by James Lewis
“Uh, uh. I remember a place you eat. A very special place. Like no place else. You go inside, sit down, and right before your eyes …” Juan spread his hands open like an actor welcoming applause.
“Right before your eyes you see the bank,” Mallory finished the sentence.
Juan laughed. The low clatter of an approaching train mingled with his laughter. He ignored the sound. “And you know what? Mesa Verde is only the start. We’ll be famous.” His hand swept the air as if painting a sign. “Juan and John, specialists in banks.”
The train whistled.
“No, no,” Juan rumbled on. He was enjoying the game. “I got it: ‘Johnny and Johnny!’ Sounds better, more American.” He beamed at Mallory. “We’re gonna go to America, Firecracker. They got cities with nothing but banks—Colorado, California, Texas, Austria.”
Mallory guffawed. The train whistled again, very close.
“Think of the future ahead of us!!”
“I’m thinking of the train behind you,” Mallory said calmly.
“Jesus Christ!”
Juan kicked his horse and whipped the reins hard to the left. The horse sprang free of the tracks with only a moment to spare. With a roar, the train hurtled past.
It separated Juan from Mallory. Juan looked around him frantically. His entire gang was on his side of the tracks. That meant Mallory was alone on the other side. “Shit,” he screamed.
He jumped to the ground and bent over to look under the moving train. Through the wheels he could see the legs of Mallory’s horse.
He tried to gauge the train’s speed. It was moving fast—but was it moving fast enough? He imagined making the leap himself. It would be difficult. But not, he realized with a sinking feeling, impossible.
He cursed God, St. Christopher, the Pope. He compared Mallory to a pig, to a whore, to a pus-running sore. He ranted that the Irish were scum and their mothers bearers of social diseases.
None of it helped. Mallory was gone when the train passed.
There was only one thing to do.
Nine hours later Juan and his brood boarded the train at Cuzco. Several soldiers were slumped around the station. The troops ignored them while they waited on the platform until a peacock captain came around and ordered his men to be alert. At that, a boyish private shuffled over to Juan and asked, “See any revolutionaries?”
“No, amigo.”
“Bandits?”
Juan pointed to his two youngest. “Those two. Very dangerous. Be careful when you arrest them.”
The soldier laughed and shambled away.
The train was nearly empty. Juan slumped next to a window and stretched out his legs. He glanced out but saw only his reflection in the night. With his hat over his eyes, he went to sleep.
He awoke when the train pulled into Aguadiz. The door at the end of the car opened and a tall, lean, middle-aged man came in. He was wearing a neat brown suit and the shirt under it looked newly cleaned. His hand held a black leather doctor’s bag.
The man strolled toward them, indifferent to the hostile glances from the boys. With silent authority, he motioned to Juan’s sons to clear a space for him. Under his glasses, his eyes were deep-set and intelligent.
With obvious resentment, the boys obeyed. The man settled into the seat facing Juan and took a book from his bag. He opened it and began to read. The title was Surgical Pathology.
They rode in silence for a long while. Once when Chulo and Nene began to squeal, the doctor cut them off with a harsh glance. Juan regarded the man with amusement. Even old man Nino and Fefe, who considered himself such a tough hombre, seemed cowed. Yet the man hadn’t said a word.
A sudden loud screeching of the brakes suddenly ended Juan’s musings. He hurtled forward but managed to brake himself on the window sill. The train jolted to a stop and stood hissing softly.
Juan wiped the window and peered out curiously. Nothing. The sound of a handle rattling made him look toward the end of the car. The door slammed open and a man in a dark uniform climbed aboard. A policeman!! The cut of his jacket marked him as a member of Huerta’s “elite” squad—loyal, tough, ruthless, and trained in torture.
Juan exchanged glances with the doctor, then pulled stiffly back in his seat. He tensed as the cop came down the aisle. The doctor’s hard face screwed up in puzzlement as he looked at Juan. Juan’s breath caught. A clammy hand gripped his spine. Still wearing the curious expression, the cop passed him and walked down through the car.
Juan’s eyes followed him. The cop reached the connecting doorway, then stopped as if struck by a sudden thought and wheeled around. Juan darted low in his seat and pulled his sombrero over his face.
He could hear the cop’s returning footsteps. His teeth clenched and he shrank in upon himself. The footsteps stopped and a hand raised his hat. Juan smiled up.
“This isn’t the first time I’ve seen you,” the cop said. His hair gave off the odor of pomade.
“No?” Juan said meekly.
The cop brought his face closer. His eyes narrowed and his mouth set in a grim line. “No, it’s not the first time.”
“But it’s the last—” With enormous force, Juan suddenly flung himself forward. His hand plunged toward the cop’s stomach. A knife slid with a faint sucking sound into flesh, and the cop collapsed with a shudder into Juan’s arms.
Juan twisted him quickly around and half carried him to the door. He worked the door open and pushed the cop off the speeding train.
He turned and walked back toward the doctor. The knife was still in his hand.
“Hey!”
Another cop was standing at the end of the car. He sighted down along a pistol aimed at Juan’s head. The door to the next car stood open behind him.
“Drop that knife, you bastard,” the cop said.
Juan let the knife slide to the ground. Slowly, he raised his hands. The cop came down the car toward him. Juan held his breath.
The cop stopped. “I can’t miss from this distance,” he warned.
What happened next stunned Juan. The cop never got a chance to say or do anything else. A hand came toward him and pressed a derringer against his ribs. He looked down at the small gun and straightened in alarm. His fingers opened and the pistol dropped to the floor.
Juan had expected help from one of his people. Instead, to his amazement, the doctor was leaning forward in his seat with the derringer. Unbelievable.
With a leap Juan fell on the frightened cop. He grabbed the man around the neck with one arm and dragged him to the door. The cop whimpered when he saw what was about to happen, and he cried out in terror as Juan effortlessly threw him from the moving train. For a moment Juan regretted having let him live. Such screaming.
The doctor was absorbed again in his book when Juan returned to his seat. His face was composed and impassive, refusing even to acknowledge Juan’s existence, or the stares of the niños. Strange man, Juan thought. Maybe he just hates police. He sat down and pulled his hat over his eyes, wondering with wary concern what kind of doctor carries a gun.
The thought pecked at him all the way to Mesa Verde. He dozed fitfully, amid the din of bickering and laughter from his boys, and whenever he looked up there was the doctor, as intent on his medical text as if he were reading a novel in a soft chair beside a fireplace. A curious case himself.
He learned nothing else about the man. At Mesa Verde, the doctor rose and left the train as coolly as he had entered, while Juan’s kids still had their faces glued to the windows. They were babbling in excitement and pointing to a peeling station sign which announced their destination.
The platform was deserted save for a column of soldiers guarding several shabbily dressed men. Juan ignored the sight and shepherded his sons away from the soldiers.
“Mesa Verde, muchachos,” he announced, feeling and sounding lyrical.
The boys looked at him in dismay. He turned to Nino. “Mesa Verde, papacito,” he said, and settled for a wan smile.
“Hey, Papa.” Chulo tugged
on his arm. “Are those men bandits?” He pointed at the prisoners.
“No. They’re revolutionaries. They’re not smart enough to be bandits.”
“Revolutionaries don’t make no money, huh?”
“They only make trouble,” Juan said.
He looked toward the prisoners just in time to see one of them shove a guard aside and race toward him. He ducked instinctively and tried to push his sons from the prisoner’s path. Almost simultaneously several guns crashed. The impact of the bullets hurled the prisoner down onto his face almost at Juan’s feet.
He herded his sons quickly away from the corpse and off the platform, before they became conspicuous. Motherofjesus, he wondered, what’s going on here?
Mesa Verde shocked him. Except for soldiers, the streets were deserted. Platoons marched on every other street, some heading in the direction of the train station, others obviously on patrol.
The walls of nearly every building they passed were either scarred by fire or pockmarked with bullet holes. Several houses stood half demolished, the tiles from their roofs scattered in the streets. Mesa Verde looked like a city under siege.
Two of Juan’s men, Pancho and Amando, broke their usual silences to complain. Both seemed as much in distress as Juan felt.
“It must be the rebels are fighting here,” Pancho said. “Maybe we should leave.”
Juan didn’t answer. They kept walking. Everywhere, walls were papered with the same poster: an elegantly clad grandfatherly looking man offering bread to a family of peons. “The Governor loves his people!” the poster claimed.
They turned a corner and came into a square with a blast-shattered fountain. At one end, near a wall, a cluster of soldiers stood with three men whose hands were tied behind their backs. Two were obviously peons; the third, a man in a business suit with a dignified moustache, looked like a banker. Near them a man in a blue poncho was busily painting white stripes on a wall.
Juan and his brood stopped and watched the man paint the last of three horizontal stripes. From across the square the soldiers eyed them suspiciously. When the painter finished, the soldiers shoved their prisoners against the striped wall. At the command of an officer, the troops then took up firing positions a dozen paces away.
The officer’s voice drifted faintly across the clearing. “Do you have a last wish?” he asked the three men. There was no answer. Then one of the peons turned toward a poster on the wall and spit in the smiling face of the governor.
Angered, the officer barked a command to fire. The shots flung the prisoners back against the wall as if they were rag dolls. Their bodies jiggled in a lunatic dance. They were dead before they hit the ground.
Confused and despairing, Juan led the others away from the square and through the ruins of a house destroyed by cannon fire. In a corner, half buried under the rubble, were the tattered remnants of a child’s doll. Madness, he thought. He had no dynamite. The city was crawling with soldiers. The rebels were presumably somewhere close by making the soldiers tense and suspicious. The civilians were too cowed to come out in the streets, so there was no hope for them to panic and create confusion. How could he possibly rob the bank? If there was one left.
“Hey,” he said to Nino. “You sure this is Mesa Verde?”
The old man merely shrugged.
A cavalry platoon rode by in a cloud of dust. They crossed the street when it passed and turned another corner. Nino stopped. He nodded mutely toward a building in front of him. Juan froze and stared trancelike at the building. The sight was like walking into a brick wall.
The building was massive and old. The walls were cracked and the portico was slanted at an angle, as if one of its supporting columns had shrunken upon itself. In the design of the columns, in the ponderous friezes along the roof line, in the elaborate grillwork of its windows, the building was unapologetically pretentious. The sign over the portico read: BANCO NACIONAL DE MESA VERDE.
Two armed sentinels stood near the carved doorway looking suspiciously at Juan and his troop. Suddenly aware that he was becoming obvious, Juan smiled and, beckoning the others to follow, strolled casually across the street. He spotted a tavern and headed for it.
Something brought him up short. God, was it? Through the tavern window he could see the back of a lean figure wearing a bowler hat. The man tilted his head back and brought a flask upward. As he did, he turned his head slightly.
Mallory!
Chapter Seven
“Get out of here! I gotta take care of something.”
Nino and the boys moved reluctantly away, casting troubled looks back at Juan. He ignored them and marched toward the tavern.
He entered softly as a cat. Mallory was alone at a table, his back to the door. The black overcoat was not in sight; he was wearing a plain gray suit now. There was no suitcase, either.
The tavern was nearly empty. Two peons talked quietly at a table in the corner of the room. The proprietor could be seen working in a kitchen at the rear.
Juan crept silently up behind Mallory. With every step, he felt the bile rise in him. He stopped just behind the Irishman, who seemed intent on ladling chili onto his plate. Slowly, Juan eased his pistol from its holster.
“With beans or without?”
What? Was Mallory talking to himself?
“You want your chili with beans or without?” Mallory repeated, louder now. He barely turned his head.
“Huh?”
“You going to eat standing up?” Mallory spooned a mouthful of chili.
Incredulous, Juan numbly lowered himself into the chair across from Mallory. Mallory pushed a plate in front of him and continued eating from the pan. With a shrug, Juan picked up a spoon and reluctantly mouthed some chili.
His gaze remained riveted on the Irishman. Somehow he had to set matters right.
“Listen, Firecracker. You try to get away again and I’m gonna shoot you. You understand?” His voice was flat.
Mallory chewed impassively. “Who’s trying to get away,” he said thickly. “A train comes along. I was on the right side, so I took it.” He looked up. “Besides, I knew you’d come to Mesa Verde.”
“Mesa Verde! Shit, what a city! What the hell’s going on here? There’s more soldiers than flies.”
“Good. Right?”
“Good?”
“Sure, where there’s revolution, there’s confusion. And where there’s confusion, a guy who knows what he wants stands a good chance of getting it” Mallory scraped the pan and stuffed the last of the chili in his mouth.
Juan started to reply but was waved silent. The two peons who had been sitting in the corner passed their table. Mallory’s eyes followed them out.
Juan suddenly was aware of someone standing behind him. He turned. The proprietor, a giant of a man, was studying him from about a foot away. He stepped to the side of the table.
“This him?” he said.
Mallory nodded. Juan stiffened and warily moved his hand toward his pistol.
“Okay, follow me.” The proprietor walked away.
“I’m ‘him’ who?” Juan whispered hoarsely.
Mallory watched the proprietor until he was out of earshot, then leaned across the table and whispered back, “You trust me?”
Juan shook his head emphatically. Trust Mallory? His nitroglycerin near a hot fire was more reliable.
The Irishman sighed. He pointed out the window. The bank was clearly visible through it, “You want to get inside there, don’t you?” he said.
Juan grinned.
“Well, I’m going to give you the chance.”
Mallory got up and followed the proprietor into the back room.
Juan hung back, suspicious. Mallory was too cool and too clever to be followed blindly. To trust him was like trusting the President. He might act in your favor, but the odds were about the same as the odds against getting the pimple disease from a whore; the only way to avoid it was not get in bed with the girl in the first place. Besides, he had learned that su
rvival always depended on commanding the situation, never being commanded. But not to follow now …? That would mean no explosives, no bank, no money.
Juan hurried after Mallory.
The Irishman and the proprietor were waiting for him in the back room. The smell of onions hung heavily in the air. They went through a narrow doorway and down a steep staircase to a dim cellar. Wine barrels and shelves stacked with bottles surrounded them.
The proprietor approached a tall wine rack set against the back wall, gripped the frame and pulled hard toward him. With a faint sigh, the shelf swung outward to reveal a door.
The big man knocked. A moment later the door opened slowly and Mallory motioned Juan to follow him. Warily, Juan obeyed.
They came into a small, musty, windowless room. The smell of dust and sweat stung Juan. An oil lamp set up in one corner cast a weak, flickering light across several dark figures and created an eerie, sepulchral mood.
Juan saw in mid-room the naked back of a man stripped to the waist. On either side, a peon held tightly to an arm, pinioning the man between them. Seven or eight other men scattered around the room were looking on indifferently.
The flash of a knife caught Juan’s eye. A tall, lean figure was standing before the bare-chested man testing the edge of the blade. Juan recognized the figure: the doctor from the train.
The realization stunned him. He turned to Mallory, who only signaled him to keep quiet. Incredible! What was the doctor doing here? What was he about to witness? Torture?
The doctor approached the man and studied his chest. He brought the knife up, and the man recoiled instinctively.
“Don’t move, goddamit!” the doctor snapped. And to the others, “Hold him still.”
A cry of pain shattered the stillness. Juan flinched. A violent shudder wracked the bare-chested man and he went limp.
The doctor picked up a cloth and dark bottle. “Relax now,” he said softly. He poured some of the bottle’s contents down the man’s chest, gently patted him with the cloth, then taped a bandage in place. Finished, he looked up and grinned. “If you’d let the infection go any longer, your widow would be paying my bill,” he said.
