The Hot Country

by Robert Olen Butler

  The address side up. Stamp lower right. It was out now, and I rotated it to look at the address, which was written in a tight, small, neat hand:

  Herr Friedrich von Mensinger

  Deutsches Konsulat

  Vera Cruz, Mexico

  He had the “von” of nobility in his name. But Mensinger didn’t use the “von” for his train ticket. The postmark was from Berlin. The writer knew he was coming to Mexico well before Mensinger boarded the Ypiranga. I turned the letter over. It was neatly knifed open at the top edge; the flap was still glued down. And Mensinger had used the back of the envelope to make what looked like random notes to himself, each item marked with an initial dash.

  kein Einmarsch. Nicht nach T

  ENP ~ Dr.

  C u. W keine Eier

  Papiere

  entweder Hammer oder Amboß

  I could figure a little of this out. Kein Einmarsch. I wasn’t entirely sure, but it had something to do with not something, and the cognate would suggest marching. Nicht nach T. Not a T. On the next line I didn’t know what ENP represented. An acronym no doubt. The tilde was from mathematics. Meaning the acronym was similar to the next thing. Doctor. Between the two initials at the beginning of the third line, the u. was an abbreviation for und. And. Keine is “none.” But I didn’t know Eier. Papiere is “paper.” The last phrase, I wasn’t sure of either. I thought the construction was “either…or” and one thing was obviously a hammer. All five notes, separately and together, seemed meaningless. Certainly notes to himself. He knew what the blanks were, what the context was.

  I pulled the letter out of the envelope and unfolded it.

  It began: Mein Schatzi. I knew this phrase. From a German girl in Chicago. My Treasure. It went on for two pages in German and I knew I would be at a loss. I needed some help with this, and I thought of Gerhard. I slipped the letter back in the envelope and returned the envelope to the center compartment. I found myself stuck on the writer, a woman—the hand was clear to me now as a woman—a woman who would call Scarface—Friedrich von Mensinger—her “treasure.” He was wealthy, of course. Maybe it wasn’t tender at all. Maybe it was “Dear Moneybags.”

  Which made me move on to the third compartment, where his money would be. It was empty.

  I lifted my eyes to Diego.

  His own eyes were fixed on my hand, which still held open the empty money compartment. He looked up at me.

  “Give me the money,” I said.

  He said nothing.

  “All of it. We have to get this back to Scarface.”

  Diego still wasn’t talking.

  “You’ve earned your silver dollar.”

  “Okay,” he said, almost inaudibly.

  I said, “I want to put him as little on alert as possible. We need to get this back to him, like someone found it.”

  “Found it? He won’t think he lost it. He is a careful man.”

  “Found it discarded after it was stolen.”

  “You want him to believe that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then the money will be gone.”

  Diego was right, of course.

  “I’ll split it with you,” Diego said.

  “Are you sure he didn’t see you when you nicked it?”

  “I’m sure,” he said. “He never looks straight at any of us.”

  I believed this. Which made it even more striking that Mensinger dropped his nominal sign of nobility for his train ticket. Wherever he was going, whatever he was up to, he was taking care not to emphasize that.

  I pulled Diego’s silver Liberty Head dollar from my pocket and held it up in front of his face between my thumb and forefinger. I was unaware of how similar this gesture was to something else until he opened his mouth and stuck out his flattened tongue and he crossed himself. Like he was about to take Catholic Communion.

  He had that narrow little look of Diego sass in his eyes, which had come to be familiar to me.

  I thought of Luisa and her hatred of the priests.

  I did not put the dollar on his tongue, as he no doubt expected me to do.

  I lowered the coin. “I bet this attitude makes your mother sad,” I said.

  He withdrew his tongue and snapped his mouth shut. “I am a good Catholic son,” he said.

  “As far as she knows.”

  “I love my mother.”

  I reached out and took his right wrist and I lifted his arm and I put the coin in his palm. It disappeared into a tight fist. I let him go.

  “How much money did Scarface have in his wallet?” I asked.

  “Not nearly as much as he’s got with him,” Diego said.

  “You didn’t keep the ticket to sell.”

  “I thought you’d want to see that,” he said, and paused so that, for at least a few moments, I’d think he sacrificed something for me. But then he said, “Besides. You get arrested for using a ticket with someone else’s name. No market for it.”

  “So you do still know how to confess.”

  “Never to a priest.”

  “Go home now,” I said.

  “What’s next?”

  “Find me in the portales later in the day. I need to hold on to the wallet for a little while. But continue to keep an eye on our man.”

  Diego saluted me and was up and across the room.

  “Diego Cordero,” I said, stopping him as he opened the door. He turned to face me.

  “Good job,” I said.

  “I am a thief,” he said.

  “You are forgiven,” I said.

  He crossed himself and vanished into the night.

  20

  Early the next morning I sent a wire to Clyde asking him to find out anything he could about a German official or diplomat by the name of Friedrich von Mensinger. I also asked him to get someone to translate a few German words for me, putting only what I didn’t know in the telegram, not the whole of Mensinger’s personal notes. At the portales Bunky was nowhere to be seen. I should have gone immediately to find him. But no. He was almost certainly sleeping one off. It was best for him simply to sleep. I could talk to him later about what was going on with him. I had another guy to see.

  The Hostal Buen Viaje was up Montesinos, just across from a loudly clanking, brake-grinding, engine-huffing switching section of the railroad tracks a quarter mile or so from the main terminal. It was a run-down one-story courtyard building made to work as a cheap by-the-week-or-month hotel. Gerhard’s name and room number were chalked with all the other lodgers’ on a board behind the front desk, where an old man sat deeply asleep in an upright position.

  I knocked on Gerhard’s door, which faced a courtyard whose cracked and shattered tiles were overgrown with ankle-high grassy weeds. It was shortly after nine o’clock.

  There was a stirring inside the room. Gerhard called out something huskily in German. I figured he was asking who the hell it was. “It’s Christopher Cobb,” I said.

  “Cobb,” Gerhard said, and though it was still husky, his voice had a tone of recognition.

  More stirring, and the door opened.

  Gerhard was mostly dressed, wearing dark gray outing pants but also a sleeveless, button-front undershirt. The man’s arms were thickly muscled. He had the build of an athlete, which had escaped my notice when he wore his band uniform.

  “The room is small,” he said, stepping out and closing the door behind him. He led me to a far corner of the courtyard and we sat at a metal table.

  I’ve not spoken much of the filth of Vera Cruz. Just as the background of things, which it certainly always was. I’ve not mentioned the flies. A reporter focuses on events and strips away the incidental details that don’t come directly to bear on the events he’s interested in, and that’s a strong writerly habit and o
ne that I think makes for a better story of any kind. But Funston was right about how the Veracruzanos lived. And how they died prematurely as a result. And a big part of that was the flies. The flies of Vera Cruz were everywhere. You walked through a curtain of them most of the time. And the zopilotes, as useful as they were, could not do a fully effective job. Or even a halfway effective job. Dead things were always around, and usually, in the heat, they pretty quickly became totally unidentifiable dead things. It was true of the streets, the plazas, the markets, the yards, the shops, the houses of the poor, and even, to some considerable extent, the houses of the wealthy. And it was certainly true of cheap hotels near the train station.

  So Gerhard and I sat in the overgrown courtyard of this particular cheap hotel near the train station and our heads were surrounded by a swirl of flies and we waved at them now and then but we mostly lived the way the locals lived and let them come and go, and we were surrounded by a smell of dead things, no doubt some of them nearby in the courtyard, hidden in the weeds, being eaten bit by bit by the insects and an occasional rat, and all of this moved me to ask Gerhard Vogel of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the obvious question: “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “It’s cheap. It’s out of the way.”

  “So you can read your Scribner’s.”

  He smiled faintly at this. “Sure.”

  “But I mostly meant Vera Cruz.”

  He shrugged. But he shrugged with his eyes fixed closely on mine. Usually a guy who you’re asking questions, when he shrugs, he looks away. At least briefly.

  So I took the initiative. “You hear anything about our scar-faced friend?”

  He didn’t blink. After a few moments, as if this answer actually took some thought, he said, “No.”

  I wanted him to translate Mensinger’s letter for me. Still, I found myself hesitating. I wondered what was going on here that I wasn’t understanding.

  “But you have something?” he said.

  I shrugged, keeping my eyes fixed on his. It wasn’t a natural gesture for me, and I didn’t mean it sarcastically. I just wanted to try to keep my leverage with him.

  “Are you under censorship now?” he asked. Full of surprises. “All you war reporters?”

  “Looks like it,” I said.

  “What do you think about that?”

  “What do you think I think?”

  “Sorry,” he said, and this time he did look away when he shrugged.

  “No, it’s okay. I don’t mind saying the obvious when it’s what somebody really wants to know. But you’re a smart guy. You can ask me straight.”

  He looked back to me and smiled. “We’re both smart guys,” he said.

  “So what do you want to know?”

  “Are you a patriot, Christopher Cobb?”

  “I’m such a patriot,” I said, “I believe the press has to be free.”

  “What if your country is fighting a war and your being totally free to write everything harms that effort?”

  “If anything needs to be understood totally and freely, it’s a war,” I said. “Especially by a public whose sons are being asked to fight it.”

  “And what about all the lying, sensational papers?”

  “Who’s going to be the omniscient and impartial über-authority to read everything beforehand and say what’s lies and what’s not? The American way is where everything is freely expressed. Then the free man gets to sort things out for himself.”

  Gerhard acted as if he was about to say more, but he stopped himself with a little shake of the head. Like he didn’t mean to get off on this anyway.

  I had a quick bloom of newsman’s intuition. Something seemed suddenly clear about this man before me. I would find it out now. I began by asking, “You want to know if you can trust me?”

  “Why’d you come here today?” he said.

  “To ask you a favor.”

  “And you trust me?”

  “Didn’t I just ask that of you?”

  “Yes.”

  A couple of beats of silence passed between us. I had to answer first. Okay.

  “I don’t see the risk,” I said.

  “What’s the favor?”

  “I have a letter. In German. Can you translate it for me?”

  He looked at me for a long moment without saying anything.

  “Go ahead and ask,” I said.

  “From him?”

  “To him.”

  I felt sure now.

  Gerhard extended his hand, palm up.

  I didn’t give it to him right away. Instead, I said, “Gerhard Vogel, around me at least, you don’t sound or act like a horn player in a small-time German band. Even if you’re from Pittsburgh.”

  He slowly turned his hand and put it palm down, on the table between us. He said, “I understand why you reject censorship. But it’s my understanding that among the best of you, there is a code of some sort. When someone tells you something, you can come to a gentleman’s agreement beforehand.”

  “Of course,” I said. “We can negotiate the restrictions about how I use what you want to say, and we either come to a binding agreement or I’ll tell you to keep your mouth shut.”

  He showed the palm of his hand again.

  “Let me ask you a question first,” I said. “And I give you my word the answer will never leave my mouth, much less my fingertips.”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you a spy?”

  “I am.” He hesitated only briefly to give me this answer. He had been thinking about this all along, bringing me into this secret.

  “For the red, white, and what?” I asked.

  “Blue,” he said. “Not black.”

  “That was my own question about the obvious,” I said.

  “You had to ask it.”

  “You didn’t have to answer it.”

  “I trust you.”

  “And you think we can help each other.”

  “Of course.”

  I pulled the letter from my shirt pocket and put it in Gerhard’s hand. I’d brought only the letter, not the envelope. Now that I knew who Gerhard was, I regretted not getting his immediate help on Mensinger’s cryptic notes. But that could wait for another meeting. Soon. I said, “Scarface is a man named Friedrich von Mensinger. He was carrying this letter.”

  Gerhard drew it to him but kept his eyes on me.

  “Don’t ask how I got it,” I said.

  He nodded in assent. He unfolded the letter, very gently. He read, translating with only an occasional pause to parse the German and to say it right:

  My Treasure,

  You have only now gone from our rooms. On my fingertips I still feel the rough badge of your manhood that you wear upon your face. I remember when that was an open wound and I saw it for the first time. I waited for you at our table in the Stadtgarten, hoping you would come in time for the music. You came at last. I know why you were late. The blood had barely stopped flowing. I wept at the sight of it. You had to strike me then to make me strong. Twice. I know you must be strong now, as you always must, as you always are, though I do not know why it should take you to such a savage and distant place. My heart breaks already, though your footsteps down the hall have barely ceased to echo about me. We belong in Madrid, together, my darling. Or Buenos Aires. Together. Do what you must quickly and come back to me or send for me if you can. I give you my heart and mind to carry with you.

  Your loving and obedient and patient wife, Anna

  Gerhard folded the letter as carefully as he unfolded it and he was not looking at me and I was looking at him only long enough to see that he was not looking at me and I looked away as well. I was happy to do so. A woman in love had just sat down at this table beside us in the midst of the cheap raggedness and the ste
nch, and with the clank and huff of track-switching, and she had spoken things that we were not meant to hear, things that would profoundly embarrass her if she knew we’d heard them, tender things intended for a man I now both envied and despised.

  Gerhard and I sat like this for a long few moments. In my periphery I saw his hand come across the table and place the letter gently before me. I turned. I picked up the letter and placed it in my shirt pocket, keenly aware now that it was pressed there against my heart.

  Gerhard and I looked at each other and I figured he was feeling roughly the same things I was about Anna Mensinger. We looked away again. Halfway across the courtyard, near a broken and tumbled fountain, I saw a stirring in the grass. Something moving there.

  I said, “So he’s a Spanish-speaking diplomat.”

  Gerhard did not respond.

  “Without portfolio,” I said.

  “But with a mission,” Gerhard said.

  I turned to him. He seemed to be watching the same spot in the grass that I was.

  “He bought a train ticket,” I said.

  Gerhard slowly brought his face back to me.

  We looked at each other for a moment. I asked Frau Mensinger politely to leave. I apologized to her. But I insisted.

  After a moment of silence, as Anna gradually complied, Gerhard asked, “To where?”

  I looked him fixedly in the eyes. “Before you answered me a few minutes ago, when I asked if you’d heard anything about the scar-faced man, you hesitated ever so slightly before saying no. If we’re trusting each other, you need to tell me about that pause.”

  Gerhard said, “I was thinking about the whole issue of trust. I had no answer on Mensinger, but I was taking the question seriously. You and I were about to start something.”

  I let this sit with me for a moment. It made sense. And this time he answered me at once, though he must have been surprised at my challenge, at what I’d observed of him to make the challenge. But.

  I said, “You’re a spy for our country. You’re now in the middle of things. But you’re a horn player, not the booking agent for the band. And even if the President was looking for an excuse to invade Mexico, it can’t be for more than a couple of weeks that he’d think it would focus on Vera Cruz.”