Jack of Spies

by David Downing

  Next morning he was coming back from the bathroom when he noticed a set of stairs heading upward. These brought him out onto a flat roof with panoramic views. The sun had risen above the American warships lying off the river mouth, some six miles to the east, and was already bathing the slopes of the mountains that bordered the plain to the west. There was a low rumbling of guns to the north, and smoke was rising in several places. A long black pall seemed to be hanging over the northwestern outskirts of the city, where Doherty had placed the front line.

  He wondered what would happen if the Constitutionalists took the city. Life would presumably go on, at least for most of its Mexican inhabitants. As far as McColl knew, the Constitutionalist leader Carranza was popular with the American government, and he wouldn’t want to alienate Wilson and his cronies by destroying oil installations or shooting the foreigners who ran them. And if the Americans remained persona grata, they would probably ensure that the British did, too.

  The Mexicans weren’t the problem. And wouldn’t be, unless President Wilson or Prime Minister Asquith did something stupid enough to unite the warring factions against the United States and Britain. That would benefit Germany.

  He walked back down to his room, finished dressing, and took to the street in search of breakfast. A café near the plaza provided eggs, refried beans, and a huge cup of coffee, as sweet as it was bitter. A boy of about six sold him a one-page newspaper, which publicized several local society gatherings but avoided any mention of the conflict raging in the city’s outskirts.

  The town didn’t seem big enough to warrant a vice-consul, but the oil field clearly did, because the address of His Majesty’s local fixer had been included in McColl’s briefing notes. Following the café owner’s directions, he walked two blocks west and took the next turn toward the river. And there, a few buildings down, was the sign he was looking for.

  The vice-consulate occupied a couple of rooms over a local shipping office. There was a secretary’s desk in the outer office but no sign of a secretary, unless he or she was part of the argument under way in the inner sanctum. McColl took the absent secretary’s seat and listened to two male voices angrily expressing their lack of satisfaction with His Majesty’s agent. They were oil engineers, working in the fields to the north of the city, and most of their personal possessions had been “confiscated” by marauding members of Pablo González’s army. “We need protection,” one kept saying, as if repeating the phrase would conjure up a gunboat.

  The vice-consul was given little chance to respond, but McColl had the feeling he’d heard the man’s voice before.

  He had. Once the two engineers had blustered their way out, he walked in on a familiar face. They’d hardly known each other, let alone been friends, but Rodney Wethers had been in McColl’s year at Oxford and even attended some of the same tutorials.

  “I wondered if it was you when I got the message,” Wethers said, standing up and offering a damp hand. He had put on a lot of weight since Oxford and doubled his number of chins. The heat had hardly begun to build outside, but he was already sweating profusely.

  A couple of minutes proved sufficient to establish their lack of common acquaintances. “So,” Wethers said, “you’re looking for Germans. There’s quite a few pass through, but they’re mostly travelers or salesmen. Nothing suspicious as far as I know.”

  “How about this man?” McColl asked, sliding across his creased photograph of von Schön.

  Wethers shook his head, dislodging several drops of sweat. “Is he a spy?”

  “He is.”

  Wethers looked at the picture again. “But who would he spy on round here? What secrets could he unearth?”

  “What about González?” McColl asked, changing tack. “Will he take the town?”

  “Probably, sooner or later. But nothing much will change. I went to see him a couple of weeks ago, at his headquarters. He’s a bit rough and ready, but he seemed reasonable enough. When I stressed the importance our government attaches to the local oil fields and how upset we would be if extraction or delivery were to be interrupted, he told me not to worry. We would have to pay what he called ‘extra taxes’ for operating in a war zone, but he offered his personal guarantee that the wells would keep pumping. And in the circumstances, that seems like quite a good bargain.”

  “Maybe,” McColl conceded. “But what if the Germans offer him more to cut the supply?”

  “I suppose they might try. But I think González knows which side his bread is buttered. Unlike us and the Americans, the Germans have only one ship in the area. They can’t put any real pressure on him, whereas we, as a last resort, could occupy the oil fields.”

  “If we did that, wouldn’t the Mexicans blow up the wells?”

  “And destroy their main source of income? I don’t think so.”

  “What if Huerta’s army looked to be forcing them out again—then they’d have nothing to lose.”

  Wethers smiled. “That’s all very hypothetical, old chap.”

  “Maybe it is. Tell me about this latest business, the arrests and Washington’s response.”

  “Ah, the Tampico Incident.” He made it sound like a dime novel. “It was nothing really …”

  “The Americans don’t seem to think so.”

  “They’re very touchy at the moment. If they’re not careful, they’ll make Huerta’s position untenable and find that they’ve landed us all with somebody worse.”

  “Are all the other leaders anti-American?”

  “No, they’re just more unreliable. Zapata and Villa aren’t much better than bandits, and the others … I suppose Carranza might fit the bill—he’s the one with the forked beard who looks like he’s itching to part the Red Sea. Villa, Obregón, and González are all ostensibly loyal to him, but who knows? From our point of view, none of them would be an improvement on Huerta. Better the devil you know and all that.”

  “The Americans don’t seem to think so.”

  “Most of them do. The American ambassador in Mexico City is Huerta’s biggest supporter. The American oilmen around here think he’s everyone’s best bet. It’s Wilson who can’t wait to get rid of the man, and his reason, believe it or not, is that he thinks Huerta is a bad man. Forget American interests, which are much the same as ours. He’d rather be righteous.”

  “It’s almost endearing,” McColl muttered.

  “It’s madness.”

  McColl had to smile. “Will Huerta bend the knee?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “So what will Wilson do then?”

  Wethers shrugged. “I don’t know, and I doubt if he does either. He’s our number-one problem, not the German.”

  “Well, maybe they’ll send me to Washington next,” McColl said, getting up. “If any messages come for me, I’m staying at the Hotel del Centro.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Just off the plaza on Calle Arista.”

  “Oh, yes, I think I remember it. You’ll find better places on the plaza.”

  “And be more noticeable.”

  “Ah, yes, the cloak-and-dagger. I’m sure there’re plenty of Oxford chaps in your line of work.”

  McColl shook the moist hand again and wiped it off on his trousers as he walked back down to the street. The temperature was rising steeply now, but the air was clear, humidity low. He needed a hat, he decided, and headed back toward the plaza, where’d he seen them for sale.

  Where should he start? After what he had heard from Wethers, Cumming’s fears seemed exaggerated, at least in the short run. But McColl was acutely aware of the gaps in his own knowledge. He had no idea how easy it was to sabotage an oil field or how long it would take to get the oil flowing again. He presumed the Royal Navy had stockpiles of the stuff, but that might be giving it too much credit.

  He had to find out what von Schön was doing. He had to find von Schön.

  The hotels were the logical place to start, and after buying a fetching straw hat, he worked his way around the pl
aza. The desk clerk in the third and plushest hotel recognized the photograph. After pocketing the proffered pesos, he said that Señor von Schön had checked out three days ago, and when McColl looked doubtful, he brought out the register to prove it. The clerk had no idea where the man had gone but would gladly look out for him, if sightings were to be rewarded.

  McColl assured him they would be and continued around the plaza, on the off chance that the German had simply switched hotels. By noon he had visited every establishment he could find in the vicinity. Von Schön, it seemed, was gone.

  After lunch he tried the station, where a train had reportedly left for the capital two or three days before, but either no one there had seen his man or all those he asked were too annoyed at having their siesta disturbed to admit it. Seeing their point, he went back to his room and dozed for a couple of hours.

  That evening he worked his way around the hotels again, this time searching for von Schön’s fellow countrymen. He eventually found a couple who claimed to be water-treatment specialists, just as von Schön had done in Tsingtau. These two, he decided after several minutes’ conversation, really were what they claimed. And more to the point, they had met von Schön, the visiting botanist. He had gone into the interior—collecting specimens, they assumed, although they didn’t know what or where—but they expected him back before long. A few days, he had said.

  McColl was up at dawn and spent an hour on the roof writing two cables—a brief one to Cumming reporting his arrival, a longer one to Tim Athelbury, apologizing for his nonappearance, announcing his resignation from the firm, and suggesting that Mac be given his job.

  After breakfasting at the same café, he called first at the vice-consulate. Wethers was pleased to see him and happy to pass on McColl’s request that someone from the Mexico City embassy check the major hotels for von Schön. “They won’t like it,” Wethers said with something close to relish. “But they’ll have to do it.”

  McColl moved on to the town’s telegraph office. This, as he’d hoped, was a basic affair, with only one operator sending and receiving at any given time. The incumbent’s name was Alberto Ruiz, and as McColl soon discovered, he ran the office with his brother, Diego. After paying for his two cables and saying how much he liked Mexico, he asked to meet Alberto and his brother after the office closed. “I have a business proposition for you,” he said, “and I’ll buy you both a beer while you think it over.”

  They met in the plaza at seven, and neither brother needed much convincing. Alberto stared hard at the photo of von Schön and repeated McColl’s proposition out loud to confirm his understanding. “If this man sends a cable, you want a copy. And for each cable we copy, you pay us ten American dollars.”

  “Sí.”

  “Okay.” He passed the picture to his brother, who studied it for what seemed an age, then shyly nodded his acquiescence.

  McColl walked back to his hotel feeling he’d done all he could. If von Schön had gone to the capital, the embassy should find him. And if he was out there making anti-British deals with González, then he’d surely wait until he got back to Tampico before reporting his success to Berlin.

  Over the next three days, McColl’s confidence slowly eroded. Von Schön did not check back in to his hotel, and there was no word from either Mexico City or the brothers Ruiz. It was possible that the embassy staff had been too busy attending social functions to do the requested chore, possible that Pablo and Diego had reconsidered their involvement in international espionage. But he doubted it. As the days went by, he became increasingly worried that the German was stirring up trouble somewhere else.

  Waiting for word certainly lengthened the days. He explored as much of the town as seemed safe, but there wasn’t much in the way of sights—a relatively new cathedral, a redbrick customs house that looked far too British for its tropical surroundings. The intricate wrought-iron balconies gave the streets a touch of class and also came from Blighty, but being an actual white man was obviously becoming something of a liability. Not many minutes went by without a malevolently whispered “Gringo” pursuing him up the street.

  Down by the river, he watched small groups of foreigners being evacuated, and more were doubtless leaving from the various oil-company wharves, but despite the growing antipathy toward outsiders, he never felt really under threat. Gunfire was often audible, though it never seemed to come any nearer, and one morning’s unexpected shelling of the northern suburbs by federal gunboats was not repeated. As far as the rest of the town was concerned, business went on as usual.

  He devoted many hours to watching the plaza for von Schön, nursing cervezas and improving his Spanish with a copy of Don Quixote a fellow hotel guest had left behind. He wrote several letters to Caitlin that he tore up, finally settling for a simple statement of how much he missed her. How long the missive would take to reach the Mexican capital, let alone New York City, didn’t bear thinking about.

  The vice-consulate received daily news updates from the embassy, so he dropped in at lunchtime each day to find out what was happening in the wider world. On Wednesday, Wethers informed him that Huerta had offered Wilson a compromise, on Thursday that Wilson had turned it down. On Friday the news came through that the Americans had delivered an ultimatum.

  “Threatening what?” McColl wanted to know.

  “It’s not been made public,” Wethers said, “but they’re planning to blockade Veracruz.”

  “Why not Tampico?”

  Wethers shrugged. “Too close to the fighting, perhaps. If Huerta’s enemies take it, then a blockade won’t do him any damage. And Veracruz is the country’s biggest port.”

  As McColl walked back to the plaza, it crossed his mind that von Schön might have headed in that direction. But why? What interest did the Germans have in Veracruz?

  How would he get there? McColl walked on down to the railway station and consulted the beautiful map of the national network that a local Michelangelo had painted on the booking hall’s ceiling. Veracruz was only 250 miles down the coast from Tampico, but a rail passenger between the two would have thrice that distance to cover, taking in not only Mexico City but several towns farther north whose names he recognized from war reports. Not a trip to take lightly.

  Lying in bed that night, he decided to give it another couple of days and then seek advice from Cumming. Next moment, or so it seemed, his shoulder was being shaken and a voice was urging him to stir himself. The person above smelled far less fragrant than Hsu Ch’ing-lan, and he recognized the clammy hand.

  “I’ve had news from the embassy,” Wethers told him. “There’s a ship named the Ypiranga heading for Veracruz with a cargo of German arms for Huerta. It’ll probably be there on Monday or Tuesday.”

  “The American blockade,” McColl murmured, hoisting himself up on one shoulder.

  “Precisely. And it might explain why your friend von Schön hasn’t turned up. He’s probably waiting for the ship in Veracruz.”

  McColl swung himself out of bed and went to pull back the sheet that served as a curtain. The sky above was blue, the street below still in shadow. “How the hell do I get there?” he asked. “I checked out the trains yesterday, and even if they’re running, it would probably take a week.”

  “There’s no other way that I know of.”

  “What about the roads?” he asked, although he knew the answer already.

  “There aren’t any. Not to the south, anyway. They’re just cart tracks.”

  McColl nodded. In the unlikely event that an automobile was available, his chances of driving one that sort of distance over unsurfaced roads without a breakdown were negligible. He could probably hire a cart and horses, but the latter would need frequent rests or changing, not to mention food and water.

  “I don’t even know how you’d get across the river,” Wethers was saying. “Last I heard, the ferry was out of service.”

  The mention of a ferry gave McColl an idea. There had been at least one Royal Navy ship among the flotilla
standing guard at the mouth of the Pánuco. It was beyond cheeky, but what was the harm in asking? The ship had to be somewhere, and maybe his presence in Veracruz was worth the price of a run down the coast.

  Wethers laughed at the suggestion but agreed to give it a try. He did caution McColl against expecting a swift response—it was already Saturday afternoon in London, so they could hardly expect a reply before Monday morning. McColl feared even that might be optimistic, but for once the empire was firing on all cylinders, and a breathless Wethers came rushing up to McColl’s table in the plaza soon after noon on Sunday, inviting him to pack his duds and hurry on down to the dock.

  He looked as surprised as McColl felt. They shook hands for the last time, and McColl ran back up to the Hotel del Centro, eliciting mutters of “Loco” from most of the Mexicans he passed. He rammed all his possessions into the suitcase, sat on it, and finally managed to fasten the buckle.

  The river, when he reached it, looked depressingly empty, and he had a sudden mental picture of himself, the lonely British agent, hopelessly stranded in some steamy foreign backwater. He was still admiring this romantic portrait—“Far From the Country He Serves” seemed a splendid title—when a tender rounded the distant bend of the river and headed in toward the wharf. A sailor grabbed McColl’s suitcase and helped him aboard, and soon they were gliding back downriver.

  None of the crew seemed interested in conversation, but he did catch several curious looks. The empty banks and idle wharves looked even more desolate in daylight, and reaching the sparkling ocean was almost a relief. The light cruiser Glasgow was waiting about a mile offshore, but most of the ships he’d seen the week before had left, presumably for Veracruz.

  The cruiser’s retractable steps had been lowered for his embarkation. “A king for a day,” he murmured to himself as he climbed toward the deck. The captain was waiting to welcome him aboard, a tall man of around forty with bright blue eyes in a weather-beaten face. If his opening remarks about running a taxi service might have been mistaken for resentment, the boyish smile with which he delivered them ruled out any such implication.