by Mike Resnick
“You’re on the 3A Bus Route,” corrected the driver in bored tones. “I take it every day of the year.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but we ain’t never declared war on Uruguay before.”
“Pablo did once, didn’t you?” asked one of them.
“Yes, but I didn’t really mean it,” explained Pablo. “I was dating a girl from Uruguay and she stood me up.”
I turned to the driver. “Where does this here assault vehicle let us off?”
“Montevideo,” he said.
“Montevideo to you,” I replied politely. “Now, where does it stop?”
“Downtown Montevideo,” he said irritably. “That is the capital of Uruguay.”
“Not much longer,” I said. “We may take the whole town back to Buenos Aires with us.”
I pulled out a deck of cards and gave my men a crash course in higher mathematics, all having to do with the number twenty-one, and before we knew it the driver announced that we had reached Montevideo.
I walked up to the front and looked out the window. “Well,” I said, “if we’re going to conquer Uruguay, this is the place to do it. Pull over at the next corner.”
He did as I told him, but then I saw a cop walking his beat.
“Is he carrying a gun?” I asked, peering at him through the glass.
“Yes, I think so,” said the driver.
“Go another two or three blocks,” I said.
He drove three blocks and stopped.
“See any more cops around?” I asked him.
“No, Señor.”
“Fine.” I turned to my army. “Men, we’re getting out here.” As they clambered down onto the sidewalk, I turned to the driver. “Pick us up on your way back.”
“That will be in about five minutes, Señor.”
“No problem,” I said. “It ain’t that big a country.”
I stepped down onto the pavement, briefly examined the area to make sure there weren’t no cops around, and cleared my throat.
“I, Lucifer Jones, hereby declare Uruguay conquered and now the property of the Third Fatherland. If anyone’s got any objections, let him speak now or forever hold his peace.”
“I have one,” said Pablo.
“Shut up,” I said. “You’re on our side.” I waited a respectable thirty seconds, and there weren’t no more objections. “Man and boy, that was the easiest five hundred deutschmarks I ever made,” I announced. “Have we got time for a victory drink?”
“I don’t think so,” said Pablo mournfully. “Here comes the bus.”
“Climb aboard,” I said. “We’ll get our drink at some little town along the way, where they don’t water their liquor and the prices are better.”
And a moment later, with Uruguay all wrapped up and ready to be delivered, we boarded the bus and headed back to Argentina. We sang martial songs, especially about oversexed enemy captives named Rosita, and played a little more blackjack, and were all set to stop for a drink in some village near the border (which I suppose didn’t officially exist no more), when the bus came to a stop again.
“Out of gas?” I asked.
“Out of courage,” said the driver, pointing nervously ahead of us, where there were some fifty uniformed soldiers with guns, and most of them guns were pointed right at us.
I turned to say a word or two of encouragement to my victorious army, but all six of ’em was hiding under the seats, so I just climbed down off the bus and walked forward, with my hands up in the air so everyone could see I didn’t have no weapons or hidden aces in ’em.
“Greetings, brothers,” I said. “To what do I owe the honor of this here get-together?”
“You are our prisoner,” announced an officer, stepping forward.
“I’d love to be your prisoner,” I said, “but we’ll have to do it some other time. I’m in a hurry to get back to Buenos Aires and report that Uruguay has fallen.”
“It has?” he said, turning white as a dirty sheet. “I never heard a shot.”
“It was a pretty bloodless victory,” I said.
“Miguel!” he hollered. “Did you hear the news?”
“I don’t believe it!” said the officer called Miguel.
“Don’t take my word for it,” I said. “Ask the men in the bus.”
I indicated my troops, who all nodded their heads vigorously, then ducked back behind the seats again.
“This is tragic!” said the one called Miguel. “What foul fiend perpetrated this heinous sneak attack?”
“’Twasn’t no sneak attack,” I said. “It was right out there in the open for everyone to see. But in answer to your question, the foul fiends are Colonel Guenther Schnitzel, Colonel Hans Grueber, and Colonel Wilhelm Schnabble, and my understanding is that they’re considering packing up the whole country and shipping it to Germany.”
“Those bastards!” screamed the first officer. “We were going to conquer Uruguay next week!”
“Actually,” said the other apologetically, “we were going to conquer it last week, but I had a hangnail and his cousin was getting married.”
“We’re not going to permit them to plunder the treasury we were going to plunder!” yelled the first one. He turned to me. “I am Colonel José Marcos of the Uruguayan army, and this is my co-conspirator…ah…my fellow officer, Colonel Miguel Garcia.”
“And I’m the Right Reverend Doctor Lucifer Jones,” I said, wondering what it was about being colonels that made people so bloodthirsty.
“We will give you one thousand American dollars if you will lead us to these German usurpers,” said José. “Half now, half when you deliver them.”
“Right,” said Miguel. “We will find them, cut them to ribbons, and then Paraguay will be ours.”
“Uruguay, Miguel,” said José. “Uruguay.”
“Oh, right,” apologized Miguel. “Paraguay is next month.”
I resisted the urge to say “You go Uruguay and I’ll go mine,” because they clearly weren’t in the mood for highbrow sophisticated witticisms, so I simply allowed that it was a right generous offer, and the sooner they paid it the sooner I could put ’em in touch with the German colonels, who were probably right where I’d left ’em unless they finally found them other two Reichs what went missing and took ’em home.
Well, money changed hands, and in my good-heartedness I told ’em that they’d not only paid for a cornerstone, or at least a corner brick, of the Tabernacle of Saint Luke, but they’d also bought absolution for any sins they committed at Madame Fifi’s for the next 72 hours.
I thought Miguel was going to head right off to Madame Fifi’s, but José said no, they’d paid for the information and now they wanted it. So I told ’em that the three colonels in question had been sprawled out in the garden of the Hotel Presidente when last I saw ’em, and I couldn’t see no reason why they should stray too far from it.
“We don’t want to march right down de Julio Avenue,” said Miguel. “Who knows what kind of trap they might have set?”
“Right,” said José. “We should make them come to our trap.”
“Do we have one?” asked Miguel.
“You, Reverend Jones,” continued José, “will arrange a meeting between Miguel and myself, and your three German officers, in the little border town of Salto. Then, when they arrive, our men will attack and cut them to pieces, and Uruguay will be ours.”
I got back on the bus, and then we began driving off to Buenos Aires. Me and the army started swapping risible stories—I especially liked the one about the blind carpenter and the dancing girl—and then almost before I knew it we were pulling up to the Hotel Presidente. The colonels were still in the beer garden, crushing the flowers in between bouts of watering ’em, and I walked over to report that Uruguay had fallen. For some reason this seemed to surprise them, but I assured them we’d done it without no casualties nor even any collateral damage, and finally they offered to walk me inside and buy me a victory drink.
“Well, that’s mighty nice of you,” I said,
“but I got urgent business in Salto.”
“Oh?” said Guenther suspiciously. “What’s in Salto?”
I’d thunk long and hard about it on the way back, and I figgered if I told ’em a bunch of guys were waiting there to chop them into fishbait they’d probably decide they had urgent business elsewhere, so instead I said that Madame Fifi’s House of Scarlet Pleasures had opened up a branch in Salto and was giving out free coupons, and suddenly all three colonels made a beeline for the bus and had the driver gun the gas pedal, even before the conquering army could get off and go back to work.
All they could talk about was Madame Fifi’s, though Wilhelm, who was clearly the most sensitive of ’em, kept asking if making love to a member of an inferior species might not constitute bestiality, which was good for ten years in the hoosegow back in Germany.
It began raining about halfway through the trip, and pretty soon it was pouring cats and dogs and other critters that unlike most men got enough brains to come in out of the rain. Finally the bus pulled up in the mud in the middle of Salto, and everyone got out—the Germans, who still hadn’t stopped talking about Madame Fifi’s, and the army and me and the bus driver, just to stretch our legs and keep clear of the coming slaughter.
Then José and Miguel walked out from a nearby building, and I could see that the rest of their army was hiding behind it. José stopped by the bus long enough to pay me my final five hundred dollars, and then the two Uruguayan colonels walked straight up to the three German colonels.
“You have a lot of nerve, Señors,” said José. “Uruguay is ours, and I demand that you relinquish it right now.”
“We won it fair and square,” said Guenther, “and we are not giving it back.”
“We’ll see about that!” snapped Miguel. “You are outnumbered fifty to one!”
“That’s seventeen to one,” José corrected him. “With one left over.”
“What are you talking about?” demanded Miguel.
“Well, we have fifty armed men, plus ourselves, so that’s fifty-two, and there are three of them, so that comes to seventeen-to one, with one of us left over.”
“Who cares?” screamed Miguel. “They’re outnumbered and we’re going to kill them! That’s all that counts!”
“I beg to differ,” said Hans calmly. “We are members of the Aryan race. One of us is worth fifteen of you.”
“Even if that’s true, and I’m not conceding it for an instant,” re-plied José, “then we still outumber you one-point-sixteen-to-one!”
“Ah, but it’s raining,” noted Guenther. “That decreases your mobility by nineteen percent.”
“But you wear a monocle,” said José. “That decreases your field of vision eleven percent even if it wasn’t raining.”
“But there’s also a nine percent chance that your pistol will misfire in the rain,” noted Hans.
“Can we just stop talking and kill them, please?” said Miguel wearily.
“Oh, all right,” said José. “Anything to make you happy. Let’s step out of the way of our bayonet-wielding infantry.”
Nobody moved.
“Uh…I can’t lift my legs,” said Miguel.
“Neither can I,” said Guenther, frowning.
And sure enough, all five of ’em had sunk into the muck and mire past their knees, and they were stuck there.
Suddenly I saw the Uruguayan infantry break cover and race over toward the bus.
“Take us back to Montevideo,” said one of ’em to the driver.
“Don’t you want to save your fearless leaders?” I asked.
“They aren’t fearless, and they’re not our leaders. We only came with them because they told us Madame Fifi had opened a new branch here.”
I turned to my army. “How about you guys?” I said. “You want to save any of these here colonels?”
“No!” they said in unison.
“You sure?” I said. “After all, you won a whole country for ’em. They might want to give you a slice of it.”
“They would, too, the bastards!” said Pablo passionately.
“I’m not quite sure I follow that particular line of reasoning,” I said.
“It’s hard enough just to keep our block clean,” he said. “Who wants to be in charge of cleaning a whole country?”
I could see where his sentiments lay, so I didn’t try to talk him out of it. Then I took one last look at the combatants. Hans was explaining that the mud wouldn’t hamper three guys as much as two, and José was answering that any mathematician would know that two guys were one-third less likely to be hampered, and then Wilhelm said he hadn’t eaten all day and Miguel said that as soon as he got loose he’d cut Guenther into pieces and feed him to Wilhelm, and Hans snickered and said that his knife would be so rusty by then that it wouldn’t cut through Wilhelm’s flesh, and pretty soon they were back to yelling and cursing at each other, and I noticed that all their noise had attracted a bunch of curious spectators, most of which had four legs and long whiskers and were covered with spots, and that seemed like an appropriate time to leave all them would-be conquerors behind, because the real conquerors had just showed up.
We dropped the Uruguayan army off in Montevideo, then turned the nose of the bus back to Buenos Aires. We stopped by Salto, but there wasn’t no sign of none of the colonels, though we did see some mighty fat, contented jaguars.
Me and the Argentine army got off in the middle of town, they decided to go back to their jobs and their womenfolk, and as for me, I’d had my fill of conquering countries and decided it was time to start plundering them. I’d heard of some forgotten kingdoms off to the west that were filled to overflowing with priceless gems and liberal-minded high priestesses, and I decided then and there to go grab my share of both. But as you will see, it wasn’t quite as easy as it sounds….
A Four-Sided Triangle
There wasn’t a whole lot of white folks in La Paz back in the spring of 1937, but them what was there all remember what happened, all the romantic intrigues and double crosses and blazing guns and the like, and they’ve codified it in song and story what’s come down to their descendants and a bunch of scholars who ain’t got nothing better to do with their time, and it’s gotten so famous that these days I think they’re even talking about making a movie or two about it.
So before you get any further misled, I want to tell you my side of the story.
As readers what’s been breathlessly following my heroic exploits and encounters in South America will know, I’d just finished waging a secret war of conquest against Uruguay. (In fact, it was so secret that not a single history book even mentions it.) I’d tooken my leave of Buenos Aires and the passenger bus from which me and six street cleaners (well, five active, one unemployed) had launched our lightning strike across the border, and I heard talk of some hidden city called Macho something-or-other up in Peru.
Well, right off I knew it was my kind of place, since the one thing a city named Macho figgered to have in abundance was a bunch of scarlet women what was there to help all the men kind of exert their machoness. I figgered I was less than a thousand miles from it when I ran a little short of funds. Now, I could see that the locals was mostly uneducated peasants and probably couldn’t count up to twenty-one if I was to introduce a complex game like blackjack, so instead I taught ’em how to play a sporting game with a pair of six-sided cubes that only required ’em to count up to twelve.
Turn out that at least it was right in theory. To this day I don’t know if any of ’em could count to twenty-one unless the Good Lord guv ’em an extra finger or toe, but they sure could count up to three, which was how many dice hit the ground when my spare accidentally tumbled out of my sleeve.
Which is how I came to spend the next six nights in the calaboose at Cochabomba, which sounds like Bubbles La Tour’s specialty dance at the Rialto Burlesque back in my home town of Moline, Illinois, but was actually this here village what lay directly between me and paydirt, which is to say Buenos Aire
s and Macho-whatever-its-name-was.
Still, the grub wasn’t all that bad, especially if you had a taste for dirt-flavored salamanders and warm water with stuff floating in it. At least the salamanders was mostly dead and the water was mostly wet, which was better than a lot of hoosegows I’ve been in.
I was still planning on heading to Peru to find a lost empire or two when I sat down to play a game of checkers through the bars of my cell with Diego, who was the sheriff and cook and janitor all rolled into one fat old man with a droopy mustache. He wasn’t no happier hanging around the jailhouse than I was, but he looked a lot better fed.
“You know,” he said, as he moved a checker, “this jail has sat empty for three years.”
“You don’t say,” I answered. “No wonder all the snakes and rats are so lonely and rarin’ for a little companionship.”
“Then,” he continued, “all of a sudden, three men in three weeks—and all of them English speakers.” He lit a cigar and looked like he was thinking of offering me one, and then decided not to. “It would be bad for your health.”
“Ain’t it bad for yours, too?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “But then, I eat a diet that is not guaranteed to kill me, my poor amigo.”
“Getting back to them two other English speakers…” I said.
“It is most unusual,” he said. “Not only that I have had to arrest three in a row, but also that you all practice honorable vocations—a military man, a gentleman farmer, and a minister.”
“What in tunket was an English-speaking military man doing here?” I asked.
“He threatened to kill another man,” said Diego. “I gather it was an affair of the heart.”
It’s been my long and interesting experience that affairs of the heart usually start about two feet lower, but I didn’t feel like getting into no esoteric philosophical argument, so I just allowed that affairs of the heart could be mighty heartfelt and that I hoped he hadn’t been busted a rank or two in his outfit.
“Oh, he is retired,” said Diego. He rummaged in his pocket for a minute, pulled out a crumpled business card, straightened it out, and read it: “Major Theodore Dobbins, late of His Majesty’s armed forces.”
