The Hot Country

by Robert Olen Butler

  Now it was a matter of my sprinting toward the south side of the customs building before the two men from the Ypiranga emerged from the far side of the storehouses. I took off. I made it to the Custom House and around to the southern edge facing the city, and I took up a spot behind the man-high plinth at the base of one of the front decorative columns. I had a good, mostly hidden view down Avenida Zaragoza, which they would have to cross.

  And soon they emerged, less than a hundred yards from me. I picked them up in my binoculars. They didn’t cross Zaragoza; instead they turned south on it. I came out of the shadows and followed well back. When they stopped up ahead, at the corner of Esteban Morales, I stopped too, and I was worried about them seeing me standing here, fifty yards back and all alone in the street, but they seemed sublimely, obliviously confident in their secretiveness. The talk was apparently about directions, because they pointed up Esteban Morales and conferred and pointed on down Zaragoza and talked some more, and then finally they headed up Esteban. As soon as they did, I figured I knew where they were heading.

  This was confirmed a few blocks up when they vanished south on Cinco de Mayo. I came up quickly to that corner and I took the last step carefully to pause and watch. As I expected, halfway up the block the two men stopped in front of a wide, two-story brick-and-adobe house of the sort that had a deep back gallery of rooms around a courtyard. I’d noted the place on my basic lay-of-the-town reconnoiter on my second day. This was the German Consulate. The small man knocked, and when the door opened, he handed the bag inside and the tall man did a simple aristocratic bow of thanks—no handshake—and he went in and the door shut in the small man’s face. Before he could even turn to head back to his ship, I was hustling down the street to get out of sight.

  The tall man was clearly someone very important. Straight from the Fatherland and keeping a low profile. I could smell a story here as sure as I could smell the old-fish-and-salt-wind smell of the harbor before me. This wouldn’t be an easy one, but I always had half a dozen tough stories kicking around in my head at any given time. This one sure couldn’t be any tougher to deal with than an invasion that stopped a mile inland and promised to turn into civic planning and sanitation work. Not any tougher, either, than a girl sniper with a roughhouse sense of humor.

  11

  A very few hours later I was in the portales of the Diligencias having my morning coffee straight and sludge-thick to wake up from my little stroll in the middle of the night, thinking about how to get at the tall man sequestered in the German Consulate, when there was a lone gunshot straight across the zócalo. Somehow I knew it was her. The Palacio Municipal, City Hall, another symbol of corruption to the revolutionaries, sat massively over there beyond the trees and just the one shot was fired. And though I was sure of the direction, the shot sounded farther away than the edge of the Plaza. I gathered up the cable blanks I’d been filling with nothing-happening tripe and I put down some coins, and I saw Davis, a few tables to my left, standing too. He was ready for a new day as Richard Harding Davis, crack but elegant War Correspondent, in starched and pressed field togs and gray felt hat with a blue polka-dot puggaree, symbol of the Rough Riders, of which he was an honorary member for having turned them and their Hearstian war into romantic heroes to be heralded by every newsboy on every street corner in America. He was putting the proper tilt to the hat as I looked at him, and he picked up his riding crop, the final touch. He glanced my way. He nodded at me and I nodded at him, and by the time we hit the avenida we were shoulder to shoulder and moving briskly together, heading for City Hall.

  “Cobb,” he said.

  “Davis,” I said.

  “You understand my usually keeping my distance?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Out of respect,” he said. “Your work in the Balkans—and in Nicaragua before that—was splendid. Did you get my notes?”

  “I did,” I said. And though Davis’s style irritated me, I had his lengthy handwritten notes tucked in a drawer in my desk in Chicago. This was true of the man: He was famous for his frequent, generous, handwritten praise of his colleagues, be they newsmen or novelists. Though one of my criticisms of him was that he played a little too frequently at being the latter, the excesses of novels too often finding their way into his work as the former.

  “Ironically,” Davis said, “if I didn’t have good reason to write those notes, I would be more inclined to dine with you. We do find ourselves working for the same beats.”

  “How sad,” I said, “that we now find ourselves chasing single gunshots.”

  “Though at least it sounded like a Mauser,” Davis said.

  To an attentive ear, quite a different sound from our boys’ Springfield 03s. A sniper, he was suggesting. I kept my mouth shut.

  “No matter,” Davis said. “We’ll all be in Europe soon enough, I wager.”

  “I wouldn’t wager against that,” I said, and we both seemed to realize that we were losing our focus. If we didn’t pick up the pace, we might as well go back to our coffee. So we fell silent and pressed on faster, around the band shell and through the trees and across the pavement before City Hall, an old Spanish building with its portales occupied now by cookstoves of the Second Infantry regiment.

  “He’s got guts, plugging away at our boys where they camp,” Davis said.

  Though most of the regiment at this hour was out patrolling at El Tejar, our western perimeter, what Davis said made me doubt for a moment that this was the woman sniper, a doubt that recurred when we came around the corner of the palacio. I saw a dozen or so of our boys on the case, a few in the street pointing toward the bell tower of La Parroquía, a few breaking off in both directions to circle the church and maybe catch the shooter coming out, a few others surrounding the victim. This was some local hombre gunning for an American soldier.

  But when Davis and I arrived at the victim, I figured I better rethink things. It was the utility commissioner who’d decided to work with the Americans. He was sitting there on the pavement in his serge suit and with his Panama hat upturned a few feet away, and he and one of our boys were both pressing a wad of bloody cloth to the center of his face, the commissioner gasping his breaths through his mouth.

  “What happened?” Davis said.

  A sergeant standing next to us said, “Somebody shot the guy’s nose off. Clean as a whistle.”

  Davis humphed. “You boys were hunting a man with a Mauser and a message.” With the alliteration, he turned his face and looked me straight in the eyes. He was already shaping his lead and he had just staked his claim to the phrase.

  I, however, was in the midst of realizing that I’d once again under­estimated our local soldadera. This clearly bore her signature. If Davis filed a piece on the guy with the Mauser and the message, I could beat him quite handily with my girl and a gun.

  But I suddenly found myself concerned for her. I moved off quick to trail one of our little search parties around the church. By the time the two parties of infantrymen met up on the opposite side, on Calle de Vicario, almost in the exact same spot where the plugged priest lay yesterday, I was thinking these boys were wrong about where the shooter was. The angle from the bell tower was too difficult to shoot off a man’s nose. And shooting off his nose was exactly what she’d intended to do. I didn’t know where she was, but it wasn’t the campanario.

  Our boys were huddled to confer. They’d drawn a little crowd of locals across the street. At a quick glance, I saw them as basically the same neighborhood women who gathered around the priest yesterday. My glance was quick because I was intending to draw near the soldiers and listen in, get a quote or two just in case I did a little story, make an acquaintance or two I might glean a bit of information from someday. But I was suddenly having another one of those little afterimage experiences over a certain señorita: I thought I’d just seen her.

  I looked back
to the women. She was not there. I stepped into the center of the cobbled street. I could clearly see both ways, up and back down Calle de Vicario, and she was not walking off in either direction. I moved to the women. Some of the faces turned to me. Familiar from yesterday. Blank. They stayed shoulder to shoulder, though I was acting as if I intended to move past them. I kept coming, scanning the faces behind the ones in front and the faces behind those. She was not there. They knew I was coming through and finally, as if reluctantly, they parted.

  To the left behind them was a door into a milliner’s; to the right, another opening, a passageway leading between shops, no doubt to a back courtyard and beyond. I could have plunged into either one and gone after her. But the vision I had of Luisa could have been my imagination. And if she was real, she was fleeing me again. And if she was the shooter, she might just add a gringo journalist to her list of rapacious priest and collaborating local official. I shuddered to think what body part of mine she’d shoot off.

  12

  I walked away, telling myself to get my story priorities straight. The sardonic sniper was marginal as war news, even if I could figure out a way to identify her and even if it turned out to be Luisa Morales, which I remained unconvinced of. The mystery German had the whiff of something important. But at least the directness of the sniper’s approach to collaborators led me now to a simple, similarly straightforward plan.

  So I found myself on the doorstep of the German Consulate on Avenida Cinco de Mayo. The door quickly opened to my knock and revealed a blond young man in a field-gray Uhlan uniform with captain pips on his tunic shoulder boards. A cavalryman on consular attaché duty. He had steely blue eyes and a Kaiser Wilhelm mustache so pale it felt as if I were looking at the ghostly specter of a dark mustache that had died and refused to move on along to its eternal fate.

  Living the early life I did with my mother, traveling with her always as she toured not only the United States but South America and Europe and beyond, I eventually learned good Spanish, passable French, and workable parts of other Romance languages, but I also picked up strange rudimentary bits—more sounds than words—from the Germanic and Slovak linguistic cousins of those others. My German was more double-talk than anything, more an acting talent, absorbed from all those years at the backs of theaters or in the wings and from hanging around dressing rooms and eating and drinking and sleeping in boardinghouses with actors and actresses and with the voices and dialects they put on. So I greeted this young man in Spanish, which I figured he would know, given his posting.

  “Bitte reinkommen,” he said, stepping aside and motioning for me to come in even before I said what it was I wanted. I figured he hadn’t had the time or the imperial inclination to learn the local language. My little bit of German would make me sound like a madman. I didn’t know what our common ground might be, but I wasn’t intending to pretend to be anyone other than who I was, so I said in English, slowly pronouncing each word, “I am a newspaperman.”

  “Ach, so,” he said, seeming to understand.

  “I write for the Chicago Post-Express,” I said.

  He nodded.

  I offered my hand. “I am Christopher Marlowe Cobb,” I said, the Germans I’d known in America loving the long elaborateness of names.

  He took my hand and shook it, looking me steadily in the eyes.

  Though he did not speak his own name in return, I continued to sense he knew what I was saying. Just in case, to establish German-friendly credentials, I said, “I also write for the Post-Express syndicate, which includes the Chicago Abendpost. They translate my . . .”

  The young man cut me off by speaking pretty damn good English. “I have some family in Milwaukee Avenue, one uncle and three Vetter . . . Sorry. Cousins. I have three cousins also. They read the Illinois Staats-Zeitung. A more powerful newspaper.”

  I was not sure what unsettled me most: his nearly perfect English, his relatives in Chicago, or his tightly clenching his right fist as he stressed the word “powerful.”

  Perhaps the hand was the most unsettling, since as soon as it finished clenching, it shot out to me, demanding mine, which I offered and which he shook firmly with the announcement, “Captain Hans-Peter Krüger.” He let go of my hand, clicked his heels, and bowed ever so slightly at the waist.

  “Kapitän Krüger.” I bowed as well.

  “Bitte,” he said, motioning to a pair of armchairs facing a dark wood desk to my left. And then instantly, as if correcting himself: “Please.”

  I headed for a chair as he circled the desk. “Your uncle’s also probably a Cubs fan,” I said, the Cubs being the more powerful Chicago team. I didn’t expect him to hear the little bit of a needle I was giving him, or even understand the reference. Indeed, Herr Kapitän Krüger simply ignored the comment. Meanwhile, I was taking in as much of the place as I could without seeming to.

  This front room was large and sparsely furnished, with everything made of the same carved mahogany. Out the far door was a sun-filled courtyard, which was, at the moment, empty.

  I sat, though I angled myself slightly to keep the courtyard in the periphery of my vision. Krüger was already stiffly upright in his chair.

  Behind him hung a large, framed, color lithograph of the Kaiser, beribboned, bemedaled, and with a massive eagle sitting on his helmet.

  “Have you spent time in Chicago?” I asked.

  “Spent?” I could see his brain sorting through his American idioms. “Ah. Yes. I am in Chicago for one year when I am a boy.”

  “Good.”

  “It was not the Fatherland,” he said. I got the feeling he had just clenched that right fist under the desk.

  “Not yours,” I said.

  “Not the Fatherland for my uncle and my aunt.”

  “I understand,” I said, filling a brief pause.

  “Not for my three cousins,” he said, not wanting to let any of his family escape his disapproval.

  “They were your drei Vetter,” I said.

  I was aware that sometimes my reflex, low-grade sarcasm undercut my full effectiveness as a newspaperman. I should have wanted to smooth this guy’s Germanic feathers, not ruffle them. This remark could go either way. But almost at once he smiled. “Just so,” he said. “Just so.”

  Captain Krüger was without irony.

  We looked at each other a moment. I was still improvising here, as I often did when I was seeking a thing in someone’s head and I wasn’t quite sure even what category of thing it might be.

  “How may I help you, Herr Cobb?” he asked.

  “Your country is a good friend to Mexico. For my readers—­Germans in America and all my other American readers as well—I would very much like to get the German point of view about my country’s invasion of Mexico.”

  It is important to stress at this point that I am an American, through and through. I am a patriot. If I think Woodrow Wilson and William Jennings Bryan are a couple of ninnyhammers, they are our democratically elected and legally appointed ninnyhammers, respectively, and my right to think and say these things about them is part and parcel of my being a patriotic American. But I am also a reporter. I would not normally have been speaking loosely about the ninnyhammerness of my country’s leaders to a foreigner, especially a German, but there was a journalistic goal here that could eventually better inform my fellow patriots, which is also part of being an American, having the right to be well and openly and vigorously informed.

  So I leaned hard on the word “invasion” in spite of Woody’s sudden disavowal of further hostile intentions, which, actually, was a worse sin in the opinion of a lot of patriotic Americans, which was, indeed, the reason he had every American military man—not to mention all us news boys—fidgeting and fretting and fuming in Vera Cruz. Wilson’s public pose was that this was a simple operation to stop the German ship from unloading its munitions. But I figu
red every German official in Mexico thought otherwise. Krüger eyed me carefully for a moment. Finally he said, “You should be speaking to the embassy in Mexico City.”

  “No American can go farther than El Tejar without being arrested,” I said.

  “Or shot.” Krüger surprised me with this addendum, delivered quickly and with a little too much intensity, accurate though it was. A very faint smile brisked across his lips and vanished. He may have had no irony, but he thought he had a sense of humor.

  “You understand the problem,” I said.

  “I am not authorized to speak,” he said.

  “Forgive me, Kapitän, for not knowing your chain of command. Is there no one here to consult?”

  I knew, in fact, that there was a civilian consular officer at the end of that chain.

  Krüger looked me in the eyes for another long moment. I returned the gaze steadily. If I flinched, if I looked away, I suspected he would say no. He might have anyway. Our gaze went on for another beat and another.

  Then he rose from his chair.

  “Wait, please. I will inquire,” he said.

  He did a crisp left-face and moved across the room and through the open door into the courtyard, turning at once to the left and vanishing.

  I waited a few moments and then rose from my chair, slowly, casually, as if I was being observed. I might have been. I looked at Wilhelm for a few moments. And I thought of Wilhelm and Wilson. Wilhelm and Wilson and Asquith and Poincaré. And Czar Nicholas. And Sultan Mehmed and Count Stürgkh. And, since I was standing where I was standing, I wouldn’t let myself forget Willie’s right-hand boy Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. Leaders of the world. What a bunch. A good war correspondent’s ardent employers. And I thought they would soon figure out how to find us more work. Quite soon.