Something approaching a wrinkle creased the tight expanse of his forehead. “Mark? Matthew?”
“Murdock.”
“Ah. A book yet to be written; had I but my letters.” He refilled his glass.
A hag draped in tatters, with a tin tiara gleaming in the rats of her hair, knew El Calle Santa Anna, and offered to take me there for the price of an American dollar. She’d have known me for what I was even if I’d worn a filthy serape and a tattered sombrero; they can smell it. A year saturated in fried peppers, cornmeal, and rapid immersions in leechy creeks would hardly have been enough to wash away the gringo. When, nearing the corner, she backed into a dark doorway and raised her skirts, hoping to raise the ante, I thanked Christ for the darkness, slipped another half-dollar into her crusted palm, and shoved away from her. Her parting cackle interrupted itself long enough only to bite into the coin. I’d have trusted her rotting incisors over any assayer’s scale when it came to separating silver from lead.
The street had been laid out under the early Spanish colonists, with no thought of anything broader than a dogcart passing through. At times the way was so narrow I couldn’t have stumbled over one of the many uneven stones and fallen as far as the ground; a scraped shoulder was as much as I’d get, and the devil of a time prying myself loose to proceed. As the way grew darker and tighter, I had to concentrate to avoid confusing horizontal with vertical, and thinking I was climbing the inside of a chimney. The soot was as thick, and the path as black.
Not all of the buildings bore numbers. I had to strike a match to read the addresses that existed, some painted directly on the lintels above the sunken doors, others, harkening back to a more genteel past, enameled in flaked paint on the pebbled-glass panels of coach lamps, most of them dark and colonized by wasps, sleeping in their paper cells. A rat crossing the alley paused on my instep, its eyes glowing red by matchlight, then humped along the rest of its way. I was the trespasser, but not one worth challenging.
No. 9, when it revealed itself, was something apart from its surroundings. The street broadened just before I came upon it, like a forest clearing in a fairy tale, with the witch’s house nestling quietly in its center, all brown sugar and molasses with a roof made of shortbread.
It wasn’t quite that; two stories built in the Tudor style, mortar and timber, oak shutters pierced with holes just wide enough to expel and repel bullets. It was of more recent construction than the rest of the village, but created the impression of something older, harkening back to a time of medieval siege. The prosaic sign stretching the length of the street front belonged to a time neither of the building’s inspiration nor of its surroundings:
BONAPARTE & SONS
SOLICITORS
A large bronze bust of Napoleon in his cocked hat shared a plate-glass window with a group photograph on a small easel of the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, embalmed in stiff collars and moustache wax. A lamp burning deep in the interior shone through the picture, making the judicial branch of the federal government appear transparent.
The door swung open away from my raised knuckles, framing a small man in a black cutaway and a white cutthroat collar. My other hand tightened on the butt of the revolver, but his hands were empty and he was alone in the room. I relaxed my grip.
His clean-shaven face was as brown as a bottle. I assumed at first that it was the contrast that made his linen seem spotless, but as he pivoted in the direction of the door, beckoning me past him with a dusky palm sticking out of four inches of starched cuff, the inside light fell full upon him and revealed a coat brushed to a bright sheen, a copper-colored necktie snugged tight without a dimple or a scrap of lint, square-toed boots like polished obsidian, and a shirt that would pass muster at a White House state dinner.
He did not shake my hand, but when the door was shut behind him snapped a bow, exposing a round patch of pink scalp in the middle of close-cropped hair, with his thumbs parallel to the seams of his trousers. “Felix Bonaparte, Monsieur, and your servant.”
His voice was a mild tenor, touched with an accent I associated with the French Quarter of New Orleans. How a Creole had come to light in a village perched on the ankles of the Sierra Madre was as much a mystery as how he managed to support such linen in that climate. The first was none of my business, but I couldn’t resist asking about the second.
“The widow two streets over was born in Shanghai, of a Spanish missionary and a fille de joie. An aunt shipped her to the New World at the time of the 1864 rebellion, for her safety. San Francisco was the destination, but the navigator was blown overboard in the same typhoon that altered the vessel’s course. I can but assume that God intended for me to keep up appearances in this barbaric country. My credentials, you see, are not honored north of the border.”
He’d managed to satisfy my curiosity in less than a hundred words. If he could settle all my questions in such short order, the American Bar Association had missed its bet in denying him permission to practice law.
He circled the room, turning up other lamps until the walls were visible, wainscoted halfway to the ceiling, with more pictures leaning out from the walls, suspended by wires to a rail. They were the usual three-quarter portraits of men in fierce whiskers and black broadcloth, one-eared representatives of eastern schools and northern authority, glowering down on the usual office furniture of oak and maple and overstuffed leather. A plate of beans and a half-eaten tortilla occupied the copper-cornered blotter on the desk.
Bonaparte caught the direction of my gaze. “Have you dined?”
It struck me just then that I hadn’t. I was hungry enough to sample the local fare, but wasn’t sure how well it would sit on a reservoir of beer and Scotch. I said I was fine.
“You will pardon me, then. I received a packet of material by the morning train, and at such times I frequently work straight through breakfast and dinner. I am anemic, you see. The head, it spins.” He gestured toward one of his temples, sat behind the desk, tucked a napkin the size of a tablecloth under his excellent collar, and began scooping beans into his mouth with the skill of someone born to the process without utensils. “I must ask your pardon as well for the lateness of the hour. That same work prevented me from issuing the invitation sooner.”
I sat in a tufted love seat facing him. “I don’t work by the clock myself. I can’t imagine what business you and I have to discuss. I haven’t come all this way to enter into any legal agreement.”
“Your business is decidedly not legal.” He chewed, swallowed, touched a corner of the napkin to each lip-corner, and chased the mouthful with water from a glass goblet. “Everyone in Alamos knows you have come to kill General Childress. It is my responsibility to turn you from this path.”
II
The Mother Mountains
ELEVEN
“Do not insult us both by denying the fact,” Bonaparte said; although if he was any kind of lawyer he wouldn’t know by my reaction that I had any such intention. I’d spent too much time in Judge Blackthorne’s courtroom, being turned on the spit by defense attorneys, to change expressions. “A stranger cannot cross the border unnoticed, dragging his mission behind him as clearly as smoke from the stack of your splendid train. I myself have lived here nearly twenty years, and when someday I am found extinct at this desk, the publisher of the village newspaper, who is my oldest friend, will write a stellar account of my life, adding that this late arrival will be missed in this village.”
I watched him scoop the last of the beans into his mouth, repeating the ritual with his napkin and glass of water. Joseph, I thought. The messenger who had brought Bonaparte’s invitation was a phantom; the fireman had lost no time reporting to Childress’ representative, and been asked—politely, of course—to wait while the lawyer drafted his note. Even George Pullman’s superior standards couldn’t construct a private parlor coach with walls so thick they’d foil a determined eavesdropper. Had he tried, no less than three locomotives would be needed to pull it.
�
�You’ve heard the rumors,” I said.
“General Childress would not be the extraordinary man he is if legends did not grow up round him like desert flowers after a spring rain. As with all great men, it is necessary to discount a third of them as invention, another third as either exaggeration or monstrous distortion, and to assign truth to the rest.
“That he intends to liberate this country at last, most definitely. That he is a traitor”—thin shoulders rose above his pristine collar—“must be left to history. Washington and Jefferson were both marked for the gibbet had they failed to repel the British from their shores.”
“Since you know so much about me, you must know also that I’m not interested in history lessons.”
He sat motionless; but whether he was turning over what I’d said or planning his next move didn’t make it as far as his bland placid face. He knew his own way around a courtroom, it seemed.
At length he stirred; I flexed the knuckles of the hand resting on the thigh nearest the Deane-Adams. But all he did was lift a small copper bell from the desk and shake it once. The tinkle was discreet, like everything else about him.
A door opened at the back of the room. I gripped the butt of the revolver; only to relax once again when a boy entered in white cotton peasant dress and sandals. He couldn’t have been older than ten, with straight black hair cut square across his brows. Bonaparte spoke to him in clipped tones, in Spanish so rapid I couldn’t catch it. The boy withdrew, to return a moment later carrying a leather folder bound with a cord and placed it on the desk. He was dismissed with a snap of the hand.
Bonaparte went on in his pleasant company voice, as if there’d been no interruption, untying the cord as he spoke.
“Do not think that I shall warn the General of your coming. There is no telegraph to his plantation, and the bandit situation is such at present that no mounted messenger would accept the commission. At all events he is prepared perpetually for contingencies of every sort. It is you who should be warned.”
“Merci, Monsieur.”
“Ah! Parlez-vous?”
“Un petit. I spent a season in San Francisco.”
“A cosmopolitan city, I am told.” He removed a bundle of paper from the folder and sorted it into stacks on the desk. His fingers were long, spatulated at the tips, and moved with the swift grace of a skilled faro dealer. “Yes, a most extraordinary man, the General; though he himself prefers the humbler rank of major. These are his papers, which I hope someday to donate to your Library of Congress, and ask no more than a footnote identifying myself as the contributor. Men such as I can hardly expect glory beyond that reflected from the blaze of the truly great.”
I watched mesmerized as he placed portions of Childress’ meteoric life into prosaic piles, according to his file-clerk’s sense of order.
“Your client conducts most of his affairs with the outside world through Cabo Falso,” I said. “How can you represent him from five hundred miles away?”
“I agree the situation has difficulties. That I remain alive is not one of them.” He continued his activity, cutting no-doubt revealing documents like a deck of cards. “I am not courageous, like you. It is a failing, yes, but one over which I have no control. Would you condemn me if I were born without an arm or with my heart on the wrong side of my chest? It is the same, an unintentional omission on the part of our Lord. Cabo Falso is a nest of pirates and worse. A man of my sort would not survive a week. The General understands this, and thinks no less of me, because I am so much better equipped to deal with paperwork quite as crucial as fertilizer and harvesting equipment. It requires a measure of courage, I assure you, to take a dispatcher to task for a serious error in shipment.”
He described his situation so practically I felt ashamed of my own lack of cowardice.
I reflected on what he’d said about fertilizers and harvesting equipment. “He’s keeping up the pretense of producing sugar?”
“There is no pretense about it; quite the reverse. He produces more sugar than his five closest competitors combined. You are aware of the importance of bones in the refining process?”
“I hunted buffalo, and saw pickers collecting the bones. They sold them to manufacturers in Detroit, who ground them into powder and ran raw sugar through them to take out the impurities. The bottom fell out of that market with the buffalo.”
“He’s found a substitute; or another method every bit as good. His merchandise is sought after in all the best restaurants in Los Estados Unidos and as far away as Paris, France, so I am told. It is nearly as fine as flour, but superior in granule texture, refusing to clump under the most humid conditions. Master chefs in the tropical colonies have threatened to resign if their employers will not agree to pay thrice as much for what Childress produces. You have seen his label, perhaps? The armored head of a knight circumscribed by gold laurels?”
Whereupon the son of a bitch turned his lapel, showing me a pin bearing the embossed emblem of the Knights of the Golden Circle. I kept my temper.
“And his opium? Is the quality as good?”
If I’d disappointed him by failing to rise to the bait, he didn’t show it; I’d have been disappointed myself if he had. He dropped the lapel back into place and continued sorting, calm as a stone in moonlight. I had his measure now. A poker face is only so good as the amount of pressure you applied to it. When it blew, it would shake the earth.
“I, too, have heard this canard. It is without foundation; and even if it were, where is the crime? One can purchase it in any chemist’s shop, diluted with grain alcohol and labeled laudanum; good for the miseries of the lumbago and all other manner of complaint. Had I been born to a caste lower than my own, I’d have hired a wagon and gone town to town peddling it by the quart.”
A lawyer to the bone, Monsieur Bonaparte. A client is always innocent; but if guilty, then of nothing unlawful.
At length he squared away his stacks, palming the edges as even as bricks, and lifted one.
“Since, as I believe, you insist upon pressing forward despite my friendly advice, perhaps you will be so kind as to deliver these to your proposed victim.”
Given the cordiality of the exchange so far, it seemed bad manners to leave him holding the bundle he offered. I turned it over, reading the delicate script on the top envelope. Like the rest, it was pressed from pale rose deckle-edged vellum, the whole bound with matching ribbon. It was addressed to “O. Childress.”
“They were sent by his fiancée in Virginia, an estimable woman by all accounts, and upon the evidence of her choice of husband, certainly. She has been waiting months for a reply.”
“Childress has a fiancée?”
“Is it so strange a great man may love in the corporeal sense?”
“He hasn’t been to Virginia in twenty years.”
“The relationship is all the sweeter for the absence. Had the women I married respected my privacy to such an extent, I should not be alone this day.”
I brought the bundle to my nose, but whatever scent she might have sprinkled on the envelopes had long since evaporated in that climate. “I’ll do my best.” I slid the letters into a side pocket.
“When you have finished reading them, please re-seal them as well as you can. He will not be fooled, but he will appreciate the gesture.”
It was as bizarre a meeting as I’d attended, and I’d sat in on Indian tribal councils and armed truces during range wars in Wyoming. “Is that why you called me here, to tell me I’m a suicidal fool and ask me to deliver mail?”
“Not entirely.” Felix Bonaparte returned the rest of the material to the folder and tied it securely. I wondered what it contained that he’d held back. “I doubt you welcome death, or you would not attend so to the weapon you carry. A man who ignores this precaution would ignore others, and not survive. The odds—odds; this is the word, oui?”
“A word, yes.” His relentless courtesy had begun to stand my nerves on edge.
“Thank you; it’s a hazard of my ba
ckground and circumstances that I sometimes am not sure whether I am conversing in English, Spanish, or French. The odds, you must see, are decidedly in General Childress’ favor. He would consider me small in the light of his own chivalrous nature if I did not attempt to bring them closer to even.”
He pointed. He grew his nails long, but as round as coins.
“On that wall, monsieur, is a map more current than any you have seen. It was drawn by a German cartographer named Muehlig, who took it upon himself to chart all the impenetrable regions of the earth, and thus leave his footprint on the path of the great explorers. The dream ended when he was beheaded by banditti for the value of the surveying equipment he packed upon his burro; but not before he drew this. The rurales who apprehended and shot the brigands found it of no value compared to the other items they confiscated, and so were generous enough to offer it to me. It is less than ten years old, and thus three hundred years more current than any you may have seen. I cannot part with it, but I suggest you commit as much as you can of it to memory. It may mean your life—for a while.
“At the very least you will go to your grave knowing a bit more of where your bones will rest until trumpet’s blow. To die is one thing, but to die lost—” Again he shrugged.
The map, framed in black walnut without glass, hung in gloom. I lifted the milk-glass shade off the nearest lamp and carried it over. The names of various peaks and canyons were in German; I ignored them, not because they were foreign but because they’d been named by men, and of no use to the man who roamed among them. Muehlig, using the inks and paints he’d carried, had washed the whole of the eastern coast of the Gulf of California in pale blue, but tinted the jagged bumpy region of the Sierra Madre a bilious shade that in the flickering flame inside the soot-smeared glass chimney seemed to throb, as if it had a pulse of its own, sickly green, like the discharge from an infected wound.
“The Mother Mountains, monsieur,” said the lawyer. “There the bones of the Conquistadores lay mingled with those of their predecessors, whose civilizations have been forgotten by time, buried by the very riches they sought. They died wealthy. If you will be so kind as to give me the name and address of your closest relation, I shall do my best to report where you were last seen alive.”
Cape Hell Page 6