That lesson served her well when she was a girl. Employing it, she could quickly discern the terrible struggles of those she envied or cast her anger upon. With understanding she no longer felt so alone. She now looked to Joaquin and sensed this would not be the case with him. He was already fiery tempered. Sharing all she felt would only add fuel to those flames. For the sake of her beloved son, she would have to be a swan, and keep her struggles below the surface, beyond his range of vision.
Smiling, Elena rustled Joaquin’s hair as they walked on and spoke of all the places Joaquin had recently enjoyed visiting—and might get to see again, if he played his cards right. She filled him with visions of the scintillating drama at the bull-fighting arena on Vallejo Street, and the amazing stunts performed by gymnasts and even clowns at Rowe’s Olympic Circus.
He still looked moody. Had he heard what happened last night? If so, she had to find a way to distract him from all that. Passing a luxurious hotel with a red velvet carpet sprawled outside, Elena laughed, swishing her skirt. She nodded at the hotel. “I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with… ‘H.’”
Ignoring the hotel, Joaquin raised one eyebrow in a questioning slant and fixed her with an accusing stare. “Why wasn’t Papi at breakfast?”
Her breath quickened. “I told you, he left early on business.”
“He always goes on business,” said Joaquin bitterly.
They walked on. Sadly, she sighed, “Yes, he does.”
“What’s he do, anyway?” asked Joaquin.
A trapdoor opened in her belly. He’d caught her unprepared. “Well, he’s a don,” she said quickly, “he, uh, meets with the other dons, and they…’’ Elena could just imagine what the layabouts did. “Discuss land, and investments…’’ She rewarded her son with a sharp speedy nod of confidence in what she was about to say—and a smile she did not feel. “And it’s all very important work.”
“So,” began Joaquin sourly, “he sits around with friends counting money?”
Elena hung her head in defeat. She’d never been much of a swan.
“You shouldn’t be so hard on your father,” said Elena. Her words were as much for her own sake as that of her son. It was so easy to be swept away by strong feelings and to forget all that was truly important. “You’re more like him than you think.”
His face pinched tight, Joaquin shot a sidelong glance at his mother.
No, she thought, of course you don’t believe me. Why would you, when we’ve kept the truth from you for so long?
They soon stood before the Alvarado Academy for Children, a bell tolling a warning for children not to be late. Other students rushed up the marble stairs, which lavishly rose to the iron-gated entrance. The building looked like a great beast with a high and wide arched mouth, swallowing unsuspecting little boys and girls who hurried to their fates.
Elena attempted to shake off those fanciful thoughts. The academy was the finest—and largest—school in San Francisco. Its design was similar to that of a mission. White adobe brick walls, red roof tiles, curving gables, arched barred windows, and round portals in the upper floors. Well-tended gardens led to a walled courtyard, and a lovely old world crest over the gaping main entrance suggested wealth and culture. Yet for all its style and aplomb, it reminded Elena of a prison.
Elena knelt before her son. “We’ll talk more about this later, alright?” She kissed his cheek and rustled his hair. “I love you.”
Joaquin bit the side of his lips and let out a long breath before he met his mother’s gaze. His eyes were slits, his face a deepening hue of shame. “Hotel,” he said at last. “Starts with the letter ‘H.’ ”
Hurrying away, he scampered up the marble steps and disappeared into the school.
Elena’s heart swelled with love as she watched him go. He was the one perfect thing she and Alejandro had done together, and she desperately wanted to protect him from the problems she and her husband were facing.
She turned and walked away, wondering how long that would be possible.
Elena first became aware of the strange men in dark suits after she had escaped the tight knot of houses between Telegraph Hill and El Rincon. She was strolling through Portsmouth Plaza, enjoying a better look at the sparkling harbor and its dream-like vessels, when the words of a sourfaced visitor ruined it for her: “We were five days coming a little more than ninety miles, with a drunken captain and an inefficient crew, and continually surrounded by fogs, so that, from the time we started till we stopped we never found out where we were.”
Bristling, she went on, passing the adobe building bearing the name Presidio, breezing past the bronze cannons perched outside its doors and the Mexican flag fluttering high above—and suddenly she spotted them. They rose before a crowd gathered to hear a sidewalk orator ranting from the platform before the old Custom’s House.
“A paid fire department is needed, yah, sure, you betcha,” cried the gray-bearded ragman standing before the crowd, “the question is who’s going to pay for it? Y’all really think that twenty dollars a month Foreign Miner’s Tax will cover it? Heck, that’s just gonna drive them Chinamen away from prospectin’, that’s all, not give us the money we need!”
The men in dark suits were the only ones whose faces were not upturned to the orator. Their gazes fixed on her. One was a brute with a sneering lip plastered upon a meat-pie face, the other a rat with dark little eyes and hairy palms.
Elena thought them rude, a pair of rogues or scoundrels despite their immaculate and expensive fashions. She turned and strolled off, thinking nothing more of it until she saw them again when she had paused to scrape a rock from her boot before the three-storied El Dorado, the resort of choice for well-monied Mexican gamblers. She and her husband had once dined here with an investor who spent more than ten thousand dollars a month in the hotel’s suites—never-mind the ridiculous amounts he dropped on roulette and faro. When she spotted the men half a street away, peering only vaguely in her direction, she felt the cold hand of unease caress her. She vowed to proceed cautiously in the event trouble was brewing, though she still had no real proof that she was being spied upon. After all, why would anyone do such a thing? She was the wife of a don, nothing more.
She ignored a pair of sweaty scammers as she swept down the street on her way to Still’s Bookseller and Stationer, where she wished to buy the latest issue of the French newspaper Le Californien, which was actually published here. Gambling fever had swelled in San Francisco. Barkers wandered past her on the graded and planked streets soliciting participants for lotteries in which prime real estate might be won and gambling halls and hotels burnt to the ground twice in the last year during the great fires rose phoenix-like around her, rebuilt practically at will.
Rubes flocked to the con artists who promised that gold dust could be found in the very streets. Naturally, they had sprinkled a bit here and there for the foolish would-be prospectors, from whom they extorted two dollars a piece for tin pans. The Brute and the Rat stopped to chat with the scammers and Elena relaxed—then their oily gazes once again drifted to her.
Elena briefly took refuge in the Bartlette, a “miniature” café, where she sipped fragrant mocha and scoured the streets for any signs of the dark-suited strangers. When she was sure they had moved on, she emerged and purchased her paper. She stopped before a merchant house, vaguely considering whether to visit one of the gambling halls further down the street—as the company of cool, collected professional gamblers often calmed her—and surveyed the merchant’s window display.
Elena peered at a strange contraption bearing a placard identifying the newfangled device she beheld as a “sewing machine” and crediting its creation to one Isaac Merrit Singer. Whoever had written the pithy text on the placard cautioned her not to be the last on her street to own one, and pledged that this creation would put her on the front lines of the household chore revolution.
Fah! mused Elena. I’ve had enough revolution to last a lifetime, thank you all the
same.
Elena was about to move off when something in the glass arrested her attention. Squinting, she caught a reflection of the two men in dark suits, one ridiculously tall, the other much shorter. The same two men Elena had spotted earlier were watching her from across the street.
Tension gripped Elena. She made a show of breezing away from the shop and casually browsing two more shop windows further down the street. The men appeared in the window reflections each time. The Brute and the Rat were indeed following her.
Why?
Her heart hammered madly against her chest as she sauntered along the street, forming a plan. She had a feeling that if she simply consulted a constable, the men would vanish long before the law might nab them, and who knew when they might show up again. She wanted to end this now. She passed a man reading a newspaper, the headline mentioning recent earthquake shocks. Elena wagered that her heart’s wild pounding could now match the trembling felt in the streets.
Elena continued south, passing three more hotels and well-appointed gambling dens. The streets grew narrow, the shadows upon the street long and formidable. She surveyed several rubbish-strewn alleys, but did not alter her pace until she approached a Chinese restaurant she had visited once with friends. Elena passed it, glanced at the alley next to the restaurant, quickly appraised its virtues—and veered into its damp and pungent reaches.
Crouching behind a stack of fruit-stained crates, Elena heard the steady rhythm of shiny black shoes clacking along. The footfalls slowed, stopped. Elena pictured the looks of confusion shared by her pursuers as they wondered where their quarry had gone. In the alley ahead stood a skinny Asian youth dumping more trash from the open back door to the restaurant. He cursed and kicked at the bold rats swarming and nipping at his offerings. He spun and disappeared inside the eatery, slamming the door behind him.
Elena waited. The men were murmuring now, scratching their heads and considering their options. Good. Once they left the alley, she would follow them and learn what this was all about.
A rat scampered over Elena’s foot, an orange rind in its mouth. She kicked it without thinking, and it ran squealing.
The scuffing of feet alerted her. One of the men had turned slightly at the sound of the rat. She could guess which one.
Damn.
With a savage cry that startled the men, Elena burst from cover, her fist crashing into the shorter man’s face. He stumbled back and dropped to the ground, eyes shut as if he was out cold.
Good. Elena snatched up a heavy shovel and whirled it around to defend herself against the true threat. The Brute advanced, his massive hands opening menacingly. The giant’s dark suit constrained his movements, but his legs were so long that he would be upon her in two quick strides.
Elena struck the ground at his feet with the shovel’s tip, the sharp thwack making him freeze and look down in midfeint was a smashing success. She then swept the shovel up, the wide flat head adding a kind of resistance she had never encountered before in the training sessions she endured on her trip abroad when she first learned Silambam, the staff fighting of a South Indian village called Kalaripayit. The slight hesitation wrought by the shovel’s head gave the Brute enough warning to snap his head back. The shovel only grazed the underside of his jaw, sending his teeth smacking together. His eyes bulged and his bull-like nostrils flared as he grunted with pain—and shrugged off the blow.
Elena whipped the shovel around again, turning the disadvantage of the heavy shovel head into a benefit as she launched a second sham attack. The shovel head scooped up some dirt from the alley and whipped it into her opponent’s face, blinding and confounding the lummox. He roared and thrust his hands out in an attempt to grab at her—when he should have simply grasped her weapon.
Darting close to the Brute, Elena kicked at his unprotected ankle with her steel tipped boot. His height would not help him once he was on his knees. But then his hands caught hold of the shovel and Elena’s kick landed too high. Despite this leverage the giant yowled in pain. Then he doubled over so quickly she barely had time to leap free of his reach. She rallied again, whipping the shovel away just in time. He swung a roundhouse right and she ducked beneath it, slamming the shovel into his gut and withdrawing it in a flash. Her muscles ached as the shovel rounded again. His long ape-like arms came up, blocking several strikes aimed at his head.
He snatched up a crate lid to use as a shield but she cut, sliced, stabbed and parried straight through the wood splintering in his hand. He was breathing hard, a glimmer of fear in his eyes, and his face crimson with anger that she made him feel so out of control.
Seizing this advantage, she glared into his eyes, gauged his surprise and uncertainty, and fixed him with a look that made it clear the next point in their joust would go to her—and he would be the one on the ground.
The telltale whirl of a revolver’s barrel stopped the blow. From the corner of her eye, Elena saw the cold dark muzzle of a handgun. She eased back so that she could see both her opponents clearly. The smaller ferret-faced man had risen and now fixed her with a wide smile—and his gun.
“Normally one signals surrender by waving the flag,” said the smiling man. “In your case, dropping that shovel will have to do.”
Elena loosened her grip and the shovel swiftly fell to the ground. “Who are you?” she demanded.
Lowering his gun, the smiling man nodded. “Call me Harrigan. This handsome devil next to me is Pike.”
The gargantuan Pike chuckled. “The real question, Señora de la Vega, is who are you?”
“The devoted wife of a wealthy don?” suggested Harrigan brightly.
“Or an independent woman held captive by her husband’s secrets?” Pike’s cheerful expression belied a blazing streak of cruelty.
Both men, in fact, grinned like big gamesmen who had gotten the drop on their prey and were drawing out the final tantalizing moments before the kill.
Elena’s eyes took on a hunted look. “What do you want?”
Pike’s huge meaty hand searched the air as if it might settle on something that should have been obvious. He shook his head, his brow furrowing, though he never relinquished his nasty smile. “Your help.”
Shrugging, he reached into his pocket—and whipped out a familiar length of black fabric.
The mask of Zorro unraveled from the Brute’s hand.
Elena gasped. These men had the mask her husband had lost at the aqueduct. They knew his secret!
It felt as if a legion of half-frozen spiders scampered up her back as she turned her gaze on the smiling men. She was dimly aware that they were alone in this alley, unobserved. That seemed to make the men feel all the more confident…that and their pistols. She smiled inwardly at the thought of how easily she might disarm them now that their attitude had made them sloppy.
But then what?
“Shall we go somewhere to talk?” asked Elena stiffly.
“Exactly what I was thinking,” said the beaming Harrigan as he bowed in a mockery of good manners. “And I know just the place…”
Steaming lavender-scented water lapped at Alejandro’s bare chest as he studied his cards. The dealer, one of three fellow dons sharing a luxurious hot bath with Alejandro, flashed his wide beaver-toothed grin as the last rays of twilight stabbed from diamond-shaped openings in the high-domed ceiling and glinted off his bald pate. Don Verdugo stroked his chubby cheeks and brushed his ridiculous heavy mustache, which curled at the corners of his mouth in a perpetual display of disarming and utterly false mirth and charm.
Did Don Verdugo’s cards bear images of Chinese royalty or peasantry? Was his hand strong or weak? It almost didn’t matter. Quarreling low-ranking peasants of clashing suits marred Alejandro’s hand rendering it completely worthless. He folded, dumping his cards on the tray before Don Verdugo. Sympathetic noises bubbled up from the hawk-nosed, gray-eyed Don Robau and the ferret-faced, white-haired Don Diaz, though both smiled at Alejandro’s continued losing streak.
A toweri
ng muscular Asian man massaged tangy smelling olive oil and spices into the sore back of a grunting New England businessman on a nearby slab. Roderick Cooper was his name, and he, like many others from the northern states, had married into wealthy Spanish Californio families and were slowly transforming the laid-back Spanish business philosophy of “mañana, mañana”—tomorrow, tomorrow, we’ll get around to it—into something far more cutthroat. A pair of Russian soldiers lay patiently waiting nearer to the door.
Alejandro winced as the masseuse scooped up wood and metal scrapers and scritched them along Cooper’s back to remove the oil. Alejandro had come to the California Gentleman’s Club to relax, and every little distraction annoyed him. He sighed, knowing full well that this was not the true source of his misery.
Calm yourself, cautioned Alejandro in the sanctuary of his private thoughts, be in the moment, as Don Diego taught you.
He opened his senses to his surroundings. The heavy musk of steam, sweat, and burning wax from the collection of candles in high silver candelabras mixed with the sharpness of cinnamon, which Don Diaz rubbed in his wild frizzy hair. A circular dome overlaid with a mosaic of green and blue enameled tiles crowned the sauna’s spacious main chamber. Arches fawned over the tub and several more slabs at the heart of the chamber, and windows made of intricately carved stonework peered out on lush rich green landscaped gardens. The pungent aroma of imported cigars smoked by all four dons accompanied the gray wraithlike cloud drifting over the steaming tub. The light filtering in made the support beams look like gold bricks tall as a man stacked two by two.
Such riches, such decadence…these men knew nothing of the hard labors suffered daily by good men like Cortez or the wonderful woman he married. Sometimes, it was enough to make Alejandro want to ram his fist into the men’s gloating faces. Yet—he was one of them, and they were his friends. Why else would he have confided his marital troubles to the other dons?
The Legend of Zorro Page 7