Jack of Spies

by David Downing

  He went to bed with the curtains drawn, but every now and then a ship’s searchlight would sweep across the window, like a monster in a child’s dream, trying to force its way in.

  He was woken by the sound of his window shattering. The curtains had caught the splintered glass, but the bullet had buried itself deep in the plaster of the opposite wall, a few feet to his left.

  He had slept later than he meant to, and it was fully light outside. Knowing that it was foolish but utterly unable to resist the temptation, he slowly edged an eye around the window frame for a look at the plaza. Several uniformed figures were running along the inside of the municipal palace’s arcade while puffs of smoke erupted on the roof. There was no sign of movement in the square itself.

  As he pulled back his head, he heard people running past his door. The footsteps receded, and by the time he cracked open the door, the corridor was empty. But now he heard movement above—whoever they were, they were on the hotel roof. Mexican fighters, most likely, lying in wait for the Americans. If so, his wake-up bullet had been the first of many.

  He dressed hurriedly, keeping well away from the window. Downstairs, he found that foreign guests had occupied the kitchen and were cooking their own breakfasts. Most of the Mexican staff had obviously decided that this was an excellent day to take off, and McColl found the mood reminiscent of a children’s party abandoned by parents. It was only when one of the large front windows of the restaurant exploded inward that hysteria turned to panic and everyone tumbled down the stairs to the basement.

  They could still hear the rattle of gunfire down there, and a few minutes later there were several louder booms, which one old American gentleman identified as naval guns. “They’re shelling the city,” he announced, with an enthusiasm few of his fellow residents seemed to share.

  One thunderous explosion nearby caused a shower of plaster from the basement ceiling, but the big guns soon fell silent and all they could hear in the basement was the clatter of machine guns and rifle fire. They had been there about an hour when an American sailor in coffee-stained whites appeared at the top of the steps and told them that the building was almost secure. “We’re just mopping up on the roof.”

  After twenty minutes they were given permission to go back upstairs but were warned against leaving the hotel. Purely out of curiosity, McColl tagged along with a couple of real journalists intent on visiting the roof, and he almost wished he hadn’t. Around twenty Mexican corpses were spread across the wide expanse, most missing sizable chunks of their heads. There were almost as many wounded, and two American women were doing what they could to help, tearing up sheets for bandages and offering a few words of comfort.

  “We tried to surrender,” one man was saying in his native Spanish. “We threw down our rifles, but first they shouted and then they shot us.”

  The woman didn’t understand what the man was saying, but one of the journalists did. “What did they shout?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” the man said. “They shout in English.”

  It was probably “Put up your hands,” McColl thought. And when they didn’t—bang.

  In the plaza the fighting seemed over, but gunfire was still echoing across the city. There was one battle going on in the streets behind the hotel, another in the opposite direction, out toward the harbor. The Americans were clearly advancing, but far from having it all their own way.

  As one of the women pointed out, the rising heat made it necessary to move both wounded and dead. The corpses would soon start to smell, and the audience of zopilotes would swell still further. As the only refuse collectors the city possessed, Veracruz’s vultures were protected by law and seemed well aware of that fact. Several flew over to perch on the parapet and were driven away only by a concerted flailing of arms.

  Once sufficient volunteers had been gathered, the wounded were carried down to the restaurant and laid out in lines to await a doctor. The corpses were wrapped up in sheets, brought down, and left in a pile in the plaza until a cart could be found to take them away. It was a rotten job, and once they had finished, McColl joined several of his fellow bearers in sharing a bottle of the hotel’s brandy.

  With nothing better to do, he went back up to the roof alone, thinking to follow the course of the battle. The machine guns had fallen silent, leaving only the occasional crack of a rifle—a Mexican sniper perhaps, or an angry American avenging a comrade. Veracruz was an occupied city.

  In the plaza below, an incredible sight met his eyes—a posse of marines bearing musical instruments were setting themselves up in the central bandstand. A few minutes more and “The Stars and Stripes Forever” was rolling out across the plaza. McColl listened for a few moments, shook his head in wonder, and zigzagged his way to the steps leading down between the pools of congealing blood.

  There was a de facto curfew that Wednesday evening, but by Thursday morning the occupiers were eagerly encouraging the resumption of normal life. McColl took to the streets somewhat gingerly, the pistol from San Francisco wedged in the small of his back. But the sporadic gunfire seemed far away, and most shops and cantinas were lifting their shutters, albeit with some trepidation.

  The Hotel Alemán was open for business, a third family member behind the desk. The son and father of the two he had met, McColl guessed, as the man examined the usual photograph. “The bird lover,” he finally said in Spanish. “Señor Schneider. He checked out an hour ago.”

  “Do you know where he’s going?”

  The man shook his head. “But he asked about boats to Guatemala. A paradise for birds, he said.”

  A likely story, McColl thought, handing over some pesos. Outside on the pavement, he stopped to consider his next move. Where had the German really gone?

  One bit of news had reached the hotel the previous evening—the Ypiranga had arrived that afternoon with Huerta’s arms shipment, but the Americans had refused to allow its unloading. As far as McColl knew, the German freighter was still at anchor in the outer harbor—might von Schön be on board?

  It would have been difficult to reach the Ypiranga when the harbor was swarming with American boats. It would be hard to get anywhere, come to that. There were no passenger ships leaving Veracruz, no trains. The Americans would be watching the roads out of town, and there was nowhere the German could walk to.

  No, McColl decided—von Schön was still in Veracruz. He would have to conduct another search, starting with the other hotels.

  He walked across to the Hotel Terminal and immediately struck gold. Señor Tubach had checked in only that morning. A journalist, of course, all the way from Vienna.

  McColl went back to the Diligencias, where several foreign patrons were sitting outside lamenting their lukewarm drinks. Strenuous efforts had been made to repair the shell-inflicted damage to the hotel’s ice plant, but all to no avail—replacement parts would have to be ordered from the makers in Chicago.

  The suffering some people had to endure!

  The waiter on duty was the one McColl wanted to see. A youth of around sixteen, Ernesto had been one of the hotel’s few employees to turn up for work on the previous day—he couldn’t afford to lose a day’s wages. During their confinement in the basement, he and McColl had talked for a while, and the boy’s natural intelligence and fervent ambition had been only too evident. Now McColl asked Ernesto if he knew of anyone who might like to earn some extra pesos keeping an eye on a rival reporter. “Someone with a brain,” he insisted. “Someone as clever as you are.”

  A couple of hours later, Ernesto brought his cousin Hugo up to McColl’s room. He looked about fourteen, with floppy black hair and impish eyes, and it didn’t take McColl long to work out that the boy was sharp enough for the job at hand. After showing him von Schön’s photograph and telling him where the German was staying, he outlined the task: “I want to know where he goes, what he does, who he meets. But he must not realize that he’s being followed.”

  Hugo nodded sagely, and after several minutes
’ bargaining the two fees were agreed upon—one for him, one for his agent, Ernesto.

  After lunch at the hotel, McColl joined a group of journalists keen to examine the destruction wrought on the naval academy. The damage done by the five-inch guns of the Chester and the San Francisco seemed almost slight from the outside—cornices chipped away, several windows blown in—but once one was inside, the full force of the onslaught became apparent. The bodies of the young cadets had been removed, but there were bloodstains everywhere and what looked like pieces of flesh stuck to the upper walls. The cadets’ possessions, bedding, and furniture were strewn over the floor in broken profusion, like so much bloody confetti. Every now and then, a recognizable object would meet the eye—a hairbrush, a glove, the page of a letter. In almost every room, a sign had been posted forbidding the taking of photographs, and it wasn’t hard to see why.

  Back in the Diligencias bar, he sat with a beer and listened to the journalists swap tales of “overzealous action” by the occupying forces. Resistance had not been expected, and the shock of losses had led many to lash out blindly at the first available Mexican. Women and children had died in their parlors because snipers had perched on their roofs.

  Not surprisingly, the local Mexican politicians had refused that morning’s American offer to resume control of civic affairs. The national constitution forbade them from serving invaders, they had told the American commander. Which might be true but was only half the story—they knew very well that their people would never forgive them.

  Had reports of American excesses filtered beyond the city? No one seemed to know. The mere fact of the American occupation had convulsed opinion in Mexico City, where the embassy was besieged by demonstrators, and white foreigners with even an ounce of sense were keeping to their hotels. Huerta, however, was willing to let them leave, and a first trainload of Americans, Britons, and Germans had reportedly departed the capital that morning. The American authorities in Veracruz were sending a train out to meet them, at the point six miles from town where the Mexican army had torn up the rails.

  Next morning McColl took to the town on his own. The night before had been significantly quieter, and now an hour would often pass without someone somewhere firing a gun, but he still felt safer knowing he had one in his belt and kept a vigilant eye on the roofs and windows above.

  On the far side of the battered Hotel Oriente, he came upon a group of off-duty marines teaching Mexican children how to play baseball. Marines and children were all smiles, which was more than could be said for the watching Mexican adults, who were tight-lipped to a man. McColl found it hard to blame them—as he walked through the streets, the ravages of one day’s fighting were everywhere. Only a handful of buildings had been destroyed, but hundreds had been damaged, and very few walls had escaped being scarred by bullets. Several bore the slogan MUERAN LOS GRINGOS.

  There were funeral processions that morning. He watched one from a respectful—and safe—distance, was moved by the dignity of the mourners and the melancholy song of a trumpet, and then arrived back at the plaza just as the marine band began stomping its way through another slice of patriotic bombast. He would have murdered them all if he could, so it wasn’t hard to imagine what the Mexicans were thinking.

  Up in his room a few minutes later, he was looking out through the star-shaped hole in his window when he spotted a familiar figure crossing the plaza below. Von Schön was wearing a white tropical suit and hat, with a small pouch on a strap strung like a bandolier across one shoulder. What was in it—binoculars?

  The German had company, a portly Mexican in high-heeled boots who was jabbing the air with his fingers as if dispensing an explanation.

  And there was young Hugo, ambling along behind them at a very sensible distance, gazing from side to side like a peon new to the city.

  The three of them walked on past the bandstand and into the street at the bottom that ran past the Hotel México.

  Hugo was only a few minutes late for their six-o’clock appointment. He had followed Señor Tubach when he went out the previous afternoon, stood guard outside his hotel once he’d retired for the evening, and followed him again today.

  “I saw you cross the plaza around one o’clock,” McColl told the boy. “Who was the other man?”

  “His name’s Rivera. He’s well known in Veracruz. Some people call him a man of the people, but others just think he’s a troublemaker.”

  “And what was he doing with Señor Tubach?”

  “Acting as his guide, I think. They went to lots of places together.”

  “What sorts of places?”

  Hugo shrugged. “Places to do with death. They went to the naval academy yesterday, and then to a field near the power plant where bodies were being burned. This morning it was the fiscal wharf. The Americans have dug a big grave there, and they’re bringing bodies from all over the city.”

  “And what did Señor Tubach do at these places?” McColl asked, already knowing the answer.

  “He took photographs, but not when the Americans were watching. He has a type of camera that I’ve never seen before—it’s really small.”

  “Which he keeps in the pouch around his neck?” Now that he thought about it, McColl remembered reading that one German camera company had been trying to manufacture a pocket-size instrument.

  Hugo confirmed as much.

  “And this afternoon?”

  “After the fiscal wharf, they visited a house on Cinco de Mayo—I don’t know why, but the number was seventy-five—and then they went to the whorehouse on Calle Morelos. But they didn’t stay long enough to enjoy themselves. They came back out with one of the whores and brought her to the Hotel México. I have a friend who works there, and he says they took her to the room at the top where three men died on Tuesday. When they came out, she was counting pesos. Rivera walked off with her, and Señor Tubach went back to the Hotel Terminal.”

  McColl smiled, told him he’d done well, and added a bonus to the agreed sum.

  “Tomorrow?” Hugo asked hopefully, pocketing the bills.

  “I don’t think so,” McColl decided after a moment’s thought. “But I do want to know when he checks out. Do you have any friends at the Terminal?”

  “I can buy one,” the boy said, tapping his pocket.

  McColl let him out, then wandered across to the window. The eastern sky was almost dark, the harbor lights rippling in the water.

  So that was it, he thought—a propaganda coup. Though could you call it propaganda if it was actually true? The photograph taken at the Hotel México would have been staged, but who would question it among so many genuine images? It wasn’t hard to imagine how von Schön had used the prostitute—a ravaged, half-naked Mexican heroine, lying in pools of patriots’ blood.

  How was he going to stop the man? He had to get hold of the camera and any other damning evidence of American bad behavior, real or faked. One obvious solution was to take the whole matter to the American authorities, who would presumably ensure that the photographs never saw the light of day.

  But would they? Englishmen tended to assume that Americans preferred them to Germans and thought of the latter as their common enemy, but the facts suggested otherwise. There were many Americans who heartily loathed their British cousins, and, like any other nationality, they had their share of idiot officials. The last thing he needed was an American too prejudiced or stupid to appreciate the international ramifications of these pictures being published.

  He’d be better off dealing with the business himself, and the best way of doing so looked like the simplest—he would pay von Schön a visit, take the camera away at gunpoint, and throw it into the sea. Unless he shot the German and threw him in, too, von Schön would be free to take his revenge, but what did that matter? The pictures would be gone.

  It would be risky. Von Schön would have a gun of his own, and McColl would need to surprise him. He would wait until one in the morning and trust that his last American dollars would be suff
icient to tempt the night clerk.

  There were still people in the bar when he slipped out of the hotel, but the moonlit plaza was empty. He kept to the shadows as he made his way down Independencia, but the only other thing moving was a sad-looking dog, which padded after him for a couple of blocks before running out of interest or energy. There was no sign of an American patrol, which suited him fine. If his meeting with von Schön went badly wrong, he wanted no witnesses to his being out.

  A single yellow lamp was burning over the entrance to the Hotel Terminal. He looked around, half expecting to see Hugo lurking in the shadows, but if von Schön had returned for the night, then the boy would have gone home to bed.

  He walked in, expecting to find the night clerk asleep, but the young man concerned had a girl in his lap. From the sound of the panting, it seemed safe to assume that at least their tongues were entwined, and he felt almost cruel interrupting.

  McColl said “Buenas noches,” quietly, and the heads leaped apart. “I am a friend of Señor Tubach—”

  “He is no longer here,” the young man said automatically. The girl just looked stunned.

  “When did he leave?” McColl asked disbelievingly.

  “One hour ago.”

  “Where was he going?”

  “He did not say. Now …”

  The girl turned her face to McColl, adding her own appeal for privacy. She had a beautiful face.

  He wished them both a good night and walked back out. Where the hell had von Schön gone? There was no way he could wander around town checking out all the other hotels, not with a curfew in force.

  It suddenly occurred to McColl that Hugo might have followed the German to his new hotel before he called it a day. But he had never asked for the boy’s address. A mistake, no doubt about it. Now he would have to wait, and probably till morning.