The Hungry Blade

by Lawrence Dudley

  “I probably shouldn’t show you these.” Eckhardt laughed. “I don’t need the competition. It’s a votive statue.” Hawkins held it under the light. The partly translucent stone had been worked as carefully as a small cameo, a spectacularly detailed Aztec god in profile holding a club or snake.

  “That is awesome,” Hawkins said, the others murmuring along. More of the remarkable obsidian blades followed, straight, slightly or highly curved, some more like saws. The final example was a ceremonial sacrificial knife, a perfect oval blade with an elaborate decorated handle. With a few slashes and swirls Eckhardt demonstrated how Aztec priests used it to slaughter their victims on top of the pyramids.

  “And here’s who used it,” Eckhardt said. He opened the doors on a case standing on the dresser the way you’d open a small altarpiece. A full-sized mask was inside, perfectly carved and assembled from matching pieces of jade. The mouth parted as if about to speak, the pupils were drilled through to see, an elaborate headpiece rolling up and forward, large ears pierced with contrasting colored rings. It was slightly abstracted, smoothly finished, but clearly the portrait of an actual individual.

  “Do you know who it is?” Hawkins said.

  “Not exactly. A priest or king.”

  “It’s as much a true likeness as the best Greco-Roman bronzes.”

  “Yes! Exactly! You see that!” Eckhardt almost cooed at the delight of having someone who appreciated what he had, more so than the Austs or Falkenberg, eager to impress. His excitement building, he drew a small box from under the bed, setting it in the center of the table. He spread out a black velvet cloth, then carefully set the contents in the center and stepped back.

  “This is my most valuable piece.”

  Hawkins leaned over to look and actually gasped slightly. It was a skull, jet black, carved from an iridescent obsidian, obviously of great antiquity and value. The mastery of the artist was more astonishing than the mask, the exposed teeth and bones of the nose precisely articulated, the wavy plates in the skull delineated with complete precision, including the seemingly detachable jawbone.

  Hawkins stared at it, for a moment mesmerized. It was stunning in its morbid magnetism and perfection, the impact on the senses almost magical. Like the Mexico City sky, the eyes could penetrate deep into a seemingly infinite vanishing point.

  “So easy,” Hawkins said, “to imagine the supernatural. It’s a powerful object. It isn’t a portal to another world. It’s from another world.”

  “Yes,” Eckhardt said, “you understand! The power of death, the underworld, is in it.”

  Hawkins looked back at Aust and Falkenberg. Aust looked concerned, not interested. He took a sip of his drink and set it down.

  “Horst, how can you afford all this?” Aust said. For a split second Hawkins thought he saw an expression of worry or defensiveness in Eckhardt’s face.

  “I had a little bit of family money,” Eckhardt said, “and I find good buys in the markets.”

  “Oh. I see.” Aust looked skeptical and sounded skeptical. But then he laughingly waved it off. “I’m a good Lutheran,” he said, “this stuff is too morbid for me. I like to collect colonial figures of saints, retablos.” He emptied his glass. “Elise hates it, too. Werner, another beer?”

  “Please, I need one after that.” They headed back down, shaking their heads.

  “It’s good they’re gone,” Eckhardt said. He put the skull away. “This is the most valuable, but I want to show you my favorite thing. I know you will appreciate it.” He opened an armoire and removed a long object wrapped in white flannel and carefully tied with ribbons. He unwrapped it on the bed and stood back for Hawkins to admire.

  It was a wood club-like object, over a yard long, like a thin cricket bat, with a round knob on the handle, decorated with painted diamonds, only lined on the thin edges with continuous tight rows of gleaming obsidian blades. Eckhardt handed Hawkins a pair of white cotton gloves. He put them on and picked it up, looking carefully at the rows of blades. They were shaped with incredible precision, fitted together on the sides so tightly light couldn’t pass through, the sharp edges almost a perfect straight line, only the tiniest undulation, effectively a single wicked blade.

  “What?”

  “It’s an original Aztec sword called a macuahuitl. They and the warriors of the other Indian nations carried these in battle, tens of thousands of them. Be very careful, it’s incredibly sharp.”

  “I can actually see that.”

  “Yes. During the Spanish conquest of Mexico it was written that Aztec warriors decapitated some of the Spaniards’ horses with a single blow using one of these,” Eckhardt said, “right clean through.”

  “That must’ve shocked them.”

  “It did. The Conquistadors didn’t really defeat the Aztecs, the diseases the Spanish brought did most of the killing. Do you know what ‘macuahuitl’ means? The hungry blade.”

  “Hungry—for blood?”

  “Yes. Look closely.” On the edge of the wood, between the diamond decorations and blades was a wavy stain. Blood. It’d been used.

  “It was hungry,” Hawkins said.

  “Yes. It is always hungry.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “In Spain. When we retook the castle of the Conde de Altavista from the Commies and anarchists. They looted it, of course, and tried to burn it, the bastards, but they missed this. I knew it would be lost, so I kept it.”

  “It’s slightly loose.”

  “Yes, it’s too fragile to use. Over four hundred years old! I’m making a copy, I want to see if that claim is true.” He wrapped it back up and then pulled another bundle from under the bed, quickly and alarmingly flipping the cloth away.

  “The horse’s head, you mean?” Hawkins said.

  Eckhardt held up his copy, bright new wood gleaming, remarkably similar blades lining one side, and handed it to Hawkins.

  “Yes. Others have failed to re-create one, but I’ve discovered the ancient secret: The wooden part has to be soaked in water. The wood swells and expands. That locks the blades in very tightly, like a single piece of steel, and it strengthens the blades, keeps them from breaking. However, you have to find the right kind of wood. That was their great secret—my secret. I’ve been experimenting. Very close to perfection, to what they had.”

  There was a bright, thrilled look in Eckhardt’s eyes, a pair of headlights shining through. He was breathing deeply and rapidly, an almost sexual excitement.

  Merely crazy isn’t the word, Hawkins instantly thought. Obsessed and compulsive. And he saved it from the Conde’s castle? Sure …

  Hawkins handed it back.

  “It’s fascinating you’ve figured that out. If you manage to chop off any horse heads let me know.”

  “I will.”

  Hawkins checked his watch. He had to get going soon, too.

  “Thank you, this was very informative. I’ll keep my eyes open.”

  “Yes,” Eckhardt said, his eyes still fixed on his macuahuitl.

  -29-

  It was only minutes after dawn, the sun breaking through the high snowcapped mountains to the east, lighting their sides with a golden glow. The merchants had already been out for hours, setting up in the dark, eager for business, eyes following the gringo as he hurried past their stalls, smiling and cheerfully gesturing him in. The feel of tremendous hustling energy so early in the morning was startling—no wonder these people take siestas in the afternoon, Hawkins thought.

  “¿Sombreros? ¿Sombreros?” he called out. One man pointed around an already busy corner, past a cloud of piñatas bright as neon. Beyond them an avalanche of straw hats of every description. Perfect, Hawkins thought. The owner’s smile lit up brilliantly the instant he saw Hawkins—this presumably rich gringo would surely want the best hat he had. Lightly touching Hawkins’s sleeve he tried directing Hawkins t
o the back corner where he guarded the expensive ones. Instead Hawkins stopped and began rummaging through the pile of cheap ones just inside. He plucked one out, a coarse straw weave with a wide brim and a high black band.

  “¿Cuánto? How much?” Hawkins said. The man looked confused, then nonplussed. He held up two fingers for dollars. That was probably a good shot, a high tourist price, but Hawkins was in too much of a hurry to bargain. He quickly handed over the bills and raced out.

  Several minutes later he was several blocks away, sitting in the car, watching the entrance to Aust’s house through a good-sized hole he’d punched in the hat band with a key, arms folded as if he were taking a siesta after the early market, the hat covering his face. Now that he knew where Eckhardt and Falkenberg were, he was going to find out where they went. When he had left Aust’s office the previous afternoon he’d walked by Norddeutsche Luftfahrtpartner’s office. The frosted glass door was dark, a paper leaned against it, and it was the only office on the floor that didn’t have a business name painted on the glass.

  The Austs’ gate opened and Eckhardt and Falkenberg drove out in a gleaming wood-bodied Oldsmobile station wagon and turned south, out of town. Exactly as I expected, Hawkins thought. They’re not going to work downtown. He started up and followed at a careful distance.

  The road outside San Ángel was lined with the same disturbing sprawl of improvised hovels—one wouldn’t dignify them with the word “shanty”—that were visible from the train window outside Veracruz. Again, low and desperate, built—if “built” was also the right word—from any sort of cast-off material the luckless inhabitants could find: cardboard, scrapped cans flattened out, mud and wattle, bundles of straw, cut up tires, here and there a jagged piece of car body or salvaged roofing. The same filthy children aimlessly wandering through indescribably disgusting puddles, the same revolting brown haze from dully burning little fires. And also the same sense of horror and the sense there was something indecent about merely looking, that witnessing it somehow confirmed it or made it real, completing the degradation and humiliation these people suffered. Hawkins drove along, trying to avoid eye contact. The desperation of so many people in one place was unnerving. In some men the sight might evoke a sense of satisfied superiority, they’d motor by and think, Ha! Losers! I got you beat! But it made Hawkins uneasily squirm—a sense of shame, possibly.

  After a distance that was presumably too far to walk, the traffic flowed out of town into an open green plain and simple farm plots. Ahead Hawkins could see an airplane rising. Then a side road and an airfield. He could see the wood-sided station wagon turning in.

  Hawkins pulled over by the side and watched the field for a few minutes. Either Eckhardt or Falkenberg drove up to a low building behind the tower and then went in. Was this part of Norddeutsche Luftfahrtpartner, too? Hawkins wondered. Off to one side an old trimotor airliner was parked. At first Hawkins thought it might be a Ford, but decided after a mechanic walked by that it had to be a fairly new Junkers, in a similar corrugated bare metal.

  He drove into the access road and around the parking lot behind the tower, keeping a safe distance. A sign read cuauhtémoc academia de vuelo with an image of an eagle landing. Cuauhtémoc, according to one of Hawkins’s guidebooks, was the last Aztec emperor, who’d tried to expel the Spanish. The name meant “descending eagle.” Is Eckhardt’s hand in that choice? Hawkins thought. It did seem to signal his Aztec preoccupations. Hawkins drove back, watching again from the road, assessing it all.

  It was plain to see the main activity at the field was training. There was a long row of open cockpit biplane trainers, mostly Focke-Wulfs or Bückers, a pair of old American Jennys, and what looked like two or three Focke-Wulf advanced trainers.

  A plane took off, circled the field and came around, almost overhead. He idly watched, then startled. That’s not a trainer, Hawkins realized. It looks like an Ar 68, the pointed nose, the fixed gear with the teardrop wheel fairings, very distinctive. It banked and turned, coming almost a few hundred yards away, fast. Yes, there they were: ports for the twin machine guns atop the fuselage.

  The Luftwaffe’s last fighter before the Messerschmitt, and their last biplane fighter. To the casual eye, an Arado Ar 68 might look like a trainer, but it was a fighter, nonetheless. The higher pitched, powerful snarl of the engine alone gave it away—a high-performance aircraft. The Germans had shipped large numbers to Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War, also supplied them to Hitler’s Condor Legion. Had Falkenberg flown one then? Hawkins wondered. Was he flying it now? With its power that plane called for an experienced pilot.

  Except for the two American Jennys—antiques, these days—all the planes seemed be German: Junkers, Arado, Messerschmitt, Focke-Wulf. Hawkins didn’t believe in coincidences, not on that scale. There was a powerful connection to the Reich there, in some way.

  At the same time, the Cárdenas government had implicitly backed the Republican side in Spain, and then taken in tens of thousands of refugees fleeing Franco. Would Cárdenas really be buying planes from Berlin? Hawkins thought back to the sprawling shantytown he’d drove through earlier. No, he thought, the real question is could Mexico afford this in the first place? Did it even have an air force? He’d never heard about it. Get Lilly going on that question when I get back, he thought.

  So what’s going on here, he wondered. One could say … so what? Mexico no doubt wanted trained pilots to develop its aviation. Nothing wrong with that. But even if the Germans were doing this for nonpolitical reasons, that still brought them influence. Who are the instructors? That’s a key question, Hawkins decided.

  Were Eckhardt and Falkenberg involved in some way? Hitler had intervened in Spain. Was it possible the Nazis were trying to foster Fascism in yet another country? Sure, Hawkins thought. They were doing that all over Europe. No doubt they had their sights on Latin America, too. But did they need a flight school for that?

  The kind of money the sale of so many major works of art would generate surely far exceeded what it would cost to run a school like this, particularly here in Mexico. Could it be a conduit? Hawkins thought. What are they intending to do with those paintings, anyway? A cutout to move money around? That was always a possibility, create a seemingly legitimate business as a front to finance what you wanted, but at a distance. But then there was quite a load of overhead they didn’t need. The Nazis were well funded, but they weren’t that wasteful.

  Should I simply go into the office and mosey around? he wondered. Ask questions? Maybe go right up to Eckhardt and Falkenberg, query them about air-freight rates? He mulled that a moment. No, he decided, that’s stalking them too closely, that might rattle them. Have to get more inside with them first.

  He turned and headed back into the city.

  -30-

  “Oh, Natalya, ella debe estar devastada!” Frida was sitting in a wheelchair, a handkerchief to one eye. The maid had just ushered Hawkins into her studio. He sat over to the side, next to a skinny teenage boy with close-cropped dark-brown hair, watching and waiting. The boy was wearing a traditional white guayabera, the Mexican man’s baggy shirt, loosely hanging above the knees of his white cotton pants, speckled with paint. This must be the artist friend, Hawkins thought. The boy nodded, leaned over and whispered in English in Hawkins’s ear, keeping a running translation going in a low, raspy tone of voice.

  “Natalya, that’s Trotsky’s wife. Frida says she must be devastated.”

  An enormous, tall man with a huge potbelly was sitting near her, filling his chair to overflowing the way a baked muffin overflows its cup. He wasn’t just fat—his arms, legs, head, all were massive and powerful, stuffing his three-piece suit like a string of sausages. He looked equally upset, but without her tears, his double chin quavering in distress.

  “Perhaps I should go to her,” Kahlo said.

  “Frida! You slept with her husband.” The teen grimaced but translated that, too.r />
  “I don’t care, I refuse to be shamed!” she shouted. The man rolled his eyes.

  Kahlo finally noticed Hawkins.

  “Hola,” with a quiet wave of the handkerchief.

  “Perhaps I should go,” Hawkins said.

  “No,” she said in English. “Señor Hawkins, this is Riley Echevarria. Riley has come to help you. You must find out now. He wanted you to find out. What the Fascists are doing. It was last thing he did—” She started crying again. The boy stood and extended his hand for a shake, then sat down. “And this is my Diego.” Hawkins walked over and shook his hand, too.

  “Roy Hawkins. I gather something bad has happened.”

  “I spoke this morning with El Presidente. Leon is in a coma. He has only hours left,” Rivera said.

  Ah bloody hell! Hawkins thought. He’s going to die? Stalin succeeded. That means those sources of information Trotsky had will scatter forever. If we could find them—a very big if—and connect with them, they’d still be too terrified to say a peep now. Bugger. Bugger it all.

  “I’m so sorry,” Hawkins said.

  The phone rang. Rivera heaved himself to his feet with surprising force to answer it. He listened a moment, nodded, said “gracias,” then slammed it down.

  “That’s my house. The police are in San Ángel looking for me. Unfortunately, Presidente Cárdenas says he cannot interfere with a police investigation. I have to go. Señor Hawkins, we will talk later.” He thudded out.

  “They’ll probably be here next,” Kahlo said. “You two better go.”

  “Why would they come here?” Hawkins said.

  “We both knew the killer, Jacson. No one suspected him.”

  Makes sense, Hawkins thought. Sleeper agent, slowly works his way in. There was careful, long-term planning behind this. That made it all worse still. Not only would Stalin kill Trotsky, but spread terror all around him—no one would know whom to trust. Corrode every relationship with suspicion, old friends included, spread confusion, discredit people, disrupt every organization. And so she is a suspect, too, now. Brilliant, in its way.