Bunky abruptly appeared and he nodded his thickly-silvered head at me, once, emphatically, as economical and dramatic with his hellos as he was with his news leads in his heyday. He moved the second chair around to the side so he could watch the street, as I was doing. He laid his Kodak 3A folding camera in the center of the table and it was still unfolded, with its red bellows stretched out straight from the black case.
I said to Bunky, “You know that thing looks like a dog’s dick when he’s got your leg on his mind.”
He was too much of a gentleman and too much in love with his Kodak to act as if he heard me.
“A big dog,” I said.
He reached to the camera and collapsed the bellows into the case and snapped it shut. “Down, Rover,” he said, but very quiet, almost to himself.
I’ve always liked Bunky. He was B. F. Millerman for nearly four decades, mostly when the Post was the Post and the Express was the Express and Bunky was the latter’s man at the front lines in the Franco-Prussian War and in Cuba with Teddy and in South Africa when the Brits and the Boers went at it. He did good work. I read his every word in the Express in the spring of ’98 when I was fifteen years old and Mama was dazzling Chicago as Cleopatra. B. F. Millerman was my Cap Anson, my Cy Young, and backstage at the Lyric Theater I charged up San Juan Hill with B. F. and Teddy. Bernard Francis. I finally wheedled the full moniker out of him a couple of years ago when he was drunk, and he was properly offended that I did so. Bunky took up the camera when he’d finally had a bellyfull of governments and their armies censoring and manipulating the news.
“What are we doing here, Kit?” Bunky said.
“You and me?” I said.
“You and me and all the rest of us red-white-and-blues.”
“If we all head on up the road to Mexico City . . .”
“We won’t.”
The German musicians were tuning up across the street, in the band shell behind the almond trees at the center of the Plaza, and the tuba was struggling to find a B.
“I made up a postcard for you,” Bunky said, and he took out the picture of me and Luisa and the dead locals.
I looked at it. “I should send this to Clyde,” I said.
And we heard a gunshot off to the right, down La Avenida de la Independencia. The shot was nearby but oddly muffled, so I figured it was on the far side of La Parroquía, the great, gray, el Norte-blasted parish church, which also fronted the zócalo and took up the next block south along the avenida.
“Sniper?” I said.
A second shot. It sounded like a Mauser.
“Or a drunk,” Bunky said.
“It’s too early for the drunks to start shooting and there’s barely enough light for a sniper.”
Bunky shrugged.
“But still,” I said, concluding the debate with myself, “it’s enough.” I listened for another shot. There was only silence.
I stood up. “I think I’ll take a stroll to see if he got his man.”
Bunky put his hand on his Kodak.
“This enough light for you?” I said.
He took his hand off the camera. “I’ll hold the table,” he said.
I headed south on Independencia, making it more than a stroll. I hustled along pretty quick, waiting for more gunfire, though there was still just silence. I was starting to doubt that it was a sniper. But the news had slowed down pretty dramatically in Vera Cruz and I could use a little exercise.
7
There was a high-voiced racket all around, the zopilotes in their twilight wrangling over their spots on the roof edges and on the bell tower and even on the high cross itself, where they would settle down to sleep. But when I turned the far corner, at Calle de Vicario, and faced along the street at the south side of the church, some different, agitated voices joined the din. Fifty yards ahead was a little gaggle of women hovering around something or someone on the pavement that I couldn’t see. I strode on, expecting, briefly, to find a plugged fellow gringo, probably in uniform. But even before I arrived, I’d adjusted that expectation. The Veracruzanas wouldn’t be making over an American like this.
I gently elbowed the women into opening a space for me, and I was right about the victim. It was not an American. It was a Mexican priest in a black cassock. He was lying flat on his back on the pavement, his right arm straight up in the air, and he was grasping his right wrist hard. The palm of his hand had a major bloody hole blown in it and it had already sent the priest into shock. Or, to take up the likely point of view of everyone on the street but me, it had sent him into a state of religious ecstasy: He was staring at the hole and talking to it, saying over and over, “I’m martyred. I’m martyred. By the wounds of Christ I’m martyred.”
I almost pointed out the obvious to everyone assembled: His stigmata was actually from a rifle slug. But I figured most of these assembled señoras already knew that. I looked over my shoulder and up to the roof of the two-story row building across the street, where the sniper must have fired his two shots. If he was still up there, I figured I’d be next. But I didn’t see anybody. Two shots to the priest and that was it, it seemed. I looked back at the padre. He was a slick-haired, corpulent, middle-aged man, and he was still clutching and waving his wounded hand and proclaiming his Christ-like suffering. The woman next to me said it was a miracle. I thought she was talking to herself and about the bleeding palm. But she was talking to me and she was about to answer the question that was now in my mind. She nudged me and bent to the priest and lifted the massive gold cross that hung on a chain around his neck, even as the priest yammered on, unaware of her.
The cross had been plugged right at the intersection of the upright and the crossbar. This was heavy gold plate. The Mauser slug had buried itself in the metal and it no doubt knocked him on his ass, probably right after the shot to his hand. Under his cassock he’d have another memento that I was sure he’d figure out how to exploit: the image of the crucifix imprinted on his chest in black and blue. The cross saved the priest’s life, but it wasn’t a miracle. The guy on the roof clearly knew what he was doing: sending a message. If this shooter wanted the priest dead, the priest would be dead.
I was taking all this in pretty quick, but meanwhile the priest was doing more than claiming martyrdom. He was bleeding. I knelt beside him. He had a hemp rope wrapped around his cassock as a belt. I undid it and pulled it off him. “Did someone go to find a doctor?” I asked the ladies.
“Yes. Yes, señor,” a couple of them said.
“We need to stop the bleeding,” I said, and I took hold of his lifted arm. He did not resist. He turned his face to me as I wrapped the rope around his forearm above the wrist.
“Did you see who shot you?” I asked him.
He just stared at me.
I cinched the rope tight and laid the arm across his chest. He kept it there and seemed ready just to pass out for a while.
I looked at the women gathered around me, seeing in their eyes that moment you learn to sense, the moment of the most trust you’re going to get from people you want to get information out of. “Did any of you see the shooter?” I asked.
I got a little chorus of No, señor with a trailing No vi nada or two. They’d all seen nothing. As they spoke, I scanned the dark, round faces wrapped in their rebozos, and I noticed one woman, indeterminately old but older than the rest, who didn’t say a word. As I looked her in her eyes, they shifted away. She was the one who knew something.
I needed to make another gesture. I looked at the priest, whose head had lolled to the side on the pavement. “We should make him comfortable,” I said. “May I have something for his head?”
One of the women crossed herself and unwrapped her rebozo and rolled it and kneeled next to me. She lifted the priest’s head very gently and slid the cloth beneath it. Though I was interested in the tenderness of her gest
ure and how she might have always longed to touch him like this, I put that aside, and instead, I looked up at the silent woman, who was watching. She felt my eyes on her and she looked at me.
“What did you see?” I asked her, with just a little bit of firmness, catching her by surprise.
“No la vi,” she said, and I could see in my periphery another woman’s face turn sharply in the older woman’s direction.
The older woman seemed to catch herself. “No lo vi,” she said. And then, “No vi nada.” “I did not see anything” is where she’d ended up. And just before: “I did not see him.” But the first thing she said, the unedited thing, the true thing, was: “I did not see her.” Her.
“The sniper was a woman?” I asked, looking hard at the older woman.
“No, señor,” she said, lying in every little way a reporter is trained to see, by a blinking of the eyes and a slight fidgeting of the shoulders and a pinching of the voice. “I do not know who shot.”
I looked at the other faces. “Was the sniper a woman?” I asked them all.
They weren’t talking, even if they knew.
I’d done all I could do for the wounded man and this was all I was going to get from the women. I rose and said good night to them and they were polite and a couple of them were nervous, and I moved off.
And moving slowly back north on La Avenida de la Independencia, along the face of the church, I had the obvious crazy thought. She hated the Mexican priests. She had a thing to do before she got out of town. She was a pretty damn good shot, which wouldn’t surprise me. It was Luisa. That was an intriguing little page-four-or-so story I didn’t intend to file.
Overhead the great bronze bells in the campanario struck the half hour—six-thirty—and almost instantly up ahead, from the belfry of the Palacio Municipal, a tenor of bells ecohoed the church’s bass. I could use a drink. I was trying to put Luisa out of my mind once again, but she was resisting. I tried harder: It might not even have been her; it probably wasn’t her. Even if the sniper were a woman, an urban soldadera, Luisa was a washer girl. Where could she have learned to be a crack shot? But there was a simple answer to that: She could have learned the basics from a dad or a brother, and the rest you’ve either got or you don’t. And I walked faster.
By the time I reached the edge of the zócalo, the band had started playing. I hesitated a moment under the coconut palms at the edge of the Plaza. My table in the portales was calling me, but I looked down the path to the band shell. Not only was a German ship sitting in the harbor with sixteen thousand cases of ammunition for Huerta or whoever else, there were upward of fifty thousand Germans in Mexico, many thousands fresh from the Fatherland and carrying the Kaiser’s stamp on their passports and operating the banks that held a big chunk of Mexico’s international debt, all this while Herr Wilhelm was clearly working himself up for some kind of war in Europe. So a German band playing “Give My Regards to Broadway” in a kiosko in Vera Cruz while under American occupation flared my journalist’s nostrils.
8
The benches along the path were full of older locals, segregated by sex, some full of men with their sombreros in their laps, others full of women with their rebozos gathered no farther than their shoulders, their heads also bare to the cooling twilight. The local boys were mashing from the edges of the band shell as the local girls promenaded before them in their best skirts dyed in colors of the sunset that had just now faded or the Vera Cruz sky at noon, the girls in pairs with their arms around each other’s waists, which was more than just girlfriendship. It was a taunting thing directed at the boys as well, which I knew from me looking at the prettiest of them and finding myself envying the arm of her friend.
And there were groups of strolling American Army boys in clean khakis, smart enough not to look at the local baby-dolls too close, briefed well by their officers to behave around the girls’ Latin-tempered future husbands. The horny among our boys knew where to go later, a short ride along the trolley line for the professionals. So half a dozen of our boys were gathering as I approached and trying unsuccessfully but loudly to harmonize, “Give my regards to Broadway, remember me to Herald Square.”
I moved around the shell a bit to watch the Germans making music. They all had Kaiser Wilhelm mustaches, thick over the lips with sharp upturns at each end. They all were dressed in white band uniforms with crimson trim and epaulets and brass buttons. The biggest of the musicians was pounding the upright bass drum. The cornets were carrying the tune and the trombones were sliding their sounds in and out, pointing up the melody, and I scanned the faces of these men who might otherwise have been training to fight the French or the Serbs or the Brits or whoever else. As I did, with the faces seeming as similar to each other as soldiers under their gold hat brims, a trim but solid-looking man sitting on the near end of the front row moved his eyes to me. He was blowing an alto horn, its bell bent to point upward. He didn’t look away and I nodded at him and he looked forward again.
He seemed to have recognized me. My name was certainly familiar in the American press—and my stories were even syndicated occasionally into German and Spanish—but my face was not familiar. There’d been some magazine photos of me, but only a very few. I wasn’t like the celebrity-seeking Davis. He could be recognized on any number of big-city street corners, or perhaps even from a band shell in a plaza in Vera Cruz, Mexico. But not me. Maybe I was wrong about the moment of recognition. Or maybe I just needed that drink. I looked close enough at the guy with the alto horn to find him later if I needed a German for a quote, and I headed back down the path. By the time I got to the avenida, the band had finished with George M. Cohan and had started up La Cucaracha, though more in the rhythm of a polka than a Mexican folk dance, the two pieces in sequence making up a lunatic music-hall overture for this night and for this half-assed invasion and for international politics in general.
I drifted away, back toward the hotel.
Working the city beat in Chicago as a cub reporter made me very familiar with the street lowlifes, all the grafters and prowlers, the hoisters and heavyweights, the crawlers and the gonifs. Made me never take a step in public without my full attention. So I usually knew when there was somebody else’s hand in my pocket. And as soon as I passed out of the light from the bandstand and into a dark stretch of the path, I saw a small, deeply shadowed shape out of the corner of my eye. It slipped very neatly and quietly up to me—if I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have known it was there—and suddenly a hand was in my right front pants pocket.
I clamped the wrist and twisted it out of my pocket and I dragged it and whatever was attached to it into the next splash of lamplight. It turned out to be a round-faced, splay-eared Mexican boy, maybe ten years old, and I was struck by the fact that he hadn’t made a sound, though I was sure I’d been hurting his wrist since I grabbed him and he had to be scared about being caught. But his face was as placid as any old man’s on a bench in the dark of this zócalo.
“What are you trying to do, kid?” I asked, addressing him as niño, which is actually closer to “baby” than “kid.” This he winced at.
“Okay,” I said. “Street punk.” Chulo callejero.
He smiled broadly. “You can let my wrist go,” he said. “You started off wrong, but now I can see you’re okay.”
“I started off wrong? You had your hand in my pocket.”
“I was just introducing myself.”
“I know a gonif when I meet one,” I said, using the Chicago street word in the middle of the Spanish.
He cocked his head.
“Pickpocket,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “But your wallet’s in your other front pocket. If I wanted to steal from you, your wallet and I would be vanished already.” He snapped the fingers on his free hand. “Like that,” he said.
I touched my left front pocket and the wallet was there.
“If you let go, I won’t run,” he said.
I looked at this kid. He had something about him. I let him go.
He simply dropped his arm to his side, not rubbing the wrist even once, not showing any weakness. A tough kid.
“You’re a big gringo newspaperman, yes?”
I gave him a frown.
He read me instantly. “American newspaperman.” And he added in English, pointing to himself and then to me, “Even-steven. Because you call me niño.”
“We’re not even until I pick your pocket,” I said, sticking with Spanish.
He laughed.
“You’ve got me pegged right, about the newspapers,” I said.
“I see you writing cables.” He stepped close to me and very briefly touched my writing hand, almost reverentially. “Page after page,” he said, and he backed away again. “I don’t write so much. Well, maybe not at all. Watching you makes me wish I can pick your pocket and steal that from you and run off with it. Knowing how to write.”
“Don’t you go to school?”
He laughed a razor-thin laugh and shrugged. “I am a poor boy. I work for a living.”
“Picking pockets.”
“I work for you. Yes? Honest work. I think a big American newspaperman needs some eyes and ears that can sneak around and find things out. I sneak very well.”
“I bet you do.”
As a matter of fact, we all paid locals now and then to find some things out that we couldn’t as outsiders. Or to play courier. In the Balkans I had a good man, a Macedonian hardscrabble farmer, who would take my dispatches from the battlefields at Kilkos and Lachanos to the nearest accessible telegraph in Gallikos.
The Hot Country Page 3
