The Hot Country

27

I slipped into the Diligencias through the back veranda door. The first wave of American refugees had recently shipped off to New Orleans and I was able, without drawing any attention, to get a room for the night. A good one, on the upper floor looking over the zócalo. I dropped my bag on the bed and went out and hustled to the train station, watching my back carefully. And I had to think the next step through. I was going to end up on the train with Mensinger. His ticket terminated at a strikingly obscure destination. Even if I followed him off the train in La Mancha, I didn’t want my own ticket to make anyone suspicious. An inquisitive and talkative conductor, for instance. I’d buy my ticket for a stop somewhere up the line. Torreón. One of the ironies of the civil war was that the trains did run from one rebel’s jurisdiction to another’s. From the Federales’ jurisdiction to a rebel’s and out again. The rebels allowed it for the sake of occasionally waylaying a train and robbing it, certainly. But also to avoid simply shutting the country down. The rebellion had gone on for more than three years already and showed no signs of stopping.

And so, a short time later, a certain Herr Gerhard Vogel pointed at Torreón on the train schedule, fifty miles north of La Mancha, and he asked to buy a “Zugkarte der ersten Klasse für Morgen,” which was about as much as I could expect to effectively say in this situation without resorting to double-talk faux-German. But the Mexican clerk had plenty of German travelers pass through, so in a mixture of Spanish and hand signals he verified if it was a first-class ticket I wanted, for tomorrow, and I was able simply to nod. And Bunky had done swell. The passport itself would work at customs in Hamburg. I gestured effectively enough to get the first-class car as far back of the Pullman as possible.

And it was not long before I was sitting at my table in the portales, breathing a little easier as the end-of-the-afternoon sunlight stretched out across the rooftops of Vera Cruz. The waiter, who knew me by now, immediately delivered two telegrams. There were only two people wiring me in Vera Cruz. I put the one aside with an unpleasant fizzle in my head. I opened the Chicago wire. Clyde wrote: Girl sniper great. Sold out Bulldog in half an hour, boosted Daybreak 30 percent, Morning similar. Too bad she didn’t nick you. Dope on your man FVM vague. Some sort of government banking official. You got a whiff?

I was glad his Bulldog edition sold out quick and carried into the next day. Our big bosses loved that. And as for Scarface officially being an economics guy, Clyde might as well have wired that he’d confirmed Friedrich von Mensinger as a high-ranking German Secret Service officer.

I signaled the waiter and he brought me cable blanks. I checked my pocket Elgin, which I was back to carrying, now that I expected to avoid trouble, at least for tonight, and I had a little time to get to the telegraph office. So I also ordered an aguardiente. I wrote to Clyde: Got a big whiff. Will be out of touch for a while. Bunky will handle VC inertia.

I figured that would boost Clyde’s coffee intake 30 percent, his sleeplessness a similar amount. But I laid the cable blank before me on the tabletop with a tiny nod to Clyde Fetter. Clyde did not doubt that I knew what I was doing, and he let me do it.

As did my mother. I wished I knew what it was she was doing and could happily let her do it. Not that I had any choice but to let her, whatever it was. I picked up her wire and put it down and picked it up and put it down and drank some of the aguardiente that had just arrived and then I picked the wire up and held it. She was capable of hinting further about her “golden strings” being tuned or her “brass” being handled. I don’t think she even understood how I didn’t really want to hear about that. To be fair to her, as I grew up with my mother, when she was being a woman, she rarely could do anything but simply put me in the hotel hallway and regretfully expect me to now and then put my ear to the door. For her to have had no passion or, worse, for her to have it and never act upon it were her only realistic alternatives. And her genius as an actress meant she must, by her very essence, live her life openly, always upon a stage, even if it was in a play called Life.

I didn’t respond to her last wire. And though it’d been but a relatively short time since she sent this one, it likely had already registered upon her that I was not giving her my blessing for whatever golden-string-tuning she’d decided to do. I was providing her with no end-of-the-act curtain. So the play had to go on. She felt she had to further explain. I opened the telegram.

We have always quoted the Elizabethans to each other, out of context, for our own purposes. And in her new message, after her Dearest Christopher Marlowe Cobb—her use of my name in its fullness reflecting her irritation — I recognized a tiny pastiche of The Winter’s Tale: ‘Tis hoped his sickness is discharged. To see his nobleness conceiving the dishonour of his mother! Go play, boy, play. Thy mother plays.

And her closing words worked roughly upon me: Love et cetera et cetera, Thy mother. She could do better than that, I felt, in emoting her annoyance, but her uncharacteristic lapse made it all the worse, for the realness of feeling behind it. Though she could feign realness as well, I realized.

I put a cable blank on the table before me, took a bolt of aguardiente, and I wrote: Discharged it is. Play on, Mother. My own play enters a new act. Love et non cetera. Kit

The first sentence was a lie. And so was the attitude of the second. But I could not board the train in the morning and ride it wherever it would lead me without making this thing right between us.