Aztec Fire

by Gary Jennings

  The hacendado, on the other hand, was a typical well-to-do landowner, who turned his vast lands and holdings over to an overseer, then spent most of his time in the capital soliciting invitations to the viceroy’s garden parties. He thought money bought him everything—including luck with cards, the love of women, and skill with guns.

  Watching the game, I observed the hacienda owner rise in his chair, while he stretched and yawned. Ten minutes earlier—taking out a handkerchief, coughing, then blowing his nose—he’d done the same thing.

  I knew right away that neither of those two movements were right. They were somehow contrived.

  Everyone else however was too focused on the money on the table, the betting, and the cards to notice.

  What was he doing?

  The realization came to me all at once: He was looking over his opponent’s right shoulder at something in the distance.

  He was still yawning, stretching—and staring. Since I stood directly behind him, I followed his line of sight.

  Something now caught my own eye, and the second revelation hit me like a collapsing bridge: The hacendado had help.

  The first hint was a flashing glint of light. Barely visible through the curtain on the second floor of a window across the street, I stared at it, mystified. I could guess the glint’s source: Reflecting the bright sunlight was a small, circular lens …

  A spyglass.

  Someone was spying on the hand of the man in black … but how was the person signaling the hacienda owner what his opponent had for a hand?

  Then I saw it. Hand signals. Two fingers for a pair. Three of a kind. Two and three for a full house. Other signals were being flashed, but all my attention now was on the black-garbed man.

  How could I warn him?

  Why did I wish to warn him? Perhaps because I did not like hacienda owners who worked peons to death in their fields and silver mines. Maybe because the man in black was a free spirit, a personality I had not seen since my two uncles deliberately made and kept a date with death.

  I moved away from Maria. Positioning myself so that the man in black could see me when he looked up, I deliberately stared at him and then turned my head, glancing and nodding at the glass window behind the hacendado. The spyglass was not conspicuously visible through the curtain, but if he looked closely, he would still discern that something was there … something wasn’t right.

  I was sure he’d take the hint.

  Fearing the wrath of the hacienda owner, I moved away from the card game.

  I spotted our salvation and headed for it.

  Hurrying to keep up with me, Maria whispered, “Where are we going?”

  “I’m going to turn our three reales into many more.”

  “Stop. I’m not going to let you gamble away in a card game the only food we’ll see today.”

  “This is no gamble. It’s a sure thing.”

  And it wasn’t cards. I made my way through a group of people watching a shooting demonstration.

  The shooting was being done against a half-dozen timbers squeezed together and braced against a stone wall. The distance to the target wasn’t great, about forty paces, but the circular wooden targets came in three sizes—small, smaller, and even smaller.

  The smallest was a challenge.

  The concessionaire was a short man in a brilliant red shirt and black pants, and long greasy slicked hair. He wore a red bandanna around his forehead that only emphasized his thick lips, a thick nose, thick eyebrows, and small devious eyes.

  The only pistols he allowed were his own.

  The shooter bought one shot at a time with a reale. If the shooter hit the largest of the three targets, the concessionaire gave him back his reale plus one extra; hitting the second target earned him two extra, and hitting the third target earned him three extra.

  Almost half of the men were able to hit the largest target. The percentage of hits dwindled as the targets got smaller.

  No one could hit the smallest circle.

  I sent Maria off to look at things she could not afford to buy or eat, then studied the people shooting. When a shooter was good enough to hit the target, the concessionaire would encourage him, even making side bets with the man. The shooter would keep betting because the more he shot, the more he got used to the pistol and knew exactly how to aim it.

  When the stakes were the highest and the shooter could win some real money if he hit, the concessionaire rigged the weapon. He did it when he reloaded the ball and powder for the last shot. Watching him closely, I still didn’t pick up on it for a full hour, but finally I caught him.

  He gave the pistol barrel a tiny twist.

  The man running the concession was cheating.

  There is no play in an ordinary pistol barrel. This one was rifled with minute grooves that when the trick barrel was turned would alter the course of the round. Such a small twist wouldn’t be detected by someone just holding the gun up and looking at it or aiming it. But the concession owner was changing the bullet’s flight by a couple inches. Just as the shooter got his range and perfected his aim, the concessionaire’s barrel twist altered the shooter’s projected line of fire.

  When Maria returned, my courage rose. The other onlookers had wandered away, so I stepped forward. Knowing he might turn away an indio, I held a silver reale in my open palm. I also tried to look naïve.

  “May I try, señor?”

  Even while grunting a “humph” of contempt, he could not take his eyes off my money. It undoubtedly looked like the easiest money he would make that night.

  He gave me the loaded pistol. I carefully aimed and fired, hitting the largest of the targets. Pretending it was pure luck, I asked for my winnings—my reale back and a reale more.

  “Pretty good shot, Azteca. Try it again. Go on, try it.”

  Betting the two reales of mine he was holding, I fired again, hitting the second-largest target.

  “Hey, you’re one hell of a shot. Let’s see … now you’ve got six reales. How much more do you have?”

  “Two more, señor.”

  “I’ll make you a deal. You bet all eight and hit that big target again, and you’ll walk away with sixteen.”

  “What if he’s able to hit the smallest target?”

  The question caught me as much by surprise as it did the man.

  The black-clad Spaniard from the card game had been watching. He stepped forward.

  “You know this indio,” the man asked.

  “No, but I saw him shoot, and he’s good. I’ll make you a deal. He puts up his eight. I put up ten, too. If he hits the smallest target, you pay him thirty-two. You also pay me another thirty on top of the ten I put up.”

  “Amigo, you have a bet.”

  After we put up the bet, the stranger stopped in front of me before he stepped back out of the way. “Don’t miss, Azteca.”

  “Sí, señor.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw the concessionaire give the pistol barrel a little twist as he loaded it. When he handed it back to me, I thought of giving it a twist back but decided not to. With the twist, the round pulled two inches to the left. I aimed two inches to the right and … fired.

  The smallest target exploded, and the concessionaire detonated in loud curses.

  “What are you pulling?” He grabbed the pistol from me and hit me with it. The strike hit me a glancing blow on the head. I restrained myself from pulling out my pistols and putting a bullet in each of his eyes.

  The stranger stepped between us. “You owe us money.”

  The concessionaire stared at the stranger. I could see that he was taking his measure. The cardplayer looked like a man who knew his way around cards and horses, women and guns.

  Not the sort of man one provoked into a physical confrontation.

  The concessionaire made up his mind. He gave the stranger his winnings.

  “The indio gets nothing. It’s against the law for him to fire a weapon. I’m going to have him arrested.”

 
“Señor,” the stranger said, with great courtesy, “you are right. And I’ll have you arrested for supplying the weapon.”

  “The local constable is my amigo, so—”

  The stranger’s hand moved so fast it was a blur. One moment it appeared empty, the next it was holding the butt of an ivory-handled knife with a twelve-inch blade, three inches at the blade’s broad base. The blade tapered to a narrow point, and the stranger had pierced the man’s pants crotch with that point.

  “You do not wish to offend me, hombre. You’ve been cheating people with your trick pistol. If I let them know, they’ll string you up on the nearest tree—after I separate you from your cojones.”

  He tickled the man’s crotch with a twist of his twelve-inch blade.

  The swindler’s bladder discharged.

  “My dog will feast on your missing cojones, my friend, and I will send you to join your puta-mother and the father you never knew in hell without your manly appendages.”

  The stranger moved forward till he was nose to nose with the man. He gave him a spectacular grin, and again nicked the man’s groin with a twisting, upward nudge of his blade.

  The man handed me thirty-two reales. As we left, he was doubled over in front of his concession, vomiting violently.

  The stranger said, “You are the best shot I’ve ever seen.”

  I shook my head. “It was just luck. I never fired a pistol before.”

  “Sí, and I’ve never held a deck of cards in my hands or tickled a woman’s flower with my garrancha. Where are you two from?”

  “My brother and I work at the Hacienda de la Valle.”

  Four horsemen entered the square. Constables. They didn’t ride in as locals but as men unfamiliar with the town. And looking at people as if they were searching for someone.

  Madero would never give up the hunt. That was Madero’s reputation. The bull with a brain. He just kept charging.

  Maria tensed beside me, and I casually grasped her arm. I didn’t want her to run.

  “I need coachmen,” the stranger in black said.

  “Coachmen?” I asked.

  “My two coachmen are gone. I caught them stealing and sent them packing. They weren’t the kind to watch my back … even at a card game. You and your brother want the job?”

  “Well, señor, we are heading south, for the China Road—”

  “An excellent direction. Point the horses toward the China Road.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  DON’T YOU FIND it strange?” Maria asked.

  We had retrieved the team of four from the stable, then harnessed them to the coach. Maria had purchased provisions to eat along the way while I inspected the rims and spokes for damage and greased the axles and hubs.

  We sat in the driver’s box atop the coach.

  Finding coachmen’s livery in the baggage boot at the rear of the coach, I fit into my uniform fine. Maria’s however needed a tight belt and rolled-up sleeves.

  Her new garb did nothing to improve her disposition.

  A short-barreled fowling piece—used to ward off bandidos and perhaps to pot birds for dinner—lay on the floorboard under the driver’s seat. I knew that kind of gun well, having repaired hundreds of them. It fired wide-pattern buckshot and was murderously effective at close range.

  The coachman’s assistant was to be a shotgun guard as well.

  Unbeknownst to our unsuspecting employer, Maria couldn’t even lift the weapon.

  Moreover, a quick look at the rusted fittings suggested that it wouldn’t fire anyway. I repaired it while we waited for our black-clad boss to tell us to leave. He was currently waiting for a friend, he’d said, and the next thing I knew he was snoring inside the coach.

  Earlier when I had watched him kneeling in front of a tree stump, dealing cards to himself, the deck confounded me. It was unlike any card deck I had ever seen. When I told Maria about its bizarre cards—a magician, a female pope, lovers, justice, royalty, a hanged man, the devil—Maria said it was a tarot deck.

  “For fortune-telling. Rich women love to have their fortunes told, the occult meaning of their lovers’ secret sighs, who they should take for lovers, whether they will have great wealth. All of it is pure unadulterated idiocy. It will also bring the Inquisition to your door if the Church finds out.”

  Maria was right about our employer—he was an enigma. A fancy coach with a count’s coat of arms on the doors, he had quickly rattled off his name and title to us: Count Luis Benito Juarez de Santa Barbara de la Sierra Madre.

  A nobleman no less! A count was just below a marquis in the hierarchy of nobles. But he was a count with a deck of fortune-telling cards and no coachmen. And coachmen for a noble family were not the type hired and fired for theft. They would be family retainers who spent their entire life in the service of their master. If they stole, they were given a beating, not dismissed.

  “He doesn’t look like a count,” Maria said.

  I don’t know what Maria thought a count should look like, but Luis had the wary eyes and the graceful menace of a bloodstained, battle-scarred jungle cat who had survived more than one life-and-death brawl.

  And emerged the sole surviving victor.

  He did not come across as a gentleman of luxurious leisure.

  A coach pulled up, and a middle-aged, expensively attired, strikingly attractive woman with long dark hair, an enticingly low-cut red silk dress, and a dangling pearl necklace poked her head out the window. She smiled pleasantly, almost expectantly. Count Luis climbed into her coach, his fortune-telling cards in hand.

  The woman’s coachmen wandered off to drink pulque and smoke while I reworked the fowling musket’s firing mechanism with a file.

  Maria dozed.

  After about a half an hour the woman’s coach began to rock, reverberating with groans of pleasure given and taken. The aching, sobbing groans awoke Maria, and she stared at me.

  “Do you think …?” she whispered.

  “Servants don’t think.”

  After a while the coach door opened and Luis came out, backing down to the ground, shoving a pearl necklace in his pocket. The matron affectionately touched his cheek. Her facial powders were streaked and her hair mussed.

  “The road to Guadalajara,” the count snapped up to me.

  I froze for an instant. We were supposed to take the road south, not back toward Chapala and Guadalajara. I exchanged looks with Maria and got the coach moving. When we came to the main road that led north and south, the count leaned out the window and said, “To the China Road.”

  I breathed easier and turned the team south.

  “What’s he doing?” Maria whispered.

  “He didn’t want the woman to know which way he was going.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe she’s a lover he wants to part with. Or maybe she’ll want back that pearl necklace. Or maybe her husband will want the count’s cojones.”

  “He’s … strange,” Maria said again.

  No, not strange. He just wasn’t what he pretended to be—any more than we were. If he was a count, I was the King of Old Castile. The Spanish had a special word to describe a man who was a gambler and womanizer who took advantage of rich women: picaro.

  A picaro was a rogue and often a vagabond, but a special kind of villain, a highwayman of the card table and lady’s boudoir.

  “We have no complaints,” I told Maria.

  Meeting up with Count Luis was not just good luck, it was miraculous. We could hardly complain about the count’s character when we were on the run from the viceroy’s hangman and the Inquisition’s stake. Anyway, we were finally making good time on the main road. Even if we ran into a posse of constables, they would not dare offend a nobleman by stopping his coach. Even the royal constables backed off when confronted by rich gachupines.

  The rich had prerogatives.

  Later that night we pulled off the road. The count slept in the coach while Maria and I slept on the ground. But now we were in the lap of luxury, usin
g thick blankets to soften the hard, cold ground.

  In the morning, the count stepped down from the coach. He was near Maria but didn’t see her. Opening his trousers, he pulled out his manhood and relieved himself.

  Maria leaped up and stumbled over a log trying to get away from him.

  “Eh, boy, I bet you a reale that I can piss farther than you,” the count said.

  “He doesn’t speak,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “My brother, he has no voice.”

  “What happened to it? Doesn’t he have a tongue?”

  “He’s never spoken, not even as a baby. Señor Count, we will get your breakfast now.”

  I was desperate to change the subject.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  WE ROCKED ALONG for two days, making good time. Finally we stopped at a roadside inn for the count to relieve his thirst. When he returned, he gave me instructions to a large house. When darkness fell, Count Luis left the coach reeking of perfume that he had no doubt put on to cover the smell of sweat and dust from traveling.

  The only other addition to his dark attire was a black mask covering his eyes.

  “A costume party,” I told Maria as coaches dropped off other guests.

  As the hours passed, I wandered over to a group of coachmen smoking and talking to the house’s footmen. After I got an earful, I returned and reported to Maria.

  “Count Luis is the sensation of the party. Since there’s no nobility in the area, the guests were terribly impressed that a count showed up unexpectedly. Still, from what the footmen say, he must be the world’s worst gambler. It sounds like Count Luis has lost everything except his boots.”

  “I hope he doesn’t lose his coach.”

  “And his two loyal servants.”

  An hour later Luis came out and had me move the coach so that a copse of trees hid it from the view of others. He left and came back with a masked woman. She was middle-aged but like the woman with the pearl necklace, she was still attractive. Expensively attired in red silk, she flaunted her copious cleavage, opulent figure, and a large diamond brooch.