

  There was the sound of running footsteps approaching and the door flew open. “Put up your hands, cabrón! Where’s the other one?”

  “He got away, out the window,” Jason replied.

  They ran to the open window but could obviously see nothing on the street outside. “I’ll stay with this one, you two see if you can’t find the other one. Hurry!”

  The town comandante was very fat, and he kept mopping his face with an incongruous lace handkerchief. He had an enormous cartridge belt slung around his paunch, but he acted as if he knew what a gun was and how to use it. Jason decided not to press his luck. At the moment, jail might prove to be a rather safe refuge should any of Zaragoza’s men be about, for he found it hard to believe that the man had actually come alone. In addition, there must be all kinds of allies in the surrounding bandit gangs.

  The comandante waited until his men returned empty-handed, then directed them to bring Zaragoza while he prodded Jason along.

  “Hijole, he's alive!” one of the men exclaimed, nearly dropping him.

  “He won't be for long,” the comandante replied indolently. “When they start bleeding from the mouth, it's only a matter of time. If he’s fortunate, his time will be short. When you get him to jail, one of you run over for Belen. He's not a real doctor, but he'll do for this.”

  When the door had closed and Roberta figured that the innkeeper’s attention was fixed firmly on the prisoner and his victim, she slipped out the open shutter, dropped to the pavement, and sauntered off as if she hadn't a care in the world. Happily the quick dusk of the coast was falling. On the spur of the moment she headed for the British consulate, where she hoped she might obtain at least a hearing.

  The small adobe building was hot even though the bald man sitting at the desk inside was energetically pulling a rope attached to a bamboo fan on the ceiling. “Juanito?” His face fell. “It’s obviously not, is it? Damn boy, send him for juice and he takes an hour. What can I do for you?”

  “I’d like to see the British consul.”

  “Oh Gawd, I hope it’s nothing complicated. Why are you gotten up in those outlandish clothes, may I ask?”

  “Are you the consul?”

  He sighed. “I wish I had the nerve to deny it. Yes, I'm the consul, Alexander McDonald at your service. Again, how may I help you?”

  “I don't know. Look, is there an American consul here?”

  “Not anymore. The Americans were pulled out months ago. I think they may be preparing themselves to do something rash.”

  “Then you'll have to do. Will you listen to a story? Just listen, mind you, and not interrupt? This may take a while.”

  Juanito, who turned out to be a fat little boy of about twelve with an engaging grin, came in with the juice and was sent out and came back twice more while Roberta told the consul everything — or almost everything. He soon stopped fanning and sat absolutely motionless, his bald head beaded with perspiration. After a while, he began to make notes. Roberta was relieved that he obviously wasn’t the ditherer he had at first seemed.

  “So now,” she finished, “Mr. Whitney is in jail and Zaragoza’s men are likely to descend on the town at any moment, if they haven’t already. I can’t understand where they are.”

  “You know, of course, that the whole country is up in arms. Perhaps events in some fashion seemed to require their continued presence in Guadalajara.”

  “That’s what Jas — Mr. Whitney suggested, but I wouldn’t count on it. What’s happened to Santa Anna if the country is up in arms?” He now seemed so much less a villain than did his head of secret police or Alarcón and she was not surprised that she didn’t much care what happened to him.

  “He’s still President, but only just. I’ll send your information on to the British ambassador in Mexico City, but heaven only knows what he’ll be willing or able to do about it. Bertie is not the most imaginative of men, and I dare say that Santa Anna wouldn’t be inclined to do anything about it even if he could.”

  Roberta shrugged. “It’s a chance anyway. With all of their leaders dead, they’ll be in a state of disarray in any event.”

  Dark had long since fallen, and a veritable army of insects were casting themselves furiously at the lamp, making an almost constant pinging sound on the hot glass. Though the temperature had hardly dropped noticeably, McDonald had sent Juanito home. He looked at her thoughtfully, his face shrewd and humorous in the lamplight. She decided that she might through sheer blind circumstance have come to the right person after all.

  “You have several problems, as I see it,” he said, tapping his fingers together absently. “First of all, there is getting Mr. Whitney out of prison, which won’t be easy. I could possibly have kept him out to begin with, but once in there, it takes a lot of prying, I can tell you, to have someone released. Secondly, and this pertains to the first, you are without funds. Make no mistake, anything that Mr. Whitney had upon his person now resides in the pockets of the comandante. I can’t help you there, for this month’s allocation went to obtain the release of several British seamen who decided in their cups to take the village apart stick by stick.” He gave a wintry smile. “I needn’t tell you that British consuls are not munificently reimbursed for their labors. Thirdly, there is the question of leaving. Ships are not in the habit of taking on charity cases, and the ship that is due to sail for California the day after tomorrow is American, which means I should have no influence with her captain.”


  Roberta smiled. “Sir, since most of these problems seem to pertain to money, let me put your mind at rest. It was I, not Mr. Whitney, who was carrying Colonel Olmedo’s funds. I happen to have on my person at this very moment a money belt stuffed with gold onzas, and it’s beginning to give me a heat rash. Now I wonder if - ”

  The door was flung open, interrupting what she had been about to say. “I knew it, closeted with some hussy!” A large handsome woman in her middle years swept into the room and kissed Her Majesty’s consul on the ear. “Really, Alex, are you then so wedded to this ghastly office that you can’t bring yourself to leave it? I thought someone had perhaps beaten and robbed you, there seems to be enough of it going on around here. I hope he’s being of some help to you, dearie — he seldom is to me.”

  McDonald was actually grinning from ear to ear, and for a moment Roberta could see how he must have looked when he was a young man. “I do wish you’d be more careful about your humor, my love. One day I’ll have the Queen of Sheba or some such in here, and she isn’t going to find you at all amusing. This, by the way, is Miss Roberta DuPlessis, and she has had some perfectly extraordinary adventures, enough to make one downright envious.”

  “Call me Laurie,” Mrs. McDonald advised her cheerfully. “Until we’re posted to a fancy place like Rome or Copenhagen, I can’t see standing on ceremony. Alex, why ever have you kept this poor thing cooped up in the oven here? She looks ready to drop in her tracks. Do bring her along to the house. A bath and some food always go a long way toward solving most problems.”

  As they made their way through the village, a chain of sheet lightning backlighted the boiling rain clouds, and loud thunder galloped across the sky. By running, they just made it to the door of an imposing mansion before the ominous clouds opened to a drenching rain that beat so hard on the dirt street it actually bounced back from the surface of the ground in dusty drops.

  *

  Laurie McDonald proved quite right, Roberta thought later, a bath and supper did indeed change one’s outlook enormously, especially when she could hardly remember when she had had her last hot bath.

  “I have the beginning of an idea,” Roberta said slowly. They had been discussing rather fruitlessly how to obtain Jason’s release. “I can see your point that simple bribery won’t do in the case of a really rapacious official. You’re right, of course, that he might well bleed me and not release Jason in the hope of gaining further funds. He might also simply have him shot afterward and enjoy the best of both worlds: my bribe and the favor of Zaragoza’s followers. No, there has to be some fear of higher authority plus a conviction on his part that Jason is not who he thinks he is.” She drummed her fingers on the table. “Now, how to convince him of that?”

  Much to her surprise, sleep on it she did, deeply and well. When she woke, it was as if last night’s rain had never been. She thought she could almost see steam rising from the heavy wet green foliage surrounding the house. Though she could tell from the slant of the sunlight that it was no later than midmorning, the air was already weighted down with a heavy wet heat that suffocated the spirits and slowed the blood.

  Alex and Laurie McDonald had been busy. They had collected the things Roberta had ordered the day before, along with hers and Jason’s few belongings from the inn. The innkeeper must have thought he had all the time in the world to dispose of them once he determined there was no hard money to be found. At the moment, Roberta’s hostess was engaged in basting a wide band of black material to the bottom of an impressive dark green bombazine dress that could only have been Anglo-Saxon in origin. On a chair nearby was a matching green bonnet that reminded Roberta somewhat of a funnel on one of the new steamships.

  Laurie looked up and smiled. “Good morning! Just in time to try this on. One way or another, you’ll have to see the comandante today, and in this outfit no one would ever take you for the waif dressed in men’s clothes who arrived at the inn yesterday.” She helped Roberta cinch herself tightly into whalebone stays, and then had her step into the dress. Laurie was large through the bust and hips, but Roberta was taller, which was why the black band had been sewn around the hem.

  “Not bad,” Laurie said. “I’ll just take a wee tuck here and here, and you’ll do fine.”

  The sight of that formidable, nay intimidating, dress dropped into place the key piece of the plan that had been hovering about in her mind since the night before. She would have to hope that Jason would pick up his cue promptly; she refused to entertain the notion that he might already have been spirited away or shot.

  At ten Alex came in mopping his head. “It’s only the beginning of July,” he moaned. “Three godforsaken scorching months to go. Sometimes I think I’m consul to a Turkish bath. Hurry, my dears, let's get this over with. If I once sit down, you'll never get me up, and meanwhile Juanito is stealing all my cigars.”

  They trailed out into the heat of the morning, Roberta twirling her borrowed parasol in a desultory fashion as she talked earnestly to Alex McDonald.

  They entered the comandante's office, where several men with large cartridge belts lounged about picking their teeth. The comandante himself was engaged in a game of patience, at which Roberta would lay odds he cheated. He looked up and took the cigar from his fat lips.

  “Ah, Senor McDonald. What can I do for you this morning? Good day, senora. I don't believe I've had the pleasure of meeting this lady.” He put out his pudgy hand to Roberta.

  Roberta ignored it. “I want my husband, and I want him now,” she said in Spanish. “Where have you got the miserable little pipsqueak?”

  The comandante stared at her for a moment, at a loss for words. “Am I to assume you mean the murderer who was taken into custody yesterday? He told me he was unmarried.”

  “He would! Confidence man, deserter, card sharp, yes — murderer, never. He simply hasn't the nerve.”

  The comandante was recovering, albeit slowly. “If he is so without virtue, senora, why do you want him back, may I ask?”

  “I don't want him back. However, I have three children in Philadelphia who will be done out of a sizable inheritance if I don't get him back. You see, on his thirty-fifth birthday he comes into a large sugar plantation in the West Indies, property that has been held in trust so that he can’t gamble it away. If he dies before his thirty-fifth birthday, however, I cannot according to British law acquire the land because it reverts to his sister. He will be thirty-five on the twenty-fifth of this month, and I have the papers all ready for him to sign it over to us.”

  “Is this true, Senor McDonald?” the comandante asked.

  “I’m afraid so,” Alex answered. “British laws of inheritance are not always protectors of wives and children.”

  “I want him out, and I want him out now,” Roberta persisted. “I intend to drag him back to the United States where my lawyer has already drawn up the papers.”

  “I appreciate your difficulties, senora, but the man is a convicted murderer.”

  “Nonsense! Has he been tried?”

  “Senora,” the comandante said patiently, “I am also the judge here.”

  “First of all,” Roberta continued, “Her Majesty’s consul here informs me that he has been convicted as Jason Whitney. That is not his name; his name is Reginald Creighton and he is a British subject. Secondly, the creature he was with may have murdered someone — he always took up with bad companions — but he himself would never have had the courage. Thirdly, I am in a position to bring about some very disagreeable consequences for the person who stands in my way. I am the niece of General Mariano Paredes on my mother’s side and a second cousin to President Tyler on my father’s. Never doubt that I intend to use every means open to me to bring this blackguard back to Philadelphia. Fourthly and lastly, my own finances are considerable, and I should naturally feel inclined to reward generously anyone who aids me in my endeavor.”

  “Well,” the comandante said doubtfully, “if all you say is true - ”

  She hel
d up her hand. “Before our negotiations continue further, comandante, I should like to see the prisoner. If he is in truth not Reginald Creighton, we shall of course assume that this entire conversation never took place. Bring him in, please.”

  “Bring in the prisoner,” the comandante echoed helplessly.

  The two loungers, who had been following the exchange with open mouths, hastened out. Through the walls they could hear the muffled grate of a key and the clang of a metal door. Before long the men returned, shoving a handcuffed and thoroughly bedraggled Jason with them. Like all unshaven men he looked completely disreputable, an appearance not improved by the soiled and battered state of his clothing. His eyes widened briefly as he took in Roberta in her finery.

  She didn't give him time to react. “Reginald Creighton, you cad!” she exclaimed in English. “You unmitigated, thoroughgoing bounder! Leave me and the children to starve, would you?” She gave him a vicious whack with the parasol. Then with magnificent lack of logic, “Spend my money on that hussy, would you?” She gave him another whack.

  At the beginning of her diatribe, Jason immediately cowered and put his hands up protectively as if he were in the habit of being beaten. “Oh no, my love,” he protested. “Please, my love. Think of the spectacle you’re making — ouch! Let me explain - ”

  “There’s nothing to explain! What did you do with that dreadful woman? Deserted her too, did you? Serves her right! Just wait till I get you alone, you insect!”

  Jason looked around the room desperately. “Please, sir,” he addressed the comandante in Spanish, “do you suppose I could be taken back to my cell? I’ll confess anything you wish.”

  The comandante roared with laughter. “I wouldn’t miss this for anything, hombre. It seems to me that shooting would be preferable to being in the clutches of a shrew like this one.”

  Jason slipped behind the comandante's chair to get out of Roberta’s reach. “I demand to be taken back to my cell,” he pleaded, this time with a ghost of rather shaky dignity.