Days of the Dead

by Barbara Hambly

  That left either the hawkers of oranges and ginger-beer who made their way up and down the aisles—and he knew Werther had insufficient Spanish to understand that many people shouting orders to him all at once—or the handlers of the cattle before they got into the ring.

  With luck Werther—who might be a dark-haired Bavarian for all January knew—would at least be distinguishable from the lower-caste Mexicans among whom he worked.

  And so it proved. The shadows were lengthening and the dust in the air was like shimmering golden soup among the cramped pens built in the square, but as he picked his way through the labyrinth of rough pine-pole fences, January could see at a distance the only man who might remotely be of German extraction: tall, blond, and what was generally described as “strapping.” The young man wore no hat, and though his face and throat were burned a painful shade of magenta, January could see he was extremely handsome, almost beautiful. One of the picadors, riding out of the black arch of shadow that led to the space beneath the tiers of benches and so to the ring, called out something to the blond man, and January heard him shout back, “Ja, ja—schrekliche Kuh . . .”

  Then he turned and saw January striding toward him across a small open corral.

  And bolted as if January had been aiming a gun at him.

  Startled, January plunged in pursuit. His mended white shirt like a flag in the sun, Werther vaulted over a fence into a pen full of steers, snaked through the dusty, shifting mass of horns and hooves. January slipped under a fence, dashed through a narrow chute to head him off. He yelled, “Halt!” as Werther sprang over the fence at the far side of the steers, who were now milling angrily—rangy Mexican animals with enormous horns, wild and nervous as deer. January scrambled between two flimsy railings, dashed into another corral, and skidded to a stop as Werther shot open a gate at the far side of the open space, to release from its chute a bull the size of the Mexico City Cathedral.

  The bull came out of the chute like a steam locomotive and charged January without so much as an instant’s hesitation. January bolted for the nearest fence, though he hadn’t seen a fence in Mexico that looked like it could stand up to a determined ramming, and this one was no exception, four or five skinny trunks of stripped lodgepole pine lashed to an upright with hanks of rawhide. He slid through it and into the next pen and the animal hit it full-on, snapping one of the poles outright and wrenching the ends of two more in their bindings. The bull let out a bellow and piled up and over the fence, head tossing, small black eyes furious. January had heard how fighting bulls were bred to charge anything that moved, and he understood, terrifyingly, the courage of the matadors now, to stand still and control that rank, raw-smelling onrush of flesh and rage.

  He vaulted over another fence and the bull crashed that one as well, horns glinting wickedly, so close January felt the hot drops of its spittle strike the back of his head. He pelted across the pen beyond, sprang up the next fence. There was nothing beyond that—a chute and the back wall of a mud-brick pulqueria that bordered the square. The bull smashed the fence full-force while January was still atop it, the impact of half a ton of blind animal rage nearly hurling him down on top of the bull. He caught his balance as the beast backed for another charge. Its neck muscles rippled as it flung its head sideways, then charged the post to which January clung. January leaped down into the chute, heard the bull bellow behind him, its horns snagged.

  “Andele!” cried a high voice above the thunder of hooves, the stink of cattle and dust. January backed along the chute, ready to leap onto the fence again if the bull followed him in; he saw the picador to whom Werther had been speaking—and Rose, of all people, on foot with her long pink skirts gathered in one hand and an eight-foot pike in the other—driving half a dozen dusty-flanked steers through the nearest gate into the pen with the bull.

  “I’m gonna kill that fool cabbage-eater!” cursed the picador—who, January saw with a certain degree of surprise, was a woman. As Rose shut the gate behind the steers, the picador worked her horse through the maze of chutes around the pen: “You, Sambo, this way, eh? And slow—wait till he pulls his head free. . . . He don’t see so good, that Señor Cojones, eh?”

  January waited until the bull had pulled his head back out from the entangling pieces of the chute, then cautiously followed the chute around until he was away from the pen. Enraged and filled with terror alone, once among members of his own kind, the bull seemed to forget January’s existence completely.

  January was shaking all over as he made his way around to where Rose and the picador waited in one of the small holding-pens.

  “Mierda! My little boy, he got more sense than that cabbage-eating German, eh?” The picador pushed the gate shut behind him with her pike. “Now we gotta run in one of the substitute bulls, an’ they’re both crazy bulls, you know? Potosí bulls, you never know which way they charge. That bastard there, he’s a good Gran’ Zac’, at least he charge straight. But they learn fast, bulls. Now he know it’s the man he gotta go after, not that stupid little red rag they wave. So he’s spoiled for the ring.”

  She spat on the ground. She was a lush-breasted mestizo girl, her black hair braided into a torero’s pigtail and dented steel shin-guards glinting dully over tight buckskin breeches.

  “You work fast, honey,” she added to Rose. “How you know so fast we gotta get the steers in around Señor Cojones, eh?”

  “I grew up in the country.” Rose shaded her eyes, looking up at the woman. “On Grand Isle, someone was always doing something silly and getting chased by a bull.” She’d lost her hat in her rush to rescue, and her soft brown curls lay over her shoulders; she might have been discussing the cultivation of hollyhocks.

  “She was headin’ for the steers’ pen the second that bull come outa that gate. What’d you do to that unfertilized egg, eh”—the picador used the word huero, a common term in Mexico for a blond—“that he didn’t want to talk to you that bad?”

  “I’ve never met him in my life,” January said, and slapped the dust from the sleeves of his jacket. “I need to speak to him, yes, but I can’t imagine why he thinks I’d mean him harm.”

  “Well, maybe that’s just how they say hi to their friends in Germany, eh?” She laughed at her own joke, high and rough, like a child.

  “You don’t happen to know where I could find him in town, do you?”

  “What, you think I follow him home at night for his blue eyes?” She shook her head. “He just a peon, you know? They need so many to push the steers around and keep track of the bulls. With the Army out lookin’ for anybody that got two good legs these days, they hire whoever they can get here. Old Huero knew the difference between a steer and a bull, so they hire him even though he can’t talk Spanish. I ain’t never seen him around my barrio, but that don’t mean nuthin’.”

  From the dark maw of the arch someone shouted something. The woman yelled back, “All right, keep your pants on!” She reined her scrawny horse around and tucked the pike up under her arm. “I gotta go. One thing I tell you, after givin’ the best bull of the day lessons in what he gotta chase, you can bet Huero ain’t gonna be back here.” And she tapped her mount’s sides with the spiked rowels of her spurs and trotted back into the dark beneath the gate.

  Beside him, Rose said in a thoughtful voice, “You really shouldn’t have shouted, ‘I know you murdered Fernando,’ you know.”

  Taken by surprise, January laughed so hard, he had to lean against the fence. From the pen the bull watched him, suspicion in its piggy eye.

  “If it’s any comfort,” Rose went on, linking hands with January as they edged through the chutes and pens, “I should say that Werther’s immediate reaction of attack and flight at the sight of you should put paid to Ylario’s contentions of his innocence. Whether Ylario will believe that or not is another matter.”

  January shook his head. “It has to have been Ylario who told him I was seeking him,” he said. “He reacted on sight . . . and as I’m probably the only black
man in Mexico City other than Anthony Butler’s slaves, I doubt he was mistaking me for someone else. Or . . . would he have had a reason to flee one of Butler’s slaves?”

  They stopped in the first pulqueria they passed, for January to get a shot of the curiously mellow-tasting liquor to stop his hands from shaking. The place was empty, its proprietors and its entire clientele being at the corrida. It was the first time January had been afoot in Mexico City that he hadn’t been mobbed by léperos. They were all at the ring as well—he could hear the shouting, like gusts of wind sweeping the clear evening sky.

  A round-eyed indio girl dippered the liquid from a barrel, staring in wonder at the well-dressed, dust-covered couple—one of them a black man at that—who came in to buy. The pulque was virtually raw and had a punch like Señor Cojones’s charge. When permitted to age, pulque was barely stronger than a good German beer.

  “I can’t imagine why Anthony Butler would even know of Werther Bremer’s existence,” Rose mused. “Much less send his slaves after him, particularly when he has in his employ gentlemen like our friend Mr. Dillard and that pig-headed rhinoceros of a secretary who kept asking who your master was. If I were Butler, I wouldn’t let my slaves out of the house at all, given that if they ran away here, there’d be no legal way of getting them back.”

  “They may not be slaves at all, you know.” January cracked a peanut, turned the papery shell over between his huge fingers, as if he expected to find the answer to the riddle written inside. “I mean, legally, of course, they’re not, here, but they may be freedmen back in South Carolina as well. I wonder how I’d go about finding that out.”

  “Mr. Dillard would be able to tell us.”

  “He would,” January agreed. “If you can think of a way of asking him without the question being immediately relayed back to Butler.”

  Rose said, “Hmmn.”

  Consuela’s coachman was gone, doubtless comfortably ensconced in the sun-side seats of the bullring, watching some other innocent brute being tormented and killed. Zama, too, had disappeared. The crackle of firecrackers splintered in the fading air from over the bullring wall, and the hungry sea-surge howl of the crowd. The street was lined with carriages, but not a coachman or footman was to be seen. Only old Cristobál, apparently asleep with his back against the wall of a dilapidated convent on the opposite side of the street, a rifle across his knees.

  January had to look twice to realize that every carriage was where Cristobál could see it.

  “Anthony Butler may be innocent as the day is long,” said January, helping Rose into the carriage. “Ylario was certainly keeping things from me when we talked, and just because he sincerely hates Santa Anna’s favorites taking the Principles of Universal Law into their own hands doesn’t mean he wouldn’t feel justified in doing so himself to protect Bremer. But if there’s some reason it’s Butler’s slaves that Werther is afraid of, we have to go carefully. Any approach I make to anyone in Butler’s household is going to be reported back to Butler one way or another—and me being just about the only black man in Mexico City, he’s not going to have too much of a problem figuring out who’s asking questions.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” said Rose around a mouthful of hairpins as she fixed her coiffure. “But it’s probably best to be safe.”

  “Werther is alone,” said January. “And in hiding. Therefore, I’m going to do exactly what our friend Lieutenant Shaw back in New Orleans does when he needs information about the free colored or the slaves—worlds in which he cannot move inconspicuously any more than I can move inconspicuously through the barrios here.”

  “You’re going to ask your mother?”

  January laughed, and took a silver reale from his pocket. “I’m going to ask someone who, I suspect, knows as much about the barrios as my mother does about the private affairs of every free-colored family in New Orleans.”

  He tossed the coin once in the air, catching it in his palm, then flipped it far out into the street. And though anyone would have sworn that Cristobál was asleep, the old Yaqui’s arm seemed to lengthen out like a gecko’s tongue, snagging the little silver disk as it flashed in the dusty light.

  FOURTEEN

  It took Cristobál four days to locate Werther Bremer in the mazes of the capital’s back-streets and barrios. During those intervening, nerve-racking days January tried patiently to track down every other fact he could about Don Prospero’s household on the eve of Fernando de Castellón’s murder, in the hope that—if they could not find the valet—they might at least find some clue that would lead to some answer other than the staringly obvious fact of Hannibal’s guilt.

  “The poison may not have been swallowed, you know,” remarked Rose the day after the bull-fight—Monday—as Consuela’s carriage inched along the tree-lined causeway that stretched from the city across the brackish western marshes. “It would be an easy matter to smear curare poison on the thorn of a maguey-leaf, palm the thorn, and give Fernando a smart slap on the shoulder with it. The puncture would never be noticed by candle-light as they were cleaning the body, and of course after this much time in the grave I doubt it could be detected at all.”

  Around them, every carriage and cart in Mexico City and about half its pedestrians as well streamed sluggishly along the causeway, bound for the Bosque de Chapultepec and Santa Anna’s grand review of his Army. The pedestrians at least had the option of walking between the gray stone arches of the aqueduct that stretched from the city, across the acres of reeds and sedges and the gleaming sheets of what had been Lake Texcoco, to the freshwater springs on the granite height of Chapultepec Hill. The roadway lay along the aqueduct’s feet, less than a yard above the level of the squishy lake-bed; more than one driver glared enviously at the market-women and Indians who picked their way past the clogged traffic by leaping from grass-tuft to grass-tuft. Farther out on the lake-bed, where the water was deeper, small reed boats could be seen where Indians fished as they had fished when the pyramids of Tlaloc and Huitzilopochtli towered against the sky instead of the Cathedral’s gilded towers.

  January sighed. “Leaving out the thickness of the average military uniform coat,” he said, “who would have done this, and when? Curare kills almost instantly. The door from the sala into the study was bolted, and there wasn’t a time when someone wasn’t in the sala, either clearing up after dinner or playing cards. The door from the corredor into the study was within sight of Consuela and others from the moment Hannibal emerged until Werther went in and found his master dead . . . and cold.”

  “This was much easier when we were on the Belle Marquise.” Rose’s light tone covered the real unhappiness in her eyes. “I think I preferred speculating about whether or not Fernando wore armor to bed. Even if Natividad does attend this review, how good are our chances of getting to speak with her?”

  “Oh, we should have little trouble if we can get to her when she is not with Santa Anna,” replied Consuela. She turned—gratefully, January suspected—from listening to Don Rafael, who had urged his horse up beside the carriage to recite to her the family histories of the various bulls who had been killed in the ring the day before, and the individual details of every other corrida he had ever seen in his life. His mother’s carretela lumbered in the press of vehicles behind Consuela’s barouche, the dark-green curtains of its windows parting now and then for shadowy faces to peek through. January wondered if little Pilar was one of them. “Though what you expect Natividad to tell us I do not know.”

  “Nor do I,” replied January grimly. “But she was there on the night of the murder, and I haven’t talked to her yet. And unless you can think of a way to elude your father’s vaqueros and Capitán Ylario some night to get Hannibal away from Mictlán and to the coast—and possibly evade the American chargé d’affaires as well—I think we need to at least hear what she has to say.”

  The fortress of Chapultepec, ruinous and weather-damaged, towered on a height of rock on what had once been the lake’s original
shore. Woodlands of cypress surrounded it, draped in Spanish moss and watered by the springs and by rain-tanks. “They say the ghost of Montezuma, the last Emperor of the Aztecs, can be seen in the night, walking in these woods,” remarked Consuela as the carriage finally rolled into the dense shade. “He had gardens here, and a fortress of his own upon the height—you can see the whole valley from the walls up there. They say also that La Malinche—the Indian woman who was the brains behind Cortés—haunts these woods, too, but myself, I do not believe any such thing. One of them, of a certainty, but not both . . . And if the priests will have it that La Malinche did such a good thing to bring all this land under the heel of the Spanish to make good Christians of everyone, why should she walk, indeed?”

  Don Rafael nodded wisely, and proceeded to recount how Doña Marina—an Indian woman enslaved by the Aztecs—had contributed to the Aztecs’ downfall by acting as Cortés’s translator, a tale with which every member of the party was familiar and to which Consuela appeared to listen with interest. Considering the amount of money she’d taken off Don Rafael at ombre Saturday night, reflected January, it was the least she could do.

  Beyond the woods the Army lay encamped, straggling knots of thatched shelters, old blankets slung over stretched ropes, corrals of brush holding sheep, cattle, and some of the most miserable horses January had ever seen. By the smell of it, few of the men had any idea of the sanitation required under such crowded circumstances. Among the makeshift bivouacs, the white tents of the officers rose like New Orleans steamboats among the scrum of keelboats and pirogues on the levee: French, German, or English pavilions and markees, cook-shelters where servants prepared meals, lines of blood-horses and sleek mules to carry the officers’ baggage. On the parade-ground before the camp, January watched them pass in review through a fog of yellow dust: superbly mounted colonels, majors, generals in brilliant uniforms, the glitter of bullion almost blinding in the sun. Horses pranced and caracoled; plumed hats were swept off in unison to the man who was both President and Generalissimo Benemerito en Grado Heroico, who sat his white horse before them, his face solemn and thoughtful, as if he’d spent the night reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius instead of working his own fighting-cocks in the Plaza de Voladores.