As he spoke, he patted the pocket containing the Gatling round.
* * *
I left him in his private study, cracking open a book the size and apparent weight of a paving stone, and entered the bedroom, well-lit now with a similar set of heavy green curtains spread on either side of a window as tall as the others. A scuttle-shaped iron bathtub, lined with white porcelain, steamed in the middle of the rug I’d stepped on earlier. If it had been there in the dark I’d have bumped into it, so Ysabel—if that was the Yaqui woman who’d served coffee—would have had to enlist a couple of Childress’ trained monkeys to carry it in; those gnarled hands of hers would have found challenge enough lugging in buckets of scalding water. I’d been bathed repeatedly, I supposed, but although the heat was moderate that far above sea level, my skin glistened greasily once I’d stripped. Whatever effect Childress’ justice had or hadn’t had on its audience, it was enough to break me into a sweat even if I’d been in the midst of a winter in Montana Territory.
I took the cartridge out of the pocket of the coat, hefted it, and tossed it into a corner. I hadn’t the slightest idea what use I might make of it, apart from the fact it was the one secret I’d managed to retain. His knowing it robbed it of all value. I’d gone up against men before who were smarter than I was, more ruthless, readier to act when the moment presented itself; this was the first time I found myself face-to-face with a man who embodied all three—
Virtues? Make of it what you like. One or the other or the other yet had seen me to a ripe old age in my work.
The painting I’d glimpsed in the gloom wasn’t much less murky in broad daylight. It was smaller than I’d thought—the heavy filigreed frame almost overwhelmed it—and darkened with age and layers of dirt, cheap varnish laid in over dirt, and more dirt laid in over the varnish, but it seemed to show a man bound in the rags of what must once have been grand martial attire, being disemboweled by a band of curly-haired men in some kind of peasant dress. There appeared to be a signature in the lower right-hand corner, illegible under the layers of grime and shellac. A ghastly thing, probably worth a lot of money to people in New York and St. Louis.
The clothes I’d packed, with some exceptions I noted later, were folded and hung in the cedar cabinet, with my range hat and the fawn-colored Montana pinch I wore to special occasions sharing the top shelf. There was no sign of the overalls and flannel shirt I’d borrowed from Joseph to wear while serving as fireman; Childress had been student enough of human behavior to separate them from my personality. He’d studied me as surely as his poets and philosophers. I suspected I had Felix Bonaparte, the Alamos attorney, to thank for supplying him with information. He’d be Childress’ conduit to the greater world.
That thought nudged me in the ribs, painfully enough to hurt, but not enough to tell me why. I’d been threatened, shot at, shot almost through, weakened with plague, and stood to witness cold-blooded murder masquerading as execution. You don’t count that kind of time in hours or days or weeks or years; centuries hardly answered. I’d forgotten everything about my meeting with Bonaparte apart from the man himself and his oily command of English.
I lowered myself into the tub gingerly, gasping with each inch, but the sensation of being parboiled melded into a deceptive feeling of well-being as the heat penetrated bruised muscles and strained tendons. Compared to the tarry yellow soap I’d been used to in boarding houses and railroad hotels, the cake in the dish, lavender-scented and impressed with an escutcheon of some kind, wouldn’t have turned up the nose of Queen Victoria.
Lathering up, I noted for the first time that my injured hand had been re-bandaged with the same attention paid to my scalp. I attributed that to the woman as well; but I was as wrong about that as I was about the house being an illusion and the gourds that turned out to be skulls. After I’d dried myself with a towel as thick and soft as any to be found in the best hotels in Denver, I picked up the German book on the nightstand and found it dog-eared to a page with pen-and-ink illustrations detailing the process of cleansing and dressing open wounds, with whole paragraphs of text underscored in ink fresh enough to still carry a scent. A Mexican squaw might be able to interpret the drawings, but it seemed unlikely she’d read German, with Latin phrases interlaced, much less select passages for closer study.
Something else shared the nightstand: A sepia photograph in a silver frame of a pleasant-faced woman bombazined to the neck, the collar closed with the standard cameo brooch, with her hair skinned back into what would be a tight bun and—I couldn’t shake the certainty—the devil’s own time trying to appear grave for the man behind the camera; she seemed about to burst into laughter. This, I thought, would be the fiancée Childress had left in Virginia. Naked as I was, I slapped nonexistent pockets for the packet of letters I’d been given by lawyer Bonaparte.
I had it then, the most important part of our conversation; which is always the first to go under pressure. Bonaparte had given me the packet for delivery, and it had weighed less heavily in my pocket than the useless piece of ammunition Childress had known about all along.
He surely had the letters by now, if the walking corpses who’d brought me up the mountain hadn’t burned them for kindling; or used them even less respectably.
I made a decision not to bring up the subject. If the wretches had mistreated the letters in their childish ignorance and he found out, there would be at least one more head on a pole, and another decapitated body on his utilitarian pile.
Why I should think any more of them than of a stag whose head might decorate the wall of some gentlemen’s club, or a prize-winning bass mounted on a board in a saloon, eluded me; unless it was the conviction that, generations back, a normal woman had lain with a normal man, with no thought beyond creating a normal family, human at least. What had come from that was no one’s fault; unless you embraced the existence of Satan.
Which I surely did. A man could not have seen what I’d seen, met whom I’d met, and still denied it. Tidy dress and a broad knowledge of science, literature, and the arts were cover enough for horns and a tail.
For some reason I couldn’t recall, I’d packed a fine linen shirt I’d had made to my measure in San Francisco, and the suit of clothes I wore to make a good impression testifying in Judge Blackthorne’s court. Maybe I thought I’d be invited to a state dinner in the governor’s palace in Mexico City upon the successful completion of my mission. Someone had brushed the suit to a sheen. That the valise containing this finery had been carried up the mountain with greater care than my engineer, said something about the character of my escort; but I didn’t dwell on that. The clothes, and a fresh set of cotton underdrawers, were laid out on the turned-down bed as if by a valet. On the floor at the foot of the bed stood my second-best pair of boots—I’d left the best behind to be resoled—blacked and buffed to a mirror finish. Oscar Childress, it appeared, was gearing up for diplomatic occasions, accustoming himself to entertaining elegant guests.
Well, what was so ludicrous about that? I hadn’t much history compared to my host’s, but if I’d never read beyond the Bible I’d still know that being mad has never posed much of a drawback to ruling a nation.
TWENTY-SIX
The old Mexican woman knocked at the door while I was putting on my shirt. I let her in carrying a tray containing a pitcher of hot water, a fresh folded white towel, a pearl-handled razor, and another cake of the lavender-scented soap in a silver mug.
A plain tin mirror hung on a nail above a washstand next to the window. Leaving my shirt open, I filled the basin and scraped off the growth of weeks, the Spanish steel blade gliding through the coarse stubble like a scythe through corn silk. After rinsing off, I slapped on bay rum from a flask on the stand and stared at the stranger in the mirror. I’d begun to resemble Childress’ creatures, but shiny-faced and clean-smelling in my best clothes I might pass muster in the drawing-room of a Forty-Niner; if he hadn’t become so rich he’d forgotten his time grubbing in gulches and riverbeds and s
haring his tent with lice and rats the size of cocker spaniels.
I went into the study, but it was deserted. Retracing our path to the front porch, I found my host seated in a spring buggy with a sleek rubber top hitched to a deep-bellied black with one white stocking and blinders, a rig straight out of Montgomery Ward. He wore an ankle-length duster over his indoor clothes and a milk-white straw planter’s hat with a wagon-wheel brim and a black silk band. Outside the shelter of the porch roof, his face was dishwater gray, the black’s reins wrapped around wrists thin as drawn gold. In those surroundings he might have passed for a missionary with an unmentionable disease, exiled to the wilderness to die.
He’d stopped beside the blue enamel mounting-block, but although it glistened from a fresh scrubbing I avoided it as I stepped aboard and sat beside him on the upholstered leather seat.
“How far are we going?”
“No more than a thousand yards; but as it’s all uphill I wouldn’t recommend it for strolling. Every month or so one of the poor idiots stumbles and drops off the edge.” He shook the reins and we started forward.
A ledge wound around the mountain nearest the house like the screw on a printer’s press, railed with stretches of pine on the outside. Where there wasn’t a horizontal surface sufficient to support them, the land fell nearly perpendicular from the edge. In places the path was just wide enough for the wheels to maintain a purchase, with pebbles and broken shards squirting out from under them and caroming down the mountainside. It had in the solider patches a finished look of black stone, not at all the rough fluting caused by centuries of erosion. I said it looked like a proper road.
“It’s a road; though I’d hesitate to apply the honorific. We started with dynamite, but we had to conserve it for more practical use, as the supply lines are long and the merchants are vultures. Also, there’s brittle shale tucked in between the veins of granite. I lost a fine engineer to a landslide. When the creatures came along I was able to free the men of skill for worthier work.”
As he said it, we passed a crew of his creatures dismantling a cairn of fallen stone with picks and spades. Stripped to the waist, they were all bunched raw muscle, indistinguishable from the mountain itself until they moved or the sun glistened off their sweat. At sight of the buggy, they shouldered their tools and flattened themselves against the rock while we passed within inches, sending a shower of dislodged mountain tumbling. I gripped the vehicle’s white-ash frame tight enough to split the skin of my knuckles, leaning against the driver like an infatuated maiden out for a turn in the park.
“The brutes are good for something,” he said. “What they lack in brain power they more than make up for in animal strength, and they can survive for a week trapped under a ton of rubble.”
“How frequent are the slides?”
“Constant. Most of them are minor, but there are days when I’m unable to visit the plantation. The Sierras never miss an opportunity to reclaim what’s been taken from them.”
At length the ground leveled off, until we came to a plane several acres large, so flat it seemed something had lopped off the top of the mountain the way the machete had decapitated the poor creature before the house. Long buildings of log resembled military barracks, and there were two large constructions of stone standing against a curtain of cane, the stalks growing as high as ten feet, with half-naked creatures plowing aisles through the thick growth with truncated blades, swinging them like sickles. Others gathered the mown stalks and threw them into the beds of wagons hitched to mules and oxen. The crunch of the falling cane and the swish of the bundles as they were piled into heaps sounded like an eighty-mile-an-hour wind leveling a forest.
We alighted from the buggy, and Childress’ place was taken by a white man in a butternut uniform, patched and darned all over, who saluted him smartly. He was the first probable member of the major’s original command I’d seen apart from Captain McCready. He drove the buggy around the corner of one of the stone buildings.
“I was told so many times that sugar won’t grow at this altitude I began to believe it.” Childress was shouting over the din. “I’ve since formed the opinion that the big interests had their eye on the place and sought to discourage competition. As a rule, cane grows to eight feet, sometimes nine; but as you can see, the climate and conditions are ideal, and possibly unique. I provide most of the sugar sold in Acapulco, and since I began marketing in Mexico City, the Cuban interests have petitioned the government to enjoin any United States citizen from participating in the trade. Since I’m the only one in the business, I find that complimentary in the extreme.”
“Why would a rich man want to conquer a nation?”
When he scowled, the paper-thin skin plastered to his skull broke into a myriad of wrinkles.
“Money is only a means to power. Any man who would settle for the first is no better than a carpetbagger.”
He pulled open a heavy door, gripping the iron handle with both hands, and we entered one of the stone buildings. When he shut the door behind us, the cacophony outside ceased. The interior was as big as a warehouse on the docks of San Francisco, lit by sunlight canting through mullioned windows just under the rafters, fifteen feet above our heads. Plank catwalks suspended by thick ropes circled the walls and bisected one another in tiers, with more laborers stripped to the waist standing and walking along them, supporting themselves on the hemp rails.
The top tier was occupied entirely by men in Confederate uniform carrying rifles. He saw me looking at them.
“No, they’re not enforced labor. They’re fed, sheltered, and all their medical needs are addressed, far better than when they were trying to survive on their own. Their tempers are quicker than their powers of reason: An accidental collision is seldom shrugged off, and once engaged, they fight to the death unless someone stops them.”
“Shoots them, you mean.”
“It rarely comes to that. As I said, their senses are unnaturally acute. The report alone is agony to their ears, and a near-miss is sufficient to distract them. Their ability to maintain their purpose is almost nonexistent. They literally forget what sparked the fight, or that they were fighting at all. Repetitive work like cutting cane and pulling ropes is more suited to them than anything they might attempt through any will of their own.
“I won’t show you the other building,” he said; “to do so would be redundant, and the heat is miserable. There the cane is mashed into a pulp, boiled in copper cauldrons, and distilled. It liquefies at a temperature of one hundred sixty degrees. I don’t know how the brutes stand it. Before I discovered them, the men I employed had to work in shifts no longer than fifteen minutes. We lost three in one month when they weakened and fell into the cauldrons, ruining half a day’s output. Here is where the final refinement process takes place.”
A waterfall of golden syrupy liquid gushed from a wooden vat tilted on ropes and pulleys into a larger container, filled nearly to the top with black ash and erected on a platform in the center of the hardpack floor. A sluice, wooden also, slanted down from the base of the larger vat into another on the floor, where the liquid came out as clear as water. The air was filled with a stench like scorched hair and the heavier, almost seductive smell of molasses.
“Charcoal.” Childress pointed to the contents of the larger vat. “We fire it in kilns from bone, grind it fine in revolving barrels, much like gunpowder, and pour the juice through it, leaving the impurities behind.”
I made no response, knowing the source of the bone.
“We let the liquid cool and crystallize in clay vessels. What moisture remains is then spun out of it in more rotating barrels by centrifugal force. The pulverizing itself is by mortar and pestle, albeit it on a grander scale than ordinary.”
He turned to face me. “And that, Marshal, is how you manage to take the bitterness out of your coffee.”
We went back outside, where the noise of cutting and stacking was as loud as before. Strolling toward the stalks of cane, I peered between
the rows.
Childress missed nothing. “Don’t strain your eyes looking for the poppies. They’re indistinguishable from common weeds when they’re not in bloom. In any case I’m phasing out the trade in opium. The refining process is even more elaborate than sugar and the market is limited to those who can afford it. I can move the legitimate product in much greater volume, without fear of confiscation except by the locals, who are cheap to bribe.
“You wouldn’t credit it,” he said, “but the world’s addiction to sugar far surpasses all the others. Any country practitioner can furnish you with laudanum, but men have slain each other over a peppermint stick. If I’d never touched a gram of opium, I doubt you’d have been sent here. A rebellion without financing is only the pipe-dream of a lunatic, but more governments have been overturned on traffic in harmless indulgences than drugs; but try running for re-election on bananas and tobacco.”
“What’s in the other buildings, besides the barracks and infirmary?”
“The women’s quarters; brothel, seraglio, call it what you will. Simple creatures require simple pleasures. The brutes fight over them as much as over anything else, but if I’d left them behind they’d be buggering each other all the time, and I can’t have that. Whatever else you may think of me, I am a southern gentleman.”
Two flags flew atop the nearest barracks, the stars-and-bars of the Confederacy and the other bearing the visored and laurel-encircled head of the Knights of the Golden Circle. A stable had been built onto the end of the structure, as long as the barracks itself and lined with stalls on both sides. Here one of Childress’ creatures was at work shoveling manure into a great pile outside the back entrance, and more well-tended mounts, each branded CSA, blew and twitched their tails at flies. My bay occupied a stall at the end, looking no worse the wear for its journey in the stock car.
Childress’ horse and buggy waited for us outside the stable, with the soldier who’d driven it holding it by the bit. He saluted as his commander grasped the frame and started to pull himself into the driver’s seat.
Cape Hell Page 15