The Baxter Letters

by Dolores Hitchens

  Refusal blinked at her from Mrs. Appleton’s pale eyes. “I don’t know all of the original plan. I know almost nothing of who was involved. Truly, I played a very small part.”

  “Can’t you tell me that much?” Jennifer pleaded.

  “Would you believe me?”

  “I … I think so. I came here to listen.”

  A ghost of a smile twitched Mrs. Appleton’s mouth. “You are honest. And may I say something at this point which you may not like? I think this is the place for it. I would advise you not to believe anything Baxter has told you. Not the least thing. The truth just isn’t in him.”

  “He hasn’t told me anything, except how to deliver the letters. And in what order. And I’m not sure I even got that right.” She explained quickly about the disorder in the box.

  “Can you tell me how many letters there are?”

  “Four.”

  “And Bax has had you deliver—”

  “Two.”

  Mrs. Appleton sat very still as if thinking deeply, her hands looped in the lap of the denim apron, a frown between her eyes. “He has led us toward this for so long. For so many years. I’ve told you to believe nothing from him. I wonder if I have made a mistake in that direction, myself. I have always believed in the danger because Bax warned us there was danger. And then my cousin died. But perhaps the picture isn’t quite what I think it is.” She rubbed the stray locks from her cheek with an impatient, frustrated motion. “How can I know?”

  Jennifer decided to risk asking a question of her own. “How long has it been since my uncle knew the man who looked like a general?”

  The eyes focused, snapped to attention. “The … the General!” She pronounced it in the Spanish way: heh neh rahl, with a slight accent on the last syllable. “But then—you do know! You know it all!”

  “I’m afraid that I don’t,” Jennifer corrected. “In my uncle’s box of papers and letters there are a couple of photographs. One of them shows Bax posed with an immensely important-looking man in a military uniform.”

  The narrow smile was bitter, showed her even small teeth. “So Bax had a picture made with him! Of course. When everyone’s being photographed, don’t leave out the General …

  “Does all of this … the letters, your cousin’s death, your own fear … does it go back to the General?”

  “Yes.”

  The room was silent except for the wheezing of the old dog beside Mrs. Appleton’s chair.

  “I have never told anyone,” Mrs. Appleton whispered.

  “I need to know … so badly,” Jennifer whispered back.

  “Yes, I know that you do.”

  “How long ago?”

  “More than twenty-five years. A hundred years, so far as social customs and ideas went. The country was medieval. There were lords and ladies, who owned vast lands and lived like kings. And there were peons.”

  Jennifer remembered in that moment what Mr. Dunavan had said about the country—a place where there are three or four immensely rich families and about two hundred thousand peons.

  “There was a revolution?” she hazarded.

  “There would have been a revolution, except for the General. The common people were treated like dirt. They had nothing. I was there on a tour. Full of youth and idealism. The General was a very ordinary army officer, or at least he seemed so at the beginning. A very powerful family became interested in him. Saw possibilities in him. Their name was De la Cruz. And suddenly the doddering old Presidente had appointed the young officer to be head of the army and to put down the revolutionaries.”

  “What was the General’s name?”

  “Lucero. Morning Star. Actually they said that the General had no last name. His mother had been a poor Indian girl, unmarried. He had taken the name Lucero because of his confidence in his destiny. And his destiny certainly looked good for a time.”

  “Bax was in on this in some way?”

  “Oh, no. As I say, I was there at the beginning of the revolution, and Americans were told to leave, and then later I read in the papers about the young general, and for some years the country seemed quite stable and orderly. The Army ran everything. Under the direction of the De la Cruzes and others. I don’t know how Bax came into things, nor when. As for myself, my young idealism took me into social work. In Boston.”

  The breath of years seemed to steal through the room, and Jennifer could imagine Mrs Appleton, eager, optimistic, full of plans for improving the lot of the hopeless.

  “It’s so wonderful to be young.” Mrs Appleton turned away for a moment, as if to hide a deep regret. “I don’t think I would spend my youth in social work, if my youth could be given to me again. I think I’d be pretty wild, as a matter of fact. And I certainly wouldn’t go anywhere near Nueva Brisa.”

  “You went back? You knew Bax by then?”

  “No. I went back there simply to see what the country had become. When I had left it the ordinary people were in revolt. At the time the Army had crushed the last of the revolutionaries, the powerful families had made promises of reform. Schools would be built, slums tom down, clinics provided, and the old laws by which a man could be dispossessed of land he had tilled for years, turned out to starve, would be repealed.” She shrugged and her mouth was bitter.

  “When you went back, none of these things had been done?”

  “The country was worse than ever. You wouldn’t believe the oppression. I was shocked. I was no longer so young, but my sense of justice burned as bright as ever.”

  “Did you meet the General?”

  “No. Never. He reviewed military parades every once in a while, and I saw him at things like that. Well guarded. He had married the oldest daughter of the De la Cruzes. Some people said that she had tried to commit suicide rather than be married to such as he, but it could have been a rumor without any truth behind it. I don’t know. There were some missionaries in Nueva Brisa, doing what they could in the slums there, and I joined them.”

  “But you did, eventually, meet my uncle?”

  “I am sorry to say, yes, I did.”

  “What did you have in common with Bax?”

  “Nothing whatever. He was looking for people he could use. And I was one of them. Nobody knew it at the time, but the De la Cruzes had had all that they intended to take from the General.”

  “Bax was working for them?”

  “I think so. On the surface he seemed to be the General’s …” Mrs. Appleton frowned. “… I was going to say flunky, but there was more front to it than that. He was a kind of public-relations man. He wrote silly little news releases for the North American papers. Nobody paid any attention to them. All of the news syndicates had their own men there. The situation as far as politics went must have been pretty delicate. The official line from Washington was that the General’s regime should be regarded as friendly. A loan was being negotiated, since foreign aid had become such a big thing since the war. I wouldn’t have known any of this, having little interest in politics, but the people I worked with kept me up to date.”

  “How did you meet Bax?”

  “He looked me up, introduced himself. He was younger then, of course. Quite presentable. Of course I knew he toadied around the General, but he explained it away as a kind of secret mission, which I guess it was. His job was to make the break—provide the means to make the break—so that the De la Cruzes could rid themselves of the General. So much of this I really didn’t know until my cousin told me.”

  “Mr. Shima?”

  “My cousin was sniffing around in Nueva Brisa for his own purposes. He knew I was there but we had very little to do with each other. I think now that he might have been peddling forged passports to people who needed to leave the country in a hurry. Long afterward, I discovered that this was one of his specialties. Among others.” The old dog lifted his ears all at once, his eyes opening, and whined softly. Mrs. Appleton broke off to look at him. She shivered. “Miss Hamilton, I’m getting a very nervous feeling. I think that we
ought to leave this house.”

  “Please don’t stop!” Jennifer begged. “Please tell me the rest of it.”

  “I know so little. When the plot matured, my job was to see that the child, the little boy, got out of the country. I was given a passport—one of my cousin’s concoctions, no doubt—which showed me as a widow with an accompanying child. I took the General’s child to New Orleans, turned him over to his mother there. She had escaped somehow with Bax.” Mrs. Appleton rose. She went to the hall; Jennifer heard a door open and shut, and then Mrs. Appleton came back shrugging into a short coat and carrying a handbag.

  She stood in the center of the room. Jennifer stood up. She wanted to plead again for Mrs. Appleton to continue, but she sensed that Mrs. Appleton meant to leave at once.

  “We will leave the lights on in here,” Mrs. Appleton told her, “and go out the back. There being two of us may give us some margin of safety. Or may not.”

  “Who is it, out there?”

  “The General’s people perhaps.” Mrs. Appleton shrugged. Under the lights she looked tireder, grayer, more frightened than ever.

  “After all this time?”

  “When their daughter and grandson were safely out of the General’s hands and out of the country, the De la Cruzes managed another so-called revolution, this one inside the Army itself, and the General went to prison. Quickly. That’s where he has been these many years. But my cousin Bartholomew discovered something, he made inquiries, after you delivered that letter to him, and he believed that the General had been released. Perhaps the power of the De la Cruzes and the other rich families had been broken. Or perhaps bribes had been given—enormous bribes. Even while I was there, there was talk that the General had accumulated an enormous fortune. But if it is true that the General is at last free again, at last in power again—”

  The old dog looked up into his mistress’ face and whined again, and Mrs. Appleton turned swiftly, beckoning for Jennifer to follow. They went through a dining room, passing between a big oak table and a row of chairs against a wall, on into a serving pantry and finally the kitchen, a vast dim-lit room whose windows showed the back yard under a glow reflected from the sky.

  Suddenly Jennifer didn’t want to go out into that darkness.

  “Come!”

  A large white refrigerator loomed up to the right. Beyond it was a sink, also white, with windows above it. The only light here was a faint glow which seeped through from the front of the house. But there was a feeling of familiar things here, Jennifer thought. A kitchen was known ground, while outside could be anything.

  “I’m … I guess I’m afraid.”

  “So am I. Very much afraid. The murder of my cousin was a terrible shock. Unbelievable, at first. Over the years the fear had died, had been forgotten. At first I waited each day for word to come, it was time to hide—And when the message came finally to Bartholomew and when he came to me about it, we found it hard to believe. Time had lulled us—” She was past the part of the room where there was enough reflected light to see her; she spoke from intense shadow in what must be a kind of service entry.

  “Don’t go! You may be in terrible danger out there!”

  “Perhaps. Are you coming with me?”

  Jennifer felt her way past the big appliances, an upright freezer, she thought, and then lower things like a washer against the wall, and there was a laundry smell, soap and bleach, and then she understood that Mrs. Appleton had opened the rear door for there was the fresh salty overpowering smell of the sea.

  “And Bax has dared to go back to Nueva Brisa,” she whispered, more to locate the vanished woman than to gain an answer.

  “With Bax, anything is possible. I wonder that the General wouldn’t have him murdered, though.”

  “I think he wrote me from Nueva Brisa.”

  “I’m sure that the letter was sent in some way that made you think so. Bax has a million tricks.”

  “What happened to the woman? What happened to the General’s wife?”

  “That’s the most terrible part of all,” Mrs. Appleton murmured. Jennifer found herself testing the brick path of the rear yard, trying to follow that elusive figure. There wasn’t as much light out here as there had seemed from inside, looking out. Shrubs and small trees made clots of blackness and the wind was rising, bringing with it a tumbling echo of surf.

  “Do you want your letter? I brought it …” She waited, standing still with the rising wind pulling at her hair, but there was no reply. She thought that she caught a glimpse of a low white shape, something that wagged briefly like the last signal from a tail, and then there was nothing. She ran recklessly through the dark to the street. At the end of the block was a light, throwing a scattered beam through moving branches, but between her and it the street was empty. There were house-lights here and there, and from the direction of Manhattan came a vast diffused glow.

  Mrs. Appleton had gone.

  She oriented herself, set off through the dark blocks to the train. Sometimes it seemed that there were footsteps behind her, and she paused, and then the sounds disappeared. A train waited in the station, and she got on. There were a few passengers besides herself, scattered, indifferent to her and to each other, several of the men propped against the windows asleep. Jennifer sat down. It was late and she was tired. There was still the long ride into town, and then she must face Tom with some sort of explanation.

  She wondered how much of Mrs. Appleton’s story had been true. Most of it had had an improbable ring.

  She would have to use her lunch hour tomorrow and go to the library and look up some recent Latin American history. And General Lucero—if there had been a General Lucero.

  She dragged herself through the lobby toward the elevator. The place smelled terrible. There must be a leak from the incinerator; the odor of smoke was stifling. She got into the elevator, and then just stood there, staring at the rack of buttons, overcome by a crazy compulsion to go anywhere but up. To go back to that women’s hotel, for instance. In retrospect it suddenlly didn’t seem half bad.

  Of course I’m going up. I’m just tired. Tom must be waiting for me, anxious for me to explain why I didn’t write that letter for him. I should have left some sort of explanation. We love each other, don’t we?

  Do we?

  She punched the button for her floor and propped herself to watch the dusty moons of light slide down to match themselves with the circle of pane in the door, something ritualistic, almost hypnotic, in the slowness, and she looked out at successive grimy halls until the cage wrenched to a halt before her own.

  She walked to the door, inserted her key, went in. A light glowed in the kitchen, casting a bar out into the entry and across into the living room. The place held an intense quiet, and she thought, Tom’s asleep.

  I’ll have to try to get into bed without waking him.

  But as she turned into the hall that led to the other end of the apartment, she saw that there was a light in the bedroom. Tom was waiting there, then, perhaps reading in bed. She hurried.

  There was no one in the bedroom.

  On the desk was the sheet of paper, and Tom’s notes for the letter to Bax. The sheet of paper had been wadded into a ball.

  Chapter 12

  A light was stabbing her eyes and she was being shaken. Iron hands gripped her shoulders. Her head snapped back, hard. She came to her senses to look into Tom’s furious face. “Where were you? Where did you go?” He had a knee on the mattress beside her, he was yanking her upright, his fingers dug into her flesh. The light in the ceiling exploded into rainbows.

  She made some noise of protest, some muffled cry.

  “Answer me!” He was shouting. “You skipped out. You took one of the letters!” He tried to change his grip and she twisted and slid free and pushed herself backward out of reach. She pulled the hair off her face and touched the back of her neck where hot threads seemed knitted into the skin. “The letter’s in my purse.”

  He tried to reach her wi
th one arm but she skidded even farther from him, her back tight against the headboard. The stunned fear with which she had jerked awake was settling now, dying into something else. She felt sick.

  Tom opened her purse, rummaged in it, brought forth the letter. He examined the back of it where the tape was plastered. “Where did you go?”

  She whispered, “Mrs. Appleton’s.”

  His eyes lifted, narrowed. “Are you utterly crazy?”

  “I had to know.”

  “To know what? What’s to know? The less we know, the better.” He got off the bed, took the letter to the dresser where she had put Bax’s box and its litter of contents. He spent a moment checking, as if to make sure that all of the stuff was there. Then he came back. “What did you find out that was so important?”

  He waited. But she couldn’t think of anything to say. Her flesh burned from the hard grip of hands, and there was a throbbing heat at the back of her neck. “Not much,” she got out finally.

  “We mustn’t do anything until we send that letter and get an answer,” Tom said sharply. “We contact nobody. Sean had a bright idea. He nosed around some refugee organizations. Most of them are Cuban, of course, but damned if he didn’t turn up one old guy who came from Nueva Brisa in the old days. If what this old man told him is the truth, we could really be on to something. A great big something. What’s the matter?”

  She had bent forward, covering her face with her hands, unwilling for him to see the tears.

  Some seconds ticked away. From a distance, from another apartment perhaps, she heard a clock strike. The striking gong had the same slow, ritualistic precision that she had felt in the old elevator; and she thought, without really pinning the idea down, something is dead. The patterned striking was like the footsteps of a procession. Time is walking over the grave of something, she thought, the tears hot on her palms, her eyes stinging. I don’t want to know what it is.

  “Jeff.” Tom’s voice was soft, contrite, humble. “I lost my temper. God, but I’m sorry. What can I say?” She felt him sit down and she sensed that he reached for her, but she slipped quickly out of bed on the other side.