Cape Hell

by Loren D. Estleman

  I turned his way, and made as much of a bow as I could. It wasn’t a patch on his, but he seemed to appreciate the effort. My last image of Felix Bonaparte, Esq., was of an arrangement of patches of light on a stoic face hovering above the lamp on his desk. If it weren’t for the bundle of letters in my pocket, I’d have thought I’d dreamt the whole thing.

  I passed back up the narrow alley, groping my way along the walls, which seemed closer together now, then farther apart, a vast expanse; I couldn’t see as far as the one opposite. The adobe was hot to the touch. I snatched my palm away. I wondered if a fire was gutting the building. The heat followed me, coursed up my arm, across my chest, and down the other arm, passing out the ends of my fingers like electrical current. Raw cold rushed in to fill the void. I shivered. By the time I emerged from those thousand yards of darkness I was staggering.

  The Ghost stood on its siding, inhaling flame and exhaling steam, its headlamp plowing a pale shaft through vapors as thick as churned butter. Hector Cansado, ghostlike himself, stood with his back to it, a moderate wind fluttering the end of the bandanna tied around his neck. He had the shotgun clamped to his right hip with the muzzle pointed at me.

  I spread my hands. “It’s Murdock.”

  “I know this.” He didn’t lower the weapon. “Stop walking, and keep your hands as they are.”

  I stopped. Of a sudden I felt no chills, no fever.

  “I wondered how long it would take you to come around to that,” I said.

  “It requires no genius. There is the train, and here is the man who knows how to run it. Where, Senor Deputy, does that leave you?”

  His image swam, shifted right and left, refusing to stay in one spot. I thought it was a distortion caused by the steam. I jerked my right arm, sliding the Bulldog revolver out of my sleeve into my hand. I leveled it and fired.

  Missed.

  I actually saw the slug float past him, riding the steam like flotsam on the ocean. I saw nothing after that but steam. It thickened, drifted around me, clung to my body, filled my eyes and nose, stung my nostrils. I was drowning in it. I clawed for the surface, lost my grip on the little belly gun. An hour passed before I heard it strike earth with a dull thump, as remote as at the bottom of a well two hundred feet deep.

  By then I was falling, too, plummeting through the chill air of the well. I heard the roar of the shotgun, dull also, as if it were swaddled in the same steam that pulled me down and down and shut out the rest of my senses.

  TWELVE

  I was adrift on a calm ocean, jammed into a tight berth with the sun nailed to the sky like a cartwheel dollar, blinding me with its brilliance and draining all the moisture from my body, drying me out like a dead fly on a sill. The surface of the water was as flat as a sheet of iron. Then a great toboggan-shaped bank of blue-black cloud slid across my vision, blanking out the light and drenching me in icy cold. The wind came up, turning the surface of the ocean on end, the ship sliding down one wave and climbing another, dizzying me so I couldn’t tell up from down. I gripped the edges of my berth so tightly I knew my fingers would never come unclamped; when the inevitable came, someone would have to break them to get me loose to throw over the side.

  An angel came for me, or rather tried to reach me, but it never got close enough so that I could make out its features. All I saw was a white blur, always the same distance away, a bright star obscured by haze. That was the sum total of my life: help on the horizon, always just beyond arm’s length.

  Where there are angels, devils can’t be far behind. Mine looked like Hector Cansado. His face was as big as the Ghost’s boiler, each of his nostrils like the bore of the Springfield shotgun whose stock he had braced against his shoulder, taking aim at me. Time and again I saw smoke erupting from the muzzle, the lead pellets coming my way, spreading as they went, the pattern the size of the mortar-and-timber wall of the building where Felix Bonaparte practiced law on behalf of Oscar Childress. When they struck, with the force of ten locomotives, I jerked out of my nightmare with a tongueless shout, but not into reality, only into another dream as bad. Every fugitive I had ever killed ran hot on my heels, Lefty Dugan foremost, bent double as he closed the distance so that I could see clear down inside the hole I’d bored in his head, the sides sleek and shining like the piston rods that propelled the train.

  Then something broke, and I lay in a pool of cold sweat, my vision clear. I stared at the convex coffered ceiling of the parlor car, secure in the berth that folded up into the wall when it wasn’t in use. I was alert, but weak to the point of death; when Joseph pulled me by my arms into a sitting position, then laid me back down to lift my legs, stripping away the sodden sheet, and repeated the process in reverse to replace it with fresh linen, I was as limp as a marionette in a medicine show. He had to raise my arms and brace them with one shoulder to change my nightshirt.

  I slept then, without dreaming, or with no memory later of what I had dreamt, beyond the blazing coin nailed to the sky and the engineer and his shotgun and the icy rise and fall of the ship tossed by the sea.

  “He can speak?”

  A new voice, this, resonant, not loud, like the echo of cannonfire in the ears after a period of constant bombardment: a low rumble with a distinct Spanish accent.

  “I am not a doctor, Jefe. The danger is past. I can say no more.”

  This voice was familiar. Joseph, the fireman I’d been too smart to trust; the one who’d saved my life, possibly twice. With Cansado gone to the other side there was none else to have gotten me into bed and seen me through the fever.

  I raised my head, and thought at first I’d slipped back into delusion: The star burning brightly through haze was back, but with a difference. This time it managed to approach me, and as it drew near the blurred outlines became distinct, so that when it stopped at the edge of the berth and looked down at me I saw it was a man.

  He was dressed in white, but not the shapeless dress of a peon; more like the sugar-cane barons one saw smoking cigars and reading newspapers in the lobby of the best hotel in El Paso, in a pressed linen suit and narrow-brimmed straw hat, squared across straight strong brows. The white was interrupted only by tobacco-brown skin, a parti-colored hatband, a thin black knitted necktie, and highly polished black boots, as small as a boy’s. Everything about him, in fact, was small, but he was built perfectly to scale, so that you didn’t realize he was anything less than normal stature until you had something to compare him to; in this case one of the overstuffed chairs, the nearest arm of which reached above his waist. I knew, had we stood face-to-face, he wouldn’t tip back his head to look up, forcing me to tip mine forward if I wanted to meet his gaze. I would want to, rather than guess where he might be looking if not at me. To this day when I think of him I don’t see him as small; and I do think of him.

  He wore no emblem of office, and no weapon as far as I could tell. The suit was cut so carefully to his measure it didn’t seem as if a pistol or knife could be concealed on his person. He introduced himself as Vigía Férreo, “Chief of police on approval.”

  I tried to wet my lips, but my tongue was as dry as a dead leaf. “On whose approval?” It came out in a croak. Immediately Joseph placed a hand against the back of my head, supporting it as he trickled water into my mouth from a gourd. Most of it splashed down my chin, but it tasted cool and mossy, as if it had been cranked up from the same deep well I’d fallen into when Cansado had leveled the shotgun at me. It seemed a hundred years ago. I wondered what had happened to him.

  “The citizens of Alamos have granted me the honor. My predecessor was appointed by El Presidente Diaz. He died last month, and the city fathers are awaiting word from Mexico City regarding his replacement; but los bandidos, senor, they await nothing.”

  “Were you his deputy?”

  “His mathematics tutor. He hoped for an accounting position in the state house in Hermosilla, but our merciful Lord had other plans for him.” He crossed himself.

  “Since when is long division
a requirement for law enforcement?”

  “None that I am aware of; but I was the only one he trusted with the key to the office, and the city fathers respected his judgment.”

  “What did he die of?”

  “Yellow fever. It stalks this place like an old puma. You are the very first person I have spoken to who survived it.”

  “I’ve had practice in survival.”

  “So it would seem. Whom shall we bill for your engineer’s burial?”

  Now I knew the report I’d heard was the shotgun going off in some harmless direction, diverted by Joseph with whatever weapon he’d had at hand. “You might try El Presidente, who loaned the train and its crew to the federal seat in Montana Territory. Failing that, try Judge Harlan A. Blackthorne in Helena.”

  Férreo wrote the information on a starched cuff with a short stub of orange pencil. He seemed to make use of the same half-breed Chinese laundress as Bonaparte. I asked how the engineer had met his end.

  “At the head of an axe.”

  I glanced at Joseph, whose face registered nothing. The fireman would be an artist with that tool.

  Férreo seemed to have read my thoughts. “Our little village has witnessed much that it would perhaps be best to forget—it is, you see, the path of revolution and raids across the border—but I have never before seen a man cloven from the crown of his head to his waist. This man”—his eyes slid briefly to Joseph—“has provided me with an account of what took place three days ago. I should like to hear yours.”

  Three days? I thought it had been three hours. “He threatened me with a shotgun. That’s the last thing I remember. If Joseph told you he killed Cansado in my defense, I’d take him at his word.”

  “I fear the word of an Indian does not travel as far as that of a white man.”

  “Then that’s what happened. I’ll sign an affidavit if you want.”

  “We are not so formal here. Can you enlighten me as to Senor Cansado’s motives?”

  “I can only think that he wanted to take over the train and sell it in the Sierras, along with his services as operator.”

  “Senor Bonaparte has informed me of your meeting in his office. You are still determined to press on with your mission?”

  “I don’t see how I can do that without an engineer.”

  “Nor without a train. In the name of the citizens of Alamos I am taking possession of it until further notice.”

  “What gives you that authority?”

  He smiled, teeth blue-white against brown skin. “You may have three more days to regain your strength. Then you must make arrangements for other shelter or to return home. I shall hold the train until Mexico City sends someone to claim it.

  “We live in a wilderness, Americano; wilder than anything in your frontier. A bandido with such transport as this is a dangerous animal. Moreover, to do other than I have chosen would be to countenance an act of murder. I do not believe that my predecessor would have done otherwise.” He touched his hat. “Buenos dias, Senor Deputy. If you require anything that will make your stay more pleasant, please feel free to send me a message by way of the guards. The men I trust with such duty fought alongside Juarez. Juanito will be only too happy to show you his collection of gold teeth. You have but to ask.”

  After he left, I signaled to Joseph for another drink. The water tasted better than Blackthorne’s Scotch whisky. I drank greedily, and would have gone on if he hadn’t snatched the gourd away. “Why?”

  “Lest you founder, like a horse.”

  “Not that. Why’d you take my side against Cansado?”

  He lifted his shoulders and let them fall. “Perhaps I wished to be an engineer.”

  “You know how to run this train?”

  “Stoking the fire is not the distraction you might think. I have had much time to watch and to remember what I have seen. All I need is someone to tend the boiler.” A sly look crossed his hacked-out features. “I am afraid your days of riding in ease are at an end.”

  “Don’t apologize. I was getting soft.” I swung my feet to the floor. My head struck an invisible wall. I settled back onto the mattress. “I’d better rest,” I said, when the car stopped spinning. “Stealing a train is a two-man job.”

  THIRTEEN

  If I’d harbored any hope that the guards Férreo stationed to watch the Ghost were local amateurs pressed into service, it washed away when I alighted and saw them, one in front, one in the rear, and one on either side of the coach: slit-eyed Yaqui half-breeds with brown gnurled faces, carrying Mexican Winchesters at parade rest, bone-handled pistols in holsters with the flaps cut off attached to Sam Browne belts, short-bladed machetes balancing them out on the other side. A series of civil wars had provided them with surplus uniforms: riding breeches, knee-high boots and epaulets. They held their heads at the same ten-degree tilt to keep the smoke of their smoldering cheroots from collecting under the brims of their sombreros. They might all have been related, which was more than just a possibility: There were villages throughout that peninsula whose populations had bred among themselves for centuries, normally a recipe for weakness, but not in this case. Each generation appeared to have doubled the hardness of the last, like lichens forming additional inches to shelves growing on rock.

  “Veterans of the revolution.” Joseph spat and rubbed his spittle into the rug at his feet. “Bandits. Tio Benito could hardly pick and choose when killers were required.” I couldn’t tell if the avuncular reference to Juarez was genuine or marinated in sarcasm.

  “My horse needs exercise.” I shook my head when he stirred himself. “As do I.”

  He noted the wobble when I rose from the chair where I’d been resting, excused himself, and returned to the car a moment later carrying a crooked stick. “I was told to tap the wheels with it whenever we stop.”

  “Why?”

  “Quien sabe? Cansado I think did not know either.”

  I took the stick. “What was the tribal remedy you treated me with?”

  “The powder of the cinchona bark. This area is rich in the tree.”

  “I did you a disservice. Cansado said I couldn’t trust you and I believed him.”

  “I trusted neither of you until he showed his hand. I am Aztec, after all, born with the earned wisdom of those who passed before. One traitor is to be expected. Two, they—” He faltered, made a gesture with his fists together, the thumbs turned away from each other.

  “Cancel each other out.”

  “Sí. A double betrayal leads to faith.”

  The statement made as much sense to me as that entire business. I never did trust him entirely. It was like taking up with the woman who’d thrown one man over to take up with you.

  The guards stood motionless, their eyes alone following me as I led the bay by its bit, as long as my steps took me no closer to the locomotive. Neither Joseph nor I was a prisoner, but their orders would be to prevent us from moving the train at any cost. Pressure was up; the fireman had seen to that while he nursed me, but every moment he stayed away from the tender was a loss of steam. Soon, keeping the train where it was would be no more than a formality. Without fire and water it was so much dead metal.

  I walked alongside the tracks toward the caboose, then back, as much to restore strength to my muscles as to stretch the horse’s sinews, supporting myself on the stick. Just for diversion I tapped a couple of wheels with the end, but if there was a crack in one it didn’t sing out. In time that stick came to sum up the whole of my use to the federal court in Montana Territory. Judge Blackthorne abhorred the thought of any of his pistoleers lying idle. If not a Childress, then something else would have had to be trumped up to justify my time. The whole Mexican affair was nothing more than tapping a stick against an endless succession of wheels.

  “Why not?” I said aloud.

  “Senor?” The guard nearest me sent a blank expression my way.

  “When was the last time you ate?” I asked.

  “Que?”

  I made a s
cooping motion toward my mouth. He shrugged. In all the years since I left Mexico I’ve never tried to imitate that gesture. Mexicans alone are educated in communicating through body movements; the roll of a shoulder, the lifting of an eyebrow, can out-debate William Jennings Bryan in the full cry of his eloquence.

  I jerked my chin toward the parlor car. Not a muscle moved in his face, but after a glance forward and back he took a step that direction. I hung back to let him board first, but he planted his boots in the cinderbed and motioned with his carbine’s barrel. I mounted the steps and turned to clear the doorway. He had one foot on the plush rug when something moved in a swift blur. There was a thump and the guard teetered backward, falling away from his sombrero. Moving from instinct I caught him before he fell outside the train, swiveled my hips, and let him slide to the floor, snatching hold of the Winchester on the way.

  Joseph stood on the other side of the open door, still holding the Springfield shotgun, butt foremost. The curtains across from me were drawn, blocking the view from the guard posted on that side. The Indian read my expression.

  “This was your intention, no?”

  “I was going to get him drunk, but I guess this is faster. What now?”

  “I at least thought beyond the moment. The man who stands at the front of the train has a bladder the size of a cucaracha’s, but has trouble emptying it. He steps to the side every ten minutes and spends five minutes in the effort.”

  “How do you know?”

  He reversed ends on the shotgun. My tin shaving mirror was lashed to the barrel with a bootlace. “I thought it best not to lean out the window.”

  “When did he make the trip last?”

  “I cannot say. I was involved in waiting for this man.” He gave him a stiff kick in the ribs. The guard grunted without stirring.