by Henke, Shirl
Nicholas rode up to the small cantina, the most likely place to find word of Porfirio Escondidas. Perhaps he was inside, seeking relief from the heat with a draught of pulque. Just as Fortune swung down from the big black stallion, a grimy youth missing several teeth smiled hopefully at him, brushing greasy strings of hair from his forehead.
“You are Don Lucero, no?”
Fortune nodded expectantly, then listened to the boy Calvo's directions. As Nicholas remounted, he tossed a silver coin to the youth.
Escondidas was camped about a mile outside the village in a dense stand of pines and junipers. Because of the untimely death of Don Encarnación, Nicholas was several days early. As luck would have it, Porfirio had just arrived that morning and instructed Calvo to wait in the plaza until a man answering Fortune's description arrived.
As he neared the dense brushy swale, he veered off the trail into a clearing in the undergrowth. It looked just as Calvo had described. He could smell the faint smoke emanating from a small campfire. As a precaution, he called out to Porfirio, identifying himself, and received an answering welcome.
The wiry little man was standing in front of his fire with a coffeepot in one hand. “You are early. I'd expected to spend several nights on the hard rocky earth. I am grateful. What have you learned?”
Fortune dismounted and took a cup of the inky black brew Escondidas poured for him. They hunkered down on opposite sides of the fire. Nicholas had almost finished his report on the assassination plan when a shot cracked the still twilight. Escondidas slumped backward as Fortune dove for cover while pulling his Remington from its holster. A hail of bullets followed him as he rolled behind a large boulder surrounded by scrub pines and sumac. He returned fire only once. With no time to waste seeing if Porfirio was dead or alive, he began to work his way through the dense underbrush, circling toward the place from which the shots had come.
Nicholas Fortune had spent the past fifteen years surviving in brutal hand-to-hand combat, crawling over terrain better suited to reptiles and rodents than to men. Twigs ripped his clothes and fallen pine needles punctured his skin but he noticed none of it. Moving with the silence and speed born of hard-earned experience, he listened for telltale sounds to reveal where the assassin or assassins had moved since suspending fire.
Then he heard the unmistakable sound of a boot crunching on loose gravel directly to his left. Darkness gathered. He knelt down silently, concealed behind a sumac bush. That was when he heard the breathing, low and feral, coming from his right. There were two of them. He must get them both to one side of him lest he be caught in a crossfire. He selected several small stones, tossing them with a quick snap of his wrist in front of the man to his right.
“Julio! Here!” a voice cried out, moving toward the clatter. Julio grunted and emerged directly in front of Fortune.
It took one swift lunge with his knife to bring Julio down, his throat slashed cleanly. Fortune quickly sheathed his knife and drew his pistol just as the other killer broke into the brushy enclosure. The pistolero raised his Colt with a startled oath but before he could squeeze off a shot, Nicholas had fired twice. The impact of the .44 caliber slugs sent the second assassin hurling back into the brush.
After checking to be certain both attackers were dead, Fortune made his way back to Porfirio, who lay ominously still by the side of the smoldering fire. Kneeling, he examined the wound in the young man's chest, taking a handkerchief and pressing it to staunch the bleeding.
“No use, it is no use,” Escondidas rasped, his hand grasping Fortune's arm with amazing strength. “You have to get to Juarez, tell him what you told me. Stop the assassination.”
“Where is he? How do I find him?” Fortune asked, as the blood continued to seep from his companion.
“Go to Arizpe. Ask for Martín Regla at the Three Owls Cantina. He will take you to Juarez.”
“Is the president still in El Paso?” Fortune asked, aghast at the prospect of traveling over three hundred miles to complete his mission.
“Regla will know,” Porfirio replied raggedly and began to cough up blood.
“What about McQueen? Why can't I give this information to him? He's the one who recruited me.”
“Your gringo, he is like the wind. No one knows where he is or when he will turn up. Go to Arizpe, quickly, before it is too late. Long live Mexico!”
With that, Porfirio Escondidas' head slumped onto his chest. He lay dead in Nicholas Fortune's arms.
Fortune cursed savagely. He could return to Gran Sangre and dispatch Gregorio Sanchez in his place, but it would mean the loss of another half day. And Sanchez could not identify Vargas’ spy in the Juarez camp, nor had the green youth experience enough to be able to recount all the details Nicholas had learned or to clarify their tactical significance for the president.
There was nothing to do but to ride north as hard and fast as he could.
Would Mercedes ever forgive him for this desertion? The soughing night wind held no answers as he rose and began to kick dirt onto the campfire until the bright flames flickered and died.
Chapter Twenty One
The night sky was studded by a million stars, as it could only be along the Texas-Mexico border. A cold wind gusted, raising small swirls of dust. Nicholas pulled up his collar to keep the stinging particles from his eyes. A thin quarter moon hung on the horizon. The night would keep his secrets as he rendezvoused with the man who held Mexico's fate in his hands.
Juarez's headquarters was situated at the outskirts of El Paso del Norte. Fortune had ridden for nearly two weeks to reach the border, guided by a succession of Juaristas, mostly taciturn peasants who doubtless wondered why a hacendado had sided with their cause. He smiled grimly as he approached the small rickety frame building, little more than a crude two-room settler's cabin. If only his compatriots had known who he really was and why he had taken up their cause, it might have broken their stoic mistrust.
A tall, cadaverously thin man with a badly pockmarked face stood sentry at the door of the cabin, his eyes flat and wary. “You are the hacendado from Sonora?” At Nicholas’ nod of affirmation, the man stepped aside and opened the door. “The president has been expecting you.”
The interior was spartanly furnished and amazingly clean considering the relentless scouring winds outside. A large table served as a desk, it and a few chairs the only furniture. The surface was covered with books, papers and documents. A small man with shoulder-length dark hair streaked with gray sat behind the table drafting a letter by the light of a flickering branch of candles. Benito Juarez looked up and met the tall American's eyes, then stood and offered a gravely courteous handshake.
“Good evening, Mr. Fortune, or should I call you Don Lucero?” His voice was measured and resonant. The president was a man used to weighing each word before uttering it.
“Since I ‘volunteered’ for your service only to keep Gran Sangre, I imagine Don Lucero would be more appropriate,” Fortune replied, not without wry humor.
Juarez smiled, appreciating the irony of the situation, then gestured for Fortune to take a seat before reseating himself. “I understand you've ridden long and hard to bring me information of some importance.”
“Porfirio Escondidas is dead. Ambushed by agents of Mariano Vargas, who is the real leader of the insurgents trying to kill you.” Quickly and succinctly Nicholas outlined everything that had transpired at Hacienda Vargas, including the rendezvous between Mariano and the scar-faced man and the way Don Encarnación had died, concluding with the details contained in the papers he had found in the hidden compartment of the old man's desk. “I could look around your camp for the man who met Vargas,” he offered.
“I already know who he is,” the president replied gravely. The lines of his heavy features seemed deeper, his expression haunted by the betrayal. “Emelio Jaról. He was with me when I was governor of Oaxaca. It is difficult to believe he could do this…but time and war have ways of changing men.” His liquid black eyes studied
Fortune intently.
“If you're implying time and war have changed me, you're right. A year ago I would never have imagined being a landowner, much less a republican.”
“And now you are both.” It was not a question.
Fortune did not respond, but asked instead, “What are you going to do about Emelio?”
“Nothing, Don Lucero. Nothing at all—for now.”
Nicholas stiffened, surprise and anger registering on his face. He was saddle-sore and too tired to think straight. “After nearly ending up bushwhacked with Escondidas and then coming all this distance, you mean to say you don't believe me?”
“What the president means, Don Lucero, is that we want Emelio Jaról to believe you never reached us with this information, that the conspirators' plans are still a secret. Then we'll tell him what we want him to know and use him to bait a trap for Don Mariano and his friends.”
Nicholas turned around when he heard the familiar voice. “McQueen. I wondered when you'd crawl out of the woodwork again.” He watched as the pale Americano moved out of the shadows and took a seat across from him.
“I thought you'd be an asset to us, Fortune, but even at that, you had the devil's own luck stumbling on those documents.”
“Exactly how do you plan to convince Mariano Vargas and his friends that I never reached you?” Nicholas asked. A prickling sense of foreboding raced up and down his spine as McQueen almost smiled.
“You're going to disappear,” McQueen replied affably.
“I'm going home to Gran Sangre,” Fortune said firmly. “I kept my part of the bargain—went a hell of a lot of extra miles, in fact, to give you some very valuable information. Now I have a hacienda to run. Dozens of people are depending on me.”
“Including the lovely Doña Mercedes?” McQueen's tone was mild but the implied threat was palpable.
Fortune stood up. “If you're planning to expose me as a gringo impostor, you're too late. She knows I'm not Lucero. So does his mother—and, rather obviously, so does Hilario.” He walked over to McQueen, who remained seated, completely unruffled by the dangerous glint in Fortune's eyes. “I told you before, I don't take kindly to blackmail. And I told you I was through after I completed this assignment.” His voice was soft and deadly.
Juarez, who had been observing the exchange between the two dangerous Americans in judicial silence, now stood up, tossing a sheaf of papers across his desk. “I have here, Don Lucero, orders for our march to Chihuahua City, beginning the first of the year. According to your information, Vargas will strike after we leave the state capital, most probably near the Chihuahua-Durango border. If they believe you are dead, they'll go ahead with their plans—but if you return to Gran Sangre, they will change them. And”—he shrugged eloquently—“I might die. A small matter if it were only one man's life, but at this point in the war, I believe my death would throw the forces for constitutional government into disarray.”
Juarez gazed serenely at Fortune.
“You have an annoying way of understating a case and still cutting directly to the heart of the matter,” Nicholas said sourly. He felt for all the world as if he were the spoiled boy Luce, caught riffling the church poor box.
“Does that mean you'll remain in hiding while we arrange for word of your death to reach Mariano Vargas?”
Fortune sighed in defeat. With an oath he said, “Yes. But I want to send word to Mercedes that I'm alive. She's with child and I don't want to frighten her.”
McQueen started to object but the president raised his hand. “I will send a trusted messenger to her.” Benito Juarez, who had a wife and large family living in exile in the United States, understood how hard war was on women and children.
* * * *
January 1867
Mexico City was still festive but the frenetic gaiety was born of desperation. Brilliantly uniformed French and Austrian troops still drilled on the Zocolo, but everyone knew General Bazaine had received his orders to evacuate the capital shortly after the first of the year. Foreign embassies for the most part remained open, but many European diplomats started sending their families home.
At Chapultepec Castle the court festivities took on a tense, somber undertone in spite of the more lavish and hedonistic displays at balls, masquerades and picnics on the castle grounds outside the city. With the prim censure of Carlotta now removed, Maximilian's sycophants celebrated in his lavishly redecorated palace as if each day were their last. And their days were numbered.
Eighteen sixty-six had waned to an inglorious close for the Empire of Mexico with all the major seaports on both coasts as well as every northern capital city falling to the Juaristas. In the south, the bishop of Oaxaca petitioned General Díaz asking what clemency he might expect if he surrendered, to which the triumphant Juarista general had replied, “I'll shoot you in your golden robes.”
Then word from Paris reached the emperor that his wife had gone mad. Always driven and insecure, the empress had broken down in the midst of an audience with Napoleon III. She had been placed under physical restraint after a series of interviews with the French emperor and his Holiness Pope Pius IX. Maximilian vacillated. Should he fight on or should he abdicate and go to Carlotta's side? His indecisiveness left his courtiers in a quandary. Some were fearful, others cynically determined to take advantage of the “Austrian Dreamer” for as long as he lasted. After all, there was still considerable wealth remaining in the imperial treasury.
One such pragmatic individual was General Leonardo Marquez, a military advisor instrumental in persuading the emperor to stay in Mexico after the impending French evacuation. The Tiger of Tacubaya was a short, intense man with burning black eyes and a cunning yellow-toothed smile. At the moment, he stood surveying a sheaf of papers and gazing across the Zocolo from the balcony of the imperial palace.
“The way I see it, we have perhaps six weeks to wait before Bazaine leaves. Then”—he shrugged eloquently—“it is in the hands of the gods.”
His companion threw back his head and laughed heartily. “You mean the imperial treasury will be in the hands of the tiger!”
Marquez regarded his young subordinate with desultory fascination. Tossing the documents he held onto the top of an ornately carved oak table, he prowled languidly across the room, approaching Colonel Lucero Alvarado, who had by now earned his own nickname, El Diablo. Luce had become a satanic figure who dressed entirely in black, riding a great ebony stallion through the hearts of Juarista villages bringing terror and death.
“You want to be rich, Colonel? And here I believed you had joined the imperial cause for patriotic reasons.”
There was a sly teasing note in Marquez's voice that grated on Lucero's nerves, but he let it pass. The general was his key to escaping what was rapidly becoming an untenable situation. “I'm as much a patriot as you, my general,” he replied baldly, raising a glass of fine French cognac to his lips.
Now it was Marquez's turn to laugh. “Well said. Why do we fight then, if not for love of Mexico?”
“Silver?” Lucero ventured.
Marquez poured himself a crystal goblet of the cognac. “I don't think so—at least not you. No, you enjoy the thrill of danger, the blood sport of war. You enjoy it far more than I and they named me the tiger. You are the very devil. What demons drive you, I wonder?”
Alvarado's voice was flat when he replied, “Best not to tempt the devil, my general.”
“And the devil you are. Wrapping that Juarista general up in wet rawhide and letting the skin dry in the sun was an inventive touch worthy of me. The life was squeezed out of Aranga ever so slowly as it tightened.”
“You were my inspiration,” Luce replied dryly. “A pity the general didn't talk before he died. That silver shipment his soldiers stole from the imperial army would have been well worth recovering.”
“There is a good deal more in Maximilian's storerooms, believe me. After the French are gone, it won't be long before his dithering will deliver him into the hands of his
enemies. Already he's considering a strategic move of his ‘Mexican Army’ to Querétaro, a more defensible position against Escobedo's armies.”
Alvarado noted his chief's thinly veiled gloating satisfaction. “And you, of course, concurred that the capital cannot be fortified and the best place to make a stand is at Querétaro.”
“We couldn't let the republican rabble lay ruin to all these splendid buildings our emperor has refurbished. What if they bring up siege guns? The gringos have supplied them with some formidable weapons, after all.”
“So, Maximilian leaves and his treasury remains behind...with you to guard it.” Luce's smile was sharkish.
“Alas, I won't be able to convince him to let me stay, since he expects a great pitched battle and wants all his generals united under his command, but I'll find a way to return here when the time is ripe, believe me.”
“You can assign me to permanent duty here.” Luce waited expectantly for Marquez's response.
“I don't think that would be wise right now. You have acquired a rather, shall we say, unsavory reputation in central Mexico over the past few months. If you hadn't captured General Aranga, I would never have been able to secure your promotion.”
Luce's eyes flashed dangerously as he stared at the shorter, older man. “I did no more to earn my name than you did yours at Tacubaya. You had an entire city decimated and turned the women over to your troops as spoils of war. I'm leading guerrilla fighters, desperate mercenaries who expect plunder. The emperor hasn't exactly been prompt with payrolls of late. Something about the Juaristas capturing too many of the supply trains.”
The general waved his hand dismissively. “Yes, yes, so you give them their booty in the form of women and allow them to loot churches and local shopkeepers. Well and good, but you've been so efficient at your job the Juaristas have placed a price on your head. Your rather ingenuous method of execution for Aranga was the final straw for Díaz. The two men were old comrades at arms. I fear Díaz’s army is moving north with alarming rapidity, and he has promised to personally see to your execution.”
