The Hot Country

45

I removed my sombrero and sloughed off my serape and held them low beside me on the side nearest the train as I approached Mensinger’s caboose. Anyone observing me was more likely to wonder at one of their own entering the car reserved for special guests than at a seeming gringo. Still, I drifted a little beyond the car and hesitated and looked around, and for all the potential observers arrayed widely before me, camped in the open and lounging by their campfires, and for all the irregular flow of people along the track, no one seemed to be paying any attention to me whatsoever.

I went up the back steps of the caboose and entered. I put my serape and sombrero on. There was still a bit of post-sunset lightness in the sky and I could see well enough inside to find a kerosene lamp on the desk and a box of matches beside it. I removed the chimney. The wick was new and trimmed and I struck a match and replaced the chimney. I turned the wick knob so the lamp would burn as low as possible but still provide reading light.

I looked around. The car was similar to Villa’s, though the benches on both sides were made up like bunks. Except for the lamp, the desktop was empty. The bunks had only bedding. The chair before the desk, the chair farther along, next to the potbellied stove, were empty. No saddlebags. I moved farther into the car, passing the stove, and I saw something out of the corner of my eye, a shape in the deep shadows behind the stove. I stopped. I bent near.

Mensinger’s saddlebags.

I took note of exactly how they were folded there.

I pulled them out and carried them to the desk.

I laid them flat and opened one side and began to put my hand in to feel around. But I hesitated. Mensinger could have set a little trap. I ran one hand inside, palm upward, very slowly, keeping the hand absolutely flat and with the back of it pressed against the inner wall of the bag, my hand and forearm sliding into the bag till my fingertips touched the bottom, feeling cloth on my palm the whole way. I imagined a stacking of folded clothes. I spread my hand and hooked my fingers upward at the bottom edge of as much of everything above it that I could, and I carefully began to draw out the contents in a single, preserved stack.

I felt a few small items slough away and remain inside. It couldn’t be helped. I had to deal with them later. The stack was free and I set it down on the desktop. This packing job was the work of a meticulous man, a careful and suspicious man. That was my fear. That it would be impossible to prevent such a man from knowing someone had gone through his things. Perhaps it wouldn’t matter. If I found out what I needed and did it before he returned, perhaps it would be all right. He didn’t know me and I’d stay out of his way and I’d do what I needed to do here and slip away. But I at least had to try to conceal what I was doing. If I concentrated, perhaps I could replace these things so he’d never know. Unless he was meticulous to the point of obsession.

I realized sweat was dripping from my forehead, and my heart was pounding in my throat. I’d ignored my body’s awareness of the time slipping onward and of the possibility he could walk through the door at any moment. I would have to ignore it again.

I began to lay his things aside so that I could relayer them when I put them back, as if they’d not been touched. His shirts. His woolen socks. His underdrawers, which were made of silk. Which I handled as if they were rotten fruit. His handkerchiefs. Another pair of riding breeches. And in the center of all this, a six-inch, no doubt keenly sharpened knife, pointed in the direction of the top opening of the bag. The little surprise for the prowler, as I suspected. And on and on. The usual stuff. A small rubber bag with medicines: quinine, calomel, Sun Cholera Mixture in tablets. His toothbrush. A union suit. And I went back into the bag and withdrew the sloughed-off items.

Three bars of soap. In delicate wrappers. Smelling strongly of lilac. Were these soaps his choice? Was this a side of Friedrich von Mensinger that he’d better keep hidden from Villa? Or were they specially given him by Anna, his Anna who loved him in spite of his striking her in public, twice at the Stadtgarten for her sympathetic tears, which meant he struck her often, in public and in private. She gave him these soaps and he still had them. If he scorned them when she gave them, he would have no doubt told her so and struck her again or at least thrown the soaps at her feet. If he scorned them but while he was in a placid mood, which even a man who beat a wife could find himself in now and then, if he scorned them but took the soaps, he would have disposed of them long before this. But he took them and he kept them and he waited, perhaps, for a chance to use them. Would he feel close to his wife when he did? Men who beat their wives could embody this paradox also. To wish to hurt them and yet, at times, to feel sentimentally nostalgic over them. I’d seen men do this to women. To my mother. She’d spoken of this paradox. She spoke of it and found nothing in Marlowe or Shakespeare or Sophocles or anyone else to quote so that she could express this paradox, and she thus spoke of it to me strictly in her own words, with no quotations to help distance her from whatever complex feelings she was having and I clenched at Friedrich von Mensinger’s briarwood pipe, which I now found in my hand and which I would snap in two if I didn’t control myself and stay focused on what I was here for. So I controlled myself. And I focused. And I was keenly conscious that time was slipping away and I was not finding any papers.

There was another side to the bag.

But first I carefully restacked the items I’d already withdrawn, leaving everything restored on the desktop, ready to be inserted later. All but the soaps. I didn’t know how they’d been arranged on top. But he couldn’t possibly read anything from them. They would have shifted from the jostling of the ride. If there were clues for Mensinger, they were in the arrangements of these other items. I’d done the best I could.

And now the other side of the bag. I opened it. I withdrew the items as a single unit. I once again peeled back and set aside layer after layer of Friedrich Mensinger’s quotidian life. His carefully folded white linen suit. His shoes wrapped in a towel. His clothes brush. And more. And more. And there was no Papiere. There were no documents. No papers.

I restacked this final collection of Mensinger’s meaningless stuff.

Everything from the saddlebags sat upon the desk in two piles. I took a deep breath. And I heard a thump. A sound from outside. I straightened. I stopped breathing. I could simply bolt in the other direction, to the joined end of the car. There was another door, another platform, a way out. Unless it was locked. But now I heard laughter beneath the windows. Passing. Two male voices now. Speaking Spanish. Two drunken Villistas.

He could have taken the papers out. He could have hidden them separately. I turned around. I looked to the bunks. To the bedding. To the stove. Perhaps inside the burner of the stove. I was about to move to these places but I thought of Mensinger’s saddlebags once more. One more possibility.

I picked up the bags, one compartment in each hand.

One side was heavier than the other. The first side I searched.

I laid the bags down. I opened the heavier side and looked at the top stitching. Nothing unusual. I ran my hand to the bottom. I pressed my fingertips as far in as possible and then bent them downward. The inner wall was one large flap. I ran my hand along the bottom of it and at the far left I found a heavy button. I undid it. I moved my hand along the bottom edge to the far right and I found another button. I undid it. I pulled the flap out of the bag. I reached back inside and I found an inner compartment, shallow but sufficient to hold the thing I drew out. A thin, leather document portfolio.

I had him. I cleared the space beneath the lamp. But time was the thing. I had to keep that in mind, but I had to slow down now. I slipped the leather flap of the portfolio out of its loop and I opened the cover.

I ran the fingertips of both my hands in the leather margins surrounding this little pile of documents. There were several things here. Heavy paper. I lifted them out. I had to be obsessively meticulous now myself. If I’d inadvertently, inevitably left him some little clue in his personal items that someone had been here, I could at least make him think the intruder did not find the papers. But I was suddenly keenly aware once more of the beating of my heart, each beat marking time, like the ticking of a clock in a world sped up. These seconds were rushing now, these minutes. I thought: I should just take the papers. Take them and get on my horse and ride away. I could not only write a story but produce the documents themselves, could give them to the U.S. government.

And now I felt the sudden demand to define myself. Or to redefine myself. I was a reporter. I’d already stretched the boundaries for a reporter. But not by the standards of most of my colleagues in the business. The Hearst men. The Pulitzer men. They would do anything for a story. I’d already done more than I’d expected. Here I stood in this man’s quarters, rifling through his private things. Intervening was another matter. Richard Harding Davis would intervene. They all did in Cuba. They all worked up a dandy little war of their own, all at Mr. Hearst’s bidding. And taking the papers wouldn’t change Mensinger’s intentions. It would come out that the American stole these things and perhaps simply give weight to his arguments. And the story itself, without my actually stealing the documents, would be just as good. A story about what Germany was trying to do. What Mexico might do. Bring it into the public light in a newspaper.

I kept the documents in my hand but I centered them in the bright, immediate arc of the kerosene lamp. Voices. I straightened up again. Spanish. Mensinger spoke Spanish. But I knew his voice now. Pinched. Sucked through his nose. The superior man speaking the inferior language. These voices passed. They were not him. I bent to the documents. I needed to read them quickly, get their gist, a flavor of their phrasing. Needed to apply my best quote-gathering frame of mind.

The first was a letter in German. The Imperial Eagle sat spreading his wings at the top. At the bottom was a signature. Clearly Wilhelm’s, with wide slurs of ink at the peaks of the “W” and the “l’s” and the “h,” the man pushing heavily, grossly at a flexible nib. My German wasn’t good enough to waste time trying to read it. I moved this document to the bottom of the stack. And I found a letter in Spanish on the same paper, with the same eagle. I pulled the bottom letter up again and I matched a few words, and the two documents were the same. This was a translation for Villa. Full of warm, fellow-warrior backslapping. And a promise of general financial support and the immediate gifts of arms if they were used to advance their “appropriate, immediate common goals,” as would be explained in person by the Kaiser’s special emissary, Friedrich von Mensinger. A further promise was made of unwavering support in whatever form was necessary in the event of “longer-term engagements with common enemies.”

All of this was consistent with the suspicions I’d already formed. The Germans wanted Villa to take on the Americans. And they would be very happy, I was sure, if it became a longer-term engagement.

Both letters went to the bottom of the stack. And now I was looking at another eagle. The American eagle. The appropriate common goal. I was holding heavier paper, curled at the edges, a photograph that was not quite the size of a letter. The image was somewhat blurred, rather dim, as if the original item was photographed covertly in low light and was enlarged beyond its negative’s natural capacity. And what I was looking at was a typewritten memo on the apparent letterhead of the President of the United States. It read:

19 February 1914

To Secretary of State Bryan,

I think our conversation clarified our thoughts. Under no circumstances can the United States of America allow the bandit Pancho Villa to gain control of Mexico. He is an illiterate man who can not think rationally. Venustiano Carranza is a man of breeding, education, rational good sense. Our total support of him would allow to control the Mexican government for our business and political interests. We shall speak soon about ways for implementing this.

And it was signed “Wilson” in a clearly legible, pretty straightforward hand, sharp-edged and forward-slanting, with the “n” extended outward and then slashed downward and slightly to the rear, a flourish, but a stiff one. It struck me — though without an authentic one to compare it to — as reminiscent of the President’s actual signature, which I’d seen a few times. But it had always struck me that his signature was simple enough and legible enough that someone with any such skill at all could easily create a forgery of it.

And certainly the memo was a forgery. I doubted the form of the dateline. It was the Europeans who put the day before the month. The phrasing sounded off. From its stiffness to the odd “allow to control.” The word “us” might have simply been omitted by accident in that phrase, but I thought I’d heard Germans make this mistake in English. There must be a phrase in German they were trying to reproduce.

Not that Wilson and Bryan were incapable of coming to the conclusion expressed here. It might even be likely. I just didn’t believe the proof was authentic.

But Villa would have no way to doubt this memo. The next sheet under the photograph was the Spanish translation, which was all he’d care about. And even that, he wouldn’t be able to read very effectively. The irony was that this element of the Mensinger mission was based on the very assessment of Villa they were ascribing to Wilson. The forged memo exploited the man’s near illiteracy and emotionalism.

And maps were next. The first was large and folded. I laid the papers on the desktop and unfolded it. A Rand McNally map of Texas, only two years old, specially featuring the railroads and military forts of the state.

I refolded the map.

I was aware again of the shortness of my breath.

I opened the next map. It was a U.S. Department of the Interior topographical map of San Antonio and its surrounding area, detailing the streets and the railroads and highlighting the military posts in red.

I’d been making a major incorrect assumption all along.

And there was one more map. An original. Hand-drawn. But professionally so. By some German-American. No. Gerhard Vogel, the real one, was a German-American, and he gave his life for his country. This was a German in America. Seeming to be an aspiring artist. Visiting this tourist site. Making sketches. Chatting with the guards. A charming man. A talented man. And he’d made a detailed map showing entrances, guard stations, communication lines, the parts of the walls that were in disrepair, the places of weakness. He’d drawn a map of the Alamo.

The immediate goal.

Ignore the Americans in Vera Cruz. Raid America itself. Destroy the Alamo and cause whatever damage you could along the way. And even maybe try to hold on to southwest Texas. Hold on till the rest of Mexico stopped fighting itself and united behind Villa and, as one, undertook a glorious campaign to avenge their loss in 1848. Between all the rebel factions and the Federales, the Mexicans had significantly more men in arms than the whole of the U.S. Army. And they were battle-seasoned. And they could even dream of getting it all back, all the way to California.

And even if Villa and his country would be crazy to do it, even if they were doomed to fail, with the Kaiser working up his own conflict in Europe, German interests would be well-served if they could arrange a major, protracted war between America and Mexico. And the war would cut off Mexican oil, which the U.S. and Britain both greatly relied on, with Mexico’s prime ally, Germany, reaping the supply

What a hell of a front-page story.

And my hands were already working quickly. Quickly but carefully. I was bent very near to the portfolio to put these things back in, just as they were when I found them. They were inside now. Right order. Squared up. The portfolio was closed. I pulled the inner flap out of the saddlebag. I laid the portfolio in its space. I pushed the flap back in. I reached deep inside the saddlebag and found the first of the two buttons on the flap down there.

Too much of a hell of a story. I was racing too fast inside. My hands weren’t working like they should. The goddam button wouldn’t go. Wouldn’t go. Were my hands trembling? Hell no. Maybe.

Voices. I clenched in the chest. I unbent a little, though my hand stayed where it was, still struggling with the button. The voices passed. He wouldn’t come with a heralding of voices. He would be alone. He would appear suddenly at the door. He could appear at any moment.

I didn’t like this. It felt like goddam stage fright. Which I had once, as a very young man going on the stage for the first time. To carry a spear. To open a carriage door. Something. I felt like that. I’d rather face machine gun fire than this.

I put both hands inside the portfolio. One to hold the button hole open. They fumbled in there, my hands. I couldn’t even find the buttonhole now. This was not who I was. This was not. I took my hands out of the portfolio. I pressed them against the tabletop, braced myself there. I worked to control my breath.

And a sound from the door.

And I found my body upright, my head turned toward the back end of the car, my right arm extended, my Browning pistol pointed at the door. All this happened just now by reflex, I realized. And I held my breath. Held it. My breath was not clenched. I was holding it. And my hand was steady. The barrel of the pistol was utterly motionless. I could squeeze the trigger as softly as I needed so as to put a bullet in the center of his forehead. I was who I was again.

But the door was not opening.

The sound once more: a scuttling along the floor, and then silence. A rat. A different rat from the one I was expecting.

I lowered my arm.

I put my pistol in its holster.

I bent once again to the portfolio and thrust my right hand deep inside and I buttoned first the one side of the inner flap and then the other.

I picked up the stack of objects from that side of the bag. I slipped them in as I’d found them. The shirts and the socks and the riding breeches and the silk drawers and the knife in their midst. The soaps. And then the other side. The linen suit. The shoes. The clothes brush. All the rest. All of it went in as it had come out and I secured the outer flaps of the saddlebags.

I turned down the wick on the lamp, angled a hand over the top of the chimney, and I blew out the light. I picked up the saddlebags.

I turned toward the front of the caboose and walked into the darkness there. The glow of a hundred campfires outside showed me the shape of the stove, and I returned the saddlebags to the space behind exactly as I’d found them. I stepped farther on to the door that adjoined the next car, a boxcar. The door was, as I suspected, locked. I was quite calm. I turned and I walked to the rear door and I opened it.

The back platform was empty. I stepped out, closed the door. Mensinger likely would approach from the same side of the train I’d earlier walked along, the side where he’d dismounted from his horse. I could go down the steps to the other side of the train. But I knew where I wanted to go next. And I was not afraid of Mensinger. I wouldn’t be in Villa’s camp for long. I had what I needed for the story.

But I did take off my sombrero so I could peek around the corner of the car. There would still be some inconvenience in running into him in the next few moments.

I looked. It was dark but I could see from the desert glow of campfires that he was not in the immediate vicinity. I went down the steps, put my sombrero on, and strode off toward the forward trains.

I walked perhaps a dozen boxcars along and I saw him approaching on foot. He was still fifty yards away and he was looking at me, I thought, but I simply let my head fall slightly forward. The brim of the sombrero made him vanish, made my face disappear from his sight. It was dark. I could not see any details of his face. So he could not clearly identify mine, especially when he knew my face only as a Canadian coffee salesman and the rest of what he saw was so wildly out of context with that.

I made myself stumble a bit, stagger a bit, and I cursed in Spanish, pitching my voice high, putting on just enough of a tinge of the melodrama-Mexican to still stay real but to make my voice unrecognizable as the voice from the station in Mexico City. I sang a little: “Ay, ay, ay, ay, Canta y no llores. .” Enough for him to hear, and I broke off, as if I could not remember the words. And I saw his high-booted legs, his puttees, and though he slowed — he did slow down — nevertheless he was passing. And I saw the British cavalry sword that had been on Villa’s desk. It was hanging now at Mensinger’s side. A gift for the German government representative. And Mensinger passed, and I kept going, staggering ever so slightly once more. “Ay, ay, ay, ay,” I sang.