The Hot Country

33

And Herr Friedrich von Mensinger sat down next to me.

In Mexico City I’d followed him into the waiting room of the National Railway’s Estación de Buena Vista. I was careful not to be noticed. I found a place at the very end of one of the long wooden benches otherwise packed tight with Mexicans in serapes and rebozos, a class of Mexicans I figured would be invisible to Mensinger, as Diego had once observed about him. Being among them, I thought he might not notice me either. I watched him when I could, but there was no pressure to do so. He floated past and out of sight and then floated back again, his head and shoulders sticking high out of the middle of the dense Mexican crowd where he seemed trapped. And he began to float away again. But as he passed this time, he surprised me. I had been imagining him as implacably, aristocratically impervious to anything that did not fit his purposes. But the face that was passing now was pinched in intense discomfort. And for a moment he turned his face in my direction, found me instantly, focused on me as intently as if he were about to thrust with his fencing saber. In the next moment, he was borne away, but I knew he would be back, and when the young man sitting to my right suddenly stood up and moved off, Mensinger was beside me, arriving so quickly and unobserved that I imagined he had somehow scaled the wall and clung to an electric light fixture in the ceiling and had thus dropped down beside me in the instant the space was vacated.

And so here we now were. Shoulder to shoulder. This must have been as discomforting for him as it was surprising for me. That he should have lost his composure in the press of a crowd of heathens. That he felt the compulsion to seek refuge next to the only non-Mexican he could find. And now, to regain his composure, he was not speaking. He was sitting here beside me as if it were simply the only available empty space on the bench. Which gave me time to decide a couple of crucial things.

I found myself calm, though I also found that the impulse to make a wise and prompt retreat was stronger in me right now than on any hot-lead-filled field of combat I’d ever covered.

But I was calm, and it was time to improvise.

I could not be Gerhard Vogel. That much was abundantly clear.

Outside of the occupied zone, it was less likely I’d have to show my passport. And if I did, such a moment would not be in Mensinger’s presence. For documents and tickets, he would be in the Pullman drawing room and I would be in a first-class car.

I could be anyone I wanted.

Except German. Except American.

We could speak Spanish. But since I didn’t know what else he might speak, I figured I better be English-speaking in my assumed identity.

Mensinger cleared his throat.

I was not ready yet.

I held very still, letting him have no cue to speak.

Could I be English? They were high on the list of Germany’s imminent enemies. If I wanted to actually make this a fruitful exchange, I should not be English.

South African. English but not quite English. But possibly a sore point for Mensinger, since the Germans strongly sympathized with the Boers against the Brits, and not so very long ago. Not South African.

Canadian.

Mensinger shifted a little beside me. I could see him enough in my periphery to watch him fake a cough into his fist.

I remained absolutely motionless.

Canadian. The Germans, as far as I knew, never had a thing to do with what was now Canada. The only question was Quebec or Ontario. I could pull off the French. But it was a different French and another layer of complexity. Simple. This needed to be simple. Toronto.

I was ready, and suddenly I was keenly aware of the way things had abruptly changed. The man I’d been observing from afar and delicately following for some days now was pressed hard against my right shoulder and arm and thigh.

I ever so slightly flexed my right shoulder, and with a little head-flip to the left I popped my neck. I glanced for a brief beat in Mensinger’s direction. He sensed it and was turning his face toward mine as I looked back to the front again. The afterimage of Friedrich Mensinger was almost entirely his scar, a fibrous white scimitar running along his left cheek from ear to lip, as wide as a pipe stem. Wider than any dueling sword would leave under normal circumstances. He was one of those who packed his wound with horsehair to keep it agape while it healed. A further assertion of Germanic manliness.

I blinked the image away. I waited. I could sense him pondering how to speak, not knowing my language.

After a moment, he said, in a slightly pinched, slightly nasal voice, aristocratic to my ear, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

I looked at him. His eyes were shockingly pale, the gray-green of a scummy pond on a cloudless afternoon. His mustache was his own, not Wilhelm’s; it was full and dust-colored but with no uptwirls, no points at all. He was his own man.

“Deutsch?” I said. “No. Nein. Sorry. Do you sprechen English?”

He narrowed those eyes at me a little.

“I’m Simon,” I said, thinking Legree, in the spur of the melodramatic moment, staring into this face. Now I needed a last name. Canadian-sounding. “Chance,” I said, drawing on the Cubs of my youth, their peerless leader. “From Toronto.” Simon Chance would do.

He was still not unnarrowing his eyes.

“Canada,” I said.

I lifted my right hand from between us and angled it toward him, inviting a shake of sorts in the tight quarters.

“Nein English,” he managed to say. And then, remembering, “No. No English.”

“Do you speak Spanish?” I said in that language.

He nodded.

“No problem then,” I said. And this became our common tongue.

“I am Friedrich Mensinger,” he said, taking my hand and shaking it firmly enough that I was glad I got the crotch of my thumb into his or this would have been painful.

“We are conspicuous here, aren’t we, you and I,” I said, nodding my head toward the crowd of Mexicans from whose currents he had just washed ashore.

“Yes we are,” he said, letting go of my hand. “We are different.”

“What part of Germany are you from?”

He hesitated for one brief beat. “The north,” he said.

Though he was vague, he did not look away from me. His pond-eyes showed nothing. They were still. He needed to be sitting here next to me, in our little Aryan corner of this world. So he was more comfortable now. Which meant, ironically, he’d recovered his reserve. He was fundamentally a man of secrets, after all.

I had to be careful if I wanted to work even a little something out of him.

Ask nothing. Give something. It didn’t have to be meaningful. “I came up from Vera Cruz this morning,” I said.

He didn’t give a damn, of course.

So I matched his mood. And I showed him I expected nothing. I broke off our eye contact and looked out at the crowd.

Mensinger was feeling like himself again, extracted from this mass of his inferiors. What did Richard Harding Davis call these people a few days ago? He was, in effect, talking of their ingratitude for our occupation of a piece of their country. Spigotties and squaws. There was no German translation for that, but I suspected Mensinger had his equivalents.

I needed to make it clear to Mensinger that I was not going to small-talk him. But before I fell silent, I regretted that I needed to play my gambit once again, to set the political mood. “Couldn’t be witness to that any longer. Schweinehund Americans,” I said. And without looking at him, I added, “I think that’s the appropriate German.”

“It is,” he said.

And I said no more. He said no more.

If he was watching the crowd too — which he must have been; he was certainly not staring at me — then eventually he’d want to keep the connection going. Even if just a little bit.

It took a while. But finally he said, “They will not go forward, these Americans, do you think?”

“Their president has no balls,” I said. I did not look at him, but I felt him — what? hard to describe — do something like a faint expansion of his chest to hear his own thought confirmed in the very terms he’d thought it. But I had to be careful. No more allusions to his envelope.

“You are right,” he said. “We have a way of saying that in German.”

He was about to try out his line for Villa. I still wouldn’t look at him, though I thought he had turned to me now. I would have trouble keeping the eagerness out of my face.

“Dieser Nation hat doch keine Eier,” he said

I clenched the fist that was sitting on my thigh. I’d picked up the critical, unexpected word. The whole nation has no balls. The United States of America. Not just Woodrow Wilson. Or eggs, actually. The U.S.A. has no German balls, which are rather like eggs. I was tempted to ask him if that was chicken eggs that Germans were proud of having. Goose eggs? Quail eggs?

I bucked up my reportorial objectivity.

I looked at him.

He winked at me. He offered no full translation.

I smiled and nodded and hoped it didn’t look forced.

We stayed silent. He looked away. I looked away.

The crowd jostled very near us and a woman’s rebozo loosened from her chest and an infant’s head and shoulders emerged and swayed close to Mensinger, nearly into his face. He recoiled and his hands moved out of sight and I wondered if he still had his pistol on his far hip, if his hand had gone there by reflex. The woman caught up her child and the crowd flowed on, and the space before us, though slight, was clear again. It was enough. Mensinger’s hands reappeared and stretched to his knees and settled there, his arms straight and stiff. He was resolved not to be provoked by these people.

But he was. They deeply unsettled him. He needed to talk, to escape inward. “They are full of guile, however, these Americans,” Mensinger said. “We can say they have no manhood and it is true, but they still can cause trouble.”

I turned my face to him. He was not looking at me. He had once again, to my eye, become his scar, upward-bent, like a musing frown. It was all I saw for the moment. He was going on: “They can meddle in things that are not their affair. This much is clear from Vera Cruz.”

He paused. He seemed to be watching the crowd, but he’d retreated into his mind. His scar pivoted away. He fixed his eyes intently on mine. “Is this not so?” he said.

I had an abrupt stopping in me, a hot flush in the face from being caught. I heard this as a direct challenge, as if he knew I was an American. But he said, “I ask for your opinion as one who shares a long and vulnerable border.”

I shrugged, glanced away for a second to recover my composure.

I said, “Their President seems timid.” I believed it. I hated to admit it to this Hun. But I needed to draw him out.

“They are not so far removed from Theodore Roosevelt,” Mensinger said. “He was more like a German. So there is that element in the Americans. This is the trouble with a mongrel country. They are inconsistent. And I do not expect even this man Wilson to be timid forever.”

Mensinger was sounding a little heated now. He seemed to realize it. He stopped abruptly. “So,” he said. And he shut up again.

But quotes. Quotes. I already had some very fine quotes for my story, straight from a German secret agent.

“What is your work?” Mensinger suddenly asked. He realized he’d been talking too much, even with an apparently meaningless Canadian. He wanted to know if he’d made a mistake.

“Coffee,” I said. “Mexican coffee. High-mountain, shade-grown, cheap-and-getting-cheaper coffee. Wonderful beans. Did you smell the coffee in the warehouses of Esperanza? Great bouquet. Half those beans will end up in Canadian cups. It’s cold and it’s dark in Canada. We need to get our blood going and we do it with Mexican coffee, which I export to great profit for the everlasting benefit of my countrymen.”

I had no idea where all that came from. Unpremeditated. Improvised. To be honest, actors — who were, collectively, my aunts and uncles, my older sisters and brothers, my trainers and my professors, my fathers — through all my formative years — actors, I say — including the actor I myself often am — sometimes scare the hell out me.

But Mensinger, who I’d been playing to as if he were the Mayor of New York in a loge box with his party at the Belasco, seemed convinced. He very slightly tilted his head and nodded. “I like a good cup of coffee,” he said. “But strong. Very strong. Your Mexican coffee is not strong.”

“It can be made strong.”

“Very strong,” he said. “Strong in the bean.”

“Strong in the bean,” I said. “Right. Of course. I don’t think Mexican coffee is strong in the bean.”

“No.”

“No.”

“Some people cannot take it strong in the bean,” he said. And by “people” I gather he meant “nations.”

“In your country you make sure you buy it strong,” I said.

“In the bean. Yes. Very.”

“And what do you do for a living, Herr Mensinger?”

He did not miss a beat. “I also am a businessman.”

He offered no more.

“What sort of product?” I said.

“Money,” he said. “Money is the product. I advise banks. There are some very powerful German banks in Mexico.”

I was not interested in having him elaborate on his cover identity. So I took the opportunity to chip away at any suspicion he might have had about me. I said, “Can I ask you a question about your German bankers in Mexico?”

He did not answer. His lower lip pushed up into the same curve as his scar.

I said, “What do they do for strong coffee?”

It was not what he expected, of course. The face froze for a moment, and then he actually smiled and chuckled. A creepy smile. His mouth undid its curve, flattened, then spread wide and puckered a little at the corners and opened in a quarter smile with gray teeth. The chuckle was a slow turn of a Gatling gun. None of this, of course, prompted by a sense of humor. I didn’t think he was capable of perceiving irony, much less attributing it to a Canadian stranger, much less appreciating it as a subtle joke. This was a smile and chuckle of cultural and intellectual superiority. Prompted by my continuing to think and talk and ask such questions as this about coffee after he had already made the international politics of that subject clear to anyone who had ears to listen.

“They suffer,” he said.

I put on a sympathetically constricted face. I nodded.

I looked out to the crowd for a moment, to let Mensinger assume a drift in my shallow Canadian mind. Without looking at him I said, “Will these Mexicans ever have a viable government again?”

Mensinger snorted. “They need another Díaz.”

“Perhaps Carranza. He seems keen on taking over.”

Mensinger snorted again. “A weak man. He is no Díaz.”

“Not strong in the bean,” I said. Now I looked at Mensinger, ready to put on a vapid face for him, to keep him off guard.

“Not strong in the bean,” he said. I had him, for the moment at least. He’d bought into the metaphor and was watching the crowd. He was thinking — and not about me. This was good.

“Pancho Villa, then?” I asked.

“He is very strong in the bean,” he said.

“But he seems regional. All the rebels seem regional.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” Mensinger said.

“What could Villa possibly do to put the whole country behind him.” I didn’t ask it, I said it. And I said it with a scornful, dismissive tone. The dumb Canadian coffee merchant. I wobbled my head and smirked, hoping he would see it.

Mensinger looked at me.

I wobbled my head and smirked some more.

He was thinking whether I was worth instructing.

Wobbled and smirked. Though I knew I’d better stop that. I was overacting.

He was thinking I’d never understand. But part of him liked instructing the ignorant in things they could never understand. How superior he was.

I’d stopped wobbling and smirking. “Permanent chaos,” I said.

“Something bold,” Mensinger said.

I held still. I said nothing.

“He is a very good military man,” Mensinger said. “He can do something bold.”

I shrugged. Very very slightly. “They all just fight each other, the rebels.”

Mensinger hesitated again. Those eyes. Pale though they were, beneath their scummy surface, things rose near and then swam deep again. I tried to read those eyes. I was afraid I’d done all I could do. What I had going now in order to induce him to let down his guard: I could see all that dissipating. He had no reason to feel anxious surrounded by mongrel Mexicans. They were beneath him. He had nothing more to say to this idiot merchant from a marginal country. I was beneath him. But his eyes now gathered a focus that you sometimes see in pedants and preachers and the supremely powerful.

He said, “You bring a country together by finding someone you can all agree to hate.”