The Hot Country

44

We rode only one train back and pulled up at a postal car.

Slim said, “Our boys are quartered here.” He said no more about that but he swung a leg off his horse. “Our boys” included me.

We all dismounted and a kid not much older than Diego suddenly appeared. He was wearing an overlarge sombrero and a single bandolera over one shoulder, mostly empty but with a few rounds of what looked like shotgun cartridges. He was not carrying the weapon itself. He took Slim’s reins and Hernando’s, and Slim nodded him toward my horse as well. We went up the end steps and into the postal car.

Inside, it smelled of mildew and old wood and of the complex body-and-equipment stink of fighting men in the field. At the far end were bag racks stuffed with gear and weapons. Stretching this way below the windows along one wall were sorting tables, which functioned like low-slung bunk beds — one man to sleep on the tabletop, one below. Along the other wall were a couple of little clusters of spindle-back chairs.

Slim and Hernando stepped ahead of me and started clearing bunks. Our losses from the hacienda. They were finishing up and Slim said, “We most of us sleep out in the open if the night’s good. Old habits.”

“Thanks,” I said to him, putting my saddlebags on one of the cleared doubles. Even as I ostensibly settled in with our boys, I was starting to get restless as Christopher Cobb. I could see using one of the chairs with my sorting-table bunk to break out the Corona and start serious work on writing the back end of the story.

I’d had no way to act upon this till Slim got me quartered, but I realized the story needed me to take a specific, immediate action. Villa seemed to understand the press and he used us for his own ends. He also seemed impulsive in his speech and a little naïve about international politics. But in this case, whatever would happen between Mensinger and Pancho Villa was likely to stay strictly between them until it was too late. I had to get ahead of this story. And the only way I could see to do that was to look at Mensinger’s papers.

And the image of him standing near Villa’s car snapped clearly into focus in my head. His horse and saddlebags were elsewhere. He had nothing in his hands, nothing under his arm. Okay. He was not going to play all his cards straight off his horse with the night coming on. This was the time just to register his horsemanship with Villa and have a drink. He would keep the papers to himself overnight. He would make that presentation formally. Probably tomorrow. The papers weren’t left on the horse. They were in his quarters. And this might be the only shot I had at them.

“I need to step out for a while,” I said, my first impulse being to head up to Villa’s car and wait for Mensinger to come out and then follow him. I needed to know where he was staying, but this plan would simply leave me waiting for him to go out again. Which he might not do.

Slim and Hernando shot each other a sly look. Slim said, “Next train back, the first boxcar behind the tender. Ask for Señora Toba-Rojas. She keeps track of the unattached women. She’ll know about your girl if she came to us.”

“Use my name with the señora,” Hernando said, and he flipped his chin at Slim. “Not the gringo’s.”

The two shared a laugh, about Slim’s problems with Toba-Rojas, not about me supposedly looking for Luisa. I was content to let them think that was why I was going out. And I was glad to know how to look for Luisa, if it came to that.

I took my first step away from them and my hand fell to my side. I touched my holster. I paused. Do I want my pistol with me? Yes. And then another thought: Before I dashed off to find out something the hard way, I should see if there was an easier way. I turned back to the two men. They knew I was a reporter. They would assume I’d consider anyone fair game for my questions. And this guy was obviously interesting.

So I asked, “Do either of you know where the German will be quartered?”

Hernando and Slim looked at each other, thinking together in silence about this.

After a moment, Slim nodded, and then Hernando. As if the one made a suggestion and the other agreed, though neither of them said a word. These were two men who had fought beside each other for a long while.

“Well, not your journalist car,” Slim said.

Hernando said, “No. The journalist car is full of whores now.”

Slim shot me a glance. “Always has been,” he said.

The two laughed loud, this time at me.

I made myself laugh too.

Slim said, “There’s another caboose a couple of trains back.”

“Right.”

“They’d put him there.”

“Any important visitors go there when we’re on the move,” Hernando said.

I had to lead up to a suspicious question now, but I didn’t know any other way.

I asked, “Does everybody in camp realize the important visitors stay there?”

Slim and Hernando were still giving my questions thoughtful consideration. They looked at each other and nodded. “Pretty much,” Slim said.

“Do the big boys get a guard?”

“Sometimes,” Slim said. “If they bring one.”

“And when they go out? What about theft?”

Slim shrugged. “If there ain’t exactly honor among all the thieves here — and there is actually some of that, believe it or not — there is at least fear. Everyone knows not to mess with whoever’s in there. The man who does has nowhere to run and he’d end up shot if he tried to.”

“The guy who brought him to Villa. Would he be able to ease the German’s mind on that?” I asked this of Slim, in English.

Slim gave me a quick now-I-know-what-you’re-up-to look, but he said, also in English, “Major Ostos. Yeah. He’d put your man’s mind at ease.”

“Thanks,” I said and I took a step toward the door.

“Hey,” Slim said. I stopped and turned. “Chicago Slim,” he said. Meaning me.

I was surprised at how this filled me up like a racing tire on a Stutz. But all I could do was nod very slightly. Which was enough for Tallahassee Slim, I knew.

He said, in Spanish again, “When you’re done mashing, if you want to do some drinking, we’re fifty yards due south.” And he pointed very deliberately out the window of the car to show me where he meant.

I nodded again and turned and I went out the door and down the steps. I thought: Mensinger wants to keep it personal with Villa tonight. Ostos assured him of the safety of his quarters. Mensinger took the papers inside and put them somewhere out of sight. They are waiting for me. For a little while, at least.

And though I was focusing on the story now, as I headed in the direction of Mensinger’s car, my thoughts of the saddlebags carried me to an image of Mensinger taking them from his horse and hiding them away, but my mind ebbed back to the horse being led off and then on to the boy who took our own horses. I thought of his bandolera, and then I thought of Diego, and I thought of all the children I’d seen out of the corner of my eye in the past hour or two. It was not just the women of Mexico who went off to live inside the war as it was being fought; it was the children. And my mind flowed back again to Diego. And to Bunky. I reassured myself that when I finished this story and got to the nearest safe telegraph office — and given the story’s contents, that would mean a telegraph office across the border — and as soon as Clyde cleared the story and was ready to run it, I would head back to Vera Cruz.

I was passing the first boxcar after the tender on the next train. The door was open. And I thought of Luisa too. But I didn’t know how long Mensinger would linger with Villa tonight. Every moment was crucial. I put aside all the peripheral people in my life. I walked faster, as fast as I could without drawing attention to myself.