Shadows of Annihilation
Page 15
“Surely God will take the little ones to Himself and Our Lord will comfort them,” another said, crossing herself; everyone present followed suit. “The Lady of Sorrows, herself a mother pierced by grief, will intercede for them.”
“May it be so.” Luisa nodded, but continued: “And Paris gone, the beautiful city, with its cathedrals and churches and great buildings of the past, all gone to nothing . . . War is very hard, war is suffering and loss and grief, we all know that, hasn’t Mexico suffered over and over since the time of our grandparents? But this that has happened to Paris, that is a new thing that has arisen and is very bad, very evil. It will beget nothing but more evils.”
There were nods and sighs at that; someone mentioned St. Thomas and St. Francis. Another was thankful that old Don Porfirio had died naturally in his Parisian exile, before the disaster. A third crossed herself and murmured that surely God would protect them in the end.
Señora Gutiérrez cleared her throat. “Let us examine the manteles, the altar cloths, ladies. We must find all the things that need repair. All must be perfect for the fiesta and for God and the good saint.”
The cloths were set out on clean tables in the broad patio, where the strong natural light would reveal any faults, and the gear for repairs was brought out.
All the cloths were on a foundation of fine white linen; many were white-on-white, with broad central areas of drawn threadwork. Ciara helped smooth one. Diamonds, arranged in a lattice pattern, were filled with finely worked designs of spider monkeys, mermaids, women wearing hats and wide skirts, birds of many kinds, flowers, sacred hearts, crosses, and hands.
“This is marvelous work!” Ciara said approvingly, bending close. “So subtle, and so regular. The stitching is very even . . . I cannot see any gaps or mistakes even in this bright sunlight!”
“Es trabajo devocional,” Señora Gutiérrez said, meaning that it was done as a devotion, an act of worship between the maker and God, a prayer in thread and cloth. “Human eyes may not see it inside the cathedral, but those of the Lord do.”
And to be sure, also done for the maker’s honor before her family and friends, Luz thought, smiling; most men might not notice the work much, but other women would see a good deal more even in dimness . . .
Other images were done by couching, with gilt threads and purl, very fine gold or silver wire, laid across the surface of the ground and secured by a succession of small stitches, a technique that required an infinite capacity for taking pains to do well, not to speak of creating the images in the first place. That was an art as exacting as oil painting.
Splashes of wax or other stains brought out cloths and bowls of warm water and patient care. Needles were threaded to repair spots worn or frayed, and after a while the strangers were allowed to help with the simplest parts. Conversation didn’t stop during any of that, involving a good deal of gossip and teasing, and the two outsiders came in for a cheerful grilling. There were occasional pauses for more water of oranges, little glass cups of arroz con leche—which was a sweet creamy rice pudding seasoned with cinnamon and bits of fruit, and biscuits and coffee. Luz had never been invited into a Mexican home, however humble, without being offered something to eat.
“Yes, my father was an engineer in California,” Luz said; the best cover stories played with the truth rather than simply trying to cover it up. “My family has lived there for a long time; a hundred twenty years, since the days when it was ruled by Spain. My grandfather’s grandfather was an officer in the king’s army and received a grant of land when he retired, near the town of Los Angeles. El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula, in full, a very small place then but a city now. Quite a lot of land, fine grazing and good for crops too, but he was blessed with many sons, and his sons were blessed with many sons, and so”—she shrugged—“we are not poor, but we are not rich, either.”
That put her right in the middle of this middle-class gathering, avoiding the chilling effect of great wealth and the condescension directed at the lower orders.
“Your family kept their land when the gringos came?” someone asked.
“About half of it; there were quarrels, and cheating, but not always, and alliances too.”
“Alliances like Concha de Moncada,” someone said with a laugh, and there were more sighs, dreamy ones this time by the younger women. “Don Carlos, what a catch. The governor!”
Luz’s spying ears pricked up; the governor of this state was a midwesterner named Carl Seelmann, and the de Moncadas were rich mine- and landowners.
I’ll have to get Julie to fill me in on the details.
“And so handsome, such a real man, so dashing and brave, a true caballero, but locamente enamorado—ready to tear out his heart with crazy love for her.”
That was accompanied by a dramatic heart-ripping gesture and an expression that was the speaker’s idea of romantic agony and looked to Luz more as if something furry and large were biting her foot.
“And a baby coming already! No wasted time!”
The love lives of the upper crust were as much a cherished spectator sport here as anywhere.
Señora Gutiérrez sniffed. “Earthly love is but a path to love of God at best,” she said. “So through her, Don Carlos was brought to the Church, to the salvation of his soul, and so his children will be brought up in the true faith.”
“Yes, alliances like that,” Luz said, blessing the vagaries of Governor Seelmann’s heart. “My father’s mother was a girl from Maryland . . . Catholic, of course . . . and his father’s sisters married among the newcomers; my cousins in those families do very well now.”
Which was true enough in Santa Barbara; half the big ranchers around there had a Californio girl in the bloodline, which was regarded as rather chic nowadays provided the Californio was sufficiently wealthy and not too dark. In the last days of Mexican California, when a growing stream of Yankee adventurers had already started to settle in, there had been a popular saying that thirty thousand acres of dowry added amazingly to a young lady’s charms . . . and that a big ranch was worth a Mass. She was basing this identity partly on a daughter of Francisca De la Guerra she’d gone to school with.
Eventually: “. . . and as the eldest of five girls, I must find work to help them and my mother, when dear Papá died so young,” she said.
Which gave her a good daughter’s excuse, centered on her family, for being unwed well past the usual age in Mexico. Spinsters weren’t unknown here, though they were pitied, especially when they ended up living with relatives as hangers-on, often no better than an unpaid upper servant.
“Mary Cavanaugh” was supposedly an orphan from Chicago, raised by an aunt who acted as housekeeper to a group of priests who taught in a church school, hence the recipient of an excellent education that included tutoring in Spanish.
“So you are here to find locations for schools?” Señora Gutiérrez said.
“Yes, señora. Schools for girls, teaching skills such as nursing, or as accountants and telegraphists and telephone operators—”
And pharmacists and X-ray technicians, but let’s not get too esoteric.
“—and the like, to provide respectable employment.”
That was routine enough in the United States now not to be much of a novelty anymore, but still a very recent development here.
“Surely girls should marry,” Señora Gutiérrez said. “Or take the veil.”
“Oh, of course, and most will marry no doubt, such is the way of nature and God’s will,” Luz said, getting thoroughly into character. “But think, señoras, so many lost their intendeds, or those who would have become their intendeds, in the war here. Others lost their prospects when their families were ruined and have no dowries now. Some such will take the veil—one of my sisters is a novice of the Discalced Carmelites—but not all have a vocation. I do not, and it is a great sin to pretend one fal
sely. Surely there should be a way for them to win their bread, a way that will not mean hardship for them or their families.”
That brought a buzz of interest, especially when she mentioned the wages that sort of work could command—nothing out of the ordinary north of the border, but still very generous here; it would be some time before incomes found a level across the vastly expanded domains ruled from Washington. Though the cost of living was lower here too, not just compared to New York or Chicago, but to places like Little Rock or El Paso.
As Julie pointed out, here it’s all a pyramid based on men with oxen and wooden plows, Luz thought. Even the peak can’t get very high on that.
“I would have thought such things would be put in the capital,” Señora Gutiérrez said.
“Ah, the capital already has several,” Luz said. “Also it is policy now to put things elsewhere—so that taxes will not always flow from places like this to be spent far away. And there are fewer temptations, problems, distractions, for young ladies away from the capital.”
That brought a pleased chorus of agreement; one young matron clapped her hands in glee. If there were two things you could usually expect a middle-class audience in a Mexican provincial center like this to agree on, it was that Mexico City was a vampire sucking their blood, and that it was a den of iniquity and sin besides. Fortunately, the Protectorate actually had such a policy and program; the Black Chamber operatives were simply impersonating its agents.
And of course the Mexico City crowd think of these people as rubes, hicks, and dullards who deserve to be plucked, Luz thought.
* * *
—
What a charming group of ladies!” Ciara said a few hours later, waving over her shoulder. “And so friendly to two strange Americans.”
“Well, it helps that we’re Catholic,” Luz said. “Which incidentally is hard to fake convincingly. And that my assumed name was Mexican, and of course that we both speak the language. Señora Gutiérrez is too shrewd and too strong-minded to be safe to be around much for honest spies, but I think a couple of the others might be quite useful as sources.”
“That young widow, Luisa Muñoz, for example?” Ciara said.
“I liked her . . . You think she might be pro-American?”
“Do I think that she wants us to rule Mexico? No. I doubt a tenth of them are, in that sense of the term, and that’s being optimistic.
“I did get the distinct impression she didn’t actually dislike us, and that she thought the Germans were much worse,” Ciara said, with a shudder. “Which is true. That horrible thing at Castle Rauenstein . . .”
Luz nodded; they’d seen the horror-gas demonstrated there on a regiment of captured Czech deserters, while they were both undercover as German assets—as a Mexican and an Irish-American revolutionary respectively. Though that had only recently become pretense on Ciara’s part.
“And she mentioned her husband was killed in the fighting before the Intervention,” Luz said. “I’ll see if she has a dossier, and which of the factions he was fighting for.”
“There’s a possibility that she’s pro-American in the sense that she thinks we’re the best of a bunch of bad alternatives, including some Mexican alternatives. It’s just a hunch . . .” Ciara said.
“. . . but a hunch is your mind working where you don’t notice it.”
And that part of my mind has a lot of hands-on experience, she thought; she didn’t think that was vanity, but it wasn’t something you said aloud. Nice to see my beloved educating hers.
“I see what you mean, but even if she is, what would she know?” Ciara said.
“Possibly nothing, possibly more. Men tend to dismiss women’s gossip for the same reason everyone tends to forget servants have eyes and ears, but tapping that telegraph can be extremely revealing. We should cultivate those ladies if we can, inconspicuously. In particular, take any opportunity you have to get to know Luisa. I think she liked you, too.”
Ciara laughed a little self-consciously. “I was never much of a mixer . . . You’re the one with the charm!”
Luz shook her head. “Don’t underestimate yourself, querida. You just didn’t have much opportunity, busy as you were.”
Running a bookstore, caring for an increasingly ailing father, and self-administering the equivalent of at least a university degree would do that.
“I’ve noticed that people like you, especially when you’re being spontaneous.”
“Spontaneous under an assumed name?”
“That’s just a matter of living the part. You only need to say something specific from your cover when it comes up—don’t volunteer information much, it sounds suspicious.”
Ciara nodded gravely; she was always serious about work. Then:
“What next?”
“The mercado,” Luz said, naming the main town market as opposed to the periodic street-and-square variety. “The Jesús González Ortega Market, to get technical. We need to do some shopping . . . and it’s where the whole city comes together. I’ve found it useful before, but nobody will put this identity together with the covers I used then.”
The mercado was only a block from the cathedral and the Plaza de Armas, a handsome building reconstructed after a fire early in the century, then rebuilt and reopened in the last prosperous days before the revolution, and of which the locals were immensely and rightly proud. The frame was cast iron, the nineteenth century’s idea of modernity, but much of the facing and all of it on the Beaux-Arts single-story frontage of square windows and pillared portico on the Avenida Hidalgo was pink stone; the ground dropped away steeply behind, leaving the lower level two stories high and featuring a covered section with a roof supported on cast-iron columns and lacework that had been the last word about the time Luz was born. Every detail had been copied from somewhere else, but the ensemble was intensely Mexican.
They walked in amid the thronging crowds and a white waterfall of noise, buying two henequén shopping bags for a nickel from a vendor at the entrance and putting them over their arms.
“Now, this is lively, as lively as the produce stalls down by the Haymarket back in Boston!” Ciara said. With a smile at Luz: “And it’s such fun, doing the marketing together!”
“It is, querida,” Luz said sincerely.
And a bit like old times, she added to herself, looking around.
At butchers’ stalls, bakers’, and quite literally candlestick-makers’, piles of strange gaudy fruits and the first small sweet local peaches and baskets of cherries, piles of potatoes and beets and onions and nameless roots and strings of chilies, vendors of street food tending their pots of beans or vats of hot oil, porters trotting by under enormous stacks of anything at all and everyone shouting their wares or bargaining at the top of their voices under the high arched ceiling . . . which echoed so that you had to shout to be heard.
In July 1913 she’d shot a man named Felipe Ángeles, a Mexican commander who was far too honest, popular, and capable to be allowed to continue as head of the city’s defenses against the approaching Americans, in a crowd even more densely packed than this, at high noon, not twenty steps from where she stood almost exactly four years later minus one month. She’d faked a stumble with her little FN pistol muffled in a serape folded and pressed against his chest, and then lowered his body to prop him sitting against the wall and drape the colorful rectangle of woven wool from chin to knees. Next to—ironically—a butcher’s stall with strings of sausages and piles of chops and tripe and pigs’ heads on hooks, which neatly covered any smell of blood.
And all the while she’d loudly berated her supposed husband for spending their money on pulque while she did all the work, with a final shrill yell advising him to sleep it off before he came home if he didn’t want a comal broken over his worthless, lazy, drunken head. The sugar skull had been inconspicuously tucked into his hand beneath the woven wool . . .
The screams and commotion started when she was crossing to the other side of the road in front of the cathedral just off the Plaza de Armas, probably because someone had seen more blood flowing out between the iron pillars of the market arcade than legitimately deceased porkers could account for.
Luz blinked herself back to the present. “Let’s get some greens, chat with some of the sellers, and share a gordita,” she said to her partner. “And then drop them off at the icebox; I want your green salad nice and crisp, to help your lovely hair grow back.”
There was a message waiting on the table of their dining nook, probably courtesy of the secret passage.
“¡Aja!” Luz said, as she read the three cryptic lines. “Well, I’ll be taking the salad along to a potluck, it seems.”
Ciara looked at her and raised a brow. “And when you say Aha! in Spanish, it bodes ill for someone, darling. What is it?”
“We’re dining with the station chief again, late, and via the confidential entrance. It seems that the airships arrived promptly, and the Rangers made contact with bandits. She’ll need to brief us; apparently it’s not clear whether they got them all.”
SEVEN
Town of Jerez
State of Zacatecas
United States Protectorate of México