The Creed of Violence

FOUR

3ERE WAS A phone in the theatre next to the building where the girl was. John Lourdes called the BOI office at the Angelus Hotel. His field commander, justice Knox, was out, but an operative wrote down Lourdes's observations and requests.

The girl remained overnight. She slept on a flimsy sofa bundled up like a child. A single candle burned on a table nearby. Shadows bore out the window in that room was barred.

John Lourdes took up on the stairwell at the end of the hall so he could watch any comings and goings from that office, but there were none. He balled up his coat to use as a pillow and played the role of bum stealing a place to sleep off the street. The building grew dark and empty. Any vague and distant sound was like the fleeting tone of dreams.

As he waited for daylight to continue his surveillance, he could not get the girl out of his mind. She seemed to touch certain inarticulates within him. He also found that she and the conversation with the Germans, if you could call it that, seemed entwined, as if they were part of one single experience.

He had always been at his investigative best when details were studied at a distance. He was at his most comfortable with the world when that too was experienced at a distance.

He approached what he was experiencing with the same cool eye. As for the girl, it was in great part her silence that affected him. The silence she exuded as she crossed that bridge and walked alone almost otherworldly from all that was going on around her, while at the same time being intensely on guard.

Now, the Germans and their comments about the "unclean" left him trussed up with his past openly exposed. What they said had infuriated him not only for its degrading and racist implications but because he, in fact, felt in some way "unclean."

Neither the BOI nor justice Knox had any idea the criminal and murderer called Rawbone was his father. He'd relegated that detail of his heritage to the trash heap of history, inventing a story about an Anglo father, now deceased, named Lourdes. John Lourdes had done so not only because he felt unquestioned shame, but because he was also driven by aspirations of career and betterment and knew this crime of chance would not play to his favor.

That was the term a friend of his father's used, a man his mother thought to be "unholy and unsavory." The friend was a disgraced attorney named Burr. As a boy he'd been to the great white house in the hills above El Paso with his father. Often it was at night, often the men spoke in secret, often afterward his father would disappear for days at a time.

One night, before leaving, Burr had slipped some paper money into the boy's shirt and told him, "See your father there? You can thank him; your birth is a crime of chance ... but all birth is a crime of chance."

Burr's manner was such that even the very young John Lourdes knew the statement was meant in a malicious way to taint him. And now, all these years later, beyond the restless hours and mysteries that afflicted him, beyond all aims, objectives and intentions there was this need as final as final could ever hope to be, that he, John Lourdes, would be the one to bring about his father's bloodletting, that he would be the cause hand behind his death.

As DAWN BEGAN to seep across the building doorway, there came the sound of distant and sporadic gunfire. It was not a good sign. Not much later the girl came out of the office with a man. He must have been in there all night because John Lourdes had not seen him enter. He was a small fellow, bespectacled and Mexican. He was neatly dressed and rather unassuming except for the knife sheath hanging from a pistol belt under his green felt coat.

They made straight for the Santa Fe bridge with Lourdes following, but this was no ordinary morning. The street was spilling over with people. Pamphlets were being passed out urging the citizenry to take up arms against the Diaz government. There was a rabble atmosphere of anger and retribution for the overturning of free elections. Making it through the chaotic foot traffic was near impossible. Everywhere weapons were being brandished and fired off with wanton disregard. A government flag was burned in the street, its smoking ashes singeing the air. Up ahead, at the hipodromo, the racehorses had been loosed from their stables and were being stampeded down the Paseo.

It was then President Diaz's mounted shock troops appeared far up the Paseo, their columns re-forming to become a phalanx across the boulevard. When the commander ordered lances readied, his troops answered crisply.

They held there with the sun to their backs, and their battle line shimmered in the heat. The commander demanded the crowd disperse, but it remained defiant. The Mexican with the girl in tow shouldered his way through the shouting insurrectos toward what he assumed was the safety of the sidewalk buildings. Again the commander shouted his orders and again the crowd answered in a fanfare of epithets and arms held aloft with clenched fists.

The command was given, the surge of troops immediate and brutal. Most of the citizenry fell back in a panic; some stood their ground and fired. The street became a pall of yellow dust and screams. The ensuing pandemonium swept over the Mexican and the girl. They were lost to each other. He was taken in a wave of humanity down the sidewalk while she was trampled over.

John Lourdes managed to hold ground then shoulder his way forward. He reached the girl, who lay on the sidewalk trying to protect herself. He pulled her up and into a doorway. She was bloody and frightened; she was trembling. He held her by the arms till she calmed. She thanked him with a nod and by putting a hand on his heart. His thought: Get her back across the border and somehow question her. Suddenly the Mexican punched his way through a wild frieze of bodies in headlong retreat. He had a revolver drawn and pointed. He threatened John Lourdes in no uncertain terms to be away, now, be away.

THE SOUND OF gunfire was evident as far as the Rio Grande. Word quickly spread about the noonday assault at the hipodromo. Americans gathered along the riverbank. The air above the buildings along the Avenida Paseo de Triunfo was heavy with smoke. By the time the Mexican herded the girl to the bridge, John Lourdes was there waiting.

He watched her descend the weathered planking to the quarantine shed. The Mexican kept her under steady surveillance until she disappeared within that grim-faced building. He then looked over to the American side and seemed to acknowledge someone. John Lourdes scanned the crowd along the river to see who it might be.

The girl appeared, then as usual started up Santa Fe. John Lourdes set off to follow. She hadn't gone but a few yards when a man slipped through the crowd and took hold of her arm.

He was very tall and quite lean. He was much older and wore pleated pants and a vest. He had a long, dour face and said nothing to the girl.

A trolley slowed and the man pressed the girl to board. John Lourdes swung toward the rear steps, and as the girl was being led to a seat, she noticed him. She stared so that the man with her turned to find out what had caught her attention. John Lourdes eased back into a faceless wall of passengers. They rode the line as far as the park at Oregon and Mesa. They entered the Mills Building. John Lourdes followed them and others into the elevator. The girl made sure not to look at him. She was trembling so. They took the grated elevator to the fifth floor. They went in one direction down the hallway, John Lourdes the other. The office they entered was numbered 509. The downstairs directory read: sIMIC SHIPPING-IMPORTS AND EXPORTS, ROOM 509.

There was a tobacconist in the lobby beside the entrance to the Modern Cafe. It was from there John Lourdes called in. Just across the park was the Hotel Angelus, which headquartered the BOI. John Lourdes was told justice Knox and an operative were on their way from northern El Paso. He bought cigarettes and waited by the Cafe doors. He detailed everything in his pocket notebook.

He was slipping the notebook back into his coat pocket and starting outside for a touch of sunlight and air when he walked right into a gentleman entering the lobby. John Lourdes looked up to excuse himself but could only stare.

"Now looking down as you walk along may score you a lot of loose change," said the man, "but you've got to keep those gunsights at eye level if you really mean to make something of yourself."

And with that his father offered an offhanded grin, then was on his way.