The Hot Country

12

I walked away, telling myself to get my story priorities straight. The sardonic sniper was marginal as war news, even if I could figure out a way to identify her and even if it turned out to be Luisa Morales, which I remained unconvinced of. The mystery German had the whiff of something important. But at least the directness of the sniper’s approach to collaborators led me now to a simple, similarly straightforward plan.

So I found myself on the doorstep of the German Consulate on Avenida Cinco de Mayo. The door quickly opened to my knock and revealed a blond young man in a field-gray Uhlan uniform with captain pips on his tunic shoulder boards. A cavalryman on consular attaché duty. He had steely blue eyes and a Kaiser Wilhelm mustache so pale it felt as if I were looking at the ghostly specter of a dark mustache that had died and refused to move on along to its eternal fate.

Living the early life I did with my mother, traveling with her always as she toured not only the United States but South America and Europe and beyond, I eventually learned good Spanish, passable French, and workable parts of other Romance languages, but I also picked up strange rudimentary bits — more sounds than words — from the Germanic and Slovak linguistic cousins of those others. My German was more double-talk than anything, more an acting talent, absorbed from all those years at the backs of theaters or in the wings and from hanging around dressing rooms and eating and drinking and sleeping in boardinghouses with actors and actresses and with the voices and dialects they put on. So I greeted this young man in Spanish, which I figured he would know, given his posting.

“Bitte reinkommen,” he said, stepping aside and motioning for me to come in even before I said what it was I wanted. I figured he hadn’t had the time or the imperial inclination to learn the local language. My little bit of German would make me sound like a madman. I didn’t know what our common ground might be, but I wasn’t intending to pretend to be anyone other than who I was, so I said in English, slowly pronouncing each word, “I am a newspaperman.”

“Ach, so,” he said, seeming to understand.

“I write for the Chicago Post-Express,” I said.

He nodded.

I offered my hand. “I am Christopher Marlowe Cobb,” I said, the Germans I’d known in America loving the long elaborateness of names.

He took my hand and shook it, looking me steadily in the eyes.

Though he did not speak his own name in return, I continued to sense he knew what I was saying. Just in case, to establish German-friendly credentials, I said, “I also write for the Post-Express syndicate, which includes the Chicago Abendpost. They translate my. .”

The young man cut me off by speaking pretty damn good English. “I have some family in Milwaukee Avenue, one uncle and three Vetter. . Sorry. Cousins. I have three cousins also. They read the Illinois Staats-Zeitung. A more powerful newspaper.”

I was not sure what unsettled me most: his nearly perfect English, his relatives in Chicago, or his tightly clenching his right fist as he stressed the word “powerful.”

Perhaps the hand was the most unsettling, since as soon as it finished clenching, it shot out to me, demanding mine, which I offered and which he shook firmly with the announcement, “Captain Hans-Peter Krüger.” He let go of my hand, clicked his heels, and bowed ever so slightly at the waist.

“Kapitän Krüger.” I bowed as well.

“Bitte,” he said, motioning to a pair of armchairs facing a dark wood desk to my left. And then instantly, as if correcting himself: “Please.”

I headed for a chair as he circled the desk. “Your uncle’s also probably a Cubs fan,” I said, the Cubs being the more powerful Chicago team. I didn’t expect him to hear the little bit of a needle I was giving him, or even understand the reference. Indeed, Herr Kapitän Krüger simply ignored the comment. Meanwhile, I was taking in as much of the place as I could without seeming to.

This front room was large and sparsely furnished, with everything made of the same carved mahogany. Out the far door was a sun-filled courtyard, which was, at the moment, empty.

I sat, though I angled myself slightly to keep the courtyard in the periphery of my vision. Krüger was already stiffly upright in his chair.

Behind him hung a large, framed, color lithograph of the Kaiser, beribboned, bemedaled, and with a massive eagle sitting on his helmet.

“Have you spent time in Chicago?” I asked.

“Spent?” I could see his brain sorting through his American idioms. “Ah. Yes. I am in Chicago for one year when I am a boy.”

“Good.”

“It was not the Fatherland,” he said. I got the feeling he had just clenched that right fist under the desk.

“Not yours,” I said.

“Not the Fatherland for my uncle and my aunt.”

“I understand,” I said, filling a brief pause.

“Not for my three cousins,” he said, not wanting to let any of his family escape his disapproval.

“They were your drei Vetter,” I said.

I was aware that sometimes my reflex, low-grade sarcasm undercut my full effectiveness as a newspaperman. I should have wanted to smooth this guy’s Germanic feathers, not ruffle them. This remark could go either way. But almost at once he smiled. “Just so,” he said. “Just so.”

Captain Krüger was without irony.

We looked at each other a moment. I was still improvising here, as I often did when I was seeking a thing in someone’s head and I wasn’t quite sure even what category of thing it might be.

“How may I help you, Herr Cobb?” he asked.

“Your country is a good friend to Mexico. For my readers—Germans in America and all my other American readers as well — I would very much like to get the German point of view about my country’s invasion of Mexico.”

It is important to stress at this point that I am an American, through and through. I am a patriot. If I think Woodrow Wilson and William Jennings Bryan are a couple of ninnyhammers, they are our democratically elected and legally appointed ninnyhammers, respectively, and my right to think and say these things about them is part and parcel of my being a patriotic American. But I am also a reporter. I would not normally have been speaking loosely about the ninnyhammerness of my country’s leaders to a foreigner, especially a German, but there was a journalistic goal here that could eventually better inform my fellow patriots, which is also part of being an American, having the right to be well and openly and vigorously informed.

So I leaned hard on the word “invasion” in spite of Woody’s sudden disavowal of further hostile intentions, which, actually, was a worse sin in the opinion of a lot of patriotic Americans, which was, indeed, the reason he had every American military man — not to mention all us news boys — fidgeting and fretting and fuming in Vera Cruz. Wilson’s public pose was that this was a simple operation to stop the German ship from unloading its munitions. But I figured every German official in Mexico thought otherwise. Krüger eyed me carefully for a moment. Finally he said, “You should be speaking to the embassy in Mexico City.”

“No American can go farther than El Tejar without being arrested,” I said.

“Or shot.” Krüger surprised me with this addendum, delivered quickly and with a little too much intensity, accurate though it was. A very faint smile brisked across his lips and vanished. He may have had no irony, but he thought he had a sense of humor.

“You understand the problem,” I said.

“I am not authorized to speak,” he said.

“Forgive me, Kapitän, for not knowing your chain of command. Is there no one here to consult?”

I knew, in fact, that there was a civilian consular officer at the end of that chain.

Krüger looked me in the eyes for another long moment. I returned the gaze steadily. If I flinched, if I looked away, I suspected he would say no. He might have anyway. Our gaze went on for another beat and another.

Then he rose from his chair.

“Wait, please. I will inquire,” he said.

He did a crisp left-face and moved across the room and through the open door into the courtyard, turning at once to the left and vanishing.

I waited a few moments and then rose from my chair, slowly, casually, as if I was being observed. I might have been. I looked at Wilhelm for a few moments. And I thought of Wilhelm and Wilson. Wilhelm and Wilson and Asquith and Poincaré. And Czar Nicholas. And Sultan Mehmed and Count Stürgkh. And, since I was standing where I was standing, I wouldn’t let myself forget Willie’s right-hand boy Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. Leaders of the world. What a bunch. A good war correspondent’s ardent employers. And I thought they would soon figure out how to find us more work. Quite soon.

I’d stared at the lithograph long enough. I drifted, quite nonchalantly, to the doorway leading to the courtyard. The blue and white pavement tiles were faded from decades of sun. The rosebushes were severely pruned and the stone fountain in the center was dry. There were voices from one of the doorways along the upper-floor gallery. To my left. A distant churn of guttural German sounds. Krüger and his boss. I didn’t expect anything from them. And then a door was opening on the right-hand upper gallery. I took a small step back, without losing my line of sight.

It was the tall man from the ship in the night. I could see his face for a brief moment, which moved me instantly farther backward, totally out of sight. I really didn’t expect anyone to reveal himself here. Or speak to me. I just needed to get near all this, put details in my head that might be useful. I certainly didn’t want to be seen by the tall man. If eventually I had to follow him, I did not want to be familiar to his eye. But I now had a clear image of his face, from the flash of it before me, and that much was valuable. Deep-set eyes. I did not catch their color, from this distance, but they certainly were not dark. Probably good, standard, Aryan aristocratic blue. And yes: His left cheek had the livid curve of an old fencing scar, his Schmiss, his smite, his medal of academic honor.

I sat down once more in my chair before the desk, and soon Captain Krüger returned. He did not sit. He stood behind the desk, his arms stiff at his sides. “I am sorry, Herr Cobb. We have nothing to say.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Kapitän Krüger,” I said.

I rose. I added, “It was only from respect for your country’s opinions that I have sought you out.”

“We are aware of that,” Krüger said. “And we offer to you our thanks.”

He bowed at the waist. I bowed at the waist. I repressed the impulse to ask the reporter’s classically abrupt, unexpectedly knowledgeable question, in this case something like: Oh, and one other small thing, Kapitän, what is the mission of the important German official who snuck in here in the middle of the night from the Ypiranga? But I could think of nothing Krüger might say in flustered response worth my revealing that I knew something was going on.