So Far From God

by John Harris

  He accepted that pressures had been put on her. He’d been subjected to the same pressures from Horrocks and been forced to submit to them.

  ‘So why give up now?’

  ‘Because of you. Because I love you.’

  He stopped dead, and she faced him, her face pale with unhappiness. ‘Oh, Fitz,’ she whispered, ‘Why do we always quarrel? Why do we hate each other so much?’

  The misery in her face knocked all the stuffing out of him. Aghast through his outrage at the unhappiness he had brought her, it was beyond his power to resist. Calling himself a big soft-hearted, sentimental Irishman, he put his arms round her and held her close. ‘There,’ he said stupidly. ‘Steady on.’

  He felt her body relax and slump against him, shaken with terrible paroxysms of sobs. Her arms went round him, clinging desperately as if to the last refuge in a gaping sea. ‘If you go on like this you’ll break your heart,’ he said.

  He sat on the bed, still holding her, and she put one hand behind his shoulder and gave a little moan. Because she had been angry with him, her capitulation was more complete and, as he held her, his lips against her forehead, she was clutching his hand, kissing it with a desperate ardour, using Mexican and German endearments she had heard her mother use to her as a child because she had never learned any others. It was as if she had suddenly realised she needed that love she had always denied herself in her concentration on her career and, as they sank back, she offered no resistance, throwing away caution, pride, everything.

  ‘Oh, Fitz,’ she whispered. It sounded almost like a cry of despair.

  Three

  A warm breeze was coming through the open windows, stirring the curtains, the shutters making great slashes of shadow and butter-yellow sunshine. Outside they could see the palms and the gum trees in the garden and smell woodsmoke from a fire somewhere.

  Slattery felt dazzled and humbled. He’d planned and plotted for this moment, he realised, from the day he’d first met Magdalena on the train to Chihuahua, but when it had arrived it had come unexpectedly when they were staring at each other with fury in their eyes. Because of their anger, their passion had been all the more powerful.

  As he turned his head, he saw her studying him. She didn’t return his smile. All her life she’d been supported by the religious and moral instruction she’d undergone as a child. Her family had been good practising Catholics and in their teachings she had always been able to find the answer. Now she felt she no longer could.

  ‘I’m confused,’ she said. ‘I’ve lived all my life with Fausto’s lies and now I’m uncertain and guilty. I don’t know who to believe. And I need to believe. I need to be able to trust. Don’t ever let me down, Fitz.’

  He took her in his arms. Outside the swallows were high in the air, crying thinly. He knew his hold on her was still tenuous but he was determined not to let her slip through his fingers again.

  When he saw Pilar in the hall that evening, she gave him an odd look and he realised she knew exactly what had happened between them – and even approved. Magdalena remained curiously reserved, trying to behave as if nothing were different when she knew very well it was.

  He saw her off for the north on the evening train a week later. The new war in Mexico hadn’t yet progressed from manoeuvring to shooting and it was still possible to travel the length of the country. He was waiting at the station when she arrived, a tall woman in blue velvet over a pink blouse with a whalebone neck and a veil, and a magnificent flowered and feathered hat. As she swept across the dusty platform to the train, Jesús was trailing behind with her dresser and a porter pushing a trolley with her luggage. He was changing fast, broadening and growing handsome, and Slattery noticed several girls turn to eye him. For the journey Magdalena had bought him a fine blue suit and a soft felt hat.

  ‘Look after her, Jesús,’ Slattery adjured him. ‘If there’s trouble, telegraph me at once.’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  As they stood by the steps to the carriage, Magdalena nervous and unable to stop talking, Fausto Graf appeared. Consuela Lidgett was with him, together with a blond young man with a turned-up moustache and a high stiff collar, who had Potsdam written all over him.

  ‘Fausto’s wife doesn’t seem to enter his plans much these days,’ Magdalena commented. ‘Is he living with her?’

  Graf spotted her. ‘My little sister,’ he said, approaching. ‘We’ll be travelling together.’

  ‘I’m travelling with my dresser,’ Magdalena announced coldly. ‘You can travel with whom you like.’

  Graf looked at Slattery, full of smiles. ‘Though we are on opposite sides of the fence, Herr Slattery,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t mean that in a neutral country we cannot be friends.’

  ‘Don’t be bloody silly,’ Slattery snapped and Graf’s smile widened.

  ‘Well,’ he conceded, ‘perhaps not friends. But we can treat each other with politeness when there are ladies present. No?’

  That night Slattery dined at Silvain’s. It had once been a favourite haunt of Huerta’s but with his departure the clientele had changed and Slattery bumped into Hermann Stutzmann with Consuela and the young German he’d seen on the station platform. The German was polite and chilly, what the Germans called ‘correct’. Consuela looked prosperous. She gave him a distant smile and, as she disappeared with the young German, Stutzmann remained behind, fumbling with his hat and cloak until they were out of sight. He was as eager as ever to be friendly.

  ‘Splendid show tonight, Herr Paddy,’ he said. ‘I had to promote Evangelina Oropesa to Magdalena’s roles and in the second act, she was almost as good as Magdalena. But not quite. Nobody can be La Graf. Unfortunately, I foresee difficulties.’

  ‘What sort of difficulties?’

  ‘Fausto is paying too much attention to Oropesa.’

  ‘Is he chasing Oropesa?’

  ‘Everybody chases Oropesa. She doesn’t have a faithful heart.’

  ‘What about Consuela?’

  Stutzmann’s gentle face sagged. ‘It is very sad because she thinks Fausto is faithful. She came with him once to ask for a part. She said she could sing.’ Stutzmann gave a huge shrug. ‘She couldn’t, of course. She sounded like the honk of a motor horn. It was then that Fausto met Oropesa. She has a nice shape, of course, but she has a brain like a plate of sauerkraut and in a few years she’ll be nothing but a top C and a double chin.’ He paused to draw breath. ‘He’ll have to be careful now La Lidgett’s back, of course. He has enough troubles already.’

  ‘What sort of troubles, Hermann?’

  Slattery was hoping for something important but it turned out to be only another of Fausto Graf’s sexual adventures.

  ‘Elizabeth von Boenigk.’

  ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘Wife of Baron von Boenigk.’

  ‘Come on, Hermann. Who’s he then?’

  ‘One of General Kloss’ aides. You’ll know of General Kloss. He was Huerta’s director of munitions and ordnance. Von Boenigk is a handsome good-natured willing boy and he has a handsome good-natured willing wife.’

  ‘Is Fausto chasing her, too?’

  ‘Where Von Boenigk is these days, my friend, Unser Fausto is, too. He keeps Oropesa just for Mexico City – when Consuela isn’t around. He’s a free-ranging man.’

  The food at Sylvain’s was indifferent. It always was these days, because Zapata was preventing supplies from entering the city and, knowing that the Carranza currency in use would be declared worthless as soon as Obregón left the capital, stores were hoarding their stocks. Two days later the water also disappeared as Zapatistas blew up the pumping station and the stench became appalling.

  Filth and pestilence had become normal and the streets were dangerous. And, with the Church reaping the consequences of consistently backing the wrong horse, sacred buildings were also being sacked and drunken soldiers wandered about with their heads through magnificent religious paintings. Encouraged by Obregón, who was an agnostic, they rode their horses up
to the altars and smashed the plaster saints with a sweep of their swords.

  Despite the show of power, however, it was always Zapata sitting in the hills of Morelos just to the south, who controlled the city. Obregón was finding he could no longer hold the place and Carranza was talking of shifting the seat of his government to Veracruz on the coast. The Americans had never been in the slightest danger of being thrown back into the sea, and had spent their time there trying to clean the place up. The Mexicans, who had always accepted flies and smells as part of life, thought they were mad, and showed no surprise when Woodrow Wilson announced they were due to leave on Mexico’s Independence Day.

  ‘Neat sense of timing,’ Slattery observed.

  The disappearance of the Americans was a stroke of luck for the hard-pressed Carranza and he stripped the capital of everything he could carry and began to move to the coast. From near Horrocks’ office, Slattery watched as the Carrancistas headed east along the Paseo de la Reforma. Some were aiming for the station, some were for chancing it on the road. Carts, cars and wagons were all moving steadily in the same direction, followed by men on horses and squads of troops on foot. As the last of them vanished, Slattery turned towards the Avenida Versailles, only to see men on horses approaching from the direction of Chapultepec. At their head, his face shadowed by his huge sombrero, was a slim figure in black.

  ‘Zapata,’ Slattery said. ‘Back again! This bloody place’s becoming a no man’s land. Nobody wants it, but nobody can afford to ignore it.’

  Immediately horses began to disappear again and brides were left weeping in their wedding carriages, the horses ridden away by Zapatista soldiers. Stable owners took to sitting up all night with guns on their knees and Atty was careful to hide the Studebaker under bales of hay in the stables behind the house.

  Unused to cities, the Zapatistas eyed everything with suspicion, especially the street cars, and several firemen were picked off as they hurried to a fire by sharpshooters who thought the fire engine a new form of weapon and the brass helmets they wore the uniform of a new invading army.

  Despite the distance, the war in Europe had started to affect life. The assassination in Sarajevo had scarcely caused a ripple, but the sinking of three British cruisers in the English Channel by a submarine brought a shout of triumph from the German residents, and Atty returned home with a furious face after being jeered at in one of the neighbouring bars.

  ‘The bastards are saying they’ve found a new weapon that’ll win the war,’ he snarled.

  With Carranza gone, news came from Horrocks at Tacuba further north that Villa was on his way to join up with Zapata, and the arrival of the northern armies brought a new saturnalia of debauchery, looting and murder as the Villistas exacted revenge on anybody who had spoken against their chief. Then Turner appeared on the doorstep, complaining that Carranza’s paper money had been declared worthless.

  ‘What am I supposed to do?’ he demanded.

  ‘Change your plates,’ Atty said bluntly. ‘And start printing Villa’s “Dos Caros” notes.’

  By this time, in a military situation which was rapidly becoming chaotic, the leaders of armed groups were wavering in an agony of indecision about which side to support, knowing perfectly well that in the roulette game of rebellion swift promotion had to be staked against a dishonourable death.

  Growing nervous of his involvement, Zapata withdrew once more to the Morelos hills and, as the armies began to line up for battle, railways, always the prime military objectives, were blown up, patched together and blown up again, until mountains of scrap began to rise in the railway yards. Walls gaped roofless and were pocked with bullet holes, and hanged men withered in the sun on trees and telegraph poles.

  You could always tell which side the soldiers were on from the songs they sang. Villistas tended to favour ‘Adelita’, Carrancistas preferred ‘La Cucaracha’, while Zapata’s hordes sang to the melting ‘Valentina’. Some were ranchero units, some were led by priests who had unfrocked themselves to join their rebel congregations. The Zapatistas were a peasant army clad in white cotton. The northerners wore scraps of uniform bought from the United States in job lots, with colourful additions of their own, and travelled on trains, using the locomotive as a machine for towing, an armoured fighting vehicle, or a bomb on wheels. The age span for soldiers stretched from seven to seventy. Below twelve, a boy became a bugler, a drummer or a courier; over twelve he was a fully-fledged soldier, and even the women pitched in when occasion offered.

  As fighting began to flare up along the border, on the American side, every window facing Mexico was filled with steel plates, bales of hay or sandbags and blocks of wood, but it still didn’t stop American citizens being killed, and finally the American troops along the border had to withdraw their positions a humiliating mile into their own territory to avoid casualties.

  Although Magdalena had been intending to rest before crossing into the States to fulfil her contract, Slattery picked up news of her singing in small theatres in northern Mexico and eventually a packet of theatre bills and programmes arrived with the explanation that she was using these performances to bring her voice back to pitch and to make sure she was capable of carrying out the terms of her contract.

  ‘Soon I shall be leaving for the States,’ she wrote. ‘I send you a kiss.’

  It wasn’t much but it was unexpectedly warm.

  With the war in Europe glued to a line of trenches that ran from the Channel to the Swiss border and the struggle in Mexico still nothing more than skirmishing, he wondered if the situation was stable enough to see her before she crossed the border, and he was actually on the point of closing the office and booking his ticket when Horrocks did one of his pantomime demon acts and arrived on his doorstep without warning.

  He was dressed in a haphazard fashion that was far from his usual immaculate style and he was livid. He had arrived from Veracruz that morning and been stopped in the Alameda Gardens by drunken soldiers.

  ‘Nine times they pretended to shoot me!’ he spluttered furiously. ‘And each time they stole another piece of clothing, until I was as naked as the day I was born. I had the greatest difficulty persuading a cab driver I wasn’t drunk and getting the damn man to drive me to my hotel. I then had to get him to call the manager and borrow some clothes before I could cross the lobby.’

  Slattery grinned. Only the Mexicans, with their gift for humiliating the paler-skinned northerners, could have managed to infuriate the imperturbable Horrocks. ‘Next to shooting a man to death,’ he pointed out, ‘they like most of all to scare him to death.’

  Horrocks glared. ‘They put me up against a bloody wall,’ he snarled. ‘And told me to show my profile! Then the other profile! Then full face! They could barely stand up for the drink they’d taken.’

  ‘Or doubtless,’ Slattery grinned, ‘for laughing.’

  ‘It’s not funny!’

  Slattery’s smile died. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Mexico is never funny, but it still raises a sad laugh occasionally.’

  Horrocks snorted. ‘We’re not in the business of laughter, sad or otherwise. We’ve lost Kloss! You know Kloss – he was Huerta’s director of munitions and ordnance. He’s also a German agent, and we’ve lost contact with him. He’s important and we need to know who’s getting his advice. Because, whoever it is, he’s going to win this new war. We want him. Find him.’

  Four

  There were various ways of finding Kloss but Slattery decided Stutzmann would provide the best lead. He found him in the wings of the Opera House stage, his plump face made up into a mask of ferocity for his role in Dolores Ruíz. Onstage, Evangelina Oropesa was hitting the high notes in a solo.

  ‘Mein lieber Freund,’ Stutzmann said. ‘You and I shouldn’t be talking together. We are on opposite sides of the fence.’

  ‘You and I, Hermann, will never manage to be enemies.’

  Stutzmann gave him a grateful smile. ‘I’m sure you want something,’ he said.

  ‘I�
�m looking for Fausto Graf. Where is he?’

  ‘Mein lieber Kamerad, I am told it’s my duty not to talk to you, because you are British and I am a Hun. Otherwise it is Rassenverrat – race treason. That is what they impressed on me when I reported at the Consulate where it was considered I could do a better job here for Germany than reporting as a reservist. You must ask the Frau Lidgett. She ought to know.’

  That evening, Slattery dined at Sylvain’s again. As he’d half-expected, Consuela was there with the young German who’d been seeing Graf off at the station. Her clothes were good and she wore pearls but he noticed a growing tightness about her mouth.

  As the German clicked his heels and left, she gestured to Slattery to join her. Her eyes hungrily took in the big rangy frame, the red hair and the amber fox’s eyes, and almost immediately she began to talk.

  ‘I tried going back to Gordonsboro,’ she said. ‘But Gordonsboro’s not for me any more.’

  ‘And Fausto?’

  ‘He says he’s getting a divorce.’

  ‘I saw him heading north. What happens to you when he’s not here?’

  Her face grew taut. ‘I look after myself. It’s not hard and he pretends not to know. I don’t mind about Loyce now. He didn’t love me. He wasn’t trying to save my life, like I said in the article I wrote. He didn’t even know I was there.’

  They chatted for a while then she tapped his arm with the fan she carried.

  ‘Will you see me home?’ she asked quietly. ‘My friend had to leave and the streets these days are no place for a single woman.’

  They finished their wine and he sent a waiter to call a cab. In the darkness inside, watching the crowds and the occasional drunken soldier, she said nothing and made no attempt to touch his hand. Her apartment was on the second floor of a block just on the right side of the district where the bourgeois quarter touched on the slums. As she unlocked the door, an Indian maid, dressed in what looked like old finery of Consuela’s, greeted them and produced a brandy bottle. Consuela eyed Slattery speculatively and pushed the bottle towards him.