The Hot Country

19

It was darkly shadowed at the doorway to my rooms and I’d had too much Scotch and too many cigarettes and too much war-correspondent gab and too much military point of view but especially too much Scotch and too much darkness and so Diego startled the bejesus out of me when he slipped from the shadows and slid something smoothly leathery into my hand and said, “He never felt a thing.” He tried to vanish again but I recovered quick and though my reflexes may have been a little dulled by the Scotch I still caught him by his collar and hauled him back to me.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Now you got me, you can give me that silver dollar. Scarface’s wallet with his train ticket is worth a dollar.”

“His wallet?”

“In your right hand.”

My right hand was actually still holding Diego’s collar. He realized that.

“Wait,” he said. “Your left hand? Maybe your pocket? You’re quick with your hands, Kit. You said I can call you ‘Kit,’ right? I remember my dad being quick with his hands.”

His papi.

“How is it I’ve turned you into a little smart-ass, Diego Cordero Medina Espinoza?”

“You think it took America invading to make me a smart-ass? I am my own smart-ass, Kit.”

“Don’t call me that,” I said.

“Mr. Cobb.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Papi.”

I still had him by the collar and I opened my door and pulled him inside and shoved him — though gently — in the direction of the desk chair.

“Don’t call me that,” I said.

I turned on the overhead electric light.

“Okay, boss,” he said in English.

Now he was sitting in the chair like an obedient kid in the front row at school.

It was in my left hand, actually. “You nicked this from the man with the scar?” I used the English verb from the street in the midst of the Spanish question.

“‘Nicked’?” he asked.

“A little American language lesson,” I said. “Pickpockets,” I said slowly, clearly, in English, “nick leather.” And I held up the wallet with the last word.

“Diego Cordero Medina Espinoza nick leather on Scarface,” Diego said in English.

“I think he’s a dangerous man,” I said, returning to Spanish. “I don’t like you trying this.”

“I am a sly one,” Diego said.

“I don’t want you dead.”

Diego reared back a little. Like this was a surprising thought.

“I’d have to find a new boy.” I added this in the offhand, tough-guy way we’d put up between us. But then, as gently as I’d shoved him to the chair, I said, “I don’t want you to steal for me, either.”

Diego shrugged. “Wallets are a good way to understand.”

As far as he knew, I ignored this. I’d said the right thing to him. But damnation, I was glad to have this wallet. I sat on the side of the bed and looked at it.

It folded in thirds and was made of good oak-brown leather. Full grain from something young. He’d had it a long while, the patina of years upon it, including a rubbed wedge of darkness from the oil of his skin every time he grasped the wallet in the same place and pulled it from his pocket.

I looked at the wallet and then at Diego. Scarface was tall.

Diego looked at me looking at him. The boy was shrewd. He knew what I was thinking. “He put it here,” he said, motioning with his hand to where the lower outer pocket of a suit coat would be. “For just a moment. When he changed some money at the post office window. I could not help but steal it.”

“He was alone?”

“Yes.”

“He didn’t notice you?”

“No.”

I opened the wallet.

“I nick very good,” he added in English.

I reminded myself to remember where things were, to return them to their exact positions after I handled them. I was already thinking that some anonymous, honest Mexican needed to return this to the doorstep of the consulate pretty quickly, without it appearing to have been thoroughly searched.

The wallet was clearly on Scarface’s person a great deal. But he used it simply for basic things. In one compartment was the ticket. A Pullman car reservation for day after tomorrow. For Friedrich Mensinger. The National Railroad via the capital to a city named La Mancha, estado Coahuila. Outside of Cervantes and Spain, the city name wasn’t familiar to me.

“La Mancha?” I said, mostly to myself, but the kid was quick.

“What is the state?” Diego said.

“Coahuila.”

“That’s up north,” Diego said.

“I wonder what he wants up there.”

Diego shrugged. “I couldn’t hear much of the talk with the ticket clerk. Do I get my dollar?”

“You’ll get it.”

“For this?”

“I’m still trying to see what we have.”

“The trains aren’t regular going up north these days,” he said. “I think Scarface wanted to go sooner than three days.”

Three days: Diego had already looked at the ticket. Of course he had.

I slipped the ticket back into the compartment. I put my fingertips inside the middle compartment and felt an envelope. I pulled it slowly from the wallet, noting its orientation, though Diego had already no doubt disarranged everything.

The address side up. Stamp lower right. It was out now, and I rotated it to look at the address, which was written in a tight, small, neat hand:

Herr Friedrich von Mensinger

Deutsches Konsulat

Vera Cruz, Mexico

He had the “von” of nobility in his name. But Mensinger didn’t use the “von” for his train ticket. The postmark was from Berlin. The writer knew he was coming to Mexico well before Mensinger boarded the Ypiranga. I turned the letter over. It was neatly knifed open at the top edge; the flap was still glued down. And Mensinger had used the back of the envelope to make what looked like random notes to himself, each item marked with an initial dash.

kein Einmarsch. Nicht nach T

ENP ~ Dr.

C u. W keine Eier

Papiere

entweder Hammer oder Amboß

I could figure a little of this out. Kein Einmarsch. I wasn’t entirely sure, but it had something to do with not something, and the cognate would suggest marching. Nicht nach T. Not a T. On the next line I didn’t know what ENP represented. An acronym no doubt. The tilde was from mathematics. Meaning the acronym was similar to the next thing. Doctor. Between the two initials at the beginning of the third line, the u. was an abbreviation for und. And. Keine is “none.” But I didn’t know Eier. Papiere is “paper.” The last phrase, I wasn’t sure of either. I thought the construction was “either…or” and one thing was obviously a hammer. All five notes, separately and together, seemed meaningless. Certainly notes to himself. He knew what the blanks were, what the context was.

I pulled the letter out of the envelope and unfolded it.

It began: Mein Schatzi. I knew this phrase. From a German girl in Chicago. My Treasure. It went on for two pages in German and I knew I would be at a loss. I needed some help with this, and I thought of Gerhard. I slipped the letter back in the envelope and returned the envelope to the center compartment. I found myself stuck on the writer, a woman — the hand was clear to me now as a woman — a woman who would call Scarface — Friedrich von Mensinger — her “treasure.” He was wealthy, of course. Maybe it wasn’t tender at all. Maybe it was “Dear Moneybags.”

Which made me move on to the third compartment, where his money would be. It was empty.

I lifted my eyes to Diego.

His own eyes were fixed on my hand, which still held open the empty money compartment. He looked up at me.

“Give me the money,” I said.

He said nothing.

“All of it. We have to get this back to Scarface.”

Diego still wasn’t talking.

“You’ve earned your silver dollar.”

“Okay,” he said, almost inaudibly.

I said, “I want to put him as little on alert as possible. We need to get this back to him, like someone found it.”

“Found it? He won’t think he lost it. He is a careful man.”

“Found it discarded after it was stolen.”

“You want him to believe that?”

“Yes.”

“Then the money will be gone.”

Diego was right, of course.

“I’ll split it with you,” Diego said.

“Are you sure he didn’t see you when you nicked it?”

“I’m sure,” he said. “He never looks straight at any of us.”

I believed this. Which made it even more striking that Mensinger dropped his nominal sign of nobility for his train ticket. Wherever he was going, whatever he was up to, he was taking care not to emphasize that.

I pulled Diego’s silver Liberty Head dollar from my pocket and held it up in front of his face between my thumb and forefinger. I was unaware of how similar this gesture was to something else until he opened his mouth and stuck out his flattened tongue and he crossed himself. Like he was about to take Catholic Communion.

He had that narrow little look of Diego sass in his eyes, which had come to be familiar to me.

I thought of Luisa and her hatred of the priests.

I did not put the dollar on his tongue, as he no doubt expected me to do.

I lowered the coin. “I bet this attitude makes your mother sad,” I said.

He withdrew his tongue and snapped his mouth shut. “I am a good Catholic son,” he said.

“As far as she knows.”

“I love my mother.”

I reached out and took his right wrist and I lifted his arm and I put the coin in his palm. It disappeared into a tight fist. I let him go.

“How much money did Scarface have in his wallet?” I asked.

“Not nearly as much as he’s got with him,” Diego said.

“You didn’t keep the ticket to sell.”

“I thought you’d want to see that,” he said, and paused so that, for at least a few moments, I’d think he sacrificed something for me. But then he said, “Besides. You get arrested for using a ticket with someone else’s name. No market for it.”

“So you do still know how to confess.”

“Never to a priest.”

“Go home now,” I said.

“What’s next?”

“Find me in the portales later in the day. I need to hold on to the wallet for a little while. But continue to keep an eye on our man.”

Diego saluted me and was up and across the room.

“Diego Cordero,” I said, stopping him as he opened the door. He turned to face me.

“Good job,” I said.

“I am a thief,” he said.

“You are forgiven,” I said.

He crossed himself and vanished into the night.