The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire

by C. M. Mayo

  “And?”

  “This was in front of, er, it says, ‘the café owned by Don Rogelio’ something.”

  Maximilian puffs his cigar. “Something? That is an original surname.”

  “Difficult to make out the handwriting, sir.”

  “So . . .” Maximilian still has his ear in his hand. He exhales toward the ceiling and watches the smoke swirl. He closes his eyes. “The café owned by Don Rogelio something, the mayor’s colleague, has been enjoying less custom than usual?”

  “Seems to be the slant of it, sir.”

  Maximilian stabs his cigar into the ashtray. He drums his fingers. Then, suddenly, with a long arm, he slides the fire orange Totonac bowl across the desk. “Bonbon?”

  At this very moment, a few blocks away, Princess Iturbide is heading to a crucial appointment—to see Count Villavaso’s Number 12 on the Calle de Coliseo Principal, a mansion that, it so happens, stands opposite the widow de Gómez Pedraza’s. Over the past month, Princess Iturbide’s search for a residence has been an exercise in increasing frustration. She has not seen the inside of Count Villavaso’s house, but from Mrs. Yorke’s descriptions, it is the single house in Mexico City of a size and style suitable for the residence of a crown prince that is not a mice-infested wreck. (There was one other, but its best rooms have been requisitioned by French officers, who will not be leaving, and no, it does not matter a straw to them who the new owner might be—the cheek!)

  Princess Iturbide is at the end of her tether—every day another pettiness imposed by the Master of Ceremonies, who has grown bolder in the empress’s absence. Last Saturday, four of the little boys invited to her children’s party were turned away at the gates to Chapultepec Castle because, that martinet declared, their shoes were the wrong color. Not brown; shoes had to be black. The wrong shoes! On two- and three-year-old babes! It turns the mind to taffy.

  Princess Iturbide sees Maximilian only rarely, while everyone else and their third cousin’s monkey, all assume they have a standing invitation to nose themselves into the nursery. Some footman painted Agustín’s toy blocks purple; the cheap paint flaked off and discolored the carpet. Without the courtesy of requesting one’s permission, Frau von Kuhacsevich teaches him to count in German, Hungarian, and some Balkan language! Last night, while one was at the theater, Tüdos took it upon himself to feed Agustín a heaping bowl of veal goulash, and the consequences of that kept the nursemaid up half the night. Puppies have been turned away, a tortoise, an albino squirrel!

  And the pilfering! Lingerie disappears from the drawers; overnight, a half-bottle of one’s orange-flower cologne evaporated. The darling came to Chapultepec Castle with a favorite toy, a blue ball, and someone stole it. What other conclusion can she come to, after asking five times, has someone, anyone seen it? She did not put it past that nursemaid she dismissed, Olivia What’s-her-name, to have taken it away with her, out of spite. One must live with every cupboard, drawer, and trunk locked.

  In a word Princess Iturbide is wild to be out of the Imperial Residence. Count Villavaso has determined to go live with one of his daughters in Querétaro, and according to Mrs. Yorke, having lost their hacienda in Guerrero to the insurgents, they are keen for cash. God willing, she will get his house.

  Taking the lackey’s arm, she steps down onto the cobblestones. Across the street the windows of the widow de Gómez Pedraza’s house are shuttered. Her cedar doors, sunbleached and battered, are nothing special; Count Villavaso’s, however, are carved with acanthus leaves and bare-breasted caryatids—all in need of a coat of varnish, but superb. The stone escutcheon with the count’s coat of arms: that, of course, will have to be chiseled out. The brass knocker, in the shape of a lion’s paw, has been nicely polished. She lifts it as high as it will go and lets it drop with a definitive klak.

  Furious barking. What must be a horse of a dog throws itself against the inside of the door. Footsteps hurry. Groaning, the great wooden door opens just enough to reveal the mastiffs slavering snout, and above it, the porter’s pocked cheek. Pepa wrinkles her nose at the smell that seeps out, of liver frying in lard.

  The eye regards her.

  “Pas possible!”

  “I am not French. I am Princess Iturbide.”

  “No se puede pasar. You cannot come in.”

  “Excuse me?” She thought, perhaps she had not heard him correctly. Never has she been treated thus by a porter. “I tell you, I am Princess Iturbide.”

  The mastiff gives an ugly growl. The porter says in the same rude tone, “No se puede pasar.”

  “I am expected! I have come all the way down here from Chapultepec Castle to see this house, and at considerable inconvenience!”

  In a frenzy, the mastiff lunges, but the porter, one hand on the latch, keeps his grip on its collar, and the door closes. With a clank, the bolt comes down.

  Stunned, Pepa turns and nearly collides with a beggar. And an Indian carrying a stick with a string of wee paper piñatas; he breaks into a toothless singsong, the piñatitas dancing in her face, “Two pennies, one for two pennies.”

  Foolish, she chides herself. Why did she not bring the bodyguard? But these Germans gossip like magpies; she has had quite enough of their big noses in her personal business.

  “Stand back!” she says, shooting the lackey a venomous look for not having said it first. Bracing her hip, she limps to the curb where that lackey, ashine in his palace livery, face slack with indifference, holds open the carriage door. More beggars and a threesome of shoeshine boys crowd around. As Pepa settles inside, grubby faces appear in the window. One of those boys hops up, and up, trying to see her.

  “Go away!” She raps her ring on the glass.

  One says to the other, “She’s the witch.”

  There is a pleated silk curtain. With a fierce tug, she pulls it closed.

  On the interminable ride back to Chapultepec Castle, it occurs to Pepa that the porter may have mistaken her for someone else. This is a wounding idea, because she believes herself to be a singular individual. In shops, of course, she is recognized at once and attended with elaborate courtesy. The best people have been collecting her carte de visite. The wife of the British ambassador has pasted it in her album, after the duc de Morny (Louis Napoleon’s half-brother), and right next to one of the Murat princes.

  But then, a little while later, another explanation occurs to her: that something fearsome had just transpired in that house. Robbery, a murder? It has gotten so that one can travel only a mile or two beyond Chapultepec, and risk encountering terrorists and their sympathizers. Since the empress departed for Yucatan, things have gone from bad to worse. As Madame Almonte says, “Maximilian needs to take the velvet glove off his iron fist.” By God in Heaven, he had better do it!

  Nothing to do. Nothing to be done. Grain by grain the sands have slowed. The hourglass is spectacularly jammed.

  On a folding chair outside the door of nursery, with his elbows on his knees and his chin stone-heavy in his hands, Weissbrunn, the bodyguard, slumps.

  Prince Agustín is having his nap.

  Was it an hour ago—it seems a year—Princess Iturbide came back from the city with a face that could have shriveled the testicles of an elephant. She’d gone to see some house she’s got the butt-headed notion to buy. There is no house he’s heard of that doesn’t have several officers quartered in the best rooms. Why she would want to leave Chapultepec Castle, he can’t figure. Nights, Weissbrunn wouldn’t walk anywhere in Mexico City unless he was blind drunk, or absolutely had to, and then, he’d take the middle of the street and armed with a pistol, saber, and brass knuckles.

  Frau Furchterregend, Madam Formidable, that’s the Germans’ nickname for the Princess Iturbide; in the residence, they all use it behind her back. Before, with the click of his fingers, Weissbrunn could have tossed off ten nicknames for a self-important battleaxe like that one. But here in Mexico City’s thin mountain air, or maybe it’s all the cannabis he’s been smoking, his head feels like it�
��s got sawdust in it, and glue. The little Iturbide, Weissbrunn just calls him by his Christian name. Agustín! Agustín, come away from the horse. Tere, his nursemaid, she’s a treat for the eyes, but such a little cabbage-head. She let Agustín walk right by a horse’s hind legs. They were outside the stables in the park. “Das Pferd! The horse!” Weissbrunn cried, unable to think of the word in Spanish, but Tere froze. He roused himself from the bench, and grabbed the nipper by the back of his jacket, and swung him up over his shoulder. Agustín started screaming, Christ, a bullhorn in his ear.

  Yeah, here’s the big-fuck adventure of the New World: Lieutenant Horst Weissbrunn’s turned into a goddamned baby-minder.

  Weissbrunn may have a sharp-looking uniform and a splendid mustache, but this bodyguard duty makes him feel lower than a stomped-on cow patty. The prince—he’s a beautiful boy—just makes Weissbrunn think of his own lousy self. He could have been a father by now. Why isn’t he married? He’s made a dog’s breakfast out of his life, beginning with the gambling. Slap-stupid wagers he made when he was drunk, so! Conduct unbecoming to a gentleman, his superior officer stuck that in his file. So, he had to ship out with the volunteers. For Archduke Max, yeah, Viva Max! And all that cartload of Mexican flag-waving crap.

  Austria is about to lock horns with Prussia, and where is Lieutenant Horst Weissbrunn of the ulan (cavalry) regiment number 10? Cooling his heels in this piss-ant setup. And he’s no longer in the ulan regiment number 10 because he’s gambled away his mount, four pairs of boots, his watch, and his signet ring, and after that he got drunk, and he said something idiotic, he can’t even remember what, that got him slapped on the cheek by a pretty French girl, probably the only pretty French girl in the whole fucking country, and in front of his commanding officer, who laughed, a big jiggling gut-bucket of a laugh, “Weissbrunn, what an ape you are!”

  “Who’s the ape?” Weissbrunn glared at him.

  The officer, being stupid with beer, said, “If I’m the ape, Weissbrunn, you’re the ape’s prick.”

  And so, Weissbrunn, being even more stupid with beer, and some more of that cannabis, yeah, barely able to stand, challenged him to a duel. In Austria this would have got him clapped in handcuffs and to a court-martial, but this is Mexico, where in the wind of such strong need, yes! Turkeys fly. And the ostriches, too! Hell, take some of that Oaxacan mezcal, and you’ll find the furniture flying right out the window. So, he got demoted and sent to the Imperial Residence, Chapultepec Castle. He was pulling sentry duty for the whole fucking raining summer.

  And did it rain? Like a cow pissing on a flat rock.

  Volunteering for Mexico would have looked a sight smarter if he could have seen some real action. He’d give his right arm to be one of Fünfkirchen’s ulans roaming the sierras—ambushes, gun battles, hand-to-hand combat! If he’d stayed with his regiment, by now, he would have seen combat at Tetela de Oro, at Zantla, and Ahuacatlan. Combat is the golden chance to distinguish oneself, to redeem oneself. Battle can be alchemy, in a flash a heap of dung turns into a mountain of gold, that is, a chestful of medals. Of course, instead, you could get a bayonet through your guts.

  But in Weissbrunn’s case, that would not be likely. If his head is a mess, his body has a mind of its own, and his reactions, when he’s sober, are lightning-quick.

  He packs a .36 caliber pistol six-shooter with a seven-inch barrel. It was issued to him last month when he reported to work inside the Imperial Residence. Other than in target practice, he’s fired it twice, both times off-duty. He hit a goose. Bak, it fell out of the sky and splashed into Lake Texcoco and sank. The second time, behind the stables in the park, he popped a squirrel as it went leaping along a high wall—Bak, a fluff of fur. The rest of the critter disappeared, over the other side.

  In Austria, he’d packed a .44 caliber six-shooter with an eight-inch barrel, and in Italy, in ’59, he used the hell out of it. He doesn’t remember most of the Battle of Solferino, except that when he ran out of bullets, he picked up a rifle, and when that was out of bullets, he was bashing in their skulls with the butt. And then, he’s not sure when this was, he was running, stumbling through drifting smoke over bodies, legs, pieces of flesh, there were pools of blood on the rocks, crows were circling, and the boom-boom of the artillery. It was all a jumbled, crashing blur except for one thing, and this remains in his mind, as clear as a photograph: curled atop a fence rail, perched there like a creature, a severed hand. That image sears into his mind, oh, about 2,779 times a day and in his dreams. That hand. His own big-knuckled hand—to see it there, resting on his thigh . . . he slips it inside the front of his jacket. The way he makes the memory stop, until it pops back, is to hum, Ein, zwei, drei und der Hündschen . . .

  Fuck no, he isn’t going to report what happened this morning down by the duck pond.

  Frau Furchterregend had gone to the city, so it was just the three of them, Weissbrunn, Tere, and the prince. They left the carriage, they walked along the path to the pond. Weissbrunn was feeling nasty. He had cramps. Maybe he’d eaten bad fish. Tere set her basket of tortillas upon a tree stump. She tore one up, and Agustín began to toss the shreds. Whenever the ducks crowded too close, Tere would sling a piece out into the pond, and the ducks would tail after it, and then Agustín would ball up his fists and stamp his shoe. So Tere would give the nipper a bit of tortilla, he’d drop it near his feet, and the ducks would swim right back, the water rippling and sparkling behind them. It went on like that, ducks swimming out, ducks swimming back. Once in a while a mallard rose up, flapping his wings, as if to announce, No, you fuckers, the tortilla belongs to ME! ME! ME! The mallards went pecking at each other and splashing, but the others milled near the other shore or went to perch on a rock and preen their feathers.

  Once, when he was about six years old, in Olmutz, his uncle showed him his kaleidoscope. Horst held it to his eye while his uncle turned it so that the colored glass went to diamonds, to ice-crystal shapes, flowers, scarlet, purple, dazzling blue. It was like watching the stained glass of the cathedral come to life, magically form itself and reform itself. And Weissbrunn was thinking how it was like that in a way, the patterns of the ducks forming and reforming on the water, so green as glass, leaves and ribbons of foam floating along its surface; through the wavering, mottled reflection of the ahuehuete trees, and near the sandy edge, close to where they were standing, there were rocks on the bottom, furred with moss and water-grasses, gently waving. In the hedge a rustle: A tiny Indian in a shawl, a face like a raisin. Her eyes darted to something behind Weissbrunn. He swung around; a knife-blade ripped through the side-flap of his coat. He grabbed the wrist, and before he could see the face, with his other fist, he socked and socked it and punched, Weissbrunn kicked him in the ribs, he kicked the knife away, and he threw him face down, and landed a knee in his spine, grabbed his hair, and smashed that face into the dirt.

  “Schwein!” Weissbrunn shouted into his ear.

  Weissbrunn smashed his face down again, then pulled him up by the hair. What was this asshole trying to do? But Weissbrunn couldn’t think what to say, not in German, least of all in Spanish. His heart was racing, but his skull felt like it was full of mud. He slugged him in the mouth.

  The Mexican groaned and then lifted his head and spit out a bloody gob. It had a gold tooth in it.

  Weissbrunn took his knee off the Mexican’s back. “Get up,” he ordered, and as he stepped back, he slid out his pistol.

  Cringing, the Mexican stood. His face was pulp. His nostrils quivered, he was breathing raggedly. His frock coat was a gentleman’s, but its collar gaped and the sleeves were too long, rolled up. The boots looked stiff and misshapen, the toes curled upward, and the tops came up to his knees he was so short. Weissbrunn loomed two full heads taller; his shoulders were almost twice as broad. A feeling he recognized came over him: a peculiar, deadly calm. It was what he felt when he had to slaughter an animal. It was what he felt when he’d been in the beautiful thick of battle.

  He sa
id, “Put your hands up.”

  The Mexican’s hands went up, shakily, but not high; the fingertips almost touched his earlobes.

  Weissbrunn cocked the hammer. “Higher.”

  Blood was streaming from the man’s nose onto his shirt. Droplets, bright crimson, splashed the sand.

  Aiming the pistol at the Mexican, Weissbrunn checked left, checked right. At the commotion, the ducks had scattered to the other end of the pond, and Tere was sitting on the tree stump with Agustín on her lap. She was trying to wrestle his arms down and wrap him into her shawl. He was crying, “Lupe!” Some baby-prattle.

  Weissbrunn stood there with his finger on the trigger. What was he supposed to do? He couldn’t think. Nail the fucker between the eyes? Not in front of the baby.

  He had not been issued handcuffs.

  He’d had a silver whistle, but where was it? He patted at his pockets . . . Ach, ja, he’d lost that at cards also.

  Firing shots into the air? Could bring help, but more likely, with these idiot Mexican park police, a crazy shoot-out.

  He had one thing straight: Protect the prince. He’d told himself a hundred times: fuck that up and you’re fucked.

  He could feel the sweat running down the sides of his nose, and between his shoulder blades. His intestines were cramping again. Suddenly, he needed . . . Christ on his Throne in Heaven! And it wasn’t going to wait until he could get all the way back up to the residence. He’d been lusting to kill, but now, he wanted nothing more in the whole world than to run into the bushes and drop his trousers.

  Weissbrunn said, holding himself firmly, “If I see you here again, I will kill you.” He lowered his piece.

  The Mexican, trembling, leaned forward and spat out another gob of blood.

  “Go!” Weissbrunn said, waving his pistol toward the path back into the park. “Get out of here!”

  The Mexican still had his hands up, and he stared at Weissbrunn with stark terror.