The Hot Country

8

The benches along the path were full of older locals, segregated by sex, some full of men with their sombreros in their laps, others full of women with their rebozos gathered no farther than their shoulders, their heads also bare to the cooling twilight. The local boys were mashing from the edges of the band shell as the local girls promenaded before them in their best skirts dyed in colors of the sunset that had just now faded or the Vera Cruz sky at noon, the girls in pairs with their arms around each other’s waists, which was more than just girlfriendship. It was a taunting thing directed at the boys as well, which I knew from me looking at the prettiest of them and finding myself envying the arm of her friend.

And there were groups of strolling American Army boys in clean khakis, smart enough not to look at the local baby-dolls too close, briefed well by their officers to behave around the girls’ Latin-tempered future husbands. The horny among our boys knew where to go later, a short ride along the trolley line for the professionals. So half a dozen of our boys were gathering as I approached and trying unsuccessfully but loudly to harmonize, “Give my regards to Broadway, remember me to Herald Square.”

I moved around the shell a bit to watch the Germans making music. They all had Kaiser Wilhelm mustaches, thick over the lips with sharp upturns at each end. They all were dressed in white band uniforms with crimson trim and epaulets and brass buttons. The biggest of the musicians was pounding the upright bass drum. The cornets were carrying the tune and the trombones were sliding their sounds in and out, pointing up the melody, and I scanned the faces of these men who might otherwise have been training to fight the French or the Serbs or the Brits or whoever else. As I did, with the faces seeming as similar to each other as soldiers under their gold hat brims, a trim but solid-looking man sitting on the near end of the front row moved his eyes to me. He was blowing an alto horn, its bell bent to point upward. He didn’t look away and I nodded at him and he looked forward again.

He seemed to have recognized me. My name was certainly familiar in the American press — and my stories were even syndicated occasionally into German and Spanish — but my face was not familiar. There’d been some magazine photos of me, but only a very few. I wasn’t like the celebrity-seeking Davis. He could be recognized on any number of big-city street corners, or perhaps even from a band shell in a plaza in Vera Cruz, Mexico. But not me. Maybe I was wrong about the moment of recognition. Or maybe I just needed that drink. I looked close enough at the guy with the alto horn to find him later if I needed a German for a quote, and I headed back down the path. By the time I got to the avenida, the band had finished with George M. Cohan and had started up La Cucaracha, though more in the rhythm of a polka than a Mexican folk dance, the two pieces in sequence making up a lunatic music-hall overture for this night and for this half-assed invasion and for international politics in general.

I drifted away, back toward the hotel.

Working the city beat in Chicago as a cub reporter made me very familiar with the street lowlifes, all the grafters and prowlers, the hoisters and heavyweights, the crawlers and the gonifs. Made me never take a step in public without my full attention. So I usually knew when there was somebody else’s hand in my pocket. And as soon as I passed out of the light from the bandstand and into a dark stretch of the path, I saw a small, deeply shadowed shape out of the corner of my eye. It slipped very neatly and quietly up to me — if I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have known it was there — and suddenly a hand was in my right front pants pocket.

I clamped the wrist and twisted it out of my pocket and I dragged it and whatever was attached to it into the next splash of lamplight. It turned out to be a round-faced, splay-eared Mexican boy, maybe ten years old, and I was struck by the fact that he hadn’t made a sound, though I was sure I’d been hurting his wrist since I grabbed him and he had to be scared about being caught. But his face was as placid as any old man’s on a bench in the dark of this zócalo.

“What are you trying to do, kid?” I asked, addressing him as niño, which is actually closer to “baby” than “kid.” This he winced at.

“Okay,” I said. “Street punk.” Chulo callejero.

He smiled broadly. “You can let my wrist go,” he said. “You started off wrong, but now I can see you’re okay.”

“I started off wrong? You had your hand in my pocket.”

“I was just introducing myself.”

“I know a gonif when I meet one,” I said, using the Chicago street word in the middle of the Spanish.

He cocked his head.

“Pickpocket,” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “But your wallet’s in your other front pocket. If I wanted to steal from you, your wallet and I would be vanished already.” He snapped the fingers on his free hand. “Like that,” he said.

I touched my left front pocket and the wallet was there.

“If you let go, I won’t run,” he said.

I looked at this kid. He had something about him. I let him go.

He simply dropped his arm to his side, not rubbing the wrist even once, not showing any weakness. A tough kid.

“You’re a big gringo newspaperman, yes?”

I gave him a frown.

He read me instantly. “American newspaperman.” And he added in English, pointing to himself and then to me, “Even-steven. Because you call me niño.”

“We’re not even until I pick your pocket,” I said, sticking with Spanish.

He laughed.

“You’ve got me pegged right, about the newspapers,” I said.

“I see you writing cables.” He stepped close to me and very briefly touched my writing hand, almost reverentially. “Page after page,” he said, and he backed away again. “I don’t write so much. Well, maybe not at all. Watching you makes me wish I can pick your pocket and steal that from you and run off with it. Knowing how to write.”

“Don’t you go to school?”

He laughed a razor-thin laugh and shrugged. “I am a poor boy. I work for a living.”

“Picking pockets.”

“I work for you. Yes? Honest work. I think a big American newspaperman needs some eyes and ears that can sneak around and find things out. I sneak very well.”

“I bet you do.”

As a matter of fact, we all paid locals now and then to find some things out that we couldn’t as outsiders. Or to play courier. In the Balkans I had a good man, a Macedonian hardscrabble farmer, who would take my dispatches from the battlefields at Kilkos and Lachanos to the nearest accessible telegraph in Gallikos.

“So you’re a good sneak,” I said.

“The best.” And he held up the wallet from my left front pocket. Which, of course, he’d lifted when he touched my writing hand with his pathetic little poor-boy-wanting-to-better-himself story.

I grabbed the wallet.

I did need him or someone like him, I realized. To try to track the one story that felt full of real potential.

“I want you to watch a ship,” I said.

“Day and night,” he said.

“That’s what I need. You’re free to do that?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Your family. .”

“I am free,” he said, his voice going hard in a don’t-go-there kind of way.

“I’ll pay you a silver Liberty Head half-dollar as soon as anything but slops goes over the side or she cranks up her engines or even anything unusual happens on deck.”

“Each time?”

“Each time.”

“Real silver?”

“Real silver.”

“Shake,” he said and he extended his hand.

I just looked at it and said, “If I take that, will you lift my wallet again?”

“I’m not that good. And I couldn’t even begin to steal the money belt around your waist, under your shirt, just above your pants belt.”

This kid continued to surprise me. And these were his credentials.

I took his hand and shook it. “I’m sneaky myself, street punk. You won’t fool me again.”

“I won’t try.”

“What’s your name?”

“Diego. And you are Christopher Cobb.”

“I thought you couldn’t read or write.”

“They talk about you in the portales. It’s why I chose you.”

“The Ypiranga is the ship.”

“I figured,” he said.

“I won’t need your pickpocket skills,” I said.

“Whatever you need, I can do it,” he said. And I believed him.

And he made me sad. I’ve seen plenty of kids like this. This one seemed exceptional and we’d been talking light with each other, and I know how I am, moving through a world of war and human suffering with a kind of sport about it, and maybe you need to do that to keep sane. But a kid like this always brought me back to the tough truths. A kid like this — even an exceptional one with smarts and pluck and ambition and wit — hasn’t got much of a chance in the end. He grows up a thief and dead or a hardscrabble peon and dead or he’s just a kid who works for the outsiders, for the enemy, and ends up a dead kid.