by Jack Higgins
‘These things happen in war.’
‘I killed him,’ I said. ‘Killed all four of them neatly and expeditiously with a Thompson gun from the upstairs window of Cohan’s Select Bar. It was raining hard at the time and not a soul on the streets. They knew better. The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize, that’s what Mick Collins used to say and I believed him. In the end, it was too late to change. Even after Drumdoon. All I could do was run for the hills.’
‘It’s never too late for anything in this life.’
‘Now you’re playing priests again.’
He changed, just like that. ‘Damn me, but you’re right, Keogh, and that won’t do at all. Seems to me a man ought to stand by what he’s been, even at the final end of things, or his whole life’s been nothing.’
‘That’s me,’ I said. ‘A perfect description.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. What about that Indian kid. You saved her bacon back there at Tacho’s didn’t you? That ought to count for something.’
There was a kind of comfort in that and I thought of her for a moment, the dark, calm eyes, the olive skin, the warmth of her body when she had held me close on that night of torrential rain.
‘I’d say she owes as much to you as she does to me,’ I said. ‘If you hadn’t taken a hand in the game when you did …’
‘Don’t make the mistake of assigning a motive to my conduct that didn’t exist, Keogh.’ His voice was harsh again, his old cynical self. ‘I didn’t intend anything when I stepped into the bar at Tacho’s that night. What took place just happened to be the way things worked out. There was no method intended in my madness. And now I’ve talked. I’m going to sleep.’
He relieved himself into the bucket in the corner, then lay on his straw mattress, his irons clinking as he arranged his legs.
I stayed there at the window, clutching the bars and staring up into the cold night sky at stars older than time itself, that would be still here tomorrow night when little Emmet Keogh was long gone. God help me, but looking back on it all, this rag of a life of mine, it seemed such a pitiful waste.
The sergeant of the guard brought us coffee at seven o’clock, but no food which was reasonable enough under the circumstances.
After that, we were left alone for a good two hours. Van Horne had nothing to say. In the cold morning light he looked older than his years and his beard was tangled, the face dirty. I can have been in no better case and was feeling understandably depressed. The sounds of activity in the courtyard outside didn’t help.
There was the tramp of marching feet, a shouted order or two and van Horne got to his feet and went to the window. There was a certain amount of confused shouting and then a high-pitched scream.
‘What’s going on?’ I demanded.
‘They’re getting ready to shoot some poor bastard and he isn’t taking it too well.’
I joined him at the window and peered through the bars. There was a wooden post in front of the wall on the other side of the courtyard and the prisoner they were tying to it was struggling so hard that it was taking four soldiers to control him. As they moved away leaving him upright against the post, I got a look at his face and could not avoid a short, ironic laugh.
‘As old Tacho said, sometimes God looks down through the clouds.’
‘You know him?’
I nodded. ‘Captain Jose Ortiz. Chief of Police in Bonito.’
‘Well I’ll be damned,’ van Horne said. ‘Bonilla certainly doesn’t let the grass grow under his feet.’
Ortiz was unable to disgrace himself further for they had gagged him with an old bandana and blindfolded him. Cordona was in charge of the execution and I stayed to watch for some perverse reason of my own, but then I had seen a great many men die this way in my time and there was no reality to it at all. A single sharp command, a ragged volley and the pitiful creature strapped to the post ceased to exist. No satisfaction to be had there and in any event, as I turned away they came for us.
We were taken by the sergeant and half a dozen men through the cell block into a cool, white-walled corridor with windows so high that one could not see out into the courtyard. The sergeant produced a key and removed our leg-irons, and we waited.
After a while, the door opened behind us and I could tell by the rattle of leg-irons on the floor that another prisoner was being brought up. I looked over my shoulder casually and got the shock of my life. Janos was standing there between two guards, his linen suit filthy beyond description, sweat oozing from that great fat face.
His eyes widened and without the slightest hint of embarrassment he said, ‘Why, Mr Keogh, sir. We meet again.’
The effrontery of the man was such that I was unable to contain my laughter. ‘Meet my good friend Mr Janos from Bonito,’ I said to van Horne.
‘The character who confuses whisky with guns?’ Van Horne gave him a hard smile. ‘At least you’ll present them with a sizeable target, my friend.’
Janos ignored him. They had still left him his stick and he stumped forward as the leg-irons were removed. ‘Mr Keogh. I feel this whole sorry business very deeply. My fault, sir. If I could make amends I would, believe me. If it is any satisfaction, we are to suffer the same fate.’
‘No satisfaction at all,’ I told him.
The door opened and Lieutenant Cordona entered, a sheaf of papers in his right hand. He nodded to the sergeant who took Janos by the arm and led him forward.
‘Paul Janos,’ Cordona said, reading from the first sheet. ‘Age fifty-nine, otherwise Count Rakossy, sometime Colonel of the Austrian Imperial Guards.’
‘Must we really rake up all that sort of thing?’ Janos said wearily.
‘You have been tried by a military tribunal on the charge of treason against the state and have been found guilty as charged. The sentence of the court is that you be shot to death.’
‘Then I would suggest that we get it over with as quickly as possible.’
Cordona saluted formally and opened the door. Janos turned and said gravely, ‘I am sorry I got you into this mess, Mr Keogh and that’s the truth of it, sir. Good luck.’
The impudence of the man was breathtaking and when he went out through the door it was as if he were taking them and not the other way round.
It was over very quickly. A shouted command, the fusillade, a single revolver shot and no more than a couple of minutes after that the door opened and Cordona and his men returned.
They took van Horne, the sergeant and half a dozen men closing in on him before we knew what was happening as if they anticipated trouble.
As they pushed him through the door, he turned and called over his shoulder. ‘No regrets, Keogh.’
Which put a lump in my throat the size of my fist. I closed my eyes and waited, the coldness seeping through me. The inevitability of death is something few men ever consciously consider for to do so would make life itself unbearable, but now, in a real and frightening way, I knew that I was going to die. That I had only a few more minutes to live.
The rifles crashed outside and I stayed there, eyes closed, listening to the marching feet as they approached the door. When I opened them again, Cordona was before me, the final scrap of paper in his hand.
‘Emmet Keogh, age twenty-six, British citizen …’
His voice droned on and I looked beyond him out into the terrace at his side of the courtyard, the hard black shadows of the pillars falling across the flagstones like iron bars in the morning sun. And then we were moving out through the door and across the courtyard to the wooden post, blood fresh on the cobbles at its base.
I stood quietly while they strapped my ankles, waist and chest. Cordona said gravely, ‘I regret the absence of a priest, señor. You must make your peace with God in your own way.’
Then they fastened a bandana about my eyes and walked away. My mind seemed frozen. It was as if this was happening to someone else, not me. I didn’t even feel fear anymore, could think of no prayer worth the saying.
He gave the or
der to load and it was as if I could hear each bolt click home separately for they were not particularly well trained or perhaps they had no stomach for the work.
His voice brought them to the ready. There was a single breathtaking moment in which I begged my brother to forgive me and then an ear-shattering roll as they fired.
I was still alive, that much was obvious, had not even been hit which made no kind of sense at all. There was silence for a moment and then steps approached. The bandana was untied and I blinked in the sudden glare of the sun.
Cordona was pale, but calm. ‘You will come with me now, señor,’ he said impassively.
The sergeant was busy with my straps and I moistened my lips and croaked, ‘What in the name of God are you playing at, lieutenant?’
He turned without a word and led off across the courtyard and the sergeant applied the butt of his rifle gently in the small of my back and sent me after him. We went through the archway into that small enclosed garden again. There was no sign of Bonilla but Oliver van Horne and Janos stood against the wall, guarded by three soldiers.
I paused, staring at them in astonishment and Janos called, ‘You are familiar with Alice in Wonderland, sir? “Curiouser and curiouser”, was the phrase she used as I recall.’
Van Horne said nothing, his face grim like any predatory animal sensing danger and we were given no opportunity for further conversation for Cordona went straight in through the french windows and the sergeant brought the three of us after him.
Colonel Bonilla was sitting behind his desk enjoying a late breakfast. He glanced up, wiping his mouth with a napkin and nodded to Cordona who ordered the sergeant and his men outside and took up position by the window.
‘An unpleasant start to the day, gentlemen,’ Bonilla observed. ‘But one which I trust makes the point that I hold you all in the hollow of my hand.’
It was van Horne who broke the silence. ‘All right, what’s it about? What’s the game?’
‘A good word for it,’ Bonilla said. ‘Rather apt, but it’s really quite simple. I want you, Señor van Horne, to play the priest again, something you seem to have a talent for.’
Van Horne stared at him in amazement. ‘What did you say?’
‘And Señor Janos will make an excellent businessman. He has the build for it. He looks substantial therefore people will believe he is in other ways.’
‘I am complimented, sir,’ Janos told him with considerable irony.
Bonilla ignored him. ‘And you, Señor Keogh. Your task is the simplest of all. It might have been created especially for a man of your peculiarly dark talents.’
He smiled gravely. ‘All you have to do is kill someone for me.’
6
‘In the year since the Revolution there has been much unrest, much violence in many parts of Mexico, but nowhere more so than in this area. Worst of all is Mojada in the northern foothills of the Sierra Madre.’
Bonilla indicated the right spot on the map with the end of his riding crop and I took a close look. It was perhaps thirty or forty miles from Huila, the sort of place that had sprung up a couple of centuries earlier at the side of the old pack trails across the mountains.
‘All right, so what’s the story?’ van Horne demanded.
‘It is soon told, señor. I am military governor for this entire area based on Huila, and yet a bare thirty miles away there is not only no law and order but also a state of complete anarchy that none of my predecessors succeeded in doing anything about.’
I said, ‘I thought that’s what you had troops for?’
‘I have two hundred men to police the whole of my command area. An army would not be enough to handle the situation in Mojada and the few I have been able to spare in the past have never succeeded in achieving anything. You see, gentlemen, the key to the whole affair is to be found in the personality of one remarkable man, Tomas de la Plata, once a major under my own command until he turned his back on honour.’
He said the last bit as if it really meant something to him and continued, ‘Once, the de la Platas were great landowners in these parts. Now, all that is left is a decaying hacienda outside Mojada and a few acres of land plus an old silver mine that hasn’t been worked in ten or twelve years.’
‘Does anyone still live there?’ I asked.
‘His father, Don Angel de la Plata and his sister, Chela.’
‘And Tomas? What about him?’
‘God alone knows where he is from one moment to the next. Last month he and his men robbed the night express to Madera. Not content with that, he shot the driver and left the train to free-wheel down a gradient. It ran off the track after five miles. Over thirty people were killed, many injured.’
‘And he can still find people to follow him after that?’ van Horne said.
‘Death and suffering has been the story of my country for years now, señor. It has become something of a way of life to us. Three million dead in the Revolution alone. What are thirty more compared to that?’
‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘But I still can’t get a clear picture of the man in my own mind. What is he? Dissatisfied revolutionary or plain bandit?’
‘God alone knows and Tomas himself.’ Bonilla carefully fitted a cigarette into a black, ivory holder. ‘When I first knew him he was just out of university. The complete idealist. Everything was wrong therefore everything had to be changed.’
‘Which can hardly have made him popular with people of his own class, surely,’ Janos put in.
‘No, he lost a great deal by aligning himself with the people and their cause so completely. Even his own father publicly disowned him.’
‘But he didn’t mind,’ I said. ‘All for the cause. He sounds familiar.’
Bonilla smiled rather sadly. ‘It has been my experience that idealists of this type tend to be complete fanatics who cannot tolerate less than perfection either in the cause they fight for, or in the conduct of their associates.’
‘Perfection is hard to come by in this world,’ van Horne said.
‘Life, on the whole, is something of a compromise between what we would like and what we can have. Tomas was never capable of making that kind of accommodation.’
‘So what exactly went wrong in the end?’ I asked.
‘A great mystery. On the successful conclusion of the Revolution, Tomas was transferred to Huila because of his special knowledge of the area and was made second-in-command to the then military governor, a Colonel Varga. It seems they didn’t get on very well.’
‘Any particular reason?’
‘Varga was a great ox of a man, a peon who had risen through the ranks. A good soldier in his own rough way, but still inclined to eat with his fingers if you follow me. He was found in bed one morning with his throat cut from ear to ear. He had also been deprived of his manhood, a macabre touch if you like.’
‘And Tomas de la Plata?’
‘Gone, señor, vanished from the face of the earth, to reappear a month later at the head of twenty or thirty rogues who attacked and robbed a military supply column on its way here. The first of many such acts of lawlessness.’
‘And where does he get the men from?’ van Horne asked.
‘There are always those dissatisfied after every revolution, as Señor Keogh knows better than anyone from his own country.’ Which was hitting pretty low. ‘Just as there are always those who will reject any kind of authority if they can. In the area of Mojada, the people enjoy complete freedom from state control. Taxes are not collected for no tax collector can operate. There is no law, no justice because no police officer can live there. They have even rejected the church. Three priests during the past eighteen months. Two murdered and one found wandering in the desert, stripped of his clothes, beaten half to death. Quite out of his mind.’
To my surprise, van Horne made no comment to that and it was Janos who said, ‘Are you saying that de la Plata actually uses Mojada as his headquarters with the active support of the people?’
‘Let us say
he is to be found in that general area most of the time and occasionally in Mojada itself although it is no secret that there are always a few of his followers on view, just to keep the general population in line.’
‘So most people up there don’t particularly care for him?’ I said.
‘They fear him, señor. I have visited the place on three occasions myself. I have quartered troops there for a month at a time and all we meet is a wall of silence.’
‘All right, colonel,’ van Horne said. ‘Let’s get down to cases. What’s all this leading up to?’
‘Ten years of war, gentlemen, three million dead, the economy ruined. My country has suffered enough. Now we need stability and quiet, an end to killing. There is no room for men like Tomas de la Plata. The longer he survives the more the disaffected will seek to join him in the mountains and that won’t do at all. I want his head.’
‘And you expect us to get it for you?’ van Horne said.
‘If you do, señor, you can have your freedom and the contents of a certain Gladstone bag. Señor Janos may have his hotel back which would otherwise have been confiscated by the state.’
‘And me?’ I said. ‘What about me?’
He eyed me speculatively and then sighed. ‘Why, you will be free to go to hell in your own way, Señor Keogh.’
A thought I hardly found pleasant. Janos made the obvious point. ‘And what is to prevent us from simply clearing off into the blue, sir, once we leave here? Why go to Mojada at all?’
‘Because you have nowhere to go, señors. Not one of you. How far would you get? One hundred miles? Two? And next time there would be no choice. I have not only taken you out of the jaws of death. I have given you a chance of surviving with something in hand. I had thought you all intelligent men, whatever else you are.’
Van Horne turned to look at me inquiringly, then Janos. He said, ‘All right, colonel, we’re in. What’s the plan?’
Bonilla showed no emotion at all for, as it soon became clear, the fact that we might refuse had never entered his calculations.
