The Hot Country

20

Early the next morning I sent a wire to Clyde asking him to find out anything he could about a German official or diplomat by the name of Friedrich von Mensinger. I also asked him to get someone to translate a few German words for me, putting only what I didn’t know in the telegram, not the whole of Mensinger’s personal notes. At the portales Bunky was nowhere to be seen. I should have gone immediately to find him. But no. He was almost certainly sleeping one off. It was best for him simply to sleep. I could talk to him later about what was going on with him. I had another guy to see.

The Hostal Buen Viaje was up Montesinos, just across from a loudly clanking, brake-grinding, engine-huffing switching section of the railroad tracks a quarter mile or so from the main terminal. It was a run-down one-story courtyard building made to work as a cheap by-the-week-or-month hotel. Gerhard’s name and room number were chalked with all the other lodgers’ on a board behind the front desk, where an old man sat deeply asleep in an upright position.

I knocked on Gerhard’s door, which faced a courtyard whose cracked and shattered tiles were overgrown with ankle-high grassy weeds. It was shortly after nine o’clock.

There was a stirring inside the room. Gerhard called out something huskily in German. I figured he was asking who the hell it was. “It’s Christopher Cobb,” I said.

“Cobb,” Gerhard said, and though it was still husky, his voice had a tone of recognition.

More stirring, and the door opened.

Gerhard was mostly dressed, wearing dark gray outing pants but also a sleeveless, button-front undershirt. The man’s arms were thickly muscled. He had the build of an athlete, which had escaped my notice when he wore his band uniform.

“The room is small,” he said, stepping out and closing the door behind him. He led me to a far corner of the courtyard and we sat at a metal table.

I’ve not spoken much of the filth of Vera Cruz. Just as the background of things, which it certainly always was. I’ve not mentioned the flies. A reporter focuses on events and strips away the incidental details that don’t come directly to bear on the events he’s interested in, and that’s a strong writerly habit and one that I think makes for a better story of any kind. But Funston was right about how the Veracruzanos lived. And how they died prematurely as a result. And a big part of that was the flies. The flies of Vera Cruz were everywhere. You walked through a curtain of them most of the time. And the zopilotes, as useful as they were, could not do a fully effective job. Or even a halfway effective job. Dead things were always around, and usually, in the heat, they pretty quickly became totally unidentifiable dead things. It was true of the streets, the plazas, the markets, the yards, the shops, the houses of the poor, and even, to some considerable extent, the houses of the wealthy. And it was certainly true of cheap hotels near the train station.

So Gerhard and I sat in the overgrown courtyard of this particular cheap hotel near the train station and our heads were surrounded by a swirl of flies and we waved at them now and then but we mostly lived the way the locals lived and let them come and go, and we were surrounded by a smell of dead things, no doubt some of them nearby in the courtyard, hidden in the weeds, being eaten bit by bit by the insects and an occasional rat, and all of this moved me to ask Gerhard Vogel of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the obvious question: “What the hell are you doing here?”

“It’s cheap. It’s out of the way.”

“So you can read your Scribner’s.”

He smiled faintly at this. “Sure.”

“But I mostly meant Vera Cruz.”

He shrugged. But he shrugged with his eyes fixed closely on mine. Usually a guy who you’re asking questions, when he shrugs, he looks away. At least briefly.

So I took the initiative. “You hear anything about our scar-faced friend?”

He didn’t blink. After a few moments, as if this answer actually took some thought, he said, “No.”

I wanted him to translate Mensinger’s letter for me. Still, I found myself hesitating. I wondered what was going on here that I wasn’t understanding.

“But you have something?” he said.

I shrugged, keeping my eyes fixed on his. It wasn’t a natural gesture for me, and I didn’t mean it sarcastically. I just wanted to try to keep my leverage with him.

“Are you under censorship now?” he asked. Full of surprises. “All you war reporters?”

“Looks like it,” I said.

“What do you think about that?”

“What do you think I think?”

“Sorry,” he said, and this time he did look away when he shrugged.

“No, it’s okay. I don’t mind saying the obvious when it’s what somebody really wants to know. But you’re a smart guy. You can ask me straight.”

He looked back to me and smiled. “We’re both smart guys,” he said.

“So what do you want to know?”

“Are you a patriot, Christopher Cobb?”

“I’m such a patriot,” I said, “I believe the press has to be free.”

“What if your country is fighting a war and your being totally free to write everything harms that effort?”

“If anything needs to be understood totally and freely, it’s a war,” I said. “Especially by a public whose sons are being asked to fight it.”

“And what about all the lying, sensational papers?”

“Who’s going to be the omniscient and impartial über-authority to read everything beforehand and say what’s lies and what’s not? The American way is where everything is freely expressed. Then the free man gets to sort things out for himself.”

Gerhard acted as if he was about to say more, but he stopped himself with a little shake of the head. Like he didn’t mean to get off on this anyway.

I had a quick bloom of newsman’s intuition. Something seemed suddenly clear about this man before me. I would find it out now. I began by asking, “You want to know if you can trust me?”

“Why’d you come here today?” he said.

“To ask you a favor.”

“And you trust me?”

“Didn’t I just ask that of you?”

“Yes.”

A couple of beats of silence passed between us. I had to answer first. Okay.

“I don’t see the risk,” I said.

“What’s the favor?”

“I have a letter. In German. Can you translate it for me?”

He looked at me for a long moment without saying anything.

“Go ahead and ask,” I said.

“From him?”

“To him.”

I felt sure now.

Gerhard extended his hand, palm up.

I didn’t give it to him right away. Instead, I said, “Gerhard Vogel, around me at least, you don’t sound or act like a horn player in a small-time German band. Even if you’re from Pittsburgh.”

He slowly turned his hand and put it palm down, on the table between us. He said, “I understand why you reject censorship. But it’s my understanding that among the best of you, there is a code of some sort. When someone tells you something, you can come to a gentleman’s agreement beforehand.”

“Of course,” I said. “We can negotiate the restrictions about how I use what you want to say, and we either come to a binding agreement or I’ll tell you to keep your mouth shut.”

He showed the palm of his hand again.

“Let me ask you a question first,” I said. “And I give you my word the answer will never leave my mouth, much less my fingertips.”

“Yes?”

“Are you a spy?”

“I am.” He hesitated only briefly to give me this answer. He had been thinking about this all along, bringing me into this secret.

“For the red, white, and what?” I asked.

“Blue,” he said. “Not black.”

“That was my own question about the obvious,” I said.

“You had to ask it.”

“You didn’t have to answer it.”

“I trust you.”

“And you think we can help each other.”

“Of course.”

I pulled the letter from my shirt pocket and put it in Gerhard’s hand. I’d brought only the letter, not the envelope. Now that I knew who Gerhard was, I regretted not getting his immediate help on Mensinger’s cryptic notes. But that could wait for another meeting. Soon. I said, “Scarface is a man named Friedrich von Mensinger. He was carrying this letter.”

Gerhard drew it to him but kept his eyes on me.

“Don’t ask how I got it,” I said.

He nodded in assent. He unfolded the letter, very gently. He read, translating with only an occasional pause to parse the German and to say it right:

My Treasure,

You have only now gone from our rooms. On my fingertips I still feel the rough badge of your manhood that you wear upon your face. I remember when that was an open wound and I saw it for the first time. I waited for you at our table in the Stadtgarten, hoping you would come in time for the music. You came at last. I know why you were late. The blood had barely stopped flowing. I wept at the sight of it. You had to strike me then to make me strong. Twice. I know you must be strong now, as you always must, as you always are, though I do not know why it should take you to such a savage and distant place. My heart breaks already, though your footsteps down the hall have barely ceased to echo about me. We belong in Madrid, together, my darling. Or Buenos Aires. Together. Do what you must quickly and come back to me or send for me if you can. I give you my heart and mind to carry with you.

Your loving and obedient and patient wife, Anna

Gerhard folded the letter as carefully as he unfolded it and he was not looking at me and I was looking at him only long enough to see that he was not looking at me and I looked away as well. I was happy to do so. A woman in love had just sat down at this table beside us in the midst of the cheap raggedness and the stench, and with the clank and huff of track-switching, and she had spoken things that we were not meant to hear, things that would profoundly embarrass her if she knew we’d heard them, tender things intended for a man I now both envied and despised.

Gerhard and I sat like this for a long few moments. In my periphery I saw his hand come across the table and place the letter gently before me. I turned. I picked up the letter and placed it in my shirt pocket, keenly aware now that it was pressed there against my heart.

Gerhard and I looked at each other and I figured he was feeling roughly the same things I was about Anna Mensinger. We looked away again. Halfway across the courtyard, near a broken and tumbled fountain, I saw a stirring in the grass. Something moving there.

I said, “So he’s a Spanish-speaking diplomat.”

Gerhard did not respond.

“Without portfolio,” I said.

“But with a mission,” Gerhard said.

I turned to him. He seemed to be watching the same spot in the grass that I was.

“He bought a train ticket,” I said.

Gerhard slowly brought his face back to me.

We looked at each other for a moment. I asked Frau Mensinger politely to leave. I apologized to her. But I insisted.

After a moment of silence, as Anna gradually complied, Gerhard asked, “To where?”

I looked him fixedly in the eyes. “Before you answered me a few minutes ago, when I asked if you’d heard anything about the scar-faced man, you hesitated ever so slightly before saying no. If we’re trusting each other, you need to tell me about that pause.”

Gerhard said, “I was thinking about the whole issue of trust. I had no answer on Mensinger, but I was taking the question seriously. You and I were about to start something.”

I let this sit with me for a moment. It made sense. And this time he answered me at once, though he must have been surprised at my challenge, at what I’d observed of him to make the challenge. But.

I said, “You’re a spy for our country. You’re now in the middle of things. But you’re a horn player, not the booking agent for the band. And even if the President was looking for an excuse to invade Mexico, it can’t be for more than a couple of weeks that he’d think it would focus on Vera Cruz.”

“I understand your suspicion,” he said. “Some bad luck turned into good luck. We were playing in Mexico City. That’s where I was supposed to be.”

I kept my own silence now.

He said, “I was looking for a way back to the capital without causing suspicion. Then this happened.”

“To La Mancha,” I said, offering more to him now.

“La Mancha?”

“The train ticket.”

“Yes,” he said. “I understand.”

“It’s a National Railway whistle-stop in estado Coahuila.”

“On the way to Torreón?”

“Yes,” I said. “Carranza’s home state.”

“But Pancho Villa country now. He took Torreón only a few weeks ago. He might still be there.”

“Or in La Mancha?”

“I can’t imagine why.”

“Would Villa go there for the secrecy of it?”

“It’s not in his nature,” Gerhard said. “He doesn’t sneak around. And why should he do that for a lone German emissary? But this has to be about Villa. The Germans are making an overture.”

My sense of the alto horn player from the Vera Cruz zócalo continued rapidly to change. He was not just a street-level spy from a band shell. He seemed to have a grasp of the bigger picture. You play the reporting game long enough, you learn to make yourself dumb with each new source. You ask questions you think you’ve already gotten the answers for. Then you weigh the discrepancies. So I said, “Why Villa?”

“I bet you already have an idea,” Gerhard said.

Of course. His line of work required the same willingness to play dumb. He was telling me he knew that. I would have expected him to shoot me a little smile, to keep it friendly, since he was the one challenging my intentions. He didn’t. He was acting vaguely offended. I leaned forward. I said, “I’m just putting the obvious question in the center of the table for us both to chip in. We may see things a little differently.”

He didn’t miss a beat now. He acted as if we hadn’t just puffed our chests a bit. “All right,” he said. “Let’s say Huerta’s days are numbered. The Kaiser might try to pick a winner in the civil war.”

“Pick him when it still counts,” I said. “Before he’s truly got the upper hand.”

“Precisely,” Gerhard said. “So we have three major revolutionaries — or four or five, depending on how you sort them. Forget Gonzalez, though. He’s incompetent on the battlefield. Orozco beat him again and again when he was fighting to keep Madero in power. The three then. Villa, Carranza, Obregón.”

“You wouldn’t put Zapata ahead of Obregón?” I asked.

“We need to talk from the German point of view, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Zapata is a fool and a primitive Bolshevik. He just wants to make all the land communal for all the peasants, and once that’s done, he’d be happy simply to play the bespangled charro in the mountains of Morelos.”

“And Obregón is probably the smartest military man,” I said.

“He probably is. But not in a way that would register in Berlin. At least at this point.”

“Carranza then. Isn’t he the ostensible leader of the rebels now? The Primer Jefe, even for Villa?” I was ready for Gerhard to throw all these questions back on me. But he seemed only to have wanted to make it clear he knew my tricks. When it came down to it, he apparently liked playing the authority and wasn’t really inclined to listen to a possible different opinion. He wouldn’t make a good reporter in that way. Maybe not even a good spy. But he did know some things.

He was talking Carranza now. “That First Chief title won’t last long. He doesn’t seem a natural leader for the radical change the others are after,” Gerhard said. “He came from a landowner family, like Madero. He went to the National Preparatory School in Mexico City and wanted to be a scholar, but he had to go home to play the son of a wealthy cattle owner instead. Nevertheless, the scholarly world was the natural one for him, and it shows.”

“The Kaiser’s not looking for an intellectual.”

“What do you think?” He made a faint snort and a snappish little furrowing of the brow.

I meant it as a statement between us of the obvious thing, a step-by-step articulation of our reasoning, and he acted as if it were a naïve question. I was remembering that I didn’t like Gerhard when I first met him. He won me over with baseball, but he was a damn Pirates fan, after all.

“What do I think?” I repeated, as if that were the naïve question. “I think the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria hardly makes you an intellectual,” I said, converting his translated “National Preparatory School” back into its real name. All of this suddenly felt like a low-level game of one-upmanship that I shouldn’t be playing.

“Even worse,” he said. “The most blindly insistent intellectual is the intellectual who got stunted in his growth.”

And that was true enough. I needed to get rid of this odd sense of rivalry and just let him tell me what he thought he knew. And I realized the attitude that irritated me a few moments ago could have been directed at the Kaiser, not me. I was breaking my own rules. I was jumping to conclusions too easily. In this case about Gerhard. “So not Carranza,” I said. “Which leaves us with Villa.”

“Which leaves us with Villa. And the case for him is strong, if you think like the Kaiser. He’s got by far the largest army, the best-trained army, and the most aggressive, straightforward combat style.”

“Which is why Obregón’s virtues as a general are still not registering in Berlin.”

“That’s right. And Villa’s got a string of victories that would impress the Germans. Ciudad Juárez, Tierra Blanca, Chihuahua, Ojinaga. And now he’s beaten Huerta head-on at Gómez Palacio and Torreón. And Carranza’s getting very nervous. He thinks Villa’s in the process of clearing the way to Mexico City for himself. Something’s going to happen over all that. They will break, the two of them, they’ll turn into enemies and I think they both know it.”

“And that means renewed general chaos for all the rebel leaders, everyone fighting everyone,” I said.

“Villa’s shrewd,” Gerhard said. “As strong, comparatively, as he is, he still knows he can’t prevail in chaos. The great mass of Mexicans are just keeping their heads down. Villa needs something.”

“So the time is right for Germany to approach him.”

“Jawohl, mein Herr,” Gerhard said with that little snort of a laugh. I was finally realizing his attitude I’d been picking up on was actually directed at the country that was not his country but that was in his blood.

I said, “So the question is: What’s the ‘something’ Mensinger is going to offer? And what do the Germans get in return?”

We both took a deep breath and sat back in our chairs. There was a glib answer to this. Arms. But there were six hundred tons of arms sitting in a German ship out in the harbor right now. Was the simple offer of more arms enough to prompt a Friedrich von Mensinger and all the secrecy? Gerhard and I both understood that there was something else going on.

“Are you going to follow him?” Gerhard asked.

“You’re not?”

He shook his head very slowly no.

I said, “It’s the next move if I want this story.”

“Can we talk before you file it?”

“I’ll file.”

“Of course you will. You work for a good newspaper. I work for the United States of America.”

He didn’t need to say the next thing. “If it’s feasible,” I said.

“If it’s feasible.”

“I’m an American too.”

“I know you are. Baseball.”

“Baseball.”

Either of us could have said this now, but Gerhard did: “We both have some work to do.”