Whatever else may be happening, I am not looking forward to remaining here alone with Doña Josefa, the lovely Valentina, and whoever that was in the study, searching for . . . what?
Another rabbit, perhaps?
Nor, however, do I relish the thought of being escorted back to town by Ylario and his constables and facing the noose.
I can only trust that you’ve located Werther Bremer—or some viable alternative candidate for the role of First Murderer. Failing that, it’s O for a horse with wings and a rapid retreat to either Vera Cruz or Texas with all possible speed. I fear that Mictlán is becoming as unhealthy for me as it proved to be for the execrable Fernando.
Hoping this finds you well—and soon.
Your friend,
Hannibal Sefton
SIXTEEN
January attended the opera Thursday night—II Pirata, appallingly done—in a mood of deep disquiet. Señora Lorcha’s speculations aside, Rose’s conversation in the carriage that afternoon had served only to cut away more possibilities that there was an alternate explanation for Fernando de Castellón’s death. Don Prospero had almost certainly been locked in his room. Despite the spiteful woman’s allegations, January couldn’t imagine a way in which the cook—no matter how much he stood to lose should Fernando indeed take over management of his father’s estates—could have poisoned one diner out of twenty-four at table.
So he listened to the gossip around Cousin Tulio’s faro-bank while the evil Elena flirted with colonels and tax-farmers and minor diplomats, and neither of them learned anything that they didn’t already know—at least not anything that concerned Don Prospero de Castellón and his immediate family. Don Rafael expounded on the proper theoretical means of playing écarté and lost nearly a thousand dollars to Consuela in the process: January was beginning to understand how the diva could support the flat, a carriage, a half-dozen servants, and Doña Gertrudis, not to speak of the indigent Hannibal. On-stage, the villainous Duke of Caldora flounced about, resplendent in the ever-faithful suit of Roman armor, for the benefit of Santa Anna, in the most expensive box, with Natividad Lorcha at his side. After the performance everyone repaired to Consuela’s flat, and it was nearly three in the morning before the last guests departed, amid torchlight and servants and a clattering of carriages, handshaking, and laughter and jests.
Only when January was mounting the stairs from the courtyard did Cristobál slip in quietly through the gate past the final departing carriage and emerge from the shadows to touch January’s sleeve.
“I’ve found your boy,” he said.
La Accordada prison stood, incongruously, on the fashionable Paseo de Bucareli, a tall building of red bricks with a long grilled niche in the front where corpses were laid out for identification by—and possibly the edification of—anyone who happened along. January had no problem getting in: a small contribution dropped onto the guardroom table, where half a dozen lancers in dirty uniforms were playing ombre, earned admittance and any number of respectful bows.
“The man I seek has offered me violence before this,” said January in his loftiest Spanish, and handed another peso to the sergeant in charge. “I would appreciate it if one of your men would be on the lookout for trouble.”
“Of course, Señor.” The sergeant bowed. “Rios!”
Corporal Rios was winning and didn’t look happy about leaving his place at the table. January slipped him another peso as a douceur once they were out of the sergeant’s sight, knowing that officers frequently took a cut of bribes tendered to their men. Even in the guardroom the smell of filth was horrific, and flies buzzed everywhere above the blue drifts of tobacco smoke. As January followed Corporal Rios down a long stone-flagged gallery—trailed by the club-bearing Cristobál—the stench grew, until by the time they stepped into the harsh sunlight of the main courtyard of the men’s side of the prison, the stink was like a solid wall: dirt, rotting food-scraps, unwashed clothing and bodies, and mostly too few privies and far too many men who saw no reason not to relieve themselves in the corners of the yard.
“Most of the bad ones, the recruiters got last week,” provided Rios helpfully, shouldering his rifle. “We got a couple in last night, from a big fight at the Wandering Jew. Some old indio started it, then slipped out the back, they say, when we showed up, so we just caught those who weren’t clever enough to get away.”
January glanced sidelong at Cristobál, who definitely had a black eye and a cut on one cheekbone, but the Yaqui merely gazed ahead of him in his customary silence.
The noise of shouting and curses burst on them as they stepped forth into the yard. Breakfast had just been put out—meaning baskets of tortillas prepared by the women prisoners on the other side of the high brick wall—and the men were clumped around them, shoving and thrusting one another and yelling. Most of the noise seemed to come because one man had been turned upon by the others: as January watched, the man was pushed from the food and stumbled a few steps on the filthy flagstones, turning back to curse the greater group.
“Schweine!” he screamed, lunging back at them again. “Heiden! Schwartzen papistischen Wilden!” He was tall enough and strong enough—like a young Teutonic god—to have easily taken on any of the aged and crippled léperos in single combat, but the men banded together, swarming over their opponent like rats and dragging him to the ground.
“That one, he been nothing but trouble.” Rios shook his head and started forward. “He spit on this man or that, he don’t show no respect—you don’t got to know what kind of crazy language he speak to know he callin’ you papist. . . .”
The prisoners saw Rios’s uniform and scattered, leaving the blond man lying in the filth among the broken baskets. Bremer—January easily recognized the linen shirt, the buckskin breeches, though the valet had lost the boots he’d had on at the bullring—rolled over, shaking his head, blood trickling from a cut lip.
“Ich verlange . . .” began the young man furiously, catching sight of Rios, his finger jabbing at the retreating léperos, but he got no further. The next second he saw January, his eyes widened with shock, and he lunged at Rios—who by this time was within a foot or so of him—and tried to wrest his rifle from his shoulder.
Rios reacted far more quickly than his hangdog appearance would have led anyone to believe he could. He elbowed Bremer sharply, at the same time hooking his knee; Bremer tripped, fell, scrambling backwards, shouting “Schwartzer Teufel! Räuber!”, his wide, scared eyes on January’s face. “Meuchelmörder!” He rolled to his feet and bolted, the other prisoners in the yard drifting aside to make way for him, watching with a kind of mocking indifference, calling out jocular advice.
Cristobál and Corporal Rios spread out to either side of the fleeing youth as Bremer dove into the shadows of the arcade. January kept to the center of the yard, knowing there was nowhere else for the young man to go. He shouted “You won’t be hurt!” in German, but Bremer was past listening; he crashed into one old man who was weaving hatbands out of horsehair and beads, tripped, and grappled with him for a moment, then came up with a small knife in his hand.
January yelled “Bremer!” again as the young man lunged straight at him, had just time to duck aside and catch the knife-hand in his own massive grip. Bremer was nearly January’s height and very strong; he tried to wrench his arm away instead of switching the knife to his other hand, the way an experienced fighter would. January grabbed the other hand and Bremer kicked him, pulled his grip free, and stabbed, the small weapon tearing through January’s sleeve as Rios and Cristobál seized him from behind. Cristobál smote Bremer down with astonishing strength; Rios struck him hard over the kidneys with the rifle-butt, and the young man screamed in pain. January held out his hand to stop another blow.
“I won’t harm you, you donkey,” January panted. “Who the hell do you think I am?”
The young man looked up at him, blue eyes filled with tears and with naïve shock at hearing himself addressed in his own tongue, as if he had assumed
that no one in all the land would speak his language but himself.
“The bandit . . .”
“El Moro?” January remembered the dark face through the churning dust of the fight in the pass.
Werther swallowed hard, but some of the tension went out of his body. “I don’t know what he was called.” He wiped the blood from his chin. “He and his men tried to murder me in an alley—pursued me. . . .”
El Moro or one of the men of color—slave or free—in Butler’s employ. Like Señora Lorcha, Bremer hadn’t looked further than a black man’s skin.
January signed to Cristobál to help Werther to his feet.
“Well, I’m not El Moro,” he told the valet. “My name is Benjamin January and I have been appointed by the British minister to look into the matter of your master’s death.”
“Thank God!” Bremer burst into tears and made to grasp his hands in thanks; Rios and Cristobál pulled him suspiciously back. Though the entire conversation was taking place in German, a dozen of the loiterers in the yard moved closer to listen, the way cows will gather around an artist sketching in a pasture. January signed his myrmidons back, took Werther by the arm, and led him to the shade of the arcade again. This proved not to be a terribly good idea—the sheltered wall closer to the corner of the yard seemed to have been universally used as a privy—but it was the closest thing to privacy on hand.
“I had begun to think there were none in this godforsaken country to believe me!” Werther gulped, clutching again at January’s arms. Close up, January saw that the man was barely twenty, the light down on his cheeks glittering like a white baby’s hair. “No justice, no law, only dirty papist savages and weak excuses, and that vile old pander playing up to the President. . . .”
January’s heart sank as the image of the murderous lover dissolved before the reality of an angry, terrified boy. No wonder Ylario’s instinct was to take Werther’s side, he thought. I’d take it myself if the only other possibility wasn’t Hannibal.
He held up a stern finger. “But you must tell me the truth if I am to help you. I am a surgeon, so I know you lied about Don Fernando speaking to you before he died. As a soldier’s servant, Bremer, you should know that no man grows cold within minutes of the breath leaving his body.”
Werther sniffled, wiped his nose on his sleeve, and glared at him sulkily. “It doesn’t change the fact that that degenerate fiddler poisoned him.”
“Doesn’t it? Could not the poison have been slipped into the tisane you brought him in an unguarded moment, after you left it there?”
“There was no unguarded moment!” protested the valet. “In that filthy household, with flies and insects everywhere? I locked the study door when I came into the room from the corredor, and you can be sure I watched from the pantry to make sure no servant would enter and break the dishes out of spite, or steal the spoons! I brought that set all the way from Potsdam! I lived in terror that it would be broken, for then what would I do? He could not endure to have things mismatched, Fernando—my master.”
“And you saw no one unknown, no stranger, near the house? No sign of an intruder?”
“No,” insisted the young man.
“Did you go beyond the walls at all?”
“On that night of all nights, when my master needed me? Never!” Tears spilled from Bremer’s eyes again. “There was no mysterious stranger, no outside evil-doer. It was Sefton who murdered my master! Does everyone in this country prostrate themselves before that dreadful old man’s wishes?”
“What became of the tea-things afterwards?”
“I took them away and washed them, of course!” Werther appeared horrified at the implication that he would allow even his grief at his master’s death to interfere with his duties.
“And when you left Mictlán?”
The valet sobbed in anguish, “I—I left them in my room! I didn’t think—I should have thought! I know I should have remained there to look after all of Fernando’s things. But Don Prospero was in such a rage that I’d touch a hair of that opium-sodden Norte’s head. . . . And I felt that I had to speak to the Capitán or die! He was the only one who . . . who understood what lay between my master and me! He spoke to me so kindly—that first morning, when he came upon me weeping in my room. He laid his hand upon my head—spoke to me of Goethe and Schiller, in the language that I understand. I know he understood! And then when I came to him here in town, and he did not believe me . . .”
“About your master’s final words?”
“About the will, imbecile!” Werther flung up his hands. “He said there was no will, he found no will. . . .”
“Will?” January, his mind still trying to fit John Dillard into the picture, felt as if he’d stepped off a curb in the darkness, and into a bottomless ditch.
“Don Prospero’s will!” Werther shouted at him so that Cristobál and Corporal Rios moved forward again, and January signed them back. “Does not anyone believe me? Are you all ignoramuses? It was lying on the desk in plain view! Poor Fernando was driven to distraction by it!”
“Did he tell you what was in it?”
“Of course he told me what was in it! How else would I know why that weakling beast wanted to murder Fernando? Over screwing that minx Valentina? Who would care about that?”
“What was in it?” January had the impression of having been suddenly blindfolded and whirled around. Ylario hadn’t even mentioned a will, but he must have known. . . .
“It was the document of a madman!” cried Werther, pressing his palm to his forehead so that his fair hair spilled down over his fingers. “A hundred thousand pesos and a sugar hacienda in the tierra caliente, not to Sefton, you understand, but to those stupid idols, those images that were all over the room! But Sefton was to be their conservator, to look after them and take care of them. . . .”
“What?”
“What can you expect of that vile old man?” Werther’s voice scaled up to almost a cry. “Who but a madman would stipulate that all his money was to be given not to his only son, but to that son’s unborn child? Who but a lunatic would make his chef the heir to twenty thousand acres of prime cattle land and a hundred thousand pesos? Or grant thirty thousand pesos, and a thousand acres of land, to a papist convent, a tomb, that a half-mad harridan and her daughter might seal themselves into that corrupt sepulchre forever?”
Tears were running down his face again, and he was trembling, so that January offered him his silver flask of brandy, the mere smell of it bringing the little ring of inquisitive léperos closer. Werther drank gratefully and sniffled again, and January offered him his clean extra handkerchief as well—which Werther examined before he used, as if he suspected January of fobbing him off with soiled linen.
“Fifty thousand pesos and the town house to that Montero slut! Herrgott! My poor Fernando was tearing his hair out, trying to sort out this on top of all the other inanities: the hundreds of thousands of pesos spent on dirty old books, on Greek pots and statues of heathen gods; the mortgages and debts he bought up only to let his debtors go on living as pensioners, with their greedy, degenerate superstitious families! Had my master lived, he would have put all that right. He would have made Mictlán a paying proposition, have cleansed the house of musty books and heathen idols—yes, and leveled those foul pyramids for good building-stone as well!”
Personally January doubted this: it would take Pharaoh and all the children of Israel working under the lash to dismantle those five silent hills. The Conquistadores had certainly never managed it.
Passionately, Werther went on. “No decent country—no true law-court—would have supported such a pile of imbecilities! And then that wastrel musician, that laudanum-swilling tormentor of cat-gut . . .”
“And this will was on the desk the night Fernando died?”
“I tell you, yes!” Werther shrieked—January had never encountered someone who shrieked words like the lesser characters of Gothic novels were always doing. “It lay on the desk with the ledge
rs and the bills and the promissory notes and the deeds and all the other trash, under the eyes of those insane gods! No wonder my poor Fernando was driven distracted! What a cursed day that Fernando and I ever came to this awful land!”
As January handed him the silver flask again, he reflected that it was no wonder poor Señor dos Cerritos didn’t want to discuss the will. Contemplation of such provisions probably made him want to shriek, too.
And with a hundred thousand pesos and a sugar hacienda at stake, he thought, his belly sinking with dread, it was no wonder Ylario had no doubt that it was Hannibal who’d poisoned his benefactor’s son.
Damn it, he thought bitterly, DAMN it . . . !
“He never meant to come back to this country, you know.” Werther wiped his nose and ran a weary hand over his face. His eyes were sunken and he looked like he hadn’t slept or eaten in days. “He wanted to put it behind him, to make a new life for himself in a new world. I don’t know if you understand.”
“Yes,” said January softly, thinking of the gray streets of Paris, and of men who addressed him as “vous” instead of “tu,” like a child or a dog. “Yes, I understand.”
“We were—he was so happy in Prussia. He despised his father, and used to tell the most dreadful tales of him to the other officers. I would hear as I waited on them, for naturally in those days he would not confide in a servant. Which is as it should be—he deserved better company than a servant. In those days he had his friends about him. Only when we were here, and he was alone . . . so alone.”
His voice trembled, and he took one last drink and handed back the flask. “Herr Damiano managed the estates—it was only due to his care that my master’s allowance came to him, and was not all spent on dirty statues and heathen books. When Damiano died, my master knew he must take over the management of things here himself, before all flew to the Devil.”
Days of the Dead Page 23
