TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border

by Clifford Irving

  “He swore on the cross,” Fierro said stolidly.

  “That cost him nothing,” Urbina replied. “This is his way of getting a quick death.”

  “Wait.” Villa’s command brought them immediately to silence. “Shut up, all of you.”

  He studied the remaining six columns, his eyes narrowing to half blind slits. I remembered how he had studied the wall and the shadows in Juárez before he fired at the empty cartridge. Both Dozal and Candelario were dripping sweat, for Villa had ordered the windows closed. The bank was like a hot, airless mausoleum.

  “Try that one …” Villa pointed to the last column in the middle row.

  I don’t know how he knew, and I don’t think he could have told anyone. He smelled it, or he had the kind of calculating mind that no other man in the room could understand.

  Candelario did the drilling. After the new bit had whined its noisy way through less than half an inch of steel about two feet off the floor, it suddenly made a different sound.

  “That’s it!” Villa yelled, and Candelario flipped the switch. “Bore some more holes in a half-circle around the column. Not too deep! Be careful! Rodolfo, go outside and get a shovel—anything that’s heavy. Something that we can swing.”

  Fierro ran outside the bank and was back with a pickaxe just as Candelario finished a neat half-circle of holes. Fierro stepped forward eagerly, but Villa halted him with one stiff hand and grasped the pickaxe with the other. He was like a torero who couldn’t think of giving up the kill, the moment of truth, to any others of his troop.

  He swung the pickaxe sideways, powerfully but not wildly, as a batter tries to hit a clean line drive to center field. The flat of the curved blade struck the column exactly where the holes had been drilled.

  The column split and crumbled. Under the thin steel layer there was only plaster.

  Gold pieces popped out as if someone had thrown them. They struck the marble floor, rolling and jingling.

  Urbina scooped one up. “Pancho! For the love of God,” he cried, “Hit it again!”

  Villa swung a second time.

  The column split wide open, and gold streamed out in a smoky cloud of plaster dust, piling itself at our feet in heaps. Some of the glittering coins rolled merrily along the marble, but no one chased them. There was a hole in the column as big as a man’s head. Villa dug his fist in. He opened his fingers and began to scoop out gold.

  There were ten-peso pieces about the size of an American dime, and Spanish gold peseta pieces of varying sizes, gleaming richly on the floor and in our palms as nothing else does in this world but gold. Urbina’s eyes nearly exploded from their sockets. He sifted the coins back and forth in his calloused hands, listening to the heavy clink as they slid against each other.

  Villa kept scooping, reaching down into the hollow column as the gold kept tumbling from above, then shoveling it out onto the floor in larger and larger shining bursts. Finally it seemed that he had it all. But he stopped, concentrated for a minute as he had done before, then reached up into the column with one hand. We heard his knuckles rap some hard surface.

  He turned back to us, eyes alive with the passion of the hunter.

  “Rodolfo, go out and get heavy sacks—as many as you can find. Tell no one what’s happened. Candelario, I think there’s another partition in the top half of the column. Drill another half-circle. About here.” He tapped the steel column at the level of his head.

  After fifteen minutes of Candelario’s sweaty work, Villa struck again with the pickaxe. With three blows he opened a second hole … and yet more gold poured out, far more than had been in the bottom half. Falling from a greater height, it jingled and chimed on the marble floor, some of it rolling halfway across the bank.

  A couple of pieces dropped into my boot, and I pulled them out. The second hoard was all Yankee twenty-dollar gold pieces, stamped with the screaming bald eagle.

  Urbina said, “Mother of God!” His face twisted with emotion.

  Fierro and Dozal returned with the sacks. Most of them were stenciled FLOUR, PROP OF U S GOVT.

  Working together for half an hour, down on our knees on the cool marble, we filled thirty-two sacks.

  Out of breath, Urbina massaged his aching rheumatic shoulders. “Pancho, how much do you think it is?”

  “We’ll find out later. What we’ll do now is bring it back to the Fermont. No one will speak about this. Only the seven of us will know. If any one of you tells another man—I don’t care which one of you—I’ll have him shot. This will be the Division’s treasury. The time will come when we’ll need it.”

  He turned specifically to Urbina. “When you drink too much and feel like boasting, remember what I’ve just said. If anyone speaks, he signs his own execution orders.”

  He looked at the rest of us, one by one— Fierro, Dozal, Candelario, Lopez and me—to see that we got the message too.

  Fierro commandeered a truck, and it was late afternoon before we loaded the flour sacks aboard and drove back to the hotel.

  Lopez parked at the back entrance, and Villa ordered a laundry room on the ground floor cleared of sheets and towels. We all staggered back and forth from the truck to the room until the sacks were safely away. All of us stank with sweat, but we were elated. Villa produced a big iron padlock, snapped it on the laundry-room door, then dropped both keys into the bottom of his holster.

  “That’s the safest place,” he said. “I may be naked, but I sleep with my pistol under my pillow.”

  “Aren’t you going to count it?” Urbina asked, amazed.

  Villa eyed him idly. “What’s the rush?”

  The group dispersed reluctantly, and Candelario and I went to a nearby restaurant on Avenida Cuahtemoc. Candelario, who had worked the hardest, wolfed down a bowl of fish soup and then ordered a leg of mutton with potatoes.

  “What do you make of this, Tomás?”

  “I trust the chief,” I said, spooning up my soup.

  “But the others? Never. Not Rodolfo. And Urbina, less.”

  “Rodolfo will do whatever Villa tells him to do. If Villa told him to put a pistol in his mouth and pull the trigger, he’d blow his brains from here to the border. Urbina … well, Villa has the key.”

  “And Lopez? We hardly know him.”

  “Villa will make him an officer and keep an eye on him. You’ll see.”

  “I don’t like this Lieutenant Dozal. I have only one eye, but I’ve trained it to see for two. He kisses Fierro’s ass too much.”

  “He almost shot me once.”

  For the first time I told Candelario the story of my part in the massacre of the prisoners at Torreón four months ago. He listened, fascinated. Then he shrugged.

  “Those men would have died,” he said, “one way or another.”

  “But it wasn’t quick. It was awful.”

  Before I could unburden with everything else that was on my mind, Pancho Villa rolled into the restaurant and thumped down at our table, straddling the chair backwards.

  “Give me what’s left of your mutton leg,” he said.

  I passed my plate and he scooped up the rest of my frijoles too. Candelario’s plate was as clean as if a dog had licked it.

  After he had eaten, Villa wriggled one of the keys to the laundry-room padlock out of his holster and slapped it down in front of me. “Go count the gold. It will take awhile. Let me know tomorrow how much there is.”

  “Alone?” I asked.

  He glanced at Candelario. “Do you want to help him?”

  “Why not?”

  “All right. Both of you then. It will be quicker that way.”

  We left the restaurant, with Villa still gnawing on our mutton bones.

  Candelario, who always spoke his mind, said, “Don’t be offended, Tomás, but the chief’s trust in you now and then surprises me.”

  I was thinking the same thing. Why did he trust me that much? A bastard son can stray, and even princes of the blood have been known to betray their kingly fathers
for the lure of gold. Perhaps it was because he had already tested me when he sent me to the border with the wagon of silver, and in our business with Ravel and Sommerfeld I had handled hundreds of thousands of dollars and never skimmed a dime. He was the kind of man to keep track of that.

  On the other hand, he may have looked at the alternative choices and decided he could be worse off than by picking me. Or else he thought I feared him too much to steal. If that was so, he was wrong. I didn’t fear him anymore—a mistake for which I would soon pay—and although I considered myself an accomplice to murder and a faithless philanderer, I wasn’t a thief.

  I winced at the labels I had just so casually attached to myself. What had happened to me in Mexico? It was important to understand, but I didn’t know how to go about any kind of fruitful introspection. More important, what would happen to me when I left? That was easier to think about. The future always is, when you’re young.

  Counting the gold was a more tedious task than I had imagined. After a while the glowing pieces lost most of their meaning and all of their attraction for us, but we had time to talk, and so I asked Candelario the question that was probably troubling me more than him. “What are you going to do when this is all over?”

  “Counting the gold?”

  “No, you fool. The revolution.”

  “I’ll tell you if you promise not to laugh.”

  “Would you care?”

  “I suppose not. All right, I’ll tell you. You know I come from Camargo. I have my wife there, and four children. Two of them are sons. Frankly, I don’t miss my wife, but I have great love for my children. I’m thirty-one years of age now. So—when the revolution’s over I want to go back home and open a restaurant. A good restaurant, with tablecloths and real napkins, with waiters who wear white jackets.”

  He glanced up from the gold to see if I was laughing, but I wasn’t.

  The rest of it spilled out of him, and I had the feeling he had never spoken of this to anyone else. “I’ll run the restaurant myself. I’ve always wanted to eat as much as I liked and get fat … even fatter than Hipólito. Have you ever noticed how jolly the fat people are? That’s because they don’t deny themselves what they truly crave. I crave food all the time, almost as much as I crave women. Tomás, you have no idea how hungry I get … I think I may have a tapeworm. But I control myself, because you can’t be fat and fight well. Villa can … but not I. And then,” he said, nodding his head and scratching his beard, “with the money from my restaurant I would send all my children to school and order my sons to become lawyers. There’s no future in being a revolutionist—the lawyers will carve up everything. To eat well, to have educated sons who can take care of you when you’re old … that’s the only way to live.”

  He frowned, for the constant chink of the gold coins was irritating, like a faucet that drips all night. “So now you know, and I’m pleased you didn’t laugh. And what about you, Tomás?”

  “I’d like to be an actor.” I don’t know where that came from—I had thought that ambition was dead. “But I guess I’ll get married and go into business with Felix Sommerfeld.”

  “What kind of an actor?” he asked.

  “A real actor, on the stage. Or in the movies.”

  “I’ll pay my peso to see you. Everything is possible.”

  “You don’t find it funny?”

  “If that’s what you want to do, do it. Believe me, otherwise, after the revolution you’ll be bored stiff. This is a better life than you realize.”

  Candelario and I worked well into the evening with a few sheets of paper torn from a notebook and two stubby pencils. Around ten o’clock we were both yawning, and the work wasn’t half done.

  “Let’s finish tomorrow,” he said. “This gold bores me.”

  “Who would have believed that?”

  “But it’s so, isn’t it?”

  I slept with the key and my pistol under the pillow. Rosa asked what the key was for.

  “The laundry room. I’m counting sheets and towels.”

  In the morning Rosa told me I had slept badly. “You jerked around and pulled at the covers. You talked in your sleep.”

  “What did I say?”

  “It was in English. Once I thought you said you were cold. Is cold not the word for ‘frio’? You said it several times.”

  “I wasn’t cold. Counting the sheets and towels is a great responsibility.”

  “Aieee … mi capitán!”

  We made love then, and after some rolls and coffee in the restaurant, Candelario and I went back to the laundry room and began counting again.

  Around noon someone rattled the padlock outside, and we both drew our pistols.

  “It’s only me,” said Pancho Villa, chuckling through the thick door. “Don’t shoot.”

  Candelario let him in, and he sat down on a sack of gold, wriggling around until the hard edges no longer disturbed his ass.

  “We have only two sacks left, chief.” I wiped the sweat from my forehead with my sleeve. The windowless laundry room was even hotter than the Banco Minero.

  “How much is it so far?” Villa asked.

  I studied my pieces of paper and added the last figures to the total. The pencil was pretty well chewed.

  “There are four hundred fifteen thousand six hundred and sixty pesos. We’ve counted eighty-one thousand two hundred and twenty-five Spanish pesetas, which is about one hundred sixty thousand pesos at the bank exchange rate in El Paso. In dollars, so far, eighty-eight thousand six hundred and thirty dollars. At two pesos to the buck that’s—well, it makes a grand total of about seven hundred fifty thousand pesos.”

  “These fucking Spaniards bled Mexico dry, didn’t they?”

  “And then there’s the last two sacks. They’re full of double eagles.”

  “Keep them,” Villa said carelessly. He nodded at Candelario. “You take one.” And then, to me, he said, “The other’s yours.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said keep them. Are you deaf?”

  I didn’t know how to reply. Candelario’s face held the blank expression of the desert at noon.

  “Don’t you want it?” Villa asked me.

  “I don’t know, chief. No … no, I really don’t want it.”

  “You’re crazy, as Hipólito always says. You could have stolen anything you wanted, but you didn’t. Take it. You both worked hard.” He wagged a finger at me. “If you intend to marry Sommerfeld’s dughter, which my brother tells me is sure to happen, you’ll have to show her father something more than your nice teeth and your good posture. Just don’t tell any of the others.” He addressed Candelario then. “Do you accept this gift as well?”

  “Why not? It’s the same as stray cattle. It’s bad luck to say no to good luck.”

  Candelario was undoubtedly thinking of getting fat in his restaurant and his sons becoming lawyers.

  “Tonight you can both come here,” Villa said. “Wrap the two sacks in sheets and take them away. One of you keep the spare key. I might lose mine under someone’s pillow and forget whose.”

  He grinned, showing his red teeth.

  He had said it was settled, and so it was. I hadn’t counted the last two sacks, but I knew there had to be at least $15,000 in each one, for both were filled with American twenty-dollar pieces.

  I was rich. There was a time in my life, not so long ago, when I thought that all I wanted was true love, high adventure and fortune. True love had come my way in the person of Hannah Sommerfeld. I suppose that the life I had been living as a Mexican revolutionist had its share of adventure—although high or low, I didn’t care to say. And now I had a fortune in a flour sack. I had all a man could want.

  I wondered why it didn’t make me feel any better. It might have been the shadow ofTorreón that took the warmth out of other things, but I suspect it was a realization —the years have only clarified it—that you’re not a different man even if your bank account swells. The glow of gold merely illuminates your o
ther worries. Sometimes I think that Mammon might have sworn an oath that nobody who didn’t love money should ever have it.

  That gold became a problem quicker than a man can get grassed on a mustang. Furtive as thieves, Candelario and I each carted our sacks out of the laundry room just after midnight chimed on the cathedral tower. By the time I got it up to my room in the Fermont my heart was dancing a polka and sweat dripped down my cheeks.

  What do you do with a sack of gold double eagles? I couldn’t very well walk into the Banco Minero when the sun rose and deposit it, and it wouldn’t fit under the bed.

  I left it sitting in the clothes closet, gave Rosa my pistol and told her to guard that closet with her life. I ran out into the hotel corridor to find Candelario, who was staying up on the fourth floor. We nearly collided with each other on the staircase, he running down and I running up.

  “Jesus, Tomás! Where did you hide it?”

  “That’s just what I was coming to ask you.”

  “But this is a weighty question. I left Yvette and Marie-Thérése with my pistol to guard it. Let’s sit down and think.”

  He had a full bottle of tequila with him, so we drank while we thought and came up with some pretty wild ideas, but none of them made much sense, even to a pair of drunken men on a dark hotel staircase in the short shank of the night. We thought of burying it outside of Chihuahua City, but I vetoed that with the glum idea that the tide of war might change and we would never see this part of Mexico again; we discussed carrying it south with us in our saddlebags when the army finally moved, but Candelario pointed out that if a bullet ever struck one of the saddlebags the whole battle would grind to a halt while the soldiers threw down their rifles and scrambled for the gold that would pour out like a waterfall.

  “Then where, Tomás? I can’t think straight.”

  “The gold is a curse. I read a story once in Aesop—”

  “Please don’t tell me stories,” Candelario said. “Tell me where to keep the gold. The curse is one that I can live with.”

  “Listen. I’ve got it. I know what I’ll do. Rosa can ride like a man. It’s only a hundred miles west to Tomochic, and her family’s there. No one goes to Tomochic—it’s up in the high sierra. She can bury my sack there.”