I answered, too fast and too honestly. “Me, I don’t harbor illusions of such things,” I said. “I’m kind of counting on oblivion.” I could feel Alicia’s gaze on me. It didn’t feel comforting. I wished I’d answered the old warrior more obliquely.
Alicia said, “What about you Mr. Holmdahl? Do you believe in heaven or hell, or both?”
“I gotta go with your beaten-up-on beau,” the old man said. “If there is such a place as hell, I’m in a world of hurt, Beauty.”
She said, “How is it Villa never came after you...I mean, after he was allowed to retire?”
Emil patted her hand. “I was on the move — overseas — a hard target to acquire. And hell, Mexico secured all kinds of assurances from Villa that he’d be a good boy if they let him live on his farm and fight cocks and bed women. He had to commit to doing nothing that would give the U.S. an excuse to come in again and get him. Killing an American, even one like me, was just not an option for Villa.”
“Let’s talk about the treasure,” I said.
The old man smiled and leaned forward, crossing his too-long arms on the table. “Yes. Let’s. That’s what we all care about. And it’s sure as hell more interesting than this jawing about afterlives.”
“Let’s talk treasure,” I said again.
The old campaigner nodded. “I first heard about Villa’s lost gold and Fierro’s death when you’d likely heard it, I’d reckon along about 1915. I had some legal issues I was grappling with about then. Couldn’t run right down to Durango to make my fortune. At the time, I was trying to avoid that quick stop from a short fall.”
Alicia shot me a confused look. I said, “He means a noose.”
“Ah,” she said, stroking black hair behind her right ear.
“I heard the stories that I think many of us heard,” the old mercenary said, looking at me. “Stories about Urbina, his betrayal of Villa and abandonment of the revolution. You know ... that stuff. How Urbina holed up in Las Nievas, Durango with all that gold and silver. You probably know what happened next. Villa confronted his old friend at Urbina’s ranch, then Pancho ordered Fierro, the Butcher, to kill Urbina. Even Villa didn’t have the stomach to see his old friend die on his orders — particularly at the hands of a sadistic madman like Fierro. So Pancho left, and then the Butcher took Urbina apart, one piece at a time. After they finally killed him, they packed up the gold that they could carry and hid the rest. They split and Fierro sank in that quicksand bog.”
I leaned in now. “Yeah. That’s the myth. But we now both know he didn’t sink in the quicksand.”
Bud chimed in, “And you, Mr. Holmdahl, didn’t seem too surprised to learn Fierro is alive.”
Emil Holmdahl shrugged and sipped some water. “You always heard stories. The one I kept hearing was that Fierro faked his death. He could take the measure of men pretty good, Rudy Fierro could. Particularly when he was sounding for treachery and hate in his underlings. Fierro gambled his own men wouldn’t try to save him if he was in jeopardy, and, brothers and sister, was he ever proven right on that count.”
“Please explain,” Alicia said.
Holmdahl smiled and spoke directly to the young Mexican woman. “Fierro purposely rode into fast-moving, dangerous waters. He beelined for the one place along that arroyo you would purposely avoid if you were any kind of a horseman, and Fierro was certainly that. Yet Rudy rode right in. His horse began to flail. Fierro pretended to go under with her. Then he swam a ways and beached himself downstream, thinking he’d wait his flunkies out. Or so he thought. His plan, the story goes, was to return for the treasure they’d left behind.”
Alicia: “He was going to betray Pancho Villa? After just executing another traitor?”
“It was money, honey,” Holmdahl said. He ran his hand back through his thick, white shock of hair. “A lot of money. Rodolfo, he was no fool, you know. A stone killer, yes, but not stupid by any stretch. He could see the writing on the wall. The American government’s fascination with Villa was wavering, due largely in part to Fierro’s viciousness — all those mass shootings he had staged. And the politics were very ... fluid. Do you know that saying the goddamned towel heads have? ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend.’ You know? Well, allegiances change ... national agendas shift. It wasn’t even a year later that it all got shot out from under Pancho by that stroke-enfeebled imbecile Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was choking off Villa’s guns. So Pancho Villa seemingly retaliated against Wilson’s and America’s betrayal. On March 2, the raid on Columbus happened. A short time later, me and your beau and a bunch of others streamed across the border behind Black Jack Pershing to bring Villa back, ‘dead or alive,’ as the dumbass saying goes. An Army of ten thousand; five hundred vehicles; eight biplanes; even George S. Patton, bossing us. Eleven months, four hundred miles, and squat.”
Fiske lit a cigarette. By Christ, I’d addicted the poor scrawny bastard. My tyro poet lit his cigarette with a hammered-nickel Zippo he’d seemingly picked up sometime in the last day or so. It looked as if it was engraved on one side. When Bud sat it down by his right hand, I scooped it up and tilted it until the light fell right. I read the opening line of my novel Border Town: “Whores Die Hard.” Underneath, he’d had my name engraved.
Bud said, “I’m confused,” as he reached over and took his lighter back from me. “Fierro stayed alive — we now know that’s true — he knew where in Durango the treasure was hidden, but he didn’t go back and get it. Why the hell didn’t Fierro do that? Vengeful as he was, after you stole Pancho’s head and tried to make off with the gold, why didn’t Fierro come for you?”
Holmdahl smiled at Bud. “That’s good listening, son — well, better’n I’d have given you credit for at first flush. And you’re thinking, too. How’d this come to be you ask me — Fierro knowing where to find the gold and silver, and yet not claiming it? Problem was, Fierro was too good a teacher ... well, in the sense that he ruled by absolute fear. He demanded excellence in a way no other son of a bitch, probably, ever has or will again. So, one of Rudy’s own lieutenants — a young man of pride and conscience — spotted Fierro when he surfaced a ways downstream. He saw Rudy break surface and slide behind a stand of weed and willow there at the banks. That smart and sharp-eyed flunky of Fierro’s correctly intuited what Rudy — The Butcher — was planning. The flunky dispatched several men to ride out and overtake Villa. Plan was for them to inform Pancho that Fierro had turned on Villa and the Revolution — tell Pancho that Fierro was angling to rob el Jefe just like Urbina had. Then that old boy and another passionate and loyal young Villista rode out in pursuit of Rodolfo Fierro.”
“So way back then, Pancho, too, knew that Fierro survived,” I said. “Guess he kept that sad-ass fact secret because two men that close to Villa trying to fuck him would smack of weakening leadership.”
Emil gave me a nasty look and then jerked his head in Alicia’s direction. “Watch your foul mouth around the lady, boy,” he said.
Boy? “Sure,” I said. “Sorry to offend your sensibilities. Sir.”
Emil said, “Exactly. That’s exactly what it would have looked like. Loss of control. One lieutenant straying off the res’? Well, that can be dismissed as bad judgment. But two? In a week? That’s an authority-threatening mudslide.”
“Sure,” Bud said. “That all makes sense. But here’s the central thing: what kept Fierro from the treasure?”
“The initial pursuit, for one thing,” Holmdahl said. “Rodolfo may have been packing guns after his faked drowning — hell, I suspect we can trust that he was. But the bloodthirsty bastard was still on foot — his horse having drowned in that damned bog.
“But Villa knew Rudy too well. When the larger body of men caught up with Pancho, and told him what Fierro was apparently trying to do, well, Pancho knew that a mere two men chasing Fierro didn’t bode well. Villa sent ten men in as reinforcements to support the two poor bastards already chasing Fierro. The support crew rode maybe ten miles before they found the two dead Villistas
. The sons of bitches had been stripped naked and staked out belly-down over maguey plants — impaled — and what was left half-eaten by coyotes and ants.”
Alicia arched a dark eyebrow. “How do you know this, sir? In such ... vivid detail?”
Holmdahl jacked a thumb in my direction. “Ask Lassiter. You heard things along the sweltering trail. We didn’t have TV, didn’t have radio ... hell, not even newspapers. Hell, we didn’t even have shortdogs — those funny-looking short and wide paperbacks they printed for the Grunts during World War II and Korea. We had gossip. Corridos. We had stories. You heard things out there in the alkali.”
Okay. It was something like true. But you didn’t hear things like this. Not with this level of novelistic detail. Two dead Villa loyalists; some other Villa faithful who rode out. That old bastard Homldahl was either embroidering, or obscuring. Or there was another, more chilling prospect — Holmdahl had heard it from one of the central players. But which one?
“Fierro had eaten one horse and rode off on the other,” Emil continued. “ For months, the reinforcement Villistas chased Fierro, or so the legends, which I credit, say. They drove the Butcher deeper into southern Mexico — back toward Sinaloa, where the monster was born. Try as he might, old Fierro just couldn’t get back to Durango for months. Then Villa allegedly raided Columbus, apparently killed all those innocents — and the troops. And we all invaded Mexico — the so-called ‘Punitive Expedition.’ Nobody, but nobody, could move around in Mexico once we made the scene. Least of all Rodolfo Fierro, who had met Black Jack Pershing and who had appeared in some pretty famous photos with Villa and Pershing. And Fierro was well-known to all of us horse soldiers from wanted posters and such. You have to understand,” Holmdahl said, speaking to Alicia and Bud now, “word of Fierro’s ‘death’ in the quicksand bog got back to us well after the raid on New Mexico. And that raid was so brutal — so craven and so brazen — well, we all at first assumed Fierro probably master-minded the goddamned thing.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Bud said, clearly getting impatient. “But after you all left — after you were shipped off to Europe for the Great War — why didn’t Fierro go back then? Go back and get that treasure?”
Emil smiled, rueful and proud, all at once. “Well,” he said, “I got there first, boy.”
30
Holmdahl took a couple of forkfuls of scrambled eggs, then asked me, “You ever hear of a fella name of Al Jennings?”
“Heh, sure,” I said. “Grifter, actor, religious scam artist. ‘The Last of the Great Train Robbers,’ according to himself.”
Alicia smiled. “Was he? The last of the great train Rrobbers, I mean?”
“Naw, what he was is a horse’s ass,” I said. “First-class screw-up. He and his band once tried to stop a train they had targeted. They tried to stop it by piling these jumbo-sized discarded tires on the tracks. The engineer flipped them the bird and opened up the throttle. When the train hit the tires, it tossed them thirty or forty feet in the air. When those big heavy rubber suckers started raining back down, well, Jennings and his crew nearly got killed by those damned tires.”
“Right,” Holmdahl said. “Then he hooked up with Bill Porter — William Sydney Porter — you know, the short story writer, O. Henry? Jennings and Porter bungled some other crimes together and finally ended up in the penitentiary in Columbus — that’s the city in Ohio, not the one in New Mexico that Villa attacked, by the way.”
Bud tipped his chair back on two legs. “Are you saying you chose to hook up with this guy ... even knowing what a joke he was?”
“Even a stopped clock is right twice a day,” Holmdahl said. “Once in a while, Al’d get a line on something that held real promise. He and me and this other fella, a Texan named Jake Chrisman, well, we decided to form a partnership and go for Urbina’s — Villa’s — treasure. We had all heard the same stories and kind of tripped over one another’s mutual preparations to go hunting the treasure. At that point, it seemed better to throw in together than to try and dick one another in order to get there first. Or, at least it seemed politic to give the pretense of doing so.
“The fucking federales fell on us about four miles from Urbina’s ranch.” Emil suddenly blushed and smiled sheepishly at Alicia. “Now I’m talking dirty in front of you, señorita.” The old man jerked his head at me and then grimaced. “I personally blame Lassiter’s bad influence.”
I glanced at Bud. My “interviewer” was on his third cigarette. Hard to argue with Holmdahl’s assessment of the nasty and self-destructive effect I have on those closest to me.
“Anyways, the Mexican authorities killed three of our Mexican guards/guides,” Holmdahl said. “The rest of us just barely escaped with our lives,” he said, staring at the ceiling but clearly not seeing it. I sensed that Holmdahl was living in the back then, now. “Jennings went on back to Texas,” Emil said. “Al was yellow to the core. But me and Chrisman, well, we figured two careful gringos on horseback would be a lot less conspicuous than that crew we went down there with the first time. So just the two of us returned to Urbina’s ranch.”
I thought of Al Jennings and said, “And a two-way split beats hell out of splitting three or four ways.”
Bud smiled and said, “Or eight or nine ways — once your praetorian guard figured out what was up if you’d reached the ranch that first time.”
Emil Holmdahl shrugged. “Plan that time was to try and do it under their noses. We’d get the treasure, then move it to a safe place of our choosing, away from those characters’ eyes and ears. Then, later, we’d come back and claim it. Or, if it seemed a better prospect, we’d have just killed them all once we had the treasure. We’d murder them without a second thought, knowing they’d do the same to us, tables turned. They were nasty pieces of work. And because of that, they wouldn’t have been missed, let alone mourned. Probably wouldn’t have prompted an investigation.”
Alicia blinked in disbelief at Holmdahl’s casual confession. Her cheeks reddening, she said, “I’m surprised you could sleep at night. I mean, in that I’d think you’d be looking for ways to off one another ... have the gold without having to split with anyone else. How could you trust your associates? How could they trust you not to kill them, too?”
“I’d be a liar if I said the thought of taking them out didn’t cross my mind, and many times, at that,” Holmdahl said with bland sincerity. “And I’d be a fool to think that Al and Jake didn’t suspect me of having thoughts about killing them. I sure figured they aimed to screw me in the end, so yes, Missy, at some point, before we abandoned our first foray, it was looking to turn into some replay of Treasure of Sierra Madre — all of us looking over our shoulders at one another.
“But anyway, me and Jake lingered, then we went back and we found the treasure. It wasn’t really at Urbina’s old ranch. It was a property or two over — a little hacienda Urbina had built for his mistress. The gold and silver was at the bottom of a false well that Urbina had built in which to stash weapons for the Revolution.”
“So you found the treasure,” I said. “But then you lost it. How?”
“Well, getting back to the lady’s implicit point about subterfuge and betrayal, I took advantage of the fact that Jake was a city boy, a real tenderfoot. He relied on me as guide, cook. I cinched his saddles so he didn’t fall off and break his neck; I saw to his horse’s feeding and care. Jake was along as muscle and an extra gun. He was a good shot, though I never saw him fire under the stress of mortal combat. Those federales that killed our guards? We ran from them. Hard to know how he’d have shot with bullets flying back at him. But you know how that is.”
“Sure.” You never wanted to learn in the field — though Bud, backshooting aside, acquitted himself well enough. “You got him lost out there in the desert,” I said. “So he wouldn’t really know where the treasure was.”
“That’s right,” Emil said. “But then, even Jake started to pick up some familiar landmarks out there as I led him in circles. He started to
catch on. Jake correctly accused me of trying to get him lost and confused. Thing was, I wasn’t as sharp about doing it as I’d hoped to be. Wasn’t thinking too clearly. Then I realized I was getting ill. We found the gold and silver; gathered it. And then I realized I was deathly ill. Really thought I might die. I’d come down with amoebic dysentery. I won’t go into great detail, on account of we’re eating and the lady’s here.”
Alicia shook her head. “I’ve had some nurse’s training. I know about it.”
A few years before our split, Hemingway had come down with the same thing in Africa. It plagued him for months. I said, “A former friend of mine had a case of that. Nasty stuff.”
Emil grimaced and shook his head. “I began to hallucinate. To talk ... and Jake exploited that cursed loose tongue of mine. He drew me out and soon knew I meant to lose him out there in the desert — to eventually abandon him or kill him. Bad position he was in. And me too. Real ‘Mexican standoff.’ But Jake was alone out there with me and all that treasure. He didn’t stand a chance of finding his way back home alone. And he spoke little Spanish. If he did find his way to a town, he’d be robbed and killed by some Mexican. He knew that.
“We managed our way back to Urbina’s mistress’ house. Jake, he started nursing to me. While I slept, Jake, he took that gold and that silver, pieces at a time, and he rode up into the hills somewhere, or something — hid it all. Maybe put it in an arroyo or something. Whatever the case, he’d later tell me it was very confusing and involved at least 10 landmarks and some very specific numbers of paces between each marker. I didn’t have a chance of finding the treasure on my own, he swore. And I believed Jake. So he was in a position to dictate terms. He said he’d get me through the stomach thing, and in return I had to get him back to civilization — get him to some place civilized and crowded, where my hand would be staid. Then we would come to terms about recovering the treasure. I’d get him back to that little mysterious ranch, and he would go out there in the desert and lead me to the place he’d hidden it. Well, lead us, ’cause I figured we’d each go back to Durango with our mutual mercenaries. We’d proven we couldn’t trust one another, and I’d already made it clear I’d go to mortal lengths to screw him.”
Head Games (The Hector Lassiter Series) Page 12