“Get off your knees. You look ridiculous.”
I got up and brushed off my knees.
“Tell me what happened to Antonio.”
“Your betrothed had him murdered.”
I expected her to take the accusation like a slap in the face, perhaps staggering back, swaying dizzily so I had to catch her as she collapsed from a terrible shock. But she just stared at me quietly for a moment before asking another question.
“Why do you say that?”
I described what happened. “It was an assassination, not a robbery. They were paid to kill; stealing would have been a bonus.”
She again became quiet, pursing her lips, staring beyond me as she digested my accusation.
“That’s why you didn’t turn me in,” I said.
She met my eye for a second and turned away again.
“Ah … sí,” I said, nodding, as a revelation exploded in my head. “I thought you had the same feelings I had, that you fell in love with me when—”
“When—what? When you attacked me? Tried to—”
“I didn’t try anything; I saved you.”
“You—”
“Shut up.”
“What?”
“Shut up or I’m going to turn you over my knee and spank you. Ay di mio, you are a mean-tempered shrew. If you don’t start talking to me as a woman speaks to a man, I won’t be your lover.”
“I—I—”
She was speechless, but from the way she held the bush cutter I still wasn’t sure if she planned to use it on me.
“Why do you suspect Carlos,” I asked.
She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, then walked around, pausing to examine a rosebud. Finally, she turned back to me with a grave but polite expression.
“Did you know that Ramos de los Rios was murdered?”
It was my turn to be shocked. I thought he had died of old age or one of the pestilences that periodically come back and hurry people to their graves.
“He was hit over the head as he walked home from an evening Mass. The killer was never found.”
“And?”
“A niece of Carlos shares a carriage with me on the paseo. Carlos had approached Ramos for money after his business scheme cost him dearly. Soon after Ramos was killed, it was revealed that Antonio was his heir, not Carlos. She said that when Carlos found out he wasn’t going to inherit, he flew into a terrible rage because he desperately needed the money. His wife said something to him that he took offense to about the matter, and he struck her.”
“Perhaps asking if he had murdered his uncle,” I mused.
“I don’t know. But he is an evil person to strike his wife when she was sick, even if he didn’t kill Ramos. And…”
“And?”
“I have always felt there was something … I don’t know, deceptive, perhaps, dishonorable about him. I don’t know—it’s just a feeling.”
“Did the niece say anything more?”
“No. But now that Carlos has approached my father to marry me, I’m horrified both at marrying a man who would hit a sick woman and troubled by my suspicions.”
“What does your father say?”
“That I am finding reasons to avoid marrying Carlos because he is more than twice my age and I don’t find him attractive. I find him both pompous and mean-spirited. My father is so enthralled that Carlos is a hidalgo and was related to Cortés by marriage that he’s blind to everything else about the man.”
“Are you looking for reasons?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t leave aside my suspicion about Ramos’s death. Don Ramos was a friend of my family. He treated me very kindly. He often spoke of his handsome nephew in Spain and would joke and tease that he was going to bring him over here to marry me.”
She has another in line for her affections besides Carlos and me—and he is dead.
“Robberies are common,” I said. “What makes you suspicious that Carlos was involved? Besides his need for money?”
“From the way Ramos’s head was crushed in, he was hit more than once, but his purse was not taken. It wasn’t necessary to beat him to death. He was old and rather frail; he could have been robbed with little violence. You are a bandido—have you ever murdered someone without robbing them afterward?”
“I’m a thief, not a murderer,” I pointed out. But she had made a connection with Carlos and the crimes in my mind. “Murder, not robbery, was the motive for both. And Carlos stood to profit from both killings.”
“For certain.”
I shrugged. “There are no witnesses. He’ll never be brought to justice.”
“Exactly. That is why you must kill him.”
SEVENTY-ONE
ANTONIO DE LOS Rios managed to stagger to the river, grunting and grimacing with pain all of the way. The indio, Mazatl, had braced Antonio’s left leg with sticks and a cord made from vines. It made the leg stiff and difficult to walk on, but he could at least hobble lamely. The alternative was to crawl to civilization, as he had been crawling for calls of nature before the indio had wrapped his leg.
He had set out for the river as a matter of desperation. He knew that somewhere upstream was the road that went between Vera Cruz and Xalapa. While he had managed some crude communication with the indio, he had not been able to find out how far the road or even how far upstream Mazatl had found him, but he doubted that he could have floated down the river for a great distance after falling from the road.
The second option was to go downstream, where, he had deduced from using sign language with the indio, there was a bigger village than the one he was in and a church.
As best he could tell, the village with the church was at least a half day’s walk.
He knew from his crude linguistic communications with the indios that they didn’t use canoes to get to the village because the river was too rocky and wild.
He suspected it would be easier to walk downriver than upriver because of the grade, but was convinced that the road upstream was much closer than the church.
The best alternative would have been to have waited where he was, convalescing until he was able to get help from a message the indios would carry down to the church. The next best alternative would be having the indios carry him on a makeshift stretcher to civilizaation, but either he was unable to communicate his desire to the indios or they were unwilling to accommodate his wishes.
He believed he had managed to get across the need to bring the priest or take him to the priest by drawing in the dirt a cross, a church steeple, and a stick man walking, but they just stared at him and shook their heads.
Antonio realized the indios were kind people, that Mazatl and the other villagers had saved his life, fed him, and tried to patch him, but they were extremely primitive, and he wondered if they avoided carrying him to the larger village out of fear.
Evil fortune, he thought, first to be attacked by bandidos who killed as well as robbed and then to need help from people who were isolated from society and didn’t speak his language.
That he had been shot at close range and went over a steep cliff but survived showed that God had favored him. The lead ball from the pistola had brushed his clothes and had not even grazed him. He had gone over the cliff because he stumbled, not because he was shot.
As he lay day and night with nothing to think about but the pain and the fact that he had avoided being killed by bandidos by the bountiful mercy of God, he had convinced himself that the road was not a great distance from where he was.
Besides the walk on a bad leg and the many smaller injuries that had not completely healed, he realized that he would have to climb a steep slope to get from the river to the road. Climbing up at the spot he fell wouldn’t be possible because it was sheer cliff, but as the road and river both meandered around the mountain, he was certain there had to be a spot he could crawl up.
And crawl he was willing to do. A life of leisure and luxury was awaiting him as soon as he got to Mexico City and claimed his ri
ghtful inheritance.
SEVENTY-TWO
DIEGO MADE HIS way along the road to Vera Cruz with Xalapa behind him, knowing that he could not return to Carlos’s horse ranch near Mexico City if he didn’t have information that pleased the man. Where he would go and hide from one of the most powerful men in the colony, he didn’t know. But, for certain, Carlos would be relentless about having him hunted down and killed, if for no other reason than he knew too much.
He was unsure what information he could get that would please his employer. That the bandidos he had hired failed to kill the man Carlos wanted murdered was not going to change, though Diego had a hard time reconciling how he could have seen the man get shot and go over a cliff but the man was still alive.
He didn’t blame Carlos for his disbelief and anger. He replayed the shoot-out over and over in his mind, and Rios’s surviving didn’t make sense.
Diego was puzzled by the fact that Rios was still alive and had the impudence to claim he had killed the bandidos.
“I know what I saw,” Diego said, aloud, as he rode.
If he could find the bandido and use him to discredit Rios, he would be back in the favor of his employer. He wanted to return to where the ambush took place and look the terrain over.
There had to be a ledge just below the cliff, he thought. That was the only way Rios could have survived the fall.
To puzzle it out, he had to see the cliff himself.
SEVENTY-THREE
“MURDER CARLOS?” I was disappointed. “I’m not a murderer. You think I’m no better than Carlos.”
“No—I’m—I’m sorry.” She lowered her eyes and bit her lip.
“I was a thief. That’s what happens to men who grow up on the streets. They steal first for food to survive and then it becomes the only way of life they know. The women who grew up with us become whores because that is the way they earn their tortillas.”
“That’s horrible.”
“No, señorita, that’s life. I don’t have a false shine on me that was put on by stealing the food from indios and working servants as slaves.” I gave her a sweeping salute with my hat. “Good day.”
“I could call the viceroy, have his guards arrest you.”
“That would be your privilege.” I started to walk away, angry. I didn’t want to leave; I wanted her in my arms, but my pride was hurt.
“Wait. You’re—you’re right.”
“About what? Carlos?”
“About me. I don’t want to marry Carlos. And I lied when I said I never thought about you except as a monster. I’ve never forgotten the man whose warm eyes I looked into before he saved me from those creatures of the night.”
* * *
We left the convent to take a walk along the little river. She wanted to show me the flowers that grew along the stream.
She said she had set up the meeting at the convent because it was the one place she could go without her aunt as a chaperone or other young women as companions, as on the paseo. “A nun here is my cousin.”
The viceroy’s presence was a coincidence. She told me he came to the convent to get away from the city and tend a small garden.
Before we went through the gate, she instructed me to make a donation and didn’t care when I said that I already had.
I went to drop in a silver coin and she said, “Gold.”
I shrugged. It was stolen, anyway.
* * *
We walked and talked, and I saw in her the warm and lovely things I had always imagined. But we had to get back to the business at hand.
I told her about the cryptic remark I heard in Oaxaca regarding the great stud horse.
“She does something for his stallion that keeps him in stud fees,” she said, repeating what I had told her. “You can’t find meaning in what she meant?”
“No. But he said she was a seamstress. I’ve asked myself what could a seamstress do for a horse to keep its value…” I shook my head. “It makes no sense to me. Carlos keeps the stallion on a ranch near the city. I’m going to wander around out there and look around.”
“There’s something I can do to help. I’ll find the seamstress.”
“How?”
“Carlos isn’t likely to have come into contact with a seamstress unless it was someone his wife used. I think I know who she might be, but I’ll make sure by asking his niece tomorrow when we go to the paseo.”
“Ah, yes, the paseo—all those handsome caballeros in their fine clothes and proud horses. But tell me the truth, señorita, having been in the arms of a real man, as you once were with me, won’t you find those paseo dandies as amusing rather than interesting?”
“Juan,” she whispered the name I had revealed to her, “being with a man who is one step ahead of the viceroy’s hangman is frightening. If my father knew that I was carrying on a flirtation with a bandido, he would have me put into a convent cell and locked up for life—after he had you put in a dungeon.”
SEVENTY-FOUR
WITH LITTLE ROOM in the city to stable horses and no pasture at all, men like Carlos who raised horses and the very wealthy caballeros like the Marquis del Valle maintained small ranches outside town, bringing horses in when needed and sending them out to get exercise and mate.
These were not traditional ranchos, which were farms where food was also grown and where livestock was raised to feed a family, but small haciendas devoted exclusively to maintaining horses used for riding and for carriages in the city.
In a narrow strip of grasslands with gentle rolling hills and scattered copses of trees that began about an hour’s ride from the capital were the finest horses in the colony. Most of the ranches ran along a small river that flowed down to Lake Texcoco.
As with the horse-trading area along the river in Oaxaca, here there was also a set of pastures and corrals where horse traders gathered to buy and sell.
I went by the region on my trip to the city in the carriage of the viceroy’s aide, and he had pointed it out to me. My groom had been out to Carlos’s ranch a number of times for Ramos and to other ranches helping Ramos’s city neighbors with horses.
I told the groom that I wanted to look over the area because I was interested in buying a small ranch to raise horses. He was able to give me the lay of the land; if I kept on a low ridge that followed the river I would see most of the ranches, including Carlos’s.
Carlos had invited me to his ranch to sell me a horse. I would accept his offer, but visiting at his invitation meant that I would see only what he wanted me to see. I wanted to take a look at his ranch on my own first.
I was also toying with a more daring idea. It had occurred to me that if Carlos’s prize stud got stolen, it might bring about the final financial collapse he seemed to be teetering on.
Ayyo! It was a thought I had to clear from my mind because it was pure insanity.
I dressed as a vaquero once I had left the house, appearing much the same as I did when I dropped the locket into Mercedes’s lap.
* * *
I first rode along the road from the city that went by the gate at the entrance to each of the ranches. The gates were symbolic only, a place to put a coat of arms or ranch name. The only fencing was around the pastures where horses were kept.
After I passed Carlos’s gate, I made my way to the ridge and came back around to a point where I was above his ranch. My stableman was right: the ridge gave almost a bird’s-eye view of the line of ranches below.
I sat under a tree and chewed on a piece of dried, salted beef while I studied the small ranch below. The layout was pretty much the same as the others around it, not a grand hacienda with a palatial house and a dozen other buildings, but a small house used occasionally by the owner for overnight visits, a bunkhouse, barn, corrals, and fenced pastures.
From the distance I didn’t have a good view of El Rey, the champion stallion, although I was certain I had identified it for no other reason than it was a big horse, the size of Rojo, and occupied its own corral.
&
nbsp; It wasn’t only the stallion that I watched, but I tried to get as much detail as I could about the vaqueros. At a distance I had seen a man flee the murder of Antonio, but from my vantage point overlooking the ranch, none of the men stood out as familiar to me, and neither did any of the horses.
I was certain from speaking with the viceroy’s aide that Carlos never let anyone near the stallion. I was sorely tempted to make my way down to the corral and get a closer look at the horse, but the chance of being caught was high because vaqueros were around.
The wranglers were about now, but what about after they had their dinner and sacked out in the bunkhouse? I silently asked Rojo.
There would be a full moon tonight that provided enough light for me to get a look at the stallion close-up.
Eh, if I got rid of Carlos and if the elderly uncle from Guadalajara died before setting his eyes on me, I could stay as Antonio for a while longer by staying out of sight on a horse ranch outside the city.
With such thoughts, I kept along the ridge with Rojo, enjoying the sight of the fine horseflesh below. Going by a corral with a pretty mare in it, I started my hum more as a habit than anything else.
The mare went over the corral fence with little effort because the third log was on the ground. She came up alongside us, neighing, exciting Rojo as the two nuzzled each other.
“You found a pretty señorita,” I told Rojo. “But you aren’t going to make love to her, not on this trip.”
I took the mare back to the corral and put the log back up. I had time to kill so I laid back and dozed a bit. I woke up when I heard a familiar sound.
Ay, caramba! Rojo had gone over the fence to satisfy the mare. Eh, he made me jealous. Women just seemed to invite him in wherever we went.
When the mating was over and Rojo had returned in a more relaxed mood than I had seen him in for a long while, I replaced the log and moved along.
A moment later I heard the log go down as the mare kicked it as she went over it. I tried to shoo the mare off, but she stuck right with me. “You have to go home,” I told her.
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