The Hungry Blade

by Lawrence Dudley

  “Does Aust understand how dangerous all this could be?”

  “I doubt it. You should see the house—”

  “To die for?”

  Now Hawkins laughed.

  “Righto. It’s awesome, gorgeous. The kind of life he has here could go away in a second. And that’s assuming he and Elise would have a chance to make an escape. Imagine starting over in Germany at his age. And that’s not to mention it’s altogether possible to end up facedown in a ditch in the countryside. Powerful incentives not to get involved. I’m wondering if he could be turned, if he knew how he and his family were being used.”

  “I’d be angry.”

  “Yes. I’d be too. If we turn him, that’ll be ice cream with the cake.”

  “This’ll be an interesting report.”

  “Hear from your fella in the army?”

  “A little. He’s in Sussex. Bored to death and tremendous tension at the same time.”

  “Why?”

  “The First Canadian was the only division in the BEF to get out of France with all their equipment. If the Germans land, they’ll catch the brunt of it. Meanwhile, they sit and wait. And wait. It’s got to be unnerving, waiting for them to come.”

  “They won’t. The RAF will hold.”

  “I hope so.” There was a small waver in her voice.

  “Have you told him you now outrank him?”

  “Umm—no. It’ll wait.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I found a Sanborns up the street. I was nervous about using the same phone bank.”

  “My, you are getting into the swing of this! But don’t worry, you can call from the Reforma. That’ll be fine. I’ll see you in a minute.”

  Five minutes later he was in front of the Imperial waiting for the car when she walked by. Elegant, chic, a dark-red silk dress, small hat with some netting, rakish angle, white gloves, big white sunglasses. She walked on, face straight ahead, only the slightest turn of her head to the side as she passed, a little smile. Hawkins made a long, low whistle. She laughed, almost doubling over for a second, firmly marching along.

  -36-

  “Corrialles? Yes, I know who he is,” Rivera said. “He is a reactionary pig.” Hawkins, Riley and Rivera were sitting around Frida’s bed. She was pale, plainly not well. A trip through police custody and sleeping in a jail cell had drained her badly. They’d been released that morning.

  She nodded, then said, almost a whisper, “He is not interested in the kind of revolutionary work Diego does, but he bought one of mine last winter, once it was exhibited. At Galería de Arte Mexicano.”

  “He’s a collector, then?” Hawkins said.

  “Of sorts,” Rivera said. “He has pretensions, seeks prestige. That is his concern. But he traffics antiquities, which he illegally loots off his land. There are many ancient sites there. He has an old conquistador family. They were immensely wealthy. Much land was lost to the land reform.”

  “Antiquities? How so?”

  “He has his men dig them up on his lands. He sells them in a gallery he owns,” Rivera said.

  That’s my in, Hawkins thought.

  “Which one?”

  “La Galería del Tlaloc.”

  “And this is illegal?”

  “Yes, antiquities in the ground belong to the nation. It is a crime. But this is a huge country. There are so many ancient sites, no one truly knows how many or where they are, new ones are constantly being found. The law is impossible to enforce.”

  “Gentlemen, Diego, I am sorry, I must rest,” Frida said.

  “I have go, too,” Hawkins said. “¡Mucho gracias!” They left Rivera gently holding his lover’s hand, worry in his face. He clearly hated to leave. She closed her eyes and began drifting off to sleep.

  Forty-five minutes later Hawkins was back downtown at La Galería Esteban, one of the galleries he and Riley had visited the previous day. Within seconds after entering Hawkins spotted a painting in the back. And there we are, he thought. One of the Braques he’d seen in Bermuda. The gallery was decidedly on the small side for such a major work, and yet there it was. But as he approached he saw a red sticker hanging down emblazoned with vendido in black.

  “Mr. Hawkins, I’m sorry.” It was the manager, Mr. Garcia, nervously rushing out to intercept him. “It’s already spoken for. We sent a message to the Imperial when it came in, but a buyer arrived only moments later. Extraordinary.”

  Not an accident at all, Hawkins thought, but it hardly matters, we know now exactly where it’s going. They neatly choreographed that one.

  “Well, doggone. We would’ve been interested.” Mr. Garcia assured him they would make every effort to contact him if another came in. Was Garcia in on the game? Hawkins wondered. Maybe, maybe not, but that probably didn’t matter very much, either.

  La Galería del Tlaloc was next to a French restaurant on Avenida Parras, a pleasant tree-lined street in the tony La Condesa neighborhood. Nothing about the gallery signaled shady. The space was modern and spare, large plate glass windows and doors, small letters at the top of the window, barely clearing the head of a large and ancient statue of, presumably, Tlaloc. The god of rain and thunder was colorfully painted green and blue with hollow red goggle eyes openly staring out, seemingly to terrify passersby. What were either streams of blood or bloody tendrils flowed from its mouth.

  There was the usual introduction, the card, and the presentation of the copy of the Times. A waiter in a gray jacket immediately appeared and asked him if he wanted an espresso. Ancient-looking objects rested on immaculate white plinths. All in all, impressive. If this was General Corrialles’s doing, he was no fool. A man of some taste and discernment, or if he wasn’t, he knew to hire those who were.

  But there was a discordant note. The manager followed him carefully from piece to piece, overeager, tipping his hand badly. No doubt the man wanted a commission, but he simply was too eager to sell. The prices were low, that was the problem. Hawkins had a good sense of what primitive or historic art sold for in London, Paris or New York, at least before the war, and these seemed very low. It was possible a combination of the fighting Europe and, as Rivera said, there were so many sites, so many things, coming both out of the ground and into the country, that prices had been driven down. What collector wouldn’t want a discount Picasso?

  The manager stiffened up and smiled. A man was coming from the back of the gallery, his hand outstretched, Hawkins’s card in the other, a broad easy smile on his face.

  “Mr. Hawkins. I’m the proprietor, Miguel Corrialles. Welcome to La Galería del Tlaloc.” He spoke English comfortably, with a slight accent. The manager quickly bowed out. Corrialles was a very big and powerful man, over six feet tall, very fit, with a salt-and-pepper mustache and full head of jet-black hair. He firmly shook Hawkins’s hand, touching his elbow just so slightly, leaning in, quizzical eyes giving the impression the only thought in his mind was the guest in front of him.

  Now that’s a switch, Hawkins thought, not introducing himself as an army general? No sense of evasion. This is a man who’s very secure in who he is, knows who he is, feels no need to impress. And cultured. I can see him getting along with Falkenberg, but Eckhardt? Hardly.

  They were standing in front of a stone statue of a big cat, presumably a jaguar, round eyes fixed on its prey, powerfully crouching as if ready to spring across the centuries. There was a hollow space in its back.

  “I’m guessing it’s not a planter,” Hawkins said, raising an eyebrow, smiling slightly.

  “No,” Corrialles said, in on the joke. “It’s called a cuauhxicalli. It held the severed hearts of sacrificed victims.”

  “That’s quite an image. I’m not sure the wives of my customers would want it in the house.”

  Corrialles laughed. “I’ve encountered that. Mine, either. Perhaps I should put some flowers in it. Are yo
u looking for things for your gallery?”

  “I came down looking more for Spanish colonial. Well, at the very least, we know we can get that and sell those kinds of things. But I also wanted to find out if modern works were coming out from Europe because of the war. We’d be very interested in that, the market in New York is very strong in that area. Yet I find myself increasingly interested in these ancient things. There’s a—what would one say, between modern and ancient or primitive art—”

  “A resonance?”

  “Yes! An acquaintance got me interested. That’s a remarkable, powerful object. But I need to know more.”

  “You know more about modern art?”

  “Yes. I’m more interested in that personally. That’s where the real excitement is.”

  “Yes, very exciting! I’m thinking of displaying modern works alongside these ancient things, for that resonance. Perhaps we could work together.”

  A van had arrived outside. While they talked a pair of uniformed movers brought in a carefully wrapped and padded painting. The manager followed them, nodding to Corrialles, pointing to the rear. He nodded, also gesturing slightly to the back. The Braque he’d bought that morning was being delivered.

  Hawkins had gone in thinking he would have to hustle Corrialles, but over the next half hour it became clear the reverse was going to happen. Corrialles was smoother than the manager, but he also wanted to deal. And he could get modern works. Whether those modern works were imported or by Mexican artists was unclear. And the origins of his ancient pieces were unimpeachable. If he was digging them up on his land they couldn’t be Riley’s fakes. Then came a surprise.

  “I have a private museum at my little finca outside Tlaxcala. I am going tomorrow. Come and be my guest.”

  -37-

  A small hissing. The old car was overheating. Hawkins pulled over to the side to let the radiator cool. He’d just reached Río Frío de Juárez, at the top of the pass through the mountains, on the road from Mexico City to Tlaxcala, through mountains covered with immense pine forests. He checked the map. Three thousand meters, almost ten thousand feet high. No wonder the climb was straining it.

  He got out to stretch, working his jaw, his popping ears hurting from the changes in elevation. In the distance giant volcanoes loomed on all sides, seventeen, eighteen thousand feet high, snow and shining glaciers trimming the tops. Río Frío had the mood of an alpine mountain resort, Bavarian style chalets dotted the hillside. But poverty, like poverty everywhere in Mexico, was never far away, and here impossible to hide in the narrow defile. A row of tattered, smoky huts clung to the edge of the road, beneath the chalets. He walked on a few dozen yards to a construction site. From an official sign—el ministerio de educación—he made out they were building a new school for the village, a white, modern-looking building with large windows. At the bottom of the sign was el presidente lázaro cárdenas. Hawkins thought of Riley, the crowd in the square, the taxi driver with his hand over his heart. Good thing someone is trying to do something for these people, he thought.

  A few minutes later he was finally heading down the mountain divide, ears painfully popping again as he descended. An hour later he was speeding across a sunny plateau. The landscape around Tlaxcala looked eerily like the old Spain he’d seen from the train when he had left Europe a few weeks earlier, the intense, blinding sun, brilliant blue skies, the golden, sere fields sparsely dotted with trees. At a gas station in the middle of nowhere he pulled in to refuel. As the attendant cranked the pump Hawkins began watching an old farmer on the other side of the road. The man was behind a wooden plow pulled by a donkey, feebly pushing it through the hard-looking soil, a bent-over question mark.

  Both man and donkey trudged forward, heads down, stoic. They hit a rock. The man stopped, pulled it up and tumbled it to the side of the road, grunting. As he turned back to his plow Hawkins realized he wasn’t grunting from the effort. It was a barely stifled cry of pain, or anguish. Who could tell?

  Hawkins turned away, the guilty feeling welling up again, at … looking? At not wanting to look or seeing? Or was it a misdirected empathy, that if it wasn’t seen it wouldn’t exist? But that wasn’t so. His eyes fell on two men sitting knees up against the wall of the gas station, heads down, worn hats covering their faces.

  It was the classic image of old Mexico, lazy men sleeping away the day. Hawkins had a manual, Guide to Mexico for the Motorist, full of paintings of precisely this sort of thing, Indian women in serapes, men in sombreros, cactuses. As he paid the attendant one of the men raised his head, eyes a dull stare into the distance.

  The eyes told the story. The man wasn’t lazy, Hawkins realized. The very opposite was true. The man was utterly, to the bone exhausted, simply spent. The artist or publisher who commissioned those cartoon images missed entirely what was before his eyes.

  A few miles farther along Hawkins slowed through a village of white adobe buildings and a brilliantly painted church. A pair of elderly women were pulling carts with big wooden wheels, pain from the exertion in their faces. They looked so worn and tired it seemed they, too, no longer had the energy to cry. Outside the village a row of men with hoes were bent over, tilling a field by hand. He felt the same urge he’d felt on the train, looking at the slums, or on the way to the airfield, a cringing desire to look away. Perhaps it was a form of shame, that wealthy gringos like himself, so wrapped in the comfort of their lives, in the things they took for granted, were unable to see things right in front of their eyes.

  The images in that guidebook—well, they were illustrations, not art, he thought, because they were a form of propaganda, like the official art the Soviets and Nazis approved of—the heroic worker, the noble Aryan. Their intention, the intention of all propaganda, was precisely to keep people from seeing things, and, like the guidebook, even anesthetize their vision, to prevent them from seeing things they did not want to see.

  Then ahead, the entrance. He turned under a large white adobe archway under the words hacienda cuauhtlatzacuillotl: puerta del águila—Eagle’s Gate. There were a pair of armed sentries: a corporal and a sergeant in a guardhouse. The sergeant bent down, glancing in the window.

  “Señor Hawkins?” waving him through after he nodded.

  It was a full fifteen minutes following the dusty road without a building in sight before Corrialles’s “little” finca emerged around a low bend, a brilliant white assembly of buildings with red tile roofs, a long columned arcade, and a decent sized baroque church with an elaborate facade and lantern tower capped by a dome. A small palace. Around it were tidy, white-fenced fields with herds of menacing-looking black bulls.

  How beautiful, almost dreamlike, Hawkins thought, a fairy-tale vision of warm, inviting, aristocratic splendor, a mythic Mexico, only real.

  Next to the road a group of men were gathered around a corral, some sitting on the fence, boot heels hooked on the rail, hats tipped back. Some of them were in guayaberas or overalls, but some of them were in khaki army uniforms. Inside two men on horseback with heavy leather chaps were riding around a bull. A man dressed in jeans jumped off the fence into the corral, a flat old straw hat tipped over his eyes. It was Corrialles. Out of his fine suit, his shirt open to his sternum, revealing a broad and hairy chest, General Corrialles exuded a sense of tremendous energy and athleticism. Hawkins pulled right over and got out to watch, joining the men on the fence.

  “¡Hey, toro! ¡Hey, toro!” Corrialles shouted. He snapped a cloth at it the way a boy in a locker room would snap a towel. Instead of angry the bull looked intimidated, head down, obviously wide-eyed, watching the men on horseback, who would ride by and poke it with pointed poles. “¡Hey, toro! ¡Hey, toro!” But the bull wouldn’t lower its horns and charge. Instead it wagged its tail. “¡Usted novilla!” Corrialles shouted. The men on the horses and the fence laughed. “¡Cobarde!” That’s coward, Hawkins thought. The bull looked from man to man, as if pleading. The men
on horseback poked it again. It tried to get out of the way, fleeing around the outside of the pen.

  It trotted by Hawkins and the men, who slapped it on the back with their hats as it went by. Corrialles saw Hawkins, now sitting on the fence in his white suit, the only man wearing a tie. He lightly raised his hat and shook his head, returning his attention to the bull, bending over, hands on knees, shouting again.

  “¡Cobarde! ¡Acto como un hombre! ¡Un hombre! ¡Un hombre!” Nothing. The bull simply stood in the center, staring at him. Act like a man? It obviously had no idea.

  Corrialles shouted again, “¡Hey, toro!” and reached for a handful of dirt and threw it at the bull. It blinked and didn’t budge.

  Corrialles angrily turned away, an utterly disgusted look on his face. Then a jolt, and he almost ran to a man on the fence near Hawkins, plucked a rifle from him, turned and shot the bull through the heart. The bull made a slight moaning cry, mouth open, eyes wide, and fell over dead, one horn digging a long gouge in the dirt.

  Was it surprised? Hawkins wondered. Was it thinking, Why did you do that? It felt that way.

  Corrialles handed the gun back, stretching his arm out, then leaned over to shake Hawkins’s hand.

  “How about that, eh? We’re having steak tonight.”

  -38-

  The white-jacketed servant took the plate away. It’d been an elegantly casual dinner, and the steak in fact was very good. Certainly fresh. They’d gotten around in a lazy way to politics.

  “Half my family’s land. Three hundred and fifty years we are here at Eagle’s Gate. Two hundred and seventy years ago we built this house.” Corrialles crushed a cigarette out in an ashtray. “It was the bulls that saved us.”