by Jack Higgins
The voice was like dry leaves whispering through a forest in the evening. ‘You will be sensible now, señor, for there is nothing to fear.’
Victoria Balbuena stepped out of the shadows. The arm was removed from my throat and she put out her hands to grasp mine. She smiled and it was a smile to turn the night over.
She started to pull me into the shadows and I restrained her. ‘Hold hard there, where are we going?’
The eyes were eloquent, but it was Nachita who spoke for her. ‘We will go now, señor, leave Huila tonight. By dawn we will already be into the mountains and in that country, no federale known to man can catch a Yaqui. In four days you will be safe in the Wind River country.’
‘But why?’ I said.
‘Because my lady wishes it.’
It was the nearest he could come to expressing her status in Spanish and certainly seemed to indicate that Cordona had known what he was talking about.
I held Victoria’s hands very lightly and shook my head. ‘It isn’t possible.’
Nachita said, ‘This morning you faced death at the stake, señor, tonight you live. This is an interesting turn of events.’
He had a remarkable face and I think it was then that I really noticed him for the first time, directly confronting him as it were. Straight-nosed, thin-lipped with pale brown skin. Full of strength, intelligence and calm pride. I was even more impressed when I discovered later that he was seventy-two years of age.
I said, ‘Three lives for one. Colonel Bonilla gave me and my two comrades ours in exchange for that of a man named Tomas de la Plata.’
He said calmly, ‘But de la Plata still lives, señor, all men know this.’
‘We’re going to Mojada tomorrow to try to remedy that.’
‘Then you go to a bad end,’ he said simply.
Victoria had me in a grip like iron. I leaned close and said deliberately, ‘There is honour in this. Van Horne saved us both at Tacho’s, you as well as me. Should I desert him now?’
God alone knows why I came up with that one, but she took it seriously and nodded, her hands going slack in mine. I reached out to touch her cheek, she turned her face sideways and kissed the palm of my hand. About her neck she was wearing a round silver amulet of Indian workmanship on the end of a plaited leather thong. With a sudden, quick gesture, she took it off, pulled it over my head and down around my neck, then reached up, kissed me in a thoroughly European way, turned and disappeared into the darkness.
Nachita said, ‘I know Mojada, señor, it is an unfilled grave. Think again.’
‘It is another step along the way, my friend,’ I told him. ‘I never go back to anything. Look after her.’
He vanished, melted into the shadows as if he had never been and I stood there, fingering the silver amulet, quite unaware of its significance, a great sadness on me as if now, at last, I was at the final bitter end of things and had nothing.
7
We left at six o’clock on as grey and dreary a morning as you could wish for. A bad omen or perhaps that was just the Celt in me. Van Horne, who had been busy with the cards and wine until the small hours, looked about a hundred years old, although Janos seemed much the same.
Cordona was there to see us off, the boots and uniform absolute perfection, every inch a soldier, even at that time in the morning. He told us he would be leaving with his patrol for the rancheria at Huanca later in the day and wished us luck in his usual tight, reserved way. It was obvious that he never expected to see us alive again which was a cheerful thought on which to depart.
I drove and van Horne sat beside me leaving the rear seat to Janos who took up space for two men anyway. The streets were quite deserted as we drove through Huila and beyond the road, if road you could call it, vanished into the grey morning in the general direction of the Sierra Madre.
There was a heavy ground mist that made it difficult to see for more than a few yards in any direction although it varied greatly in intensity. About five miles out of Huila, it cleared a little and I caught a glimpse of something moving up ahead, a flash of scarlet.
As we approached, I saw that it was a pack-train of a dozen or more heavily laden mules. The Yaqui, Nachita, guarding the rear, the old Winchester in his right hand, the butt against his thigh. There were three other Indians strung out along the train, hard, dangerous-looking men in head-bands and red flannel shirts like a uniform, armed to the teeth and ready to take on the world.
Victoria Balbuena rode at the head of the procession, dressed exactly as when I had last seen her in the garden with the addition of a cloak of some kind of animal fur which hung from around her shoulders against the cold.
I drove past very slowly and Nachita raised the Winchester a foot or so as if in greeting, but Victoria stared straight ahead into the morning, giving no sign, a fierce little queen ignoring the commoners.
At least it brought van Horne to life. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said. ‘I said she’d reverted to type, but this is ridiculous.’
About fifty yards farther on I pulled into the side of the road and switched off the engine. ‘Now what are you playing at?’ he demanded.
I ignored him, jumped out and ran back into the mist. There was an ornamental bell around the neck of her horse, I heard that first and then she seemed to float into view.
She showed no surprise, no emotion at all to find me standing there. The man closest to her urged his mount forward and Nachita called to him sharply in his own language. Victoria kept on moving, staring straight ahead and I took hold of her stirrup leather and walked beside her. When we reached the Mercedes, I released my grip and she kept on going, still without a glance.
The pack-train, Nachita bringing up the rear, vanished into the mist. Janos said, ‘What was that all about?’
I climbed back behind the wheel. As I leaned forward, the silver amulet she had given me swung free and van Horne reached out to examine it.
‘She gave you that?’
‘And what if she did?’
He laughed harshly. ‘Let me tell you about the Yaqui, boy. Some of their clans put the womenfolk first. Why, it’s even the woman who chooses the man. Each girl-child at birth is given the symbol of her sex and power by her mother in the form of a silver amulet. When a girl wants a husband, she simply puts her amulet on him. When she wants a divorce, she takes it back.’
For some reason, the whole thing seemed to strike him as extremely humorous. ‘Damn me, Keogh, but you’ve just been to the altar and didn’t know it.’
He laughed so hard I thought it likely he might do himself an injury and Janos joined in. Strange, but I saw nothing funny about the business at all.
‘So what?’ I said. ‘I’ll likely be dead meat in a day or two. We all will.’
Which wiped the smile from both faces very effectively and I drove away.
Within another hour, the grey skies had lifted, the mist dispersed and the sun was climbing high into the heavens. The semi-desert plain we drove through was a dun-coloured haze rising into the mountains, the canyons dark with shadow.
If ever there was country not intended for the automobile it was this and although the Mercedes was built like a tank and could obviously stand a great deal of punishment, there seemed no point in asking for trouble, so I drove with extreme caution for most of the way. Indeed there were occasions, especially as we started to climb into the mountains, when it was necessary to get out and clear particularly large rocks out of the way.
Naturally, Janos was of no help at all in this kind of situation and he sat in the rear seat, smoking a cigar and commiserating with us loudly. Amazingly, van Horne took this quite well. In fact he grew progressively more cheerful as the morning drew on.
About ten miles out of Mojada, we stopped and had what amounted to a picnic for food had been provided in a basket carrier. Cold meat, anchovies, olives and fresh bread and a couple of bottles of red wine.
It was all rather gay and Janos toasted the general direction of Mojada, glass
raised. ‘We who are about to die, salute thee.’
‘Fine sentiments, but not for me,’ van Horne said. ‘What about you, Keogh?’
‘It comes as God wills,’ I shrugged. ‘Isn’t that what the bull-fighters say just before they go into the plaza?’
It touched something deep inside him, I realize that now looking back on it all, for I think the change was already working in him although it is difficult to say in life where anything begins or ends. Certainly the good humour left him and there was a strange, bleak look on his face as he stood and looked up into the mountains.
‘It’s a thought, Keogh, a hell of a thought.’ He shivered quite distinctly and forced a smile. ‘Strange how cold the wind can be, even in the sun.’
And there was no wind blowing.
There were horsemen in the hills as we moved closer to Mojada. Janos drew my attention to them, but they were far, far above us and it was impossible to see who they were. They kept pace and only dropped out of sight completely when we came over the final rise in the trail and looked down at Mojada in the hollow below.
It was little more than a village, surrounded by a crumbling adobe wall perhaps fifteen feet high, a relic of the days when there had been a constant threat from Indians. Access was gained through an arched gateway and inside, there were thirty or forty adobe casas, a small crumbling church with a bell tower that looked as if it had once been whitewashed and what looked like the hotel Cordona had mentioned, if hotel one could call it in such a place.
I negotiated a flock of sheep on the way down, the three old men in charge staring at us in amazement and moved in through the gateway in the wall. Once inside, we were besieged by a dozen or so ragged and barefoot children who ran at the tail of the car. Janos threw a little loose change to scatter them as I pulled up outside the hotel. It was a poor sort of place, the facade crumbling, eroding a little bit more day by day in the heat and no one doing anything about it. A board sign over the door said Casa Mojada.
I got out and opened the rear door for Janos. The children stood in a silent half circle at a respectable distance, only moving away with considerable reluctance at the urging of four or five women who had appeared from nearby houses.
There were three or four men squatting in the shade of the hotel porch, backs against the wall. Typical peons, poorly clothed and with the weary, lined faces of the prematurely old. Men who had worked like dogs since childhood to keep body and soul together. They had started with nothing and would end the same way.
Inside it was cool and dark. The floor was stone-flagged, there were two or three tables and chairs and a bar counter with a neatly scrubbed top, bottles ranged behind it. There wasn’t a customer in sight and no one to serve either. Janos hammered on the counter with his stick, then slumped into a chair, the sweat already pouring from his face again.
There was a sudden, startled gasp. I swung round and found a woman standing in an open doorway to the left of the bar. She was perhaps forty years of age and looked frightened out of her wits at the sight of us. The most significant thing about her was that she was pregnant and at that stage when she could expect the child at any time or I had wasted four years medical training.
A man appeared behind her pulling on a jacket, tall and thin, middle-aged, hair iron-grey as was the large moustache he wore. He muttered something to the woman, pushed her back through the door and came forward.
‘At your orders, señores.’
‘And who might you be?’ Janos demanded.
‘Rafael Moreno, señor, I run the hotel. I am also mayor of Mojada.’
‘Is that so,’ Janos wiped sweat from his face. ‘My name is Janos and this is my associate, Señor Keogh. We are here at Don Angel de la Plata’s invitation to inspect his mine.’ Moreno didn’t seem to be able to think of anything to say and Janos added sharply, ‘We shall require accommodation man, don’t you understand? Two rooms.’
At that moment van Horne came in through the door and the look of shock and amazement on Moreno’s face had to be seen to be believed. He took an involuntary step backwards and crossed himself briefly.
‘This good man, Father van Horne, begged a lift of me when he heard my destination in Huila,’ Janos told him. ‘You will perhaps be good enough to direct him to the priest’s house.’
‘The priest’s house?’ Moreno looked at him in stupefaction. ‘But there is no priest’s house, señor. We do not have a priest in Mojada.’
‘But you do now, my son,’ van Horne said with surprising gentleness. ‘You have a church. Now you have a priest again.’
A look of genuine horror appeared on Moreno’s face. ‘We have no priest, father, it is not permitted.’ He flung out his arms wildly. ‘There are no rooms available. The hotel is full, do you understand? You must go away, all of you. And you, father,’ he said to van Horne, ‘you most of all.’ Then he quite simply walked out, closing the door behind him.
There was a reasonably heavy silence. I went behind the bar, found three glasses and filled them with beer from a stone jug cooling in a bucket of water.
‘I should have thought he’d have been warned we were coming,’ I said.
‘Or should have been,’ van Horne drank a little of his beer and nodded. ‘That’s more like it. There’s a game of sorts being played here.’
‘Then what, may I ask, is our next move?’ Janos said.
‘The obvious one under the circumstances. We all play our parts. You two deliver me to the church with my belongings, the courteous thing to do, then you drive out to the hacienda and see Don Angel with your tale of woe. He’ll probably offer to put you up.’
‘Which leaves you on your own,’ I said.
He smiled gravely and raised his left hand and I saw that he was holding the Gladstone bag. ‘Not as long as I’ve got this,’ he said. ‘Now let’s get moving.’
When we went into the porch at the front of the church the smell of dirt and decay was immediately apparent. The door stood open for the simple reason that the lock had been smashed. Van Horne pushed it back with his boot and led the way in.
The place was a shambles. Wooden benches overturned and smashed, obscene words scrawled in charcoal on the whitewashed walls. There were piles of excrement everywhere and not only the canine variety. Humans had been here also. Even the altar, a plain block of grey stone that looked very ancient had not been missed. As obscene a version of the sexual act as I have ever seen had been chalked on the front.
Van Horne stood looking at it for quite some time, then put out a hand and touched the top of the altar gently. ‘The poor ignorant fools,’ he said. ‘I wonder if they knew what they were doing? The whole place will have to be reconsecrated after this.’
He opened a door to one side and led the way into what was obviously the vestry. There was a desk and an old wardrobe, even a narrow iron cot in the corner, although the mattress looked as if it could give one just about every disease known to man.
Van Horne said, ‘This will do me. Help me in with my trunk, then get started on your end of things.’
We brought it in between us and put it down in a corner of the room. I said, ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’
‘I usually do. I’ll use the blanket from the car and beg a mattress and a lamp from Moreno. He’ll hardly refuse me that much.’
He seemed abstracted, his eyes moving restlessly about the tiny church, the great hands clenching and unclenching nervously. I glanced inquiringly at Janos who shrugged and we left him to it and went outside.
‘He is taking his part seriously, our friend,’ Janos observed as he climbed into the rear of the Mercedes.
‘You think so?’ I shrugged. ‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s bad enough, what’s been done to the place, in all conscience. I wasn’t exactly laughing out loud myself.’
But I didn’t believe that, not for one moment for I had seen the look on van Horne’s face at the desecration of the altar. A kind of agony had showed there for a moment, and his voice had changed again
, perhaps the most significant thing of all.
The hacienda was three miles on the other side of Mojada according to the map and yet we came to the beginning of the land area within a mile, a great archway across a side road with a coat of arms and the name de la Plata carved into the stone.
I drove on through a rolling plain of tawny grassland with here and there, cows bunched together in small groups, usually in the shade of a thicket of cotton woods.
A mile beyond the archway a shot sounded on the warm air and three horsemen galloped out of a fold in the ground parallel to the dirt road we were following. I kept right on going and the leader levelled a rifle across his left arm and fired again, raising dust no more than a couple of yards in front of us. I did the sensible thing and braked to a halt.
‘If you are interested, I obtained a revolver from Cordona before leaving and my ability to shoot straight is one thing my glands haven’t altered in the slightest,’ Janos said calmly as they approached.
‘We’ll see,’ I said. ‘Try laying down the law first.’
They were all dressed as working vaqueros in straw sombreros and rawhide leggings, but the one who appeared to be in charge, the man with the rifle, was cast in his own mould. He was about the size of van Horne with a hard, brutal face and the largest hands I have ever seen on any man.
‘What do you think you’re playing at?’ Janos roared.
‘This is private land,’ the other told him in a voice roughened by a great many years of disease and liquor.
‘I am here at the express invitation of the owner of this property, Don Angel de la Plata,’ Janos said crisply.
‘You are a bad liar, señor, for I am Raul Jurado, foreman to Don Angel and would be the first to be informed of such a visit.’
He raised his left arm bringing the muzzle of his rifle up. My fingers were already touching the butt of the Enfield, but there was no need. Janos said, ‘You will notice that my hand is inside my coat pocket, my friend, where it holds a loaded revolver. You are a large man and at this range I would have considerable difficulty in missing you.’
