The Hot Country

23

The old man who’d been sleeping this morning at the desk had now vanished altogether. In the lobby there was only fly buzz and the distant huffing of a train engine and Gerhard’s name still chalked on the lodgers board. Most of the other rooms were empty.

I stepped into the ragged courtyard. The loopy drone of the flies increased, but behind that was only silence. In my normal operating area — on or around or approaching or retreating from a place of battle, be it the volcanic mountaintops of Nicaragua or the streets of Sofia — I had a pretty acute sense of the wrongness about a situation. But my first thought now was simply that I’d missed him, he’d gone out already.

This thought did not last for long. I took a step into the courtyard and another and the silence was starting to thicken into aftermath, into a thing that made me move more quickly to Gerhard’s door and I found that with my first knock it yielded a little bit, unlatched, and I pushed it open and he was lying in the center of the floor, filling the tiny room with his sprawled body, his head surrounded by the wide penumbra of his blood, his throat slashed, his eyes open sightless to the ceiling. I leaned back into the door, clicking it shut, steeling myself in the way of the battlefield. I’d seen a thousand men dead, a hundred alive in this moment and dead in the next, but this one was personal, this one was very personal. And I thought perhaps my own visit to him this morning contributed to this. And I thought this was all getting very big, whatever I was after here. And I thought I was thinking just to keep myself from letting go to the urge to run.

I breathed deep and let it out, once, twice. I became the war correspondent, the reporter. The blood looked fresh. This was recent. He was still wearing his outing pants and he’d put on a plaited dress shirt but didn’t get to the collar. The shirtfront’s whiteness was sprayed with red. There were relatively few flies, no vermin. Recent. I looked around the room. His open music case lay on the narrow bed, the horn removed and dropped beside it. The bed was angled away from the wall. There wasn’t much to search, but the killer did it thoroughly. Gerhard’s clothes were scattered at the foot of the bed, his leather suitcase gaping open, mouth down, against the floor. On this side of the room, a small chair was leaning on two legs against the wall. On the floor, near the chair, was Gerhard’s wallet, open. I stepped to it, bent to it, touched it lightly with my fingertips to see that the money compartment was empty. But I did not think for a moment that this was a robbery.

I straightened and I looked back to Gerhard. His body had preoccupied my first glance at him. Now I could see two things beside him. On the floor to his right, near his slack hand: a folded white paper. On his other side, isolated on the floor, a pale-blue-covered booklet. REISE-PASS. The German Imperial Eagle. Gerhard’s passport.

I bent to the folded paper and picked it up. I opened it. And the eagle was American here, an olive branch in one talon and a bundle of arrows in the other. This was the certificate of naturalization making Gerhard Zimmerman an American citizen in 1896, at age twenty. I folded the certificate and placed it back on the floor. I moved to the passport and picked it up. Gerhard Vogel. His assumed name. The first page had his photo. This man was the man from across the courtyard table a few hours ago: dark, wide-set eyes, his curled Kaiser Wilhelm mustaches framing the center of his face like quotation marks. The Kaiser perceiving his false identity and calling out the irony.

I closed the passport.

I had some quick and complicated decisions to make.

Mensinger and his mission were involved in this one way or another. That seemed intuitively clear to me.

There was nothing I could do for Gerhard.

I could only bulldog this story now. Tomorrow morning I would follow Mensinger north.

And that would be the best I could do for Gerhard. To figure out what was going on and to expose it.

I couldn’t travel as myself. Mensinger had not seen me yet, as far as I knew. But I couldn’t travel as an American. I’d never even make it to Mexico City.

I put Gerhard’s passport in my pocket. I looked to his naturalization papers on the floor. Both these things were left in the room, in the open, to tell the Americans that the killers — the Germans — knew who this man was and what he was doing.

I could get Bunky to put my photo in the passport. For the Federales along the route and for any possible bandit ambushes, this would help. I needed to keep away from Mensinger, but he’d be in a Pullman, reclusive, I was sure. I’d be several cars behind. I did worry about an entourage. But I had to risk this.

I’d leave Gerhard’s other papers on the floor. I couldn’t afford to get involved in an investigation, but he needed to be identified.

I took another deep breath. I looked at Gerhard. I nodded him a respectful good-bye. I turned and eased open the door, peeked out. The courtyard was still empty.

I stepped from the room. I approached the front of the hotel carefully. The old man had returned, but he was back on his chair behind the front desk and snoring heavily. I moved quietly past him and I stopped a few steps from the door and watched the street. I waited for a passerby to cross in front of the hotel, heading away from the train station. And I slipped out of the Hostal Buen Viaje, unnoticed. I turned toward the station and moved quickly off, leaving the murder behind but carrying it with me very closely now indeed.