Vultures in the Sky

by Todd Downing

  The train had reached the top of the grade now and was increasing its speed. Wheels clicked against rails in steady crescendo.

  Spahr’s elbow was propped upon his knee and his chin rested in the palm of his hand as his quick eyes surveyed the group.

  “I’ll be next,” he spoke up. “Name’s Ed Spahr. With the San Antonio Express. I was back in the diner drinking beer while we were going through the tunnel. The waiter can testify to that, I think, also a lady who was at a table back there. I didn’t know that anything had happened in here until we’d been out of the tunnel for some time.” He shifted his position and looked down at King.

  The latter caught Rennert’s eye for an instant before he spoke.

  “I am Jackson S. King, of Dallas, Texas,” unconsciously probably a note of self-importance crept into his voice, “the King and Dysart Cotton Mills. I was seated in this exact spot during the entire time we were going through the tunnel. I know nothing whatever of the man who died. I never saw him before this morning, while we were in the station at Monterrey.” He adjusted the pincenez and stared past the sheeted figure at the baked barrenness of sand and cactus outside the window.

  Radcott was rolling up his sleeves, exposing thick moist arms.

  “I’m Preston Radcott,” he said, a forced smile upon his lips, “of Kansas City. I’m with the Southwestern Novelty Supply Company. I was back on the observation platform when we started through the tunnel. I stepped back inside and closed the door but stayed there until we were through. I came back here a few minutes later. I—” he stopped and drew out his handkerchief. “I guess that’s all,” he surveyed the begrimed cloth doubtfully before he began to mop his forehead.

  Expectant silence fell between them. The steady rhythm of the rails had become again a regular restful monotone.

  “Our friend in the seat there seems to have forgotten that he is included in this truth session as well as the rest of us,” Searcey’s voice was edged with unveiled sarcasm.

  The man had turned about in his seat to face them. His shoulders were squared and his slightly cleft chin was drawn up. His eyes had lost all of their vagueness and were clear and bleakly cold.

  “Not at all, my friend,” he spoke kindly. “I had not intended to avoid an introduction, but was merely waiting until you had all concluded. My name is Paul Xavier Jeanes. My home is in San Antonio. Of this poor soul,” his eyes went for an instant to the sheet that lapped over the seat in front of him, “I know nothing whatever. All of us are upon a journey. His has ended sooner than ours. Let us hope that he was prepared.” He paused. “Of what happened while we were passing through the tunnel I have spoken. I know nothing more.”

  A queer silence followed his words. A puzzled frown was on Radcott’s face as he stared blankly at him.

  Spahr stood up and ran his lingers through his hair. “Well,” he said, with an effort at joviality that fell flat, “I guess that finishes the inquisition. Who’ll have a beer?”

  “I think I will,” Radcott jammed the handkerchief into a hip pocket and started forward.

  “Have you gentlemen forgotten me?”

  Radcott turned at the sound of the quiet pleasant voice from behind him.

  The woman who had sat at the rear of the car stood now in the center of the aisle, regarding them with a mild and slightly absent expression.

  Radcott and Searcey stepped to one side and she advanced into the center of the group.

  “Masculine conceit, I suppose, that always leaves the women on the sidelines when anything that they consider unpleasant is going on,” she said with an abstracted smile. “Or is it the protective instinct we read so much about?”

  Her face had probably always just missed being beautiful. There was a regularity of features which cosmetics might have emphasized over a coarseness of the lips and nose. The white pearl-like beauty of her teeth was marred by a slight protuberance. Her brown hair, streaked with gray, was twisted carelessly about her head into a tight knot at the back. Her smile was pleasant, lending a certain gentleness to her face.

  “I am Miss Talcott, Trescinda Talcott,” she said. “My home is in Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico City. I am returning from a visit to the States. I was reading during most of your conversation, but I believe that I heard you say that someone had died.” Her eyes, gray and kindly behind white gold spectacles, were on Rennert’s face.

  “Yes, Miss Talcott,” he gestured toward the sheet, “a man died while we were passing through the tunnel back yonder. We were wondering if anyone on this car was acquainted with him.”

  “I’ll look at him and see if I knew him, though I’m sure I didn’t. I seldom pay any attention to my fellow-travelers—they are all so much alike.”

  She stepped forward and calmly threw back the sheet with her right hand. The light from the window struck the large diamond in the ornate old-fashioned setting upon the third finger so that the stone glowed with sudden fire.

  “No,” she shook her head slowly as she looked down at the dead face, “I don’t remember ever having seen him before.” Her voice had not lost its pleasant dispassionate tone. She let the sheet fall, folded her hands before her and said, still smiling: “But then all Mexicans are so much alike even when alive that one can’t be expected to tell them apart when they’re dead.”

  An awkward silence held them for a moment. King cleared his throat, very loudly it seemed.

  “But Miss Talcott—” Jeanes had half risen from his seat, his face a shade paler than before.

  “Yes?” she had turned to go but paused now and looked at him. She repeated: “Yes?” patiently.

  A subtle change was taking place in the man’s face. The skin seemed stretched very tightly across the thinly chiseled bones, so that they were whitely visible through its transparency. In his lips alone was perceptible a slight quivering, unable to be repressed. Some of this quivering was in his voice as he spoke in a strained unnatural tone: “But surely you cannot mean what you say! You cannot be so callous in the presence of death!”

  She laughed, with singular lack of mirth. “No? What would you have me do—get as excited as the rest of you because a man has died?” Her eyes went to the window.

  The train’s speed had slackened and close to the tracks an occasional low, flat-roofed building was to be seen. Beyond these impudent evidences of man’s intrusion the barren terrain rose and fell until it merged with the barren, shadow-flecked mountains.

  “While you are here wrangling over this man—who he was and how he died—the mountains of Mexico are passing by that window and you are not seeing them.”

  Jeanes had gotten to his feet and was grasping the back of the seat with both hands. Beneath the ice of his eyes fires were alive and glowing as he stared unblinkingly at the woman.

  She raised her right hand, as if in admonition to a child, and said very pleasantly: “Yes, yes, I know what you are about to say, Mr. Jeanes. About the sanctity of human life and all that. It’s really not worth your while repeating it to me—”

  She lowered her hand to steady herself as the train came to a sudden stop, moved forward with a convulsive jerk and was still again. Sudden uproar of porters’ cries poured through the windows.

  They were in Saltillo.

  4

  Carnations Against a Wall (11:55 AM.)

  A scarred veteran dreaming of battles, Saltillo, capital of the State of Coahuila, basks in the sun in a cup of the Sierra Madre Oriental more than five thousand feet above the level of the sea. Ancient adobe and stone houses spread away from green plazas and gray-white pavements and the heaven-jabbing tower of the Cathedral to flow like lava up the slopes of the mountains, toward the grim crumbling reminders of a sanguinary past.

  The train rested in the Saltillo station for twenty-five minutes, the third of the series of delays that were to mark so fatalistically their southward course.

  The twenty-five minutes were for Rennert minutes of confusion, of much pointless talk and of conferences as grave as they w
ere futile. Officials of ascending degrees of importance in the railway hierarchy and an officer of the Mexican army, hastily summoned by the conductor, had boarded the Pullman and looked at the body. There had been a discussion of whether the man had died in the State of Nuevo Leon or of Coahuila and of jurisdiction. Dusty manuals were brought out and passed from hand to hand. His tourist certificate, issued by the Mexican consul in San Antonio, was examined and commented upon in low excited tones. His name was Eduardo Torner, of San Antonio, and he was—unexpectedly—certified as being a citizen of the United States. His age was given as thirty-eight and his profession as that of real-estate agent. This information had required the summoning of someone (Rennert never did find out exactly whom) who proved to be out of the city at the time. The air of tension that prevailed was due in part, Rennert surmised, to the strike which was threatening to tie up all traffic on the lines of the National Railways of Mexico. As yet no violence had occurred, but the railway officials evidently regarded this as being the first of a series of attempts to intimidate the workers. The army officer disagreed—volubly—although he maintained a discreet reserve on the subject of his suspicions.

  At this point the doctor arrived, a stiffly dignified white-haired old gentleman who seemed to see no necessity for haste. His examination of the body was perfunctory. He found no traces of a wound upon it and was of the opinion that the man had died from natural causes, probably heart failure. He agreed, however, that a more detailed examination would be necessary before he could give a definite statement. The body was at last removed from the train, together with the single imitation-leather bag that had comprised the man’s luggage.

  Throughout all this Rennert had remained a silent, alert and grimly amused spectator. He had accompanied the group from the train, stood on the outskirts of another conference upon the platform and now sat in the small cluttered office of the stationmaster, across the table from the latter and the army officer.

  Upon the boards of the table had been strewn the contents of the dead man’s bag. There was little of importance there, it would seem. Two silk shirts and collars, a few handkerchiefs and socks, underwear, a few toilet necessities, a paper-backed Spanish novel—El Cerro de las Campanas—of the kind hawked in railway trains on both sides of the border. His pockets had contained, besides the tourist certificate, the usual masculine impedimenta—a few loose coins, a ring with two keys, a cheap pocket-knife, a packet of matches, Mexican cigarettes, a billfold containing fifty pesos in Mexican currency.

  The room was close and fusty with the smell of human beings, of stagnant smoke, of long undisturbed dust.

  Rennert was saying, a bit wearily, as he leaned forward in a creaky chair: “Of course it may turn out that this man died, as you think, of perfectly natural causes. On the other hand, I have given you my reasons for believing that he was murdered, as he had told of the words overheard in the Pullman the night before.” He had evidently been affected more than he realized by the strained atmosphere, for the word had a sharp ugly sound in the still room. (The Spanish “matado” clicks like a knife-blade against the teeth.)

  “But Señor Rennert, how?” the officer dropped his brown hand from his glossy waxed mustache and gestured widely.

  “As to that,” Rennert had to admit, “I do not know. Probably the doctor’s examination will tell us. I have wired back to San Antonio, Texas, to learn the particulars about a man who fell unconscious upon the platform there last night before this train left. It is possible that I shall learn something which will aid us in this case. I should have a reply to my telegram by the time we reach Vanegas this afternoon. If so, I shall notify you.”

  The officer watched him with opaque black eyes. “Who was this man of whom you speak?”

  “I have no idea. One of the passengers in the Pullman told me of the incident.”

  “You think that the same person killed both these men?” there was careful lack of expression in the question.

  “I have no grounds for more than suspicion at present.”

  The stationmaster shifted his position in his chair. He was a very worried man. He was young (younger than his leathery face and the sparse black hair that lingered about his bald dome would indicate) and the past few hectic days had kept him in a state of continuous nervous tension. Two days before, when relations between the labor organizations in the Capital and the Railway had reached the breaking point, a train had been derailed just outside Saltillo. Little damage had been done and the train had continued on to the border within a few hours, but the incident had begun to assume ominous proportions in his mind in view of the increasing frequency of reports of sabotage at various points along the National Railway lines. He felt that he ought to come to some decision in this matter of the man who had died upon the Pullman; he felt that he would have done so at once had not this army officer intruded his presence, to complicate still further the already complicated question of jurisdiction.

  “You are going on to Mexico City on this train?” he asked Rennert. (A sister of his wife’s had married a mining engineer from the United States and this relationship had given him a feeling of confidence in the presence of the cool air of self-assurance of this type of American.)

  “Yes.” Rennert’s eyes had rested momentarily upon the section of the platform visible through the open window. The tall woman whom he had seen in the diner was standing at the foot of the steps, idly surveying the scene. Her hair was gold in the sun, contrasting pleasingly with the jade green of her dress. From time to time she raised-the cigarette holder to her lips and let blue clouds of smoke drift upward into the hot still air.

  “In that case,” the stationmaster summoned up courage enough to speak directly to the army officer, “might it not be well for us to keep in touch with Señor Rennert? In the event that this Eduardo Torner was involved in a plot to blow up the train, there may yet be danger. He may have confederates at some place along the line. There may have been a quarrel and one of them, or some enemy of his, may have killed him in the Pullman. From what Señor Rennert tells us, it would seem that the person who killed him is still on the train. Señor Rennert knows these people and can watch them. If you would detail some of your men to aid him—” the suggestion dangled.

  The officer was again stroking the sparse hairs of his mustache. His dark amber face was expressionless.

  “But there are soldiers on the train,” he said at last. “Since the beginning of this strike all the trains have carried them.”

  “You will give them instructions, then, to be on their guard? To make an arrest in case Señor Rennert discovers that one of the passengers is threatening the safety of the train?”

  “It is a question of authority,” the other said pompously. “I must get in touch with my superiors.”

  “You will do it, then—at once?”

  The hot heavy silence of a Mexican noon lay stagnant upon the little room as the officer pondered.

  “Yes,” he said at last, heavily.

  Trescinda Talcott lowered the blind against a brown hand that was holding a pottery bowl of unsavory-looking food up to the window and a brown Indian face that was regarding her with pleading black eyes and repeating “¡Ta-a-acos! ¡Ta-a-acos!” with almost hysterical intensity. She marked her place in the novel with the bronze paper-knife which had come from Acapulco and moved an inch or two along the seat the large bag of plaited fiber which she had bought in Oaxaca. She relaxed a bit as she regarded with slightly amused eyes the man who sat opposite her.

  She thought of him as a young man—a very young man despite his prematurely graying hair—and was amused by his perfervid air of seriousness. She had thought, after those trying yet bittersweet weeks through which she had just passed, that she could never again be amused by serious people. She had even grown a trifle bitter about them lately, she realized now. Yet this young man was different somehow. She tried to remember where she had seen a resemblance to him before—to his pallid face that seemed planed in ice yet reflect
ed glowing fire somewhere beneath. There was a painting of El Greco’s somewhere.

  She brought herself back sharply to his words (he had just said something about the danger in which she stood) and realized that she had not been following him very closely. He had paused now and seemed to be waiting for her to say something.

  She said, hoping that there would be some kind of connection between her reply and the question which he had evidently asked: “But it’s because young peoples like the Americans have such a few generations of their dead beneath the soil of their country that each addition seems so important now.”

  She saw by the tensing of the muscles in the hands that grasped the knees of the shining black cloth that he was about to break out in protest but she went on imperturbably: “But, you see, I’ve lived in Mexico too long to go back to that way of thinking. For twenty-five years I’ve lived in a house which is built on the cemetery of a former monastery. Below that—far below—is the burial place of a people who lived there before the Aztecs came to the Valley. Archæologists come and dig around the foundations of the house and find ugly little urns and statues.”

  She paused and thought: I ought to stop now because he won’t understand.

  “The flowers in my garden,” she went on, “literally grow out of human bones. The back wall of my house was used by the Huertistas as a place of execution during the Revolution. The bullet marks are still there. Below them I planted the xempoaxochitl, the Indian’s yellow death flower—wallflowers, we call them—but for some reason it wouldn’t grow. I planted carnations then. Now they are the largest and the brightest in Coyoacan. I sometimes think—”

  She wasn’t sure whether her words had followed coherently upon his or not. (That flower-bed behind La Casa de los Alamos, with the pearl and white snows of Popocatepetl in the distance! With the dampness of morning on them, the carnations lived, took on the pink and crimson tints of the flesh for which they were named—petaled carnivores.) She passed a hand across her eyes, wondering if she had really fallen asleep.