I saw his eyes move to the facing page, which had some descriptive information. “You’ve lost some weight,” he said, without looking up. We were speaking Spanish now. That much, at least, seemed to have been established.
I said, “If you would control the rats and the flies and . . .” I paused as if looking for a word. And then, quite heavily guttural and loud, I finished my thought: “. . . die Scheisse in your streets, I would not catch the dysentery and lose my weight.”
The captain lifted his eyes to me. Slowly. It was meant to be faintly ominous. But the look was also clearly defensive, prideful, a challenge to my criticism of Mexican sanitation. A rebuke. Good.
I rubbed it in. “We are meticulous about these things in my country,” I said.
He took my ticket from the conductor and gave it a very quick glance. “And why are you going to Mexico City?” he said. This was a cheap little trick, and he no doubt knew it, because the smolder in his eyes was no longer suspicion. It had become a look that said: You arrogant German jackass.
“I am not going to Mexico City,” I said. “I am going on to Torreón.”
“And what takes you to Torreón?”
“I am going to wait there with my uncle the banker,” I said, starting to raise my voice, “until fine Mexican soldiers like you, Kapitän, can figure out how to throw the invading American Schweinehunde out of your country.” I was nearly shouting now.
And the captain’s eyes shifted away. He conceded the skirmish, as the train car filled with the responsive cries of “Viva Mexico!” and “Mueran los gringos!” and even a soft “Olé!” from the man with the Díaz mustache sitting next to me.
The captain shut my passport and handed it back to me with my ticket. “Our country has many enemies to fight,” he said.
“None of them are German,” I said. I regretted it at once. I was afraid I was pushing my fake attitudes too far when I’d already said enough. But the bigger regret was still brewing in me, as the captain managed an almost respectful nod of the head. He turned away and led his subordinate and the conductor out of first class and into the second-class car behind us.
When he was gone, the real regret played like a brass band inside my head, made even worse by the admiring looks I was still getting from a dozen Mexican faces wrenched around in my direction. The faces turned away one by one and I was left with that band doing a rendition of “It’s a Grand Old Flag” with all the trumpets and trombones and tubas and one sad alto horn variously playing flats and sharps. A cacophony of Cohan mocking my betrayal of my country in a sordid little play in a first-class car outside Vera Cruz, Mexico. Those Americans I’d publicly called invading Schweinehunde were my pals and drinking buddies and fellow baseball fans and hot dog lovers, and they were lovers of free speech and the free press and freedom of religion, and for them and for me, everybody was welcome and nobody was turned away and anyone had the chance to make himself a millionaire or a doctor or a general or even maybe President of the United States, and anyone could be my pal and my drinking buddy and a Cubs fan no matter where he came from, and damn if I don’t know we fail at all that now and then, and sometimes we fail badly and maybe way too often, but that’s what we believe, and no man has walked the face of the earth who didn’t sometimes fail to live up to what he believes, but we do believe it, we do really believe all that, and now I’d cried out insults to my country in a foreign public place and inflamed hatred for my country in a train car full of people who didn’t truly understand us.
I turned my face to the upswoop of a sand dune out toward the horizon, and right in front of me a wide-winged, ugly-mugged, shit-eating zopilote floated past, and as far as I was concerned at the moment, he could come land on my chest and eat out my traitorous heart if he wanted to, and I wouldn’t even push him away.
But this passed. Pretty quick, though that didn’t mean I was insincere in my guilt. But I figured I’d just played Iago for one performance to a small house in Vera Cruz. And for bigger stakes than applause. I saved my own life, or at least my freedom. And I saved my chance to figure out where this German agent a couple of cars up ahead might be going and what he might be doing that could pose a possible danger to the country I love.
30
Before we left the federal checkpoint, the captain and his aide stepped back into our car and stopped at the doorway, just beyond arm’s length to my right. I found I was confident now in my role. I looked up at him easily, without any thought that he was here having been nagged by a suspicion about me. He didn’t even glance my way. He said in a loud voice, “Attention. Attention, travelers.”
All the faces in the car turned in his direction.
“For your safety from the foreign invaders and from the bandits who masquerade as so-called Constitutionalists, we will be adding a car of federal soldiers to the back of the train. Please accept our apologies for the brief delay.”
He paused, turning his head slowly, with a faint bounce, to each part of the car, seeming to study every face. He ended by looking across his shoulder and down at me. I gave him an approving nod, which he acknowledged by making no apparent acknowledgment at all. He returned his attention to the car in general.
“Viva Mexico,” he said, without raising his voice but with a firmness that filled the place. And like a church congregation, the Mexican travelers answered as one: “Viva Mexico.”
Then he strode up the aisle.
I was placid through all of this. But I was glad when, after a few clanking and jostling minutes, the train was moving again and I was officially just one passenger among many, checked and authorized, on his way toward the city of Torreón in the state of Coahuila.
And we began to climb. I leaned my head back against the seat and turned my face to the treetops and the bright morning sky, and I was suddenly alone. I was a man inside a man, Christopher Marlowe Cobb inside Gerhard Vogel, and I was rising high into the air and there was a landscape around me through which I moved and it was real to me but if I put out my hand to actually touch it, I would have been blocked by an invisible barrier. I was contained. I thought this was what the actors felt, all the actors I’d known—the good ones—from before I could remember, this was what they felt inhabiting a role on a stage. This. And it felt safe inside here. And since what my role involved for now was to be silent, I simply watched and waited and prepared for the scenes to come. I drifted inside this space. I prepared.
We crossed the Río Jamapa on a narrow steel-girdered bridge four hundred feet above the ruins of a Spanish causeway, and on we continued to climb, more steeply, ever more steeply, the forested ground tumbling away beside us. And the experienced travelers of this route opened the windows from the top to let the cool of the air and the first scent of pine into the car. We were nearly two thousand feet above Vera Cruz and the sea, with another mile to climb to Mexico City. Up here, the decorative birds and the exotic birds, the fragile birds and the peasant-fishermen birds—the heron and the egret, the grebe and the kingfisher—these had all vanished. Now the eagles and the hawks and the ospreys had taken over the sky, and I thought on this. I thought, but not thoughts exactly. I looked at the birds circling inside my head the way I read faces and gestures and tones of voice when I am working a new source for what he knows about a story I want to write. And sometimes the source doesn’t even know that he knows this thing. The birds circled in my head above Vera Cruz, above all that had happened these past few days.
I thought about the birds even as the locomotive, which was made for climbing mountains, pitched its voice from its huffing on the flatland into something deep and strong and tremulous, like an operatic bass who was finished with his warm-up humming and lip-trilling and now at last was singing his aria, fully, opening his lowest register, unloosing his vibrato. Even the great-taloned birds outside veered away from this voice. This was an oil-burning engine, this mountain locomotive, so as it labored, th
ere was little smoke and no grit, there was a taint of the smell of oil exhaust but mostly there was the smell of pine forest filling the car and a smell that seemed to be the chilled sunlight itself. Many of the hot-country trees had fallen away—the palms and the palmettos and the Spanish bayonets—but the banana trees were still here even as the pines densely mounted the peaks above us, the broad banana leaves dipping by the tracks at our passing, flashing glimpses of the glossy-green leaves of the coffee trees they shaded.
And we turned. And through a cut in the mountain, I had a sudden view of tableland covered with cane fields. And above these, the hawks and the ospreys and the eagles were circling. And they kept circling in my head as well. I thought of the aggressor birds with talons for grabbing and beaks for tearing flesh, and I thought of the long-legged, long-billed birds wading in the marshes of Vera Cruz, who would not dare go near these birds of the high mountains. I thought of the birds. How the birds of the marshes would themselves dip those flat bills into the water and they would grab a passing fish and swallow it and dissolve it inside them. These birds who would be snatched by the talons and torn apart and eaten by the great circling raptors: They found their own place to hunt and kill. You were a bird of prey or you were its food. And I thought: Entweder Hammer oder Amboß. Either a hammer or an anvil.
The German agent, mounted on an exhausted horse and soaked in his own sweat and covered in Mexican dust—as if he were an intrepid man of hot-country action—would ride into Pancho Villa’s camp near Torreón and he would sit with the rebel he wished to make into an ally and he would remind him that Germans have long believed—they even had an old saying for it—that you have to be either a hammer or an anvil. And Mensinger intended to tell Villa—having noted to himself: Kein Einmarsch. Nicht nach T—that Woodrow Wilson would not invade any farther than Vera Cruz, would not even go to Tampico to grab the oil fields. Because Wilson had no eggs. No balls. Keine Eier. Ningunos cojones. And Villa would laugh with this man at the American President. And Villa would feel close to this man who said these things. He would understand from his German friend that Woodrow Wilson and the United States were not a hammer. They were an anvil. Waiting to be struck by a hammer. Germany would encourage Pancho Villa to launch an offensive against the Americans.
I remained sitting very still, though I had a strong urge to leap to my feet. Indeed, I was rendered near perfectly still by that very urge, which was the way any good reporter has learned to respond when someone has just said a thing that suddenly opens a view into your story as if into a deep mountain gorge. I was keenly aware now of the man who sat in his Pullman suite, just two cars forward, looking at these same circling birds of prey.
And the question I had to ask myself was this: Did I have enough —right now—to step off this train in Córdoba or Orizaba and write this story and telegraph it to Clyde? Every enterprising, competitive, big-city newspaper in the United States of America had gone with big-splash front-page stories on fewer actual confirmed facts and more speculation than this. And this would be a pretty big one. Headlines and subheads and bits of story started gabbling at me. German secret agent makes covert trip to rebel enclave, urges Pancho Villa to launch counterattack against American forces. Agent tells Villa: “You’re either the hammer or the anvil.” Brave American secret agent murdered trying to foil German plan. And so forth. As I was imagining the way this story would play in print if I were to file it now, one thing did establish itself as part of my still totally speculative but instinctively probable assessment: Mensinger would not be going to Villa empty-handed. Envoy promises German support, German arms. I was sure the offer of arms was part of his message. Maybe that was the Papiere. Maybe the “paper” on the list of Mensinger’s talking points was some official document pledging arms to Villa. Maybe even a pledge of support for him as the future president of Mexico. He was the odds-on favorite at this point. All of which, however, was just seductively plausible speculation in my own head. As for dispatching my speculations as reportorial truth, by the second day either Nash or Svoboda, without even leaving his desk, could write a “sources say” story about the Ypiranga itself and its cargo being part of this whole plot. Those arms were poised to go to Villa for his commitment to push Funston and our boys into the Gulf of Mexico. Nash, of course, would be Svoboda’s unnamed source, or vice versa. And who knew where they would go on the third day.
And all of that stank. Sure the free press of my beloved country felt so fully and comfortably free that it routinely ran unverified stories, half-assed stories, or even outright lies to sell their goods. But that had never been done under my byline. All I had for sure was a secretive German official in a riding outfit on the way to a nothing town in a rebel province, a dead German-American who played a minor horn in a minor brass band who made some pretty extravagant claims about himself, a few cryptic words on an envelope and my own puzzle-page answers for a few of them. There could be less to this story. There could be more. But the only thing for sure was that I could not be legitimately sure about anything yet. The movements of armies, dead men in a field, advance and retreat and surrender. These were the sure things. These were facts. That’s the reporter I had been. As for the reporter I’d suddenly become, the man I’d become, in a suit I’d never wear, with a phony passport in my pocket, tempted to write a newspaper story that had not been confirmed to be true: I didn’t like any of this.
31
I did not get off in Córdoba. Even to stretch my legs for the half hour of our passenger stop. Clyde and the whole system were breathing heavily in my ear and I didn’t want to let myself be tempted. I blocked them out in the clamor of the Aztec-blooded women below my window hawking their mangoes and Dominico bananas and diced sugarcane, their sweetmeats and white cheese and bunches of high-mountain lilies.
And then we were moving through the valley of the Río Seco, with its fields of cane and its banana farms and its plantations of pineapple and tobacco and coffee. And we began to climb once more. We took a long, rising, easy-gradient curve up a mountain, slow enough for everyone on my side of the car to notice something in a verge of flatland beside the track. They all turned their faces to it: a run of blackened, gutted railway passenger cars, some upright but most of them on their sides, their axles and their undercarriages exposed, like naked corpses laid out on the road after a battle. These had been here a while, judging by the jungle growth snaking into and over them, but they stirred an immediate murmur among the first-class passengers about the bandits and how they were capable of doing any number of terrible things to any of us but how at least we had a car full of soldiers at the rear of our train and how things were in a unique uproar now, so the rebels were preoccupied with figuring out what to do about the gringos and so maybe we’d slip through, and the word was that since the invasion, trains to Mexico City had been experiencing no trouble at all. So we were all going to be okay. Maybe.
Nor did I get off when the train stopped in Orizaba, though Clyde was whispering to me pretty intensely now that it was my duty to send this story to him right away, right here in this town, so it would not be lost forever when the rebels burned my train and stole my money belt and cracked my head open because I tried to get rough with them, and even if I woke up from that, I would at least have forgotten everything I knew, including both names in my byline and even the name in between. I didn’t listen to Clyde. We sat in the station at Orizaba, halfway between the tierra caliente and the tierra fría, the tropical zone and the temperate zone, and it was raining. Hard. The passengers in the car were heartened by the rain. If it could just rain like this all the way to Mexico City, maybe the rebels wouldn’t bother.
But Orizaba was known for its rain. The passengers all knew that. The train started to roll again, and soon the rain ceased and the clouds dispersed and the high-mountain sunshine returned, insistent in light but meek in heat. If the passengers’ confidence waned, they made no remarks about it, and soon we’d pulled into Es
peranza, with forty minutes for lunch, and I stepped from the car, hoping to have a chance to observe Mensinger.
I found myself briefly breathless. Not from Scarface. We were nearly eight thousand feet above Vera Cruz and the sea now. Just the exertion of stepping off the train and moving along the platform informed my body in no uncertain terms of how thin the air was, and it took a little time for me to adjust. I slowed. I tried to breathe deeply. A strong smell of coffee filled the air, but I got no caffeine kick from it. I had to work hard at filling my lungs. Some of the Mexicans coming out of second class up ahead were slowing as well. Veracruzanos. Others, from the high country no doubt, strode on. This was their element. They were happy to be free of the thick sludge of sea-level air. I was walking slowly. The Pullman was behind me and I was hoping Mensinger would pass me so that I could follow him without a chance of his realizing. But he was not yet among those slipping by.
The station platform was wide. I was drawing near its center, from which a broad fieldstone path led to the pine-log facade of the simply named Restaurante El Ferrocarril, the Railway Restaurant. All the morning trains from Vera Cruz stopped here for lunch. Along the path were Indian women wrapped in their serapes selling peaches and pomegranates, tortillas and tamales for those eating cheap and quick. Most of the Indian women, the young as well as the old, had the bulge of a goiter on their necks, a high-mountain affliction I recognized from the mountains of Nicaragua as well.
I paused at the steps from the platform to the path, and I didn’t descend. I casually turned around, pulling my Elgin out of my pocket as if I were checking the time, weighing lunch options. I glanced at the faces heading this way. No Mensinger. I looked beyond them to the Pullman. I lit a cigarette and waited, keeping tabs on the car as I seemed to smoke and look at the scenery. The smell of coffee was still strong. Beyond the restaurant to the west were a dozen hip-roofed warehouses, full of the dried coffee beans I’d been smelling, not grown this high but stored up here to keep them from spoiling before they were sold and exported. And beyond the warehouses, far beyond them, looming over us all, was the Pico de Orizaba, the great, snowcapped volcano that rose from the high plain we sat on. It startled me. It had been there all this time and I’d been too preoccupied to actually see it. I lifted my eyes to Orizaba now and it straightened me up, sucked the thin mountain air out of me, as if Mensinger had just appeared.
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