Days of the Dead

by Barbara Hambly

  Hannibal rose to kiss Consuela’s hand, but Don Prospero seized him by the arm and pushed him from the study. “You’d best put riding-clothes on if we’re to be back by dark.” Prospero kissed Consuela’s hand himself, but by the time he turned to speak to January, January and Rose were halfway down the stairs.

  As the carriage pulled away, January turned to look back at the yellow and red walls of Mictlán, like a band of burning gold at the foot of the gray-green Pyramid of the Dead. Horses were already being led out of the gates, Don Prospero’s straight black form recognizable by his gestures as he lectured the appalled Don Rafael about their expedition to the Chalco pass. The vaqueros who would accompany them milled about, hooves raising a glitter of dust that flattened all images into matte shadows in the brittle sun of the forenoon.

  As the carriage jolted up the rise on the other side of the village, January thought for a moment he had a glimpse of a black-clothed child in the gateway, watching them out of sight.

  “Well.” Rose put down the window of the carriage and looked up at him. “At least we’re out of there. It was touch-and-go for a time—I wasn’t sure we’d make it.”

  Consuela flipped open her sandalwood fan and said, “Doña Imelda will give birth to twins out of sheer rage when her precious Rafael doesn’t return today; I wonder how long Father will keep him there before she comes out from town to retrieve him again.”

  “I have more and more sympathy for your mother,” agreed Rose thoughtfully, and glanced up at January again. “But our time hasn’t been ill-spent. We’ve heard as good an account of the banquet as we’re likely to get, and had a look at the house. The question is, what can we do?”

  January shook his head. “My nightingale, at the moment I’m afraid I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  TEN

  “Let me guess.” Capitán Ylario’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. “Since it is unthinkable that any friend of Don Prospero Ygnacio Bernal de la Cadeña de Castellón should have done so ignoble a thing as poison his host’s son, it naturally follows that the crime must have been committed by that sneaking unmanly little jardinera Werther Bremer. Oh, and he’s a foreigner, too.”

  Morning light, coming through the single window of the Capitán’s tiny room in the Casa Municipal, glinted in the officer’s dark eyes and betrayed the hard little folds below and around the rosebud mouth beneath the neatly-trimmed mustache. His hands, resting on the desk, were neat and plump in gloves of white kid, and his clothing breathed the scent of Parma violets when he moved.

  “Am I correct?”

  “I don’t know, Señor,” replied January mildly. “That’s what I’d like to find out.”

  Ylario sniffed. “And you came here all the way from the United States just because you’d ‘like to find out’?”

  From the courtyard below, the voices of clerks and soldiers drifted up, along with whiffs of steam from the coffee-vendors who’d set up shop in the great yard, and smoke from the guards’ cigarettos. A soldier’s jeering laughter could be heard mocking a prisoner: “Hey, mariposa, you find the cells here to your liking? You like your mates in there?”

  January said, “I came because Señor Sefton is my friend.”

  “Sefton is an opium-eater and a drunkard, a man whose vile habits result in periods of time when he does not even remember what he does.”

  “And Werther Bremer was Franz de Castellón’s lover. Were he a woman who had the same access to the tea that de Castellón drank after dinner, on the night before he was going to wed, would you hesitate in making an arrest?”

  “Man or woman, the jealous lover would have poisoned the girl, not the man whom he—or she—loved.” Ylario made an impatient gesture, waving aside the whole topic. “Or murdered that contemptible old madman who seems to feel that all he has to do is hand the President money in order to do as he pleases in this country without regard to justice or the law.”

  Bitterness rankled in his voice, and January saw him again in the sala of Mictlán, dismissed like a servant by that glittering scarlet figure who stood in the sunlight of the open door. Sent away like an importunate child, in the presence of his own men, of Don Prospero’s grinning vaqueros, and of strangers.

  “Who told you de Castellón had tea before he died?”

  January hesitated, seeing what would happen next. “Sefton,” he answered, and Ylario threw up his hands. “The French cook, Guillenormand, will affirm that it was de Castellón’s habit to drink tea after supper—”

  “But that particular night?”

  “No.” In fact, according to Consuela, she had seen Werther emerge from the study door, but he guessed that saying so would only elicit the observation that Hannibal’s mistress was as likely to lie as Hannibal himself.

  Ylario paced impatiently to the window, small and set deep in an embrasure in the immense thickness of the whitewashed wall. “The food that Don Fernando de Castellón ate that night was eaten by everyone else in the household. Including Sefton himself. The only thing that the murdered man consumed that the others did not was the brandy that Sefton brought him, brandy into which Sefton was seen to pour something from a bottle. Seen by old de Castellón himself. The door that separates Don Prospero’s room from the study was bolted on the study side and padlocked. No one could have entered the study unobserved between the time Sefton departed and Bremer came in to find his master dying.”

  “Dead,” said January. “I spoke with the servants who washed his body, and they all say that he was nearly cold.”

  “And you believed them? That old witch Yannamaria could have sold Sefton the poison herself. She had no reason to love Don Fernando.”

  Ylario tossed the words back at him over his shoulder. Standing beside the rough desk, with its worn surface marred by a thousand scrapings of dripped tallow, its sand-pot and inkwell of very old pewter, and its candlesticks of bright-painted indio pottery, January tilted his head to read the titles of the books stacked on one side: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, The Sorrows of Young Werther, a volume of the letters of Voltaire.

  So Ylario, like Werther, was a student of philosophy. Was it only, January wondered, Ylario’s sense of brotherhood with the philosophy-reading valet that made him so sure of his innocence? So blind to another view? Or was there something else?

  And if there was, why not say so?

  “Where is Bremer now?”

  And when Ylario hesitated, clearly sorting through what he knew and what he wished to tell, January added gently, “I may be friends with an opium-eater, but that doesn’t mean I will lie in wait to murder his accuser. It would help me understand if I could see and speak to the man.”

  “Would it?” Ylario stiffened again, and threw back his pomaded head. “And what do you think you would see? A weakling philosopher? A pretty-boy?”

  January said nothing, waiting patiently, watching him and letting his own words sink back into him. At length Ylario went on in a quieter voice. “I do not know where Werther Bremer is, Señor. After coming to me with what he knew of his master’s death—facts that establish not only the means but the motive for Sefton to poison Don Fernando—Bremer has not returned. I sent him a message to his room—a vile place in the barrio of San Juan—but received no reply.”

  “And the facts you speak of are Valentina de Castellón’s letters?”

  Ylario hesitated, then said, “Yes.”

  “Anything else? If I may ask.”

  “No.” Again the hesitation. The Capitán turned from the window, walked back to lay his hands once more on the desk. January was silent for a moment, looking into the younger man’s eyes. Seeing there stubbornness, fury—the fury of one who sees in the attack on one whom he perceives as his brother an attack upon himself. To call Werther Bremer a liar on the grounds of the body’s post-mortem bruising would be a waste of breath, January reflected. Besides, from what he knew of the venality of the courts, he’d be lucky if he could find a judge who’d heard that the blood circulates, much less th
at the hour of death could be estimated from its subcutaneous pooling. But the whispered accusations of a dying man would stick in any judge’s mind.

  “Who is Don Prospero’s heir now that his son is dead?”

  “Legally it would be young Casimiro Fuentes.”

  “Under Doña Josefa’s guardianship?”

  “I presume so, yes. Or, if Doña Josefa were to enter a convent, under that of his aunt, Isabella de Saragosse.”

  “Are there other grandchildren?”

  “No. Don Damiano’s son, Luis, was his only child. Doña Isabella and Don Anastasio have no living children.”

  “Do you know what provisions Don Prospero made for the rest of his family? For Doña Josefa, for instance, or Señorita Valentina? Or presumably for cousins farther removed.”

  Ylario relaxed so far as to seat himself, and straightened the already-meticulous papers on the surface of the desk. “For that you would need to speak to Don Prospero’s man of business, Señor Benedicte dos Cerritos. He lives off the Plaza Santo Domingo. So far as I know, there are no first or second cousins—the Bernal family is not so widespread as the Avilas or the Peraltas or some of the other great criollo clans. You will find Señor dos Cerritos a man of discretion—”

  The policeman’s voice folded drily over the word, making five syllables of it. “He shares his employer’s opinion that such mundane considerations as the laws of his country do not apply to him. A Spaniard of Spain—one of those who had too many important friends to return to that country when our Emperor Iturbide cast out the gatchupins. You may have more luck with Señor dos Cerritos than I.”

  “Thank you.” January bowed. This young man would have been a child, he thought, when the criollo Emperor had united the pureblooded nobility of the country to rise against the increasing demands of Spain. He would have come to manhood in that brief era of idealism, before chaos descended as one military strongman after another laid claim to rulership of the wealthy land. No wonder he was angry.

  “I shall communicate with you whatever I may learn.”

  Ylario stood, dignified for all his fussy silk cravat and lack of inches. “Thank you, Señor. I appreciate that.”

  From the courtyard rose the clamor of drunken voices shouting, as if it were evening instead of mid-morning. A man cursed, and there was the scuffle of feet, the sound of blows, a woman screaming imprecations. Ylario’s jaw tightened as if with pain.

  “I must go,” he told January. “I feel a good deal of concern about Bremer, for he is a man who is unlikely to receive justice once accusations begin to fly. But I saw his grief, and I know it to be genuine, the true grief of manly love, which few these days understand. And I tell you, Señor Enero, Sefton has the cunning of his kind. As long as he could go on milking Don Prospero’s madness for his support, he would do it. The girl Valentina was only a side issue. Don Fernando’s assumption of control of the estate spelled disaster for Sefton on every level. I assure you, Señor, Sefton is guilty.”

  Rose was waiting in Consuela’s open town carriage, drawn up in the shade of the plane-trees that surrounded the vast Cathedral square. She said “Oh, dear” when January recounted his interview with Ylario. “It sounds as though he’s genuinely convinced of Hannibal’s guilt, not simply determined to score political points—or genuinely convinced of young Herr Bremer’s innocence, anyway. Or both.”

  “Both, I think,” said January thoughtfully. Juan whipped up the horses—a showy chestnut pair with flaxen manes and tails—and the barouche moved into the steady stream of traffic that even at this early hour of the forenoon clogged the paved street that bordered the square. “And I must say I’m not entirely comfortable with the notion of poison being put in China green tea—the flavor of the tea is so light, I’m at a loss to think of many poisons that couldn’t be detected, particularly by such a connoisseur as it sounds like Fernando was.”

  “There is much in what you say.” Rose settled back against the deep garnet-red upholstery and contemplated the gaudy chaos of the square: thatched market-stands displaying pumpkins, corn, chickens, and chilis of a hundred different shapes and hues, hanging under dusty awnings, game-birds, fish, and baskets of axolotl salamanders ready for the pot or the oven. Women in the loose embroidered huipils of the Indians or the low-cut white blouses, bright two-colored skirts, white satin shoes, and colorful rebosos of the china poblana hawked cups of hot coffee or pandolce glittering with dark-brown crystals of sugar; muleteers in striped ponchos and broad-brimmed hats, water-carriers with enormous clay jugs suspended before and behind from straps about their heads, priests in their black robes arm-in-arm with pretty parishioners who made January think of young Padre Cesario and smile.

  Carriages clogged the roadway around the square, and the crowding grew worse as the barouche turned into the Platero, the main street of the city. English landaulets and barouches shining with paint and lacquer, drawn by high-bred frisone horses from England or the United States and driven by liveried coachmen; high-perched, sporty volantes; heavy Mexican coaches with the crests of nobility on their doors and glassed-in carretelas whose elegantly overdressed occupants peered around the half-closed curtains—all these jostled axles with gaudily-painted mule-drawn hacks, farm-carts, wagons. Men in the embroidered jackets of wealthy gentlemen or the rough leather britches of vaqueros guided their horses among the press, making them caracole, regardless of traffic, when they glimpsed ladies of their acquaintance in the carriages. And in spite of Consuela’s airy assertion that no one in the city walked, pedestrians were everywhere, talking, stopping mid-street to buy lottery-tickets or cigarettos, shouting at one another over the din.

  Soldiers were everywhere. Léperos were everywhere. Priests and monks were everywhere.

  Flies were everywhere.

  As they passed the doorway of a church, a funeral emerged, the body of a dead child borne in the arms of a black-haired Indian mother while family and friends danced around her, clapping and singing with gladness and waving banners of cut paper: the child in innocence would go straight to Heaven, and miss the pain and poverty and grief of life. It was a time to rejoice.

  The American chargé d’affaires in Mexico, Anthony Butler, had a large house on the Paseo de Bucareli, not far from the shade-trees of the Alameda, the city’s central park. As January had feared, Butler was one of Andrew Jackson’s less inspired choices, a tight-mouthed Southerner who’d followed the lure of cheap lands into the Mississippi Territory some years previously and had made enough of a fortune planting cotton to be of use to the President in his 1828 campaign. His secretary, a thickset young man with pale, suspicious eyes, asked twice if January’s master had sent a message before he’d even take his card in to his employer, and Mr. Butler himself never quite appeared to grasp that a black man could be unpossessed by anyone, or might require the protection of the United States government as much as what he called a “regular” man would.

  “No wonder they don’t let black men vote,” fumed January after he and Rose were seen out the door by one of Mr. Butler’s slaves. “You couldn’t get us to put anyone into office who’d appoint a knothead like that.”

  “Nonsense.” Rose drew down the veils that decorated her wide-brimmed straw hat. “There are just as many black imbeciles as white—and that goes for women, too, if civilization ever advances to the point of permitting us to express our opinions about who makes the laws.” She climbed into the carriage, even though the house of the British minister was within a few minutes’ walk: Cristobál and Sancho had fallen into step with them the moment they’d emerged from Butler’s door, to keep the beggars at bay.

  “Señor, my store in Jalapa was ruined by the fighting. . . .”

  “Señor, my family and I once had a hacienda in Cohuila, we were driven off by the taxes. . . .”

  “Señor, I am crippled and can no longer support my family. . . .”

  “Señor, I have a beautiful sister. . . .”

  Maybe the ragged man wrapped in the blanket had
been a hacendado once upon a time. Feeling like the Rich Young Man who was the butt of so many Biblical parables, January tossed a handful of small coins in the direction of the outstretched hands, the stinking bodies, and watched men who should have been tilling fields or minding stores or raising families scrabble for the tinkling metal in the dust.

  In New Orleans, nobody begged who wasn’t forced to by physical infirmity or mental degeneration. Mostly if you wanted work you could find it, hauling boxes on the levee or sweeping out a saloon if nothing else.

  Here, there was no work. There was no choice for these men to be anything but what they were—the flotsam of decades of war.

  Sir Henry Ward and his staff occupied another of the magnificent palaces farther along the Paseo that had been built by some Count or Marquis with money from silver-mines and cattle-ranges the size of German principalities. The Cathedral clock was striking eleven, the bells of every church and convent in that city of churches chiming in like courtiers dutifully laughing at a sovereign’s joke. Such was the press of carriages in the street that it took them nearly fifteen minutes to make the short journey, but January had seen enough of the city’s beggars by then to know that they couldn’t have covered the ground much more quickly by foot.

  As Consuela had predicted, the carriage and servants accomplished what good clothing, spotless white kid gloves, and proper English probably wouldn’t have, had January and Rose been unattended and afoot. A well-dressed mestizo servant showed them up to the wide corredor that overlooked the immaculate flagstones of the central court. An elderly English footman brought them coffee, and even bowed.