Cut to the Quick

by Tony Masero

  ‘How many men you got back there?’

  ‘We’d twenty all told, leastways we was,’ he looked down at the bodies sprawled on the trail and twisted his lips. ‘Few less now.’

  ‘What about Xavier Bond, he with you?’

  ‘The Grand Knight? Sure he is, we wouldn’t be nothing without his leadership.’

  ‘Are all you fellows Knights of the Golden Circle?’

  ‘Sure are,’ Benjamin answered proudly. ‘We hold true to the Confederacy and all it stood for.’

  ‘That’s over now, boy. No good hanging onto the past.’

  ‘You going to kill me, mister?’

  One of the women, wrenched free of her bonds and dashed over. She spat in Benjamin’s face and slapped out at him.

  ‘You beast! You pig! I will kill you.’

  Her accent was strong and laced with Latino inflection as she smacked at the crouching young man angrily.

  ‘Hold on, lady,’ warned Kirby. ‘I need to speak with this lad.’

  ‘What can he tell you?’ she turned on Kirby, her dark eyes flashing. ‘I can tell you everything there is to know about these animals. They have taken us, my sister here and my daughter. They wish to use us as their whores.’

  ‘You have a village near here?’ Kirby asked.

  ‘No,’ she answered, staring at Benjamin with a look that was as sharp as daggers. ‘Give me your gun, I will kill him.’

  ‘Not right now, I’ve a use for him. So where are you from….’

  ‘Look here, Kirby,’ Belle interrupted.

  Kirby looked up to see Guatano returning down the track. He was accompanied by two white men. The older one was a big-bellied flamboyant looking character with a broad, floppy brimmed hat set far back on his head. He carried an elderly Lee-Enfield rifle and a long machete stuffed into his belt. His companion was younger and smaller. A handsome looking fellow with a neat mustache and quick dark-brown deep-set eyes that were never still.

  The woman let up beating on Benjamin and cried out happily as she noticed them, running off down the track her arms spread wide in a glad greeting. The two other women joined in her cries of joy as they too noted the men and ran off to join them.

  Guatano stepped around the happy group and made his way over to Belle and Kirby.

  ‘You get him?’ asked Kirby.

  The Indian nodded solemnly and Kirby noted his hands were stained red and he was sure it was not the dye the Indian painted his face with.

  ‘Who is this?’ Kirby asked, jerking his chin in the direction of the group who were kissing each other, laughing and crying all at the same time.

  ‘Bandeiras,’ Guatano answered. ‘The ones who hunt for gold and precious stones. These ones were slave traders in the past but now they travel far through the jungle in search of riches.’

  ‘My friends,’ cried the burly figure with the large hat striding towards them. ‘I have much to thank you for.’ He kicked at one of the bodies as he passed by, ‘These dogs would have taken my family if not for you, I am in your debt.’ He swept off his hat and bowed extravagantly from the waist, ‘I am, Dom Tiago Solon, at your service.’

  Introductions were made all around and the young man turned out to be Tiago’s son, Ricardo. The women were his wife, Maria, his daughter Inez and sister-in-law, Nazaré.

  ‘You must come with us to our camp,’ insisted Tiago loudly. ‘This calls for celebration. And as for this one,’ his voice dropped threateningly and his cheerful look glazed over icily as he eyed Benjamin. ‘We shall arrange some special entertainment for him.’

  ‘This one, we need,’ said Kirby.

  Tiago spread his hands expansively, ‘Whatever you wish, senhor Kirby. Come, bring your Indian too. He is a good killer. There is one back there who will not be picking the flowers any more, I think.’

  ‘What do you say?’ Kirby asked Belle. ‘Reckon we should go with them?’

  Belle shrugged, ‘We need all the friends we can get.’

  Kirby turned to Guatano, ‘You coming?’

  The Indian paused, studying the group of Bandeiras for a moment. He bent over and plucked his arrow out of Lloyd’s skull. ‘I will come.’

  The camp was a simple affair of animal-hide tents gathered together in a clearing. There were four families in the band including Tiago’s, a total of seventeen people, five of them men of mature age. The American’s and their Indian ally were greeted fondly once their rescue escapade was explained. The news altering the first suspicious stares of the group to a happy welcome and they were seated on blankets before one of the tents. A large fire was lit as a damp evening chill was advancing and they were served with hot coffee, charqui, which they discovered was a kind of beef jerky and some sort of potato and maize flapjacks.

  ‘So,’ asked Tiago, once they had eaten and a flask of strong caxaca rum was passed around. ‘What is it you Americanos do in this part of the jungle? You are not of this one’s kind,’ he said, pointing a derisory finger at the bound Benjamin, who sat apart, cross-legged and staring at them dolefully from the shadows. ‘They who follow the red and blue banner with the stars.’

  ‘No, we are not like them,’ Kirby agreed.

  ‘They are scum,’ snarled Tiago. ‘We have much trouble with them. And now they have come into out camp and steal our women. We are out hunting for jaguar pelt when they came. They have killed my cousin in the taking, you see his family is in mourning,’ he nodded at one of the sad-faced women across the fire from them who wore a black band around her forehead and ashes rubbed on her cheeks.

  ‘We are here for their leader,’ explained Belle. ‘He is an old enemy of ours.’

  Tiago pouted his lips, ‘This will not be easy. That one never leaves his compound. He lives like a king in there with many slaves to keep the place. He has a harem of women to make his nights pleasurable and the other white men do no more than drink and fornicate. They take the local Indian females captive for their pleasure and would have used my family in such a way if you had not saved them.’

  ‘Do you know of a way we can get inside?’ asked Belle.

  Tiago shook his head, ‘I am not sure there is a way. We avoid the place when we can, perhaps Ricardo will know.’ He crooked a finger at his son and the young man got to his feet and came over to join them.

  ‘They wish to gain entrance to the Rancho Inferno,’ Tiago explained. ‘Do you know of such a possibility?’

  Ricardo pondered for a minute. ‘That will be very hard,’ he confessed. ‘They have many slaves who would give the alarm. These slaves are treated badly but they have more terror of this Bond man than any other and would give you up if you were seen as they go in fear of their lives.’

  ‘Do they post guards?’ asked Kirby.

  Ricardo shook his head, ‘No, they are confident. They live on the promise of the fear they have engendered. For them it is all drinking and cruelty, which they undertake daily for their divertissement.’

  ‘Is it possible to oversee the place and still be unseen?’ asked Belle.

  Ricardo nodded, ‘It is, if you can climb. They have high walls but there are many trees nearby, they have cleared them once but the forest grows back quickly. And their laziness means that there are now new trees near enough to see over the walls.’

  Kirby called across to Benjamin, ‘Will they come looking for you once you are missed?’ he asked.

  ‘I guess,’ Benjamin allowed quite willingly. ‘Ahab was high in the Order, it will be noticed he is not around. He was a personal bodyguard to the Grand Knight.’

  Kirby nodded, ‘They will send out a patrol then. Maybe that will give us an opportunity. Can you get me close enough to take a peek over these walls?’

  Ricardo nodded, ‘If my father will allow.’

  ‘Of course we shall help,’ agreed Tiago with a broad smile. ‘Have you not helped us. Now,’ he said dismissively. ‘Enough of this kind of talk. Let us drink some more caxaca and speak of other things. I have heard that in America they have solid bricks
of gold to pave the streets, is this so?’

  Chapter Thirteen

  In the nine years since the end of the Civil War, Xavier Bond had gone through some changes since his fall from grace as US senator. Back then he had been a clean-shaven and apparently upright figure with rather bland and unprepossessing, yet not unpleasant features. His hair was cut neatly and combed over from a side parting. Always tidily dressed in a dark suit and vest with a gold watch chain and small black bow tie. Not a figure to take note of particularly and in such a way he had walked the floor of the Senate and been barely noticed. Yet behind the facade he had been an avid supporter of the South and used his position to bring information to the Confederacy and create mayhem behind the Union lines where he could. His position as head of the subversive organization known as the Knights of the Golden Circle had been a well-kept secret until Belle and Lomas had sought to bring him down.

  With his escape, Bond had carried with him a few loyal supporters and joined the refugees in their journey from the defeated South and entered Brazil along with other prospective farmers encouraged to do so by the Emperor of Brazil, Pedro II. The absence of any restrictions found in his new home had led to an unfettered life of intolerance and self-indulgence for the runaway Confederate.

  Slaves abounded in the country and by moving deep into the hinterland, Bond was free of all oversight and became an absolute lord over his fiefdom. It had led him into a pastime full of dissipation.

  The once neat senator was no more; overweight now his pallid jowls had filled out and drooped on each side of the thin line of his compressed lips. His face sagged with unhealthy flesh, deep bags hung under bloodshot eyes and he sat in his throne room with a permanent bottle of wine perched on his bulging stomach.

  He was cut off from his roots and whilst he affected a joy at this newly won freedom far from home, in the depths of his soul he was filled with bitterness and resentment. It showed in the glittering eyes that peered out from under limp strings of unwashed hair hanging over his perspiring brow. His cunning was still there but his mentality verged on the edge of madness, a deep seated antipathy that could only find relief in his harem of colored and mulatto women or in the pain he would impose upon the male slaves that occupied the plantation.

  Xavier Bond had become a cruel overlord that wallowed in self-pity. His only hope for salvation, as he saw it, was to restore the Southern states to the position they had held before the war. Surprisingly for such a normally astute man, it was a naïve and empty expectation and one that could never be fulfilled. This was a thing he realized on his more clear days when the desire for drink and sexual excess had withdrawn temporarily. In those brief moments of clarity, the knowledge only deepened his sense of defeat and therefore encouraged a further state of decline.

  He had built the throne room so that he might stare out over a stone balustrade at the extent of his kingdom with its vast fields of coffee trees stretching beyond the walls. From the high viewpoint he could see all that went on and when the fancy took him bring the finger of death onto some working figure below that disappointed him. For this reason he had positioned a heavy Sharps sniper rifle on a tripod stand before him and all those within the eight hundred yard range of the weapon walked at their peril.

  Behind him in the lushly furnished room his barely-clad consorts lay indolently on cushions awaiting his call. Most of the women had been forced into submission over the years and had formed a coterie that vied for his favors rather than sought escape. There was nowhere for them to go if they did, Bond’s troop of loyal white soldiers would track them down to bring them back to face an awful punishment, examples of which hung on posts in the courtyard before Bond’s mansion.

  The fanciful edifice was built in the middle of the jungle by the sweat of his imprisoned slaves and surrounded by fourteen-foot high walls that kept the invasive jungle at bay and the place in isolation. In the courtyard below, tawdry barracks shacks ran away from the house where the army of colored slaves were kept and to one side special cottages housed his own men who used these lesser residences to behave with as much equal dissipation and cruelty as their leader.

  In the forefront of the courtyard were set a row of heavy wooden posts and from them dangled the punished. Branded, crucified, beaten and whipped, the unfortunates writhed on their various crosses until they expired and only when the smell was too unpleasant for Bond to bear any longer were their decaying bodies removed.

  In such a way the slaves were kept in a constant state of fear, the situation forbidding any decisive thought on their part and creating a serpentine attitude of apathy that made each task they were given a long and protracted affair that stretched out far beyond any respectable timespan. It was the expected result of such conditions of repression and Bond forewent the tardy results and in a way reveled in the circumstance. It was after all, a symptom and symbol of his power.

  The Sharps boomed, it’s long hollow roll of sound echoing through the surrounding forest. A lone Negro, thinking himself hidden from view had propped himself lazily under the foliage of a tree for a few minutes respite. Bond smiled thinly as he watched through the telescope he had propped on the broad ledge beside the rifle and saw the man flop over and lie still.

  ‘Lazy bastard,’ he mumbled, swinging the telescope around to track other workers. At sound of the shot they scurried fast, running with wheeled barrows and sacks over their backs or digging with feverish haste. Desperate to show that they were fully engaged and so avoid the fate of their companion.

  Bond raised an imperious finger and one of the women behind, rose lithely to her feet and fetched an open bottle from a side table. She was a tall and elegant figure; her tanned skin the color of soft gold and her slender body naked to the waist so that her pendulous breasts hung in soft invitation over Bond’s shoulder as he accepted the wine.

  Bond barely noticed, he guzzled from the neck of the wine bottle whilst his eager eyes searched the fields before him for more likely targets.

  ‘Fan’, he croaked.

  The woman swept back her long black hair from her shoulders and nodded at one of the other girls, who rose and began to lethargically wave a large woven straw leaf above Bond’s head ushering a breath of movement that moved the sultry air but gave no relief from the stifling heat.

  Bond swallowed more wine and belched softly. He reached out a hand; his eyes still on the fields and grasped the longhaired girl’s inner thigh from behind, bringing her nearer. He kneaded distractedly probing at her tight buttocks as he kept his gaze fixed on the workers below.

  The woman stood there impassively as Bond continued his intrusive invasion of her body, she knew well enough what the prospect would be if she argued.

  ‘Now,’ Bond sighed and the woman obediently knelt at his side and began to unfasten his buttons.

  She was about to bend to her ministrations when they were interrupted by the appearance of a fair-haired man dressed in the frayed uniform jacket of a Confederate corporal with fringed buckskin pants and a battered gray forage cap on his head.

  ‘Excuse me, Grand Knight,’ said the corporal, coming to attention yet averting his eyes from Bond’s immodest activities.

  ‘What?’ growled Bond, irritated by the unwanted interruption.

  ‘It’s Trooper Ahab and his raiding party. They ain’t come back yet and should be here by now.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, I’m getting complaints, sir. It’s the men, Grand Knight. They been expecting the new girls, kinda anticipating it. They’re getting restless now.’

  ‘Getting restless, huh?’ said Bond, turning his fat body awkwardly to look at the corporal over his shoulder. ‘Well, Corporal Jaines, you’d best sort it out hadn’t you? We wouldn’t want the men to get restless now, would we? Goddamn it, is that all they have to think about? Tupping some Indian whores, Lord a’ Mighty, they should find some more wholesome pastime, I do declare.’

  The double standards he employed were lost on Bond who considered h
imself a cut above the rest of humanity and therefore free to enjoy his own debauchery whilst criticizing the activities of others.

  Alistair Jaines was Bond’s eyes and ears amongst the Confederates. He was not one to participate in the lower forms of activities his companions indulged in. A loyal and militant Southerner, he had been brought up under a strict religious regime and it lingered enough in adulthood sufficient to give him pause. He made no criticism about how the others chose to live, he himself stayed apart and although he disapproved he said nothing. The years during the conflict had shown him all manner of awful things about the baser nature of his companions and yet it had perversely bound him in an undying bond of comradeship with them.

  Jaines was a tall, lean Virginian with a high forehead and long, rather defined and almost feminine features under his mat of unkempt fair hair. A handsome man by female taste and the girls in Bond’s harem cast lustful glances at him from under lidded eyes but he paid no attention to them. Jaines was a duty-bound man, who kept to the military protocols and used them as a means of maintaining his sanity amongst the dissolution of his surroundings.

  ‘You want me to go out after them?’ he asked.

  ‘That would be best advised, corporal.’

  ‘Very well, sir. I’ll get right on it,’ Jaines snapped to attention, turned on his heel and marched out.

  ‘You do that,’ breathed Bond, taking the long neck of the kneeling girl in his hand. ‘Now you get on with it too,’ he urged, pressing her down.

  With his drink-sodden attention fixed on dreamy pleasure, Bond hardly noticed anything beyond the walls and so did not see the two figures perched amongst the spear shaped leaves of a giant Kapok tree. Kirby and Ricardo peered out and the Pinkerton agent carefully noted the disposition of all that lay within the boundaries of the estate. His eye roved over the fields and the many unsupervised slaves at work. He had seen the recent killing and noted how the fear of the long shot kept the slaves in obedience.