Saffire

by Sigmund Brouwer

  Given that I raised cattle to ship to the great slaughterhouses of Chicago, I knew my shared revulsion of the event playing out below me was hypocritical, but that didn’t lessen my distaste of the slow torture and killing of a magnificent beast.

  The hundreds of spectators roared approval as the matador swirled his cape, narrowly dodging each thrust of the enraged bull. That mass approval, however, was tinged by the collective unspoken thrill at the possibility of witnessing a man’s violent injury or death.

  I had heard the same roars in my exile years in the great arenas of Europe and the large cities of the United States while I rode a nimble pony among thundering bison. As one of the Buffalo Bill riders, I was aware that—with the spear accident an exception—the danger was more illusion than reality. While it was possible to die beneath the hooves of a bison, there was more danger at my ranch in trying to rope a calf away from a mother cow. I guessed it happened the same way below, that spectators were sold on the illusion of danger. Because of the lance wound on the bull’s neck and the six banderillas still sticking from the bull’s shoulders, and the bull’s weakness from loss of blood and the dozens of unsuccessful, enraged charges, the matador’s greatest feat was likely not in avoiding the horns but in making it look like each sweep was a close miss.

  “As you can see, Mr. Holt,” Raquel said, “it is clearly not a fair fight. That is what angers me. Not the animal’s death. Death is part of living, is it not? The bull’s fate is as certain as the fate of each of us. No, it is the injustice of the fight itself. The bull faces, in turn, the matador, the picador with lance, the three banderilleros, and finally, the matador again. It is a system designed to give the matador all the advantages, a system meant to slowly bleed the animal and exhaust it. Such a system is what the people of Panama face, especially the women. Those at the top have all the advantages, and they are ruthless. The estate owners use their bankers and lawyers and police as swords and lances and banderillas against the people, never deeply enough to kill in one blow, but the end result is the same. It is the poor who suffer, and I am among the wealthy. This country needs to be changed.”

  Here it was. Raquel was about to present the reason she had wanted to meet with me—a plea for her band of rebels that she believed I had threatened in a public display of their captured flag.

  Earlier, before the bullfight started, when I asked about Saffire’s mother, Raquel had looked away for a long pause, then back at me. I found myself doing the same to her.

  “Until last night,” Raquel said when our eyes met again, “I believed I was marrying a solid man. I didn’t need to love Raoul, but I thought I could live comfortably with him. I thought that becoming his wife would allow me to accomplish some things in this country, to help those poor. I thought that the satisfaction of raising my own children would fill my heart. And then last night—”

  She stopped as if I had interrupted her. But I had not. It was the roar from the crowd, a roar with a life of its own, unlike any of the previous roars.

  We both turned to the circle of sand, already dotted with brandy stains of blood.

  The matador and bull were no longer alone.

  A man had staggered from the door that led to the matador’s tunnel. I saw the door close, as if he had been pushed into the arena.

  By this man’s gait, it was clear that he was drunk.

  More clear to me, however, was his identity, his distinctive eye patch a marker of confirmation.

  Robert Waldschmidt.

  He was bedraggled in his suit, and his hands flipped helplessly as he twirled and tried to comprehend the noise and the sand.

  Miskimon stood. As did I.

  For a moment, it appeared the matador was unaware of Waldschmidt’s presence on the sand. But when the bull rushed past the matador, well beyond the swirl of his cape, the matador turned with the bull and froze at the sight of another man with him in the ring.

  Waldschmidt staggered, barely keeping his balance.

  The bull moved toward him in a great rush of rage.

  Waldschmidt staggered again, and the bull brushed past him.

  The animal roar of the crowd changed in tone again, from shock to a mixture of jeering and cheering, as if half believed the man to be drunk and deserved death for sullying the ritual of the tercio de muerte and half believed this was some kind of vaudeville act—a skilled athlete pretending to be drunk and teasing the bull.

  “Unless we stop the bull, he’s a dead man!” Miskimon reached inside his jacket and pulled out a revolver from a hidden shoulder holster. “Clear the way and I’ll follow.”

  The steps from top to bottom were crowded with spectators who had moved from their seats to where there was more room. I started pushing them aside.

  But it was too late.

  The bull had whirled. Rushed again, with monstrous head lowered. Wicked, sharpened horns aimed like lances.

  Time seemed to slow at the moment of impact, and Waldschmidt flew into the air as if he had been struck by a locomotive.

  The matador valiantly tried to divert the bull, darting in close and waving the cape. But the bull’s rage was beyond any distraction as it continued to gore the fallen man.

  I turned away. Watching the spectacle seemed like an act of voyeurism.

  Raquel’s arms were outstretched. I moved to her and she clung to my chest and pressed her face against my shoulder. I held her, eyes closed, as aware of how much I wanted to keep holding her as I was of the vivid and horrible death that had put her into my arms.

  When I opened my eyes, Raoul Amador was a few feet away, pushing his way up the steps, his eyes focused on mine.

  He glared, then walked away.

  In the Dakotas, given the distances we traveled to visit our nearest neighbors—whether by horseback or by carriage—it seemed pointless to make the effort unless the visit lasted long enough for dinner with coffee afterward. This meant upon arrival, the horses needed to be unsaddled or unharnessed, and before leaving, it was necessary to spend time to saddle or harness our animals again. All told, then, a social call was a minimum of four hours. Except when urgent, daylight governed our travel because travel in the dark was at best worrisome and at worst hazardous. Thus, in the summer, anything past five o’clock in the afternoon was pushing it as a decent hour to arrive for a formal or semiformal social call. In the winter, of course, when the sun set much earlier, few social calls began after two o’clock, and only if the weather was good.

  Over the telephone, the night of the bullfight, Raquel assured me that, in her culture, this was not the situation at all. Nine o’clock in the city, she said, was a perfectly normal hour for friends to gather, and soirees often went into the early hours of the morning.

  I took the phone call in the lobby of the hotel in Culebra. A bellhop had been sent up the street to my bachelor quarters with a note, asking me to accompany him back to the hotel for the conversation. Had the note come from anyone but Raquel, I would have declined. The bellhop woke me from an early night’s sleep, as Miskimon had promised he would arrive at sunrise to escort me by train to my waiting steamer and to tell me all he knew about the circumstances of Waldschmidt’s death.

  But this was to be my last night in Panama, and I would regret choosing a good night’s rest over the chance to hear what Raquel might have to say to me, especially given Amador’s reaction to witnessing the embrace that she and I shared at the bullfight. The man had simply turned away and walked down the steps again. Afterward, his silence and lack of reaction had weighed upon Raquel and me during our carriage ride to the train station at Ancón, and her good-bye to me held little emotion.

  At the hotel, the switchboard operator put me through to the number on the note, and Raquel answered immediately, asking me to take a train back to Ancón and a carriage through the hills of Panama City to her fine villa. I did not point out that when I went to the villa Monday afternoon, I’d been turned away. She said her father would like to speak to me, and, moreover, she would li
ke to have a private conversation with me, properly escorted, of course, by her dear friend Odelia.

  She had her world and I had mine. Did it really matter if I spent a few more hours with her before a permanent good-bye? I could have rationalized that it would have been an embarrassment to her if I declined the invitation and that it was strictly from propriety that I accepted her request and embarked on the next available passenger train of the PRR.

  But I knew better. I was a smitten fool. I would have waded across a swamp just for the chance to have her hold my hand and wish me safe travels as we gazed into each other’s eyes.

  At the villa, with carriage wheels clattering on cobblestone as the hack drove away, I lifted and dropped the panther-head knocker on the door and was answered almost immediately with a sliding of the circular Judas window. The elderly woman who had greeted me before opened the door and nodded for me to step inside.

  She led me down a wide hallway lit by candles. Two right-hand turns eventually brought us to the back of the villa, at a double door. This she opened to a large drawing room, pointing me inside. After I stepped forward, she closed the door behind me.

  Had I not spent my younger years in travel, I would have felt like a rube in the subtle but immense display of wealth evident in the soft glow of light, provided here not from candles but from the bulbs in floor lamps supplied by electricity. The wall trim was dark, lustrous mahogany. The walls were dominated by large oil paintings. The rugs were luxurious, and the furniture, to my eyes, Chippendale.

  All of this was simply something I gave only a glance because Ezequiel Sandoval was in one of those chairs across the room. He wore a dinner jacket, whereas my only sartorial splendor was the cowboy hat in my hand.

  Raquel sat in the chair to his left, wearing a ruby-colored full-length dress. Her hair was pinned behind her head, showing the elegance of the line of her neck.

  A few feet to her left was another chair, empty, and a fourth had been placed across from them at a distance that suggested formality. A side table to the left of the chair held a decanter of wine and a full glass and something that in the soft light looked like stacked bracelets resting on a sheet of paper.

  Neither Raquel nor her father said anything at my entrance, or even seemed to turn their eyes toward me, as if I were invisible. I hesitated…how should I proceed? I wanted to be respectful of her father, so because he didn’t rise to greet me, I remained where I was.

  I looked closer at the stacked bracelets, and it struck me that what I was seeing were two sets of handcuffs.

  As I puzzled about this, from behind me and to my right came the unmistakable sound of the hammer cocking on a revolver.

  “Drop your hat.”

  No mistaking the voice. Raoul Amador. There was a set of heavy drapes along the wall where he had hidden himself.

  “Go sit in the empty chair near the wine. Move slowly. This pistol is not aimed at you but at Raquel, and if you try anything heroic, the first bullet is hers.”

  I dropped my hat. I didn’t turn my head. I estimated by his voice that he had been careful enough to keep more than a few steps between us. Enough to shoot twice. Once at her, once at me.

  I slowly stepped forward.

  “Excellent,” he said. “Before you sit, I want you to handcuff your left ankle to the right leg of the chair. After you sit, the next set is for your right wrist to the left arm of the chair.”

  Had I been alone, I would have risked death by attempting to tackle Amador, even with the distance between us. A tiny chance was better than no chance. Once I was handcuffed to the chair, I would be in his control.

  But I wasn’t alone.

  At the chair, I scooped up the first set of handcuffs. I knelt, and the ratcheting of one bracelet to my left ankle was loud to me. I glanced at Ezequiel and Raquel. They showed no expression.

  I continued with the other bracelet, securing my ankle to the right leg of the chair. All I would have to do was tilt the chair, and that handcuff would drop free of the chair leg, but it would take a second or two, and against a man armed with a pistol, that was an eternity too long.

  After I bound my right wrist to the left arm of the chair, Amador said, “Lift and jerk against the handcuff hard. I want to see that it’s secure.”

  I did so.

  A moment later he entered my vision, near Raquel, both hands gloved with a delicate kid leather, finely stitched. He held my cowboy hat in one hand and a pistol in his other.

  Like mine, it was a Peacemaker. Single action, six-shooter. A bullet for each of the three of us, if Amador wanted, and three to spare.

  He dropped my hat and stepped on it, crushing the crown.

  He slid the fourth chair a little behind Raquel, where she would have to turn her head to look over her shoulder to watch him. Her eyes remained straight ahead though. I tried to discern something from those eyes. Pupils that should have been luminous because of the low light were constricted needle tight.

  I saw the same in Ezequiel’s eyes.

  “Pick up the certificate from the side table.” Amador kept the pistol pointed at Raquel. “Read it.”

  I picked it up. I saw the words. I kept my face blank, even as my gut tightened. If he wanted a reaction from me, he wasn’t going to get it. It was about all I was in a position to muster as defiance.

  “In this light,” I said, “I can’t seem to see the lettering.”

  “Set the paper down.”

  I put it back on the side table. It was a small triumph, far too small considering the situation.

  He leaned forward and with the butt of his pistol thumped the back of Raquel’s head. Her soft grunt of helplessness was more horrible than the sound of a gunshot. That was her only reaction. The muscles on her face remained slack, giving her expression a vacuousness that chilled me.

  “Did you enjoy thinking you had fooled me? Now tell me what that paper is.”

  “A marriage certificate.”

  “Go on. Who is the husband and the wife? Not by pronoun.”

  He knew it would hurt me to say the names.

  “Raoul Amador,” I said. “Raquel Sandoval.”

  I’d seen enough to know the date and time on the certificate was 5 p.m., Wednesday, January 13, 1909. They had married in a civil ceremony this afternoon, after the bullfight, about an hour after Raquel had said good-bye to me at the train station in Ancón.

  “I’m glad you understand,” Amador said. “She is my wife. Tomorrow, I will be distraught that she has disappeared. I will remain distraught for months. Perhaps her remains will someday be found in the swamps. Perhaps not. But after a suitable period of mourning, I will collect her inheritance. She was a good wife, wouldn’t you agree?”

  I looked to Raquel to see her response. Nothing.

  “I only tell you this so that, until the noose drops over your neck, you can regret that you are responsible for her death. I didn’t need her love. Only her loyalty, and you robbed me of that when she broke our engagement last night. Now drink the wine.”

  Sudden comprehension. If I did, my own pupils would shrink to dots, and I would become as catatonic as Ezequiel and Raquel. Yet I had no doubt he would hit Raquel across her skull with his pistol if I refused, so I took the wine glass with my free left hand and brought it to my mouth. I stopped with the rim well short of my lips. Each second that passed would bring all of us nearer to rescue. The arrangement with Miskimon had been that if I did not appear outside on the cobblestone drive within five minutes, cowboy hat in hand, he would assume that I was in danger. Or that if I stepped outside wearing my hat, it would also be a signal that something was wrong in the house and I needed his help.

  I met Amador’s gaze. “I have the photos of your new constitution. This country’s politics mean nothing to me. I am open to negotiation here.”

  Amador casually leaned back in his chair, raised his pistol, pointed it right, and pulled the trigger.

  The roar of exploding grains of gunpowder and the resulting burs
t of massive sound waves felt like a sudden sledgehammer against the side of my head. For a moment, as tendrils of smoke wafted from Amador’s shooting hand, I thought he’d simply done this for effect. Raquel was unharmed.

  But Ezequiel gurgled once. He slid sideways, his head limp on his shoulders, his handsome face still remarkable and dignified—until a cough sent blood down his chin. He shuddered once. But that was all. The entry wound was somewhere at the back of his body—on this side, the appearance of his magnificence was preserved.

  Amador turned the barrel of the pistol toward Raquel’s face. The kid leather gloves were speckled with soot.

  “Drink the wine,” he said. “All of it. If the glass is not empty by the count of ten, you’ll hang for her murder too. One…”

  I drank it as if it were water, unaware of any taste.

  He lowered the pistol. Had enough time passed for Miskimon to find his way inside the villa? Would any servants investigate the sound of a gunshot?

  Amador rose from the chair and took a few steps to close the distance between us. He placed the pistol in my right hand and returned to his chair.

  A Peacemaker weighs about two and a half pounds. There was enough play in the handcuffs for me to twist my wrist and aim it at his belly. Already, however, the weapon was beginning to feel much heavier than the weight to which I was accustomed. Whatever had been in the wine was acting upon me.

  “Will you shoot an unarmed man?” he asked.

  The answer was yes, to save a woman’s life. I doubted there was another bullet in the pistol, but I would wait as long as possible before confirming it. I had to consume as much time as I could.

  “Toss me keys to the handcuffs,” I said. “I won’t hesitate to pull the trigger if you don’t.”

  “The National Police detained your friend Miskimon the moment he stepped into our republic,” Amador replied. “The servant who brought you here is already on the way to the police station to report that you accosted Señor Sandoval with an American pistol. The new science of fingerprinting is a fascination to me. If finding you here with a dead man isn’t enough to hang you, I’m sure that police procedure in regard to your grip on the weapon will be enough, wouldn’t you agree? As for your kind offer to return the photos, it appears that Cromwell has already betrayed you. The revolution is over.”