The Hot Country

31

I did not get off in Córdoba. Even to stretch my legs for the half hour of our passenger stop. Clyde and the whole system were breathing heavily in my ear and I didn’t want to let myself be tempted. I blocked them out in the clamor of the Aztec-blooded women below my window hawking their mangoes and Dominico bananas and diced sugarcane, their sweetmeats and white cheese and bunches of high-mountain lilies.

And then we were moving through the valley of the Río Seco, with its fields of cane and its banana farms and its plantations of pineapple and tobacco and coffee. And we began to climb once more. We took a long, rising, easy-gradient curve up a mountain, slow enough for everyone on my side of the car to notice something in a verge of flatland beside the track. They all turned their faces to it: a run of blackened, gutted railway passenger cars, some upright but most of them on their sides, their axles and their undercarriages exposed, like naked corpses laid out on the road after a battle. These had been here a while, judging by the jungle growth snaking into and over them, but they stirred an immediate murmur among the first-class passengers about the bandits and how they were capable of doing any number of terrible things to any of us but how at least we had a car full of soldiers at the rear of our train and how things were in a unique uproar now, so the rebels were preoccupied with figuring out what to do about the gringos and so maybe we’d slip through, and the word was that since the invasion, trains to Mexico City had been experiencing no trouble at all. So we were all going to be okay. Maybe.

Nor did I get off when the train stopped in Orizaba, though Clyde was whispering to me pretty intensely now that it was my duty to send this story to him right away, right here in this town, so it would not be lost forever when the rebels burned my train and stole my money belt and cracked my head open because I tried to get rough with them, and even if I woke up from that, I would at least have forgotten everything I knew, including both names in my byline and even the name in between. I didn’t listen to Clyde. We sat in the station at Orizaba, halfway between the tierra caliente and the tierra fría, the tropical zone and the temperate zone, and it was raining. Hard. The passengers in the car were heartened by the rain. If it could just rain like this all the way to Mexico City, maybe the rebels wouldn’t bother.

But Orizaba was known for its rain. The passengers all knew that. The train started to roll again, and soon the rain ceased and the clouds dispersed and the high-mountain sunshine returned, insistent in light but meek in heat. If the passengers’ confidence waned, they made no remarks about it, and soon we’d pulled into Esperanza, with forty minutes for lunch, and I stepped from the car, hoping to have a chance to observe Mensinger.

I found myself briefly breathless. Not from Scarface. We were nearly eight thousand feet above Vera Cruz and the sea now. Just the exertion of stepping off the train and moving along the platform informed my body in no uncertain terms of how thin the air was, and it took a little time for me to adjust. I slowed. I tried to breathe deeply. A strong smell of coffee filled the air, but I got no caffeine kick from it. I had to work hard at filling my lungs. Some of the Mexicans coming out of second class up ahead were slowing as well. Veracruzanos. Others, from the high country no doubt, strode on. This was their element. They were happy to be free of the thick sludge of sea-level air. I was walking slowly. The Pullman was behind me and I was hoping Mensinger would pass me so that I could follow him without a chance of his realizing. But he was not yet among those slipping by.

The station platform was wide. I was drawing near its center, from which a broad fieldstone path led to the pine-log facade of the simply named Restaurante El Ferrocarril, the Railway Restaurant. All the morning trains from Vera Cruz stopped here for lunch. Along the path were Indian women wrapped in their serapes selling peaches and pomegranates, tortillas and tamales for those eating cheap and quick. Most of the Indian women, the young as well as the old, had the bulge of a goiter on their necks, a high-mountain affliction I recognized from the mountains of Nicaragua as well.

I paused at the steps from the platform to the path, and I didn’t descend. I casually turned around, pulling my Elgin out of my pocket as if I were checking the time, weighing lunch options. I glanced at the faces heading this way. No Mensinger. I looked beyond them to the Pullman. I lit a cigarette and waited, keeping tabs on the car as I seemed to smoke and look at the scenery. The smell of coffee was still strong. Beyond the restaurant to the west were a dozen hip-roofed warehouses, full of the dried coffee beans I’d been smelling, not grown this high but stored up here to keep them from spoiling before they were sold and exported. And beyond the warehouses, far beyond them, looming over us all, was the Pico de Orizaba, the great, snowcapped volcano that rose from the high plain we sat on. It startled me. It had been there all this time and I’d been too preoccupied to actually see it. I lifted my eyes to Orizaba now and it straightened me up, sucked the thin mountain air out of me, as if Mensinger had just appeared.

And he had. When I lowered my eyes from the mountain, I saw him stepping down from the Pullman’s back vestibule, still done up in riding clothes, carrying his crop. Director’s note to Fritz Mensinger: Get rid of the riding crop if you want your performance to win the trust of a bandito. Mensinger, though, seemed, even from this distance, serenely confident, unthreatened. Good. All the Krüger stuff — if Mensinger was ever aware of it — had been left behind. I took a drag on my cigarette, lifted my eyes again to the volcano but didn’t see it. I could see at the lower edge of my vision Mensinger pause, adjust to the thin air, turn this way, take a step and another.

And a voice beside me said, “Guten Tag.”

Mensinger would be within listening distance in moments.

I turned to the voice. It was the elderly man with the Porfirio Díaz mustache who had been sitting for hours beside me on the train utterly silent but for his one, almost whispered Olé.

I looked into his rheumy dark eyes and I could sense that this reserved man had been working up the initiative all morning to speak. I could not be faking German when Mensinger passed by. I said to him in Spanish, “Good afternoon.” I cut back on the preciseness of my natural Spanish pronunciation but I skipped the German accent. It was better the old man be confused than Mensinger pick up on anything familiar or odd when he passed by. I said, “Would you mind that I speak Spanish with you? I must practice.”

“Not at all,” he said. “You’re doing very well. Much better than before.” He was looking surprised but not disbelieving.

“When I am angry,” I said, “I have trouble speaking properly.”

He nodded. “Of course. The captain was an ass.”

“He was doing his duty,” I said.

“I don’t really speak much. .”

“Sorry,” I said, cutting him off, as I was afraid he was about to say “German” and I sensed Mensinger drawing near. I put my cigarette in my mouth and reached for the pack inside my jacket. “I am very rude. Would you like to smoke?”

Mensinger passed us, moving briskly now.

“No,” the old man said. “Thank you.” He continued to say words but I was not hearing them, even though he would have sworn I was looking him full in the face with great attention.

Mensinger turned, quite near us. He smelled of starch and gun oil. Then he was out of my sight and I heard him going down the steps.

“. . only a few words,” the old man was saying.

“I understand,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “I once had a reading knowledge was all. In the university.”

“I see.”

I turned my head briefly away, looked at Mensinger’s receding figure, passing by the women vendors, heading for the restaurant.

“I am Doctor Manuel Agusto Tejeda Llosa.”

I looked back to him as he began giving his name, “Doctor Tejeda Llosa,” I said, shaking his offered hand. “I am Gerhard Vogel.”

“Herr Vogel.”

“Do you have a practice in Vera Cruz?” I asked.

“Ah, no,” he said. “I am not a medical doctor. I am a doctor of philosophy. From the University of. . from abroad.” His eyes shifted away.

It was easy to read him: His degree was from an American university. Which meant he probably spoke excellent English. And he knew America and Americans. Which meant sitting next to me all the way to Mexico City wanting to talk, this man would be an ongoing danger. At least he would exhaust me from the effort to keep up my role. And he could easily get around to grilling me about my life in Germany, my job in Mexico. He seemed a nice old man and I regretted it, but as soon as his eyes returned to mine, I narrowed my own. He knew why.

I let the German accent slide lightly back into my Spanish. I was only a little angry at him. But it would be enough to make the rest of the trip silent. “I suspect your American English is much better than your German,” I said. I clicked my heels and said, “It was a pleasure to meet you, Doctor.” And I walked away.

I headed down the platform, toward the rear of the train.

There was nothing to be gained from following Mensinger into the restaurant. And this walking away was just the gesture of a German ass. The logical move. I had to protect my Gerhard from exposure. I finished my cigarette and paused and stubbed it out on the platform. I half turned. I pulled out my Elgin. I glanced back up the platform. The old man was gone.

I thought now to go to the Pullman car and find Mensinger’s berth and his bag and go through them. If I could look at the “Papiere” he was bringing to Pancho Villa, I might find enough confirmation to file a legitimate story.

And I had sense enough to stop myself. It was Gerhard who was making me consider this. I was too much Gerhard Vogel now, American secret agent. But I was not Gerhard Vogel. I was Christopher Cobb playing the part of Gerhard Vogel in a melodrama entitled Christopher Cobb, War Correspondent. No. That was wrong. In that melodrama I was Christopher Cobb playing the part of Christopher Cobb faking the surface identity of Gerhard Vogel. I would not do what Vogel did. In life and in any little drama I played inside it, I was still who I was behind the mask. I was a war correspondent. A newspaper reporter. A real one. Not a yellow-journalist hack who’d buy or steal or invent whatever he needed. Nor was I a spy. Neither in my life nor in the snatches of theater in my life was felonious breaking and entering a legitimate action of a newspaper reporter. I was a reporter. Not a spy. Even though it was true that something larger seemed to be at stake here. Something that had to do with my country.

I wavered again. Wars always had something larger at stake. I hadn’t faced this dilemma before because the major wars I’d covered had never directly involved my own country. In Nicaragua, faction against faction. In the Balkans, Bulgarians against Servians and Greeks and Rumanians. I am an American, but I am an American reporter, a war correspondent, standing apart, telling things as they are. And an American does his job with the integrity the job calls for. Other Americans do their own American jobs. Soldiers. Secret agents. I am not those other Americans. This is what I told myself.

Besides. There had to be a train guard to keep the second-class hoi polloi out of the Pullman. The chances of getting into Mensinger’s berth unobserved and finding his documents and discovering the Germans’ ultimate goal with Villa were a good deal less than the chances of queering the whole story by getting caught.

I turned my back on the Pullman, the volcano, the restaurant where Mensinger was eating a meaningless lunch, and I strolled along the platform, keeping tightly bound inside my head for a time, thinking there was a very long way to go before La Mancha. I needed to stay patient.

And now I was nearing the boxcar at the back of the train. The dozen or so Federales who were supposed to protect us had emerged. Boys mostly, a few men, a motley group of rurales and impressed farm boys with a couple of weathered noncoms to lead them, the ragged, unmotivated loose ends of Huerta’s army on dangerous, thankless duty. And they were watching the women. Half a dozen women, the wives — official or unofficial — of the half dozen actual men among the soldiers. Women typically traveled with Mexican armies — governmental and rebel alike — to forage for their men and cook for them and service their bodies and tend their wounds and hold their hands as they died and even bury them. Soldaderas. Along the platform these women were crouched over an improvised fire, cooking some unidentifiable meat for their men’s tortillas.

I turned away from them. Faced the volcano. Began to walk back toward it. When Bunky asked me what my plan was, I gave him the only answer I knew. Which was vague to say the least. I had this role, for now, of Gerhard Vogel, but I was wrong a few minutes ago thinking of this as a play with fixed personalities in a structured melodrama. This was all new. It was all improvised. I didn’t know what my lines were, what my future actions were. La Mancha was a very small place. How did I follow Mensinger unobserved? And then what? But I couldn’t think about any of that yet. To improvise, you must stay in this moment and then the next and the next.

And in this particular next moment, a small thing in the landscape presented itself to me. A wooden shack a hundred yards up the train track. The telegraph office. Once again I was tempted to tell this story as I now had it. But I’d been so absorbed by my journalistic scruples, I’d overlooked a far more immediate problem, which trumped all the rest: If I tried to file the story from any of these public railway telegraph stations, there was a serious chance it would never even arrive in America. A telegraph operator who knew enough English to get a sense of what he was sending — and the operators tended to know pretty good chunks of the languages they frequently worked with — such a man would tell the authorities and then I’d be grabbed off the train and not only would the story die but the event itself might then be drastically altered in ways I would never be privy to. Hell. Forget the translation. Given the Mexicans’ feelings for Americans right now, a telegraph about anything that was written in English and bound for the United States would go nowhere except into my arrest file.

I had no choice. I had to follow this thing all the way to Villa. And then somehow improvise myself across the border.