Wrath of God
Jack Higgins
A story of passion and heroism from a violent land – Mexico in the 1920s……a place and a time when life was cheap and survival was for those who fought dirtiest. A year after the Revolution, violent unrest still simmers across rural Mexico.In the northern foothills of the Sierra Madre, the country's most renowned assassin turned psychotic bandit has dispensed with any need for rules. Plenty of men had tried to take Tomas de la Plata. But never another trained killer, who is fighting to escape the death sentence.Emmet Keogh fled a bitter war in Ireland, only to find himself halfway across the world and on the wrong side of the law. Now he has a choice. To kill the most dangerous man in Mexico – or face death by firing squad.
Jack Higgins
The Wrath of God
Dedication
For David Godfrey with thanks
Contents
Cover (#ulink_ee18ce9d-524f-50d5-8d73-cae5f1cfef71)
Title Page
Dedication
Publisher’s Note
Foreword
Mexico
1922
1
The Chief of Police usually managed to execute somebody round…
2
When we got back to the hotel, Janos took me…
3
It was all over very quickly. The men who had…
4
The next few minutes could well have been my last…
5
My father, a dedicated Fenian till the day he died…
6
‘In the year since the Revolution there has been much…
7
We left at six o’clock on as grey and dreary…
8
Smoke drifted into the late afternoon air in a dense…
9
For years I had lived a life in which everything…
10
He gave us no chance to discuss things with him,…
11
He had brought her to witness van Horne’s humiliation and…
12
I awakened to darkness, the pulsating beat of music. Guitars…
13
I surfaced to the patter of rain against the canvas,…
14
Inside the church away from the others, Nachita filled in…
15
All I could do now was wait for Nachita for…
About the Author
Other Books by Jack Higgins
Copyright
About the Publisher
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
THE WRATH OF GOD was first published in the UK by Macmillan and Co. in 1971 and later by Penguin Books. This amazing novel has been out of print for some years, and in 2011, it seemed to the author and his publishers that it was a pity to leave such a good story languishing on his shelves. So we are delighted to be able to bring back THE WRATH OF GOD for the pleasure of the vast majority of us who never had a chance to read the earlier editions.
FOREWORD
The first book I wrote after giving up a university career and becoming a full time writer. It was published in Britain and the USA with some success, but the interesting thing was that it received many film offers.
Finally, it was produced by MGM as a major movie with the great Robert Mitchum playing the strange priest who travels to Mexico during the early twenties in a huge open car but with a machine gun in his Gladstone bag. Is he really a priest is the question. The villain was played by a great Broadway star, Frank Langella and the wonderful Rita Hayworth played his mother, her last film before illness finished off her career for good. Over the years, Wrath of God has become a cult classic.
Mexico
1
The Chief of Police usually managed to execute somebody round about noon on most days of the week, just to encourage the rest of the population, which gives a fair idea of how things were in that part of Mexico at the time.
The sound of the first ragged volley sent my hand down inside my coat in a kind of reflex action when I was half-way up the hill from the railway station. For most of the way I had managed to stay in the shade, but when I emerged into the Plaza Civica, the sun caught me by the throat and squeezed hard, bringing sweat from every pore.
The executions were taking place in the courtyard of the police barracks and the gates stood wide open to give an uninterrupted view to anyone interested enough to watch, which on that occasion meant a couple of dozen Indians and mestizos. Not a bad audience considering the noonday heat and the frequency with which the performance was repeated.
At the rear of the small crowd an automobile was parked, a Mercedes roadster with the hood down, the entire vehicle coated with a layer of fine white dust from the dirt roads. An exotic item to find in a town like Bonito at that time. More surprising was the driver, who was getting out just as I arrived, for he was a priest, although like no other priest I’d seen outside of Ireland – a great ox of a man in a shovel hat and faded cassock.
He ignored the rest of the audience, most of whom were surprised to see him there, produced a cigarillo from a fat leather case and searched for a match. I found one before he did, struck it and held it out for him.
He turned and looked at me sharply, giving me a sight of his face for the first time. A tangled greying beard, vivid blue eyes and the unmistakable furrow of an old bullet wound along the side of his skull just above the left eye. One of the lucky ones to survive the revolution.
He took the light without a word and we stood side by side and watched as they marched three Indians across the courtyard from the jail and stood them against the wall. There were already half a dozen bodies on the ground and the wall was pitted with scars. The three men stood there impassively as a sergeant tied their hands behind their backs.
The priest said, ‘Does this happen often?’
He had spoken in Spanish, but with an accent that indicated that he was anything but Mexican.
I replied in English, ‘The Chief of Police says it’s the only way he can keep down the numbers in the jail.’
He glanced at me with a slight frown. ‘Irish?’
‘As ever was, father.’
‘A long way from home.’
New England American, or somewhere near unless I missed my guess.
‘I thought the revolution was supposed to be over?’ he said, and looked back towards the scene in the courtyard. ‘What a bloody country.’
Which was a reasonably unpriestlike remark although understandable in the circumstances. I said, ‘The discontented are always with us, father, even after revolutions. Why, there are some in these parts who think it’s still open season on priests.’
‘We’re in God’s hands,’ he said harshly. ‘All of us.’
Which was arguable, but I was prevented from taking the question up with him for one of the condemned against the wall inside the courtyard cried out sharply and pointed towards us as the sergeant was about to tie his hands.
There was some kind of disturbance and then a young officer strolled towards the gate and beckoned to the priest who left me without a word and went towards him.
‘Believe it or not, father, but one of these pigs wants to confess,’ I heard the officer say.
The priest said nothing; simply took a breviary from his pocket, spat out his cigarillo and started through the gate. By the time he reached the wall, all three were on their knees waiting for him.
I didn’t stop to watch for I had seen men die before or at least that’s what I told myself as I turned and went across the square to the Hotel Blanco on the far side. It was a tall slender building which had been used as a strong-point by the government forces during the war and the crumbling facade was pitted with bullet holes.
In the patio a fountain splashed water across scarlet tiles and the cool darkness of the terrace looked very inviting. The owner of the place lounged in a wicker chair by the screen door, fanning himself with a palm fan. His name was Janos and he was Hungarian as far as I could make out, although his English was excellent. The most noticeable thing about him was his great size. He must have been seventeen or eighteen stone at least, with a great pendulous belly and sweated constantly.
‘Ah, Mr Keogh. A hot day. You will join me in a beer?’
There were several stone bottles of lager in a bucket of water at his side. I helped myself to one and pulled the cork. As I did so, another volley sounded in the courtyard opposite. I sat on the rail beside him as the crowd began to disperse.
‘A nasty business,’ Janos said, managing to sound as if he didn’t give a damn.
‘Yes, too bad,’ I answered automatically, for I was watching for the priest.
He emerged from the gateway with the officer who walked to the Mercedes with him. They stood talking for a while, then the officer saluted and the priest got into the car and drove away.
‘A strange sight that,’ Janos commented. ‘Not only a priest, but a priest in an automobile.’
‘I suppose so.’ I emptied the beer bottle and stood up.
‘But not to you, Mr Keogh. Here, have another beer.’ He lifted one, dripping wet from the bucket and held it out to me. ‘In your Ireland you will have been familiar with many such vehicles. Here, they are still a rarity. You can drive yourself, I understand?’
Which was leading to something. I said, ‘It’s not very difficult.’
‘For an intelligent man perhaps not, but these peasants.’ He shrugged. ‘They are incapable of learning anything beyond the simplest tasks. I myself have a truck. The only one in Bonito. Most important to my business. I imported a driver-mechanic specially from Tampico, but the wretched man had to go and involve himself in politics.’
‘A dangerous thing to do in this country.’
He wiped a fresh layer of sweat from his fat face. ‘He was in the first batch they shot this morning. Most unfortunate.’
He obviously meant for himself personally. I said, ‘That’s life, Mr Janos. He shouldn’t have joined.’
A pretty hard way of looking at it, but then most of the more human feeling had been burned out of me a long time ago, particularly where that kind of situation was concerned. It was none of my affair and I was tired of the conversation which for some reason had a strange air of unreality to it. I was hot and I was tired and wanted nothing so much as a bath and perhaps a couple of hours on my bed before the train left.
I stood up and Janos said, ‘I have a rather important consignment to go to Huila. You know the place, perhaps?’
I saw then what he wanted, but there was no reason why I should make it easy for him. ‘No, I can’t say I do.’
‘Two hundred miles north of here towards the American border. Dirt roads, but not too bad in the dry season.’
But by then, I’d had enough. I said, ‘I’m catching the two-thirty train for Tampico.’
‘You could be back by tomorrow night. Catch the train the following day.’
‘But miss the boat to Havana tomorrow evening,’ I said. ‘And there’s no refund on the ticket.’
‘How much was it? Forty-two American dollars?’ He shrugged. ‘I will pay you five hundred, Mr Keogh. Five hundred good American dollars and very easily earned, you must admit.’
Which brought me up rather sharply because after paying for my tickets I’d no more than twenty or thirty dollars left.
‘That’s a great deal of money for running a few supplies up-country,’ I said carefully.
So he decided to be honest with me, the great shining face creasing into a jovial man-to-man smile. ‘I will be frank with you, Mr Keogh. The crates in my truck contain good Scotch whisky. A commodity in short supply in Mexico, God alone knows, but over the border they have what is known as Prohibition. There it will be worth considerably more.’
‘Including a five-year prison sentence if you’re caught running the stuff,’ I pointed out.
‘A risk someone else assumes,’ he said. ‘The man who takes over the consignment in Huila. You, my friend, will be breaking no law known to me. Not while you are in Mexico. To trade in alcohol here is perfectly legitimate.’
Which was true enough and the prospect was tempting for even if I forfeited that boat ticket I’d still be considerably better off.
He thought he had me and gave it another push. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Mr Keogh. Five hundred and another boat ticket. Now can I say fairer, sir? Answer me that.’
He was being jovial again which didn’t become him, but his eyes, those sad, grey Hungarian eyes were still and watchful and I think it was that which really decided me, combined with the fact that I wasn’t at all sure that I liked him.
‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘The price is too high.’
The smile was wiped clean, the eyes became totally blank. ‘I don’t understand you. I know your financial situation. What you say doesn’t make sense.’
‘It wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t talking about money, Mr Janos. I was talking about Mexico. I’ve had all I can take. Six months of heat, flies and squalor. And I haven’t known a day when they haven’t been shooting somebody. You’ll have to find someone else.’
‘I don’t think you understand,’ he said carefully. ‘There is no one else.’
‘Which is your problem, not mine.’
The palm fan had stopped moving and he sat there staring at me and yet not at me, sweat pouring down his face, those grey eyes fixed on a point somewhere beyond me. The fan started to move again, rapidly, and he wiped the sweat away with his enormous silk handkerchief.
And suddenly that jovial smile was back in place. ‘Why then I can only wish you luck, sir, and shake you by the hand.’
He held it out and I took it for it would have seemed churlish not to, but it was the wrong kind of grip for a fat man who did nothing but sit and sweat. Firm and strong – very strong, which made me feel distinctly uneasy as I walked away for he had given in too easily.
Before the Revolution the Hotel Blanco must have been rather spectacular, but now there were cracks on the marble stairs, great slabs of plaster flaking away from the walls. It was as if the place were disintegrating slowly. There was no lock on my door which always stood open a little and inside the room was like an oven for the electric fan in the ceiling hadn’t turned for five years which was when they’d dynamited the power plant.
I managed to get the shutters open, breaking a couple of slats in the process and let in a little warm air. I was soaked in sweat and the revolver in the leather shoulder holster under my right arm had rubbed painfully. I took off my jacket, unstrapped the holster, with some relief, and put it down on the bed.
Once this room had been something quite special for it still had its own bathroom through the far door, but now it had that derelict air common to cheap rooms the world over. It was as if no one had ever really lived here. For no accountable reason I ached for some soft Kerry rain on my face again. Wanted to stand with my eyes turned up to it, to let it run into my mouth, but that was not to be. That was foolishness of the worst kind.
The bathroom had the same air of tarnished magnificence as the rest of the hotel. The floor and the walls were covered with imported Italian tiles, all sporting little naked cherubs offering bunches of grapes to each other. The bath itself was cracked in a hundred places, but big enough to swim in and although most of the brass fittings had been stolen at one time or another, tepid brown water still gushed from a gilded lion’s mouth when you turned the handle.
I returned to the bedroom, took off the rest of my clothes and pulled on my old robe. Then I went back into the bathroom, taking the shoulder holster with me for old habits die hard.
The water was by now so brown that I was unable to see the bottom of the bath, but I lowered myself in without a qualm and lay back and stared at the cracked ceiling.
How easily things become what we want them to. The cracks on that ceiling became a map, line by line flowering into shape before me. The railway snaking down through Monterey to Tampico. Then the route across the Gulf north of the Yucatan Peninsula to Cuba and Havana town.
And what would I do there? I had an address, no more than that. A man who might be able to give me work or might not. And afterwards? But there was no answer to that one and each day would have to bring what it chose.
There was a sudden muffled crash from the bedroom that had me out of the bath and reaching for my revolver all in the same movement. I flattened myself against the wall beside the door, out of line of fire if anyone intended to shoot their way in.
I got my robe on one-handed and not without difficulty and listened. There was no sound, so I did what seemed the obvious thing, flung open the door and dropped to one knee.
The man who stood by the bed searching my jacket was straight out of the market-place, a mestizo in ragged trousers and shirt and palm-leaf sombrero. He had just taken the wallet from the inner pocket. Everything I had in the world.
‘Not today, compadre,’ I said. ‘Put it on the bed and quickly.’
At first it looked as if he was going to do as he was told. His shoulders sagged. He said brokenly, ‘Señor, my wife, my children. For pity’s sake.’
Which didn’t particularly impress me for any painter specializing in theological subjects would have found him a fair likeness for Judas Iscariot. It worked to a certain degree for when he turned to fling the jacket in my face and ran, he definitely caught me off balance.
When I reached the door, he was almost at the head of the stairs which didn’t give me a great deal of choice as he was still clutching my wallet in his right hand, so I brought him down with a snap shot in the right leg.
He went over the edge of the stairs without a cry and I heard him crash against the ironwork banisters twice. When I reached the head of the stairs he was lying face-down on the next landing. He glanced back over his shoulder, his face twisted with rage and to my complete astonishment, started to slither down the rest of the broad marble stairs leaving a snail’s trail of blood behind him.
Several things happened at about the same time then. Janos came stumping out of the shadows leaning on his black ivory walking stick, a couple of retainers from the kitchen at his back. ‘By God, sir, what’s going on here?’
‘My wallet,’ I said. ‘He stole my wallet.’
The thief slid the rest of the way down to the hall and collapsed at the fat man’s feet. Janos leaned over him and poked around in the shadows. When he straightened his face was grave and baleful.
‘Wallet, sir? I see no wallet here.’
Which was when my heart really started to sink as it suddenly occurred to me that there was just a faint possibility that there was more to this than met the eye.
The police arrived on the run, armed to the teeth as usual, ready to spray everything in sight as they came through the door, although the sergeant in charge was exquisitely polite and listened to my story with the utmost patience.
The wretch on the floor, whom no one seemed to be particularly concerned about, clutched his leg, blood oozing between his fingers and cursed all gringos and their seed to the tenth generation. He was wholly innocent and employed by Señor Janos as a general porter. The sergeant booted him casually in the ribs, left his men to search for the wallet and took me up to my room to get dressed.
‘Do not worry, señor,’ he comforted me. ‘The man is a known thief. Señor Janos gave him honest work out of the largeness of his heart and this is how he serves him. We will find this wallet. Fear not, your name will be cleared.’
But when we returned to the foot of the stairs, and he discovered his men’s lack of success, a fact to which I had already become resigned, his face assumed a more melancholy expression.
‘This is a grave matter, señor, you realize my position? To shoot this man for stealing your wallet is one thing …’
‘But to shoot him, full stop, is quite another.’
‘Exactly, señor, I am afraid you must accompany me to headquarters. The jefe will wish to question you.’
His hand on my arm was no longer gentle and as we moved forward, Janos said passionately, his jowls shaking, ‘By God, sir, I’ll stand by you. Trust in me, Mr Keogh.’
Hardly the most comforting of thoughts on which to be led away.
Above the town the Sierras floated in a blue haze, marching north towards the border. It was all I could see when I hauled myself up by the iron bars on the narrow window and peered out.
I was in what was known as the general reception cell, a room about forty feet square with rough stone walls that looked as if they might very well pre-date Cortez. There were about thirty of us in there which meant it was pretty crowded and the smell seemed compounded of urine, excrement and human sweat in equal proportions.
An hour of this was an hour too much. An indio got up and relieved himself into an over-flowing bucket and I moved out of the way hurriedly, took a packet of Artistas out of my pocket and lit one.
Most of the others were indios with flat, impassive brown faces, simple men from the back country who’d come to town looking for work and now found themselves in prison and probably for no good reason known to man.
They watched me out of interest and curiosity because I was the only European there which was a very strange thing. One of them stood up from the bench on which he sat, removing his straw sombrero and offered me his seat with a grave peasant courtesy that meant I couldn’t possibly refuse.
I sat down, took out the packet of Artistas and offered them around and hesitantly, politely, those closest to me took one and soon we were all smoking, amicably, the lighted cigarettes passing from mouth to mouth.
The bolt rattled in the door which opened to reveal the sergeant. ‘Señor Keogh, please to come this way.’
So we were being polite again? I followed him out and along the whitewashed corridor as the door clanged behind me. We went up the steps into a sweeter, cleaner world and crossed towards the administration block of the police barracks.
I had been here once before about four months previously to obtain a work permit and had been required to pay through the nose for it which meant that the jefe in Bonito was about as honest as the usual run of police chiefs.
The sergeant left me on a bench in a whitewashed corridor under the eye of two very military-looking guards who stood on either side of the jefe’s door clutching Mauser rifles of the type used by the Germans in the war. They ignored me completely, and after a while the door opened and the sergeant beckoned.
The room was sparsely furnished; desk, filing cabinet and not much else, except for a couple of chairs, one of which was occupied by my fat friend from the Hotel Blanco, the other by the jefe.
Janos lurched to his feet, and swayed there, propped up by his ivory stick, sweat shining on his troubled face. ‘A dreadful business, Mr Keogh, but I’m with you, sir, all the way.’
He subsided again. The jefe said, ‘I am Jose Ortiz, Chief of Police in Bonito, Señor Keogh. Let me first apologize for your treatment so far. A regrettable error on the part of my sergeant here who will naturally answer for it.’
The sergeant didn’t seem to be worrying too much about that and the jefe opened a file before him and studied it. He was a small, olive-skinned man in his fifties with a carefully trimmed moustache and most of his teeth had been capped with gold.
He looked up at me gravely. ‘A most puzzling affair, Señor Keogh. You say this man was stealing your wallet?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Then what has he done with it, señor? We have searched the stairs and the foyer of the hotel thoroughly.’
‘Perhaps he had an accomplice,’ I suggested. ‘There were several people milling around there.’
‘By God, he could be right,’ Janos cut in. ‘It could explain the whole thing.’
The jefe nodded. ‘Yes, that is certainly a possibility and on the whole, I am inclined to believe your story, señor, for the man is a known thief.’
‘That is very kind of you,’ I said gravely.
‘There was much in the wallet of importance?’
‘Twenty or thirty dollars, some rail and steamer tickets and my passport.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘So? Now that is serious. More so than I had realized.’ He looked in the file again. ‘I see from your papers that you were registered as a British citizen. This is correct?’
I said calmly, ‘That’s right.’
‘Strange. I thought you Irish had your Free State now since the successful termination of your revolution.’
‘Some people might question that fact,’ I told him.
He seemed puzzled, then nodded brightly. ‘Ah, but of course, now you have your civil war. The Irish who fought the English together now kill each other. Here in Mexico we have had the same trouble.’ He glanced at the file again. ‘So you would be able to obtain a fresh passport from the British Consul in Tampico.’
‘I suppose so.’
He nodded. ‘But that will take some weeks, señor, and what are we to do with you in the meantime. I understand you are not at present employed.’
‘No, I worked for the Hermosa Mining Company for six months.’
‘Who have now, alas, suspended operations. I foresee a difficulty here.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m sure Mr Janos can suggest something.’
‘By God, I can, sir,’ he said, stamping his stick on the floor. ‘I’ve offered Mr Keogh lucrative employment – highly lucrative. For as long as he likes.’
Ortiz looked relieved. It was really a quite excellent performance. ‘Then everything is solved, Señor Keogh. If Señor Janos makes himself personally responsible for you, if I have this guarantee that you will be in secure employment, then I can release you.’
‘Was there ever any question of it?’ I said politely.
He smiled, closed the file, got to his feet and held out his hand. ‘At your service, Señor Keogh.’
‘At yours, señor,’ I replied punctiliously, turned and went out.
I heard a quiet, murmured exchange between them and then Janos stumped after me. ‘All’s well that ends well, eh, Mr Keogh. And I’ll stick to my bargain, sir. I shan’t take advantage of your situation. Five hundred dollars and your steamer ticket. That’s what I said and that’s what I’ll pay.’
‘A gentleman,’ I said. ‘Anyone can see that.’
His great body shook with laughter. ‘By God, sir, we’ll deal famously together. Famously.’
A matter of opinion, but then all things were possible in that worst of all possible worlds.
2
When we got back to the hotel, Janos took me round to the stables in the rear courtyard. A couple of stalls had been knocked out at one end and the truck stood in there.
It was a Ford and looked as if it had spent a hard war at the Western Front. There was a canvas tilt at the back and it was loaded to the roof with medium-sized packing cases. I checked the wheels and discovered that the tyres were new which was something, then I lifted the bonnet and had a look at the engine. It was in better shape than I could have reasonably hoped.
‘You find everything in order?’ he demanded.
‘You lost a good mechanic this morning.’
‘Yes, an inconvenience, but much of life generally is.’
‘When do you want me to go?’
‘If you left now, you could make the half-way point by dark. There is an inn at Huerta. A poor place, but adequate. It was a way-station in the old stage-coach days. You could spend the night there. Be at Huila before noon tomorrow. This suits you?’
Amazing how polite he was being about it all. ‘Absolutely,’ I said, but the irony in my voice seemed to elude him.
‘Good,’ he nodded in satisfaction. ‘Let’s go in and I’ll give you the final details.’
His office was just off the patio at the front of the building, a small cluttered room with a polished oak desk and a surprising number of books. My shoulder holster and the Enfield were lying on the desk and he tapped them with the end of his stick.
‘You’ll be wanting that, I’ve no doubt. Rough country out there these days.’
I took off my jacket and buckled on the holster. He said, ‘You look uncommonly used to that contrivance, sir, for a man of your obvious education and background.’
‘I am,’ I told him shortly, and pulled on my jacket. ‘Anything else?’
He opened a drawer, took out two envelopes and pushed them across. ‘One of those is a letter to Gomez, the man to whom you’ll deliver the goods in Huila. He has a supply of petrol by the way, so you’ll be all right for the return trip. The other contains an authorization to make the journey signed by Captain Ortiz, in case you are stopped by rurales.’
I put them both in my breast pocket and buttoned my jacket. He selected a long black cigar from a sandalwood box, lit it, then pushed the box across to me. ‘You’ll have a drink with me, sir, for the road?’
‘We have a saying where I come from,’ I told him. ‘Drink with the devil and smile.’
He laughed till the tears squeezed from his eyes, the flesh trembling on the gross body. ‘By God, sir, but you’re a man after my own heart, I can see that.’
He shuffled across to a side cabinet, opened it and produced a bottle and a couple of tumblers. It was brandy, and good brandy at that.
He leaned one elbow on the cabinet and eyed me gravely. ‘If I might be permitted the observation, sir, you don’t seem to care very much about anything. About anything at all. Am I right?’
That strange, rather pedantic English of his had a curious effect. It made one want to respond in kind. I said, ‘Why, it has been my experience that there is little in life worth caring about, sir.’
I could have sworn that for a moment there was genuine concern in his eyes although I considered it unlikely he could ever have afforded such an emotion.
‘If I may say so,’ he observed heavily, ‘I find such sentiments disturbing in one so young.’
But now the conversation had gone too far and we were into entirely the wrong territory. I emptied my glass and placed it carefully on top of the cabinet. ‘I’d better be on my way.’
‘Of course, but you’ll need a little eating money.’ He produced a wallet and counted out a hundred pesos in ten-peso notes. ‘You should be back here by tomorrow evening if everything goes smoothly.’
By now he was looking quite pleased with himself again which simply wouldn’t do. I stuffed the money carelessly into my jacket pocket and said, ‘Life has taught me one thing above all others, Mr Janos, which is that anything can happen and usually does.’
His face sagged in genuine and immediate dismay for, as I discovered later, there was a strongly superstitious streak in him, his one great weakness. I laughed out loud, turned and walked out. A small victory, perhaps, but something.
I was eighteen years of age when I first saw men die. Easter, 1916, and a sizeable section of Dublin town going up in flames as a handful of volunteers decided to have a crack at the British Army.
And I was one of them, Emmet Keogh, hot from my books at the College of Surgeons, still young enough to believe a cause – any cause – could be worth the dying. A Martini carbine gripped tightly in my hands, I sweated in ill-fitting green uniform and crouched at the window of an office in Jacobs’ Biscuit Factory, a romantic place to die in, waiting for the Tommies from the Portobello Barracks to find us which they did soon enough.
During a slight lull in the proceedings a Mills bomb came through the window and rolled to a halt in the very centre of that busy office.
There were six of us who should have died, but for some reason it didn’t go off until I’d thrown it back out of the window at the troops who had chosen that precise moment to make a rush across the yard.
Life, then, or death, was an accident one way or the other. Time and chance and no more than that. Let it be so. Certainly from that day on it conditioned not only my actions but also my thinking. Janos had been closer to the truth about me than he knew.
For the first few miles out of Bonito the road wasn’t too bad, in fact had obviously been metalled at some time in the past, but not for long. Soon it changed into a typical back-country dirt road with a surface so appalling that it was impossible to drive at more than twenty-five miles an hour in any kind of safety.
In the distance, the Sierras undulated in the intense heat of late afternoon and I drove towards them but slightly to the north-west, a great cloud of white dust rising from the loose surface coated everything including me.
A flat brown plain stretched on either hand as far as the eye could see, dotted with thorn bushes and mesquite and acacias. I was alone on a road that led to nowhere through a land squeezed dry by the sun, barren since the beginning of time.
God, but there were times when I ached for my. own country, for the sea and the mountains of Kerry, green grass, soft rain and the fuchsia growing on dusty hedges. The Tears of God we called it.
I passed nothing that lived for the first hour, then a dot in the far distance grew into a herd of goats, an old man and two young boys in charge, barefooted, ragged, so wretchedly poor that even their straw sombreros were falling to pieces. They stood watching me, faces blank, making no sign at all, the sullen despair of those truly without hope.
I stopped a mile or two farther on to get rid of my jacket, being well soaked with sweat by then and drank and sluiced my head and shoulders with lukewarm water from a four-gallon stone jug someone had thoughtfully roped into place in front of the passenger seat.
From there on things became so bad that I had to drive very cautiously indeed, sometimes at not more than ten or fifteen miles an hour and the heat and the dust were unbelievable. I had been on the road for three and a half hours, had seen no one except the goatherds, was beginning to believe I was the only living thing in this sterile world, when I found the priest.
The Mercedes was a little way off the road and had ploughed its way through a clump of organ cactus. The priest stood at the side of the road, his cassock and broad-brimmed hat coated with dust, and waved me down. I braked to a halt and got out.
He recognized me at once and smiled, ‘Ah, my Irish friend.’
His front near-side tyre had burst which explained his sudden departure from the road, but he had come to rest with his rear axle jammed across a sizeable rock and had spent a futile hour trying to push the car free.
The solution was ludicrously simple. I said, ‘If we raise her off the rock with the jack and give her a good push she should roll clear soon enough.’
‘Why damn my eyes,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’
He would have gone down well on the Dublin Docks, but I didn’t say so. Simply opened his boot which was full of five-gallon cans of petrol, got out the jack and started to work.
‘No reason why I shouldn’t do that, it seems to me,’ but he didn’t try too hard to dissuade me, lit one of those long, black cigarillos he favoured and stood watching. I was sweating hard and the shoulder holster was something of a nuisance so I unstrapped it and put it on the rear seat of the Mercedes. Chancing to glance up a moment later, I saw that he was holding the Enfield in his right hand.
‘Careful, father,’ I warned. ‘What’s known in the trade as a hair trigger. She’ll go off at a breath.’
‘Wouldn’t it be better to have the pin fall on an empty chamber for the first pull,’ he suggested. ‘In case of accidents?’
Which was reasonably knowledgeable for a man of the cloth. ‘Fine, if you have the time to waste.’
‘Presumably you don’t.’
‘Not very often.’
He stood there, still holding the Enfield in one hand, the holster in the other. ‘You were out in the Troubles,’ he said. ‘Against the English, I mean?’
It was the kind of language American newspapers had been fond of at the time. I nodded. ‘You could say that.’
‘This Civil War back there is a bad business.’ He shook his head. ‘From what I read in the papers the Irish are killing each other off more savagely these days than the English ever did. Why, didn’t Republican gunmen kill Michael Collins himself only three or four months ago and I always understood he did more to beat the English than any man.’
‘Then settled for half a loaf,’ I said. ‘Not good enough.’
‘A die-hard republican, I see.’ He hefted the Enfield in his hand and said, ‘Not that I know about such things, but it doesn’t feel very comfortable.’
‘It wouldn’t,’ I told him. ‘I’m left-handed. The grip has been altered to fit.’
He examined the gun further, obviously intrigued by the absence of a sight at the end of the blue-black barrel, the way most of the trigger guard had been cut away. I concentrated on the jack lever and as the axle started to clear, he dropped the shoulder holster inside the Mercedes, hitched up his cassock and got to his knees beside me.
‘What do you think?’
‘Put your shoulder to the boot and we’ll find out.’
It took the two of us, and some considerable effort. There was a moment when I thought it wasn’t going to go and then the jack tilted forward and the Mercedes rolled free, scraping the rear bumper on the rock in the process. He lost his balance and fell on his hands and knees and I ran around and got the handbrake on before the Mercedes got clear away from us. When I turned, he was getting to his feet, rubbing dust from his beard and grinning like a schoolboy.
‘A hell of a way to spend an afternoon.’
‘I could think of pleasanter things to do,’ I admitted. ‘In more comfortable places.’ I stretched my aching back and looked out across the wilderness. ‘The last place God made.’
He was about to light another of his cigarillos and paused, the match flaring in his right hand, his face grave and somehow expectant. ‘At least you give him some credence, even for this.’
‘In a place like this it’s difficult to say God doesn’t exist, father.’ I shrugged. ‘Try and he’ll more than likely remind you of his presence rather forcibly.’
‘Something of an Old Testament view of things, I would have thought,’ he said. ‘A God of wrath, not of love.’
‘A view of the Almighty my own experience would tend to support,’ I said flatly.
He nodded, his face grave, ‘Yes, life can be very hard. It’s difficult to live each day as an act of faith. I know, I’ve been trying for forty-nine years, but it’s the only way.’
I picked up the jack, went round to the front of the Mercedes and set to work. He was carrying two spare wheels, a wise precaution in such country and the change over took me no more than five minutes. He didn’t offer to help, didn’t try to carry our conversation any further, but walked some little distance away to a slight rise where he stood looking out at the mountains.
When I called, he didn’t seem to hear me and I went towards him, cleaning my hands on an old rag. As I got closer, he turned and said harshly, ‘Yes, my friend, you’re right. In a place like this it must be difficult to believe in anything.’
But I was no longer interested in that kind of conversation. ‘I think everything’s all right now,’ I said. ‘Drive her back to the road and we’ll see.’
The Mercedes had a self-starter and the engine turned with no trouble at all, a change from most of the vehicles I’d had experience with. I jumped on the running-board and he took her in a wide circle, joining the road a few yards behind the Ford.
I got my shoulder holster and the Enfield from the rear seat and buckled them on. ‘You see, father, everything comes out in the wash if only you live right.’
He laughed harshly, switched off the engine and held out his hand. ‘Young man, I like you, damn me if I don’t. My name is van Horne. Father Oliver van Horne of Altoona, Vermont.’
‘Keogh,’ I said. ‘Emmet Keogh. Catholic priests who’ve been shot in the head must be rather thin on the ground in Vermont.’
His hand went to the scar on his temple instinctively. ‘True enough, but then I was the only one, to my knowledge, who served as chaplain to an infantry brigade on the Western Front.’
‘Aren’t you rather far from home?’
‘I’m on a general fact-finding trip on behalf of my diocesan authorities. We understood that in the back country in Mexico the Church has been in great difficulties since the Revolution. I’m here to see what help is needed.’
‘Look, father,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t joking this morning in Bonito when I told you there were people in these parts who thought it was still open season on priests. I know places where they haven’t seen one in years and don’t want to. Last month in Hermosa a young French priest tried to reopen the church after eight years. They hung him from the veranda of the local hotel. I saw him swinging.’
‘And did nothing?’
‘I’ve seen priests who stood by and did nothing in my own country,’ I said. ‘It’s easy to take the last walk with a prayer book in your hand when someone else is going to do the dying. Damned hard to stand up and fight for what you believe in against odds.’
For some reason I was angry, which was illogical in the circumstances and I think I knew it. In any event, I went round to the front of the Ford and turned the starting handle. As the engine jumped into life, van Horne joined me.
‘I seem to have annoyed you,’ he said. ‘And for that I’m sorry. A shocking tendency to preach on each and every occasion is my besetting sin. I’m hoping to make my way through the Sierras to a place called Guayamas on the west coast. What about you?’
‘Delivering a load of bootleg whisky to a man in Huila,’ I said. ‘You’ll find petrol there if you’re short.’
‘Do you hope to get there tonight?’
I shook my head. ‘There’s a little place called Huerta about twenty miles farther on. Old stage-line way-station.’
‘Perhaps I’ll see you there.’
I smiled and climbed into the cab of the Ford. ‘If you do, for God’s sake keep religion out of it, father.’
‘Almost impossible,’ he said. ‘But I’ll do what I can. God bless you.’
But sentiments like those had long since ceased to have any effect on me and I drove away quickly.
Suddenly, it seemed to be late evening, the sun dropping behind the Sierras taking the heat of the day with it, the great peaks black against gold as the fire died. There was no sign of the Mercedes coming up behind and I wondered what he was doing. A strange one certainly although priests, like anyone else, were entitled to their idiosyncrasies.
I came over the brow of a small hill just before dark and saw the way-station at Huerta lying below me, lights winking palely at the windows. It was a small, flat-roofed building which must have been a hundred and fifty years old at least and was enclosed by an adobe wall, most of which had crumbled away where the place faced the road.
The sky beyond was like molten gold, the great black fingers of the organ cactus like cut-outs pasted in place against a stage set as I coasted down the hill. When I turned in across the courtyard and switched off the engine, I heard laughter and singing and there were half a dozen horses tied to the hitching post. The door opened as I got out and a man appeared, bare-headed, a couple of bandoleers criss-crossing his ornate jacket, a rifle in his hands.
‘Stand and declare yourself,’ he called, and his speech was slurred with the drink.
I could have shot him, been back behind the wheel of the Ford and away before his friends inside knew what was happening, but there was no need for I had already noticed the large silver badge so conspicuously displayed on his right breast, worn only by the rurales, the country police, as fine a body of men who ever cut a throat or raped a woman and got away with it.
‘I’m taking supplies to Gomez in Huila,’ I said. ‘I have a permit from Captain Ortiz, the jefe in Bonito.’
‘Inside,’ he said, ‘where we can see you.’
The place was lit by a single oil lamp hanging from one of the beams in the low ceiling. There were four of them sitting at a long wooden table, two holding pistols at the ready as I went in. They wore the same ornate braided jackets and crossed bandoleers as the man behind me and if it had not been for the silver badges of office, one might well have been pardoned for confusing them with those on the wrong side of the law.
There was a strange uniformity in their general appearance. Heavy moustaches, unshaven chins, brooding suspicious eyes. The only one not wearing his sombrero seemed to be in charge. ‘What have we here?’
‘I’m delivering supplies by truck to Gomez of Huila.’ I produced the jefe’s travel permit and offered it to him. ‘My papers.’
He examined it, then passed it back. ‘Luis Delgado, at your orders, señor.’
‘At yours,’ I gave him politely.
‘You intend to stay here tonight?’
‘If it can be arranged.’
‘No difficulty, eh, Tacho.’ He looked over his shoulder at the old, white-haired man standing behind the small bar. ‘The señor desires accommodation. You will see to it?’
The old man, who was looking distinctly worried, nodded eagerly and Delgado chuckled. ‘They jump these back-country pigs, when I crack the whip. You will drink with me, señor?’
It seemed a reasonably politic thing to do. I downed the glass of tequila he offered, gave him his health and moved to the bar. The old man, Tacho, was frightened – really frightened. There was a mute appeal in his eyes that I was unable to answer because I didn’t know what it was all about, not realizing then that these visits by Delgado and his men were an old story.
Delgado slapped his hand hard down on the table. ‘The food, you miserable worm. You turd, what about our food?’
Tacho moved to the other end of the bar and the door opened and a young woman came out of the kitchen. As I later discovered, she was barely past her seventeenth birthday, but looked a little older as women of mixed blood tend to do. She wore the usual ankle-length skirt, an Indian-work blouse and black hair hung down her back in a single braid.
She was small for I would say I had at least three inches on her and I can barely touch five and a half feet. Dark, dark eyes, high cheekbones, a wide mouth and a skin of palest olive that reminded me of my own mother, God rest her soul. She was not beautiful yet after turning away I felt a compulsion to look at her again. Now why should that be?
Her face showed no emotion of any kind. She put the tray down on the table, turned to go and Delgado caught her wrist. ‘Heh, not so fast, little flower. An appetizer before the main course is the sensible man’s way of eating.’
He grabbed at the neck of the loose blouse, pulled it down and was put out to discover she was wearing a bodice underneath.
He roared with laughter, ‘Playing the lady, eh? We’ll soon fix that.’
She put her nails down his cheek, drawing blood and he slapped her solidly across the face as he might have slapped a man, forced her back across his knee as he put a hand up her skirt.
His friends were roaring with delight and when old Tacho ran round the end of the bar and tried to intervene, someone sent him staggering back against the wall so forcibly that he fell to the ground.
The girl struggled desperately and two of the others got a wrist each and pinned her back across the table. She didn’t scream, didn’t show any fear at all, simply fought with all her strength, would struggle for her soul’s sake to the final, bitter end, expecting nothing, not even from me, for when our eyes met, she looked through me as if I did not exist.
It was happening all over the country seven days a week, but that didn’t make it any easier to swallow. No business of mine, so I pulled out the Enfield and blew the tequila bottle on the table into several score pieces.
The effect was considerable and I have seldom seen a group of men scatter so rapidly. Delgado was the only one who didn’t move. He glanced back at me, still clutching the girl, his eyes wary, watchful, no fear there at all.
‘Be easy, señor,’ he said softly. ‘Your turn will come.’
‘The next one is through the back of the skull,’ I told him. ‘Now move to the bar, hands high, all of you.’
They obeyed reluctantly, warily, going backwards slowly, waiting their opportunity. The girl’s reaction was interesting. She moved to my side and stood very close, holding on to my jacket tightly like a child recognizing a loved one in a crowd after being lost.
Tacho had picked himself up from the floor and stood staring at me, shaken and dazed. I said, ‘Get their guns, old man, one by one. No need to fear. If anyone moves I’ll shoot Delgado through the belly.’
He didn’t seem to hear me. Simply stood there swaying from side to side. I spoke to the girl without looking at her. ‘What’s your name?’
There was no reply, but her grip tightened on my jacket. Delgado laughed harshly. ‘No help there, my friend. Little flower hasn’t had a word to say for herself in years.’
I reached down for the hand that clutched at my jacket and brought her round to the front where I could see her face which was calm and watchful.
‘You understand me?’ She nodded. ‘Right, get their guns and don’t be afraid. I will kill any man who tries to harm you.’
Something stirred deep down in those dark eyes, something happened to her face, although it was difficult to say what exactly. In any event, she turned and moved towards the men at the bar.
A spur jangled in the stillness behind me. I started to turn, remembering too late that there had been six horses at the hitching rail which meant another rurale not present in the room and was struck a heavy blow somewhere behind the right ear which put me down on my hands and knees before I knew where I was.
The Enfield fired when it hit the floor, for as I have said elsewhere, all that delicate trigger mechanism needed was a touch. There was noise, confusion, a dull pain in the chest where a boot landed. I didn’t really lose consciousness and finally surfaced to find myself on my knees, hands tied behind my back.
Delgado was busy fashioning a noose at the end of a length of saddle rope. He patted my face gently, then slipped the noose over my head and tossed the other end across a beam.
Two of his men held the struggling girl, the other three got on the rope behind me. Delgado smiled. ‘At first we hang you only a trifle. Then we have some fun with little flower. You should enjoy that. Afterwards – we’ll see. I’ll try to think of something special. A fine gentleman like you deserves it.’
The rope tightened under my chin, jerking back my head, pulling me upright to sway on tip-toes before him. Old Tacho crouched in a chair by the wall, a hand to his mouth, eyes round, even the girl stopped struggling and her captors slackened their grip, watching me. Waiting.
The door opened and Father van Horne stepped into the room, lowering his head to get through. ‘Good evening,’ he said harshly.
He was holding a Gladstone bag in his right hand and presented a strangely menacing picture in his shabby, dust-covered cassock, the shovel hat shading the great, bearded face, another of those cigarillos jutting from his teeth.
‘You would appear to have got yourself into a little trouble, Mr Keogh,’ he observed.
The men holding the other end of the rope had slackened their grip in astonishment and I managed to breathe again.
‘Let’s say I got bored with standing by doing nothing, father,’ I told him.
Delgado had his pistol out in a second, reached for the girl and pulled her out of the way.
‘Who are you?’ he demanded. ‘We weren’t expecting any priest in these parts. I would have known.’
‘So I observe,’ van Horne said. ‘Would there be any point in asking you to release this man?’
Delgado smiled nastily. ‘You could always try, but that might make me angry. I might remember that I haven’t hung a priest lately and the temptation to string you up beside this other gringo might well prove irresistible.’
‘That would be most unfortunate,’ van Horne said.
‘For you, not for me. Now let’s see your papers and quick about it.’
‘Happy to accommodate you, señor.’ Van Horne put the Gladstone bag down on the table and produced a key. ‘Humiliation, Mr Keogh, is a specific for many ailments. It does a man good to get down on his belly occasionally and repent, if you follow me.’
I didn’t. Not until he opened the Gladstone bag, took out a Thompson sub-machine-gun and blew the top of Delgado’s head off.
3
It was all over very quickly. The men who had been waiting to haul me over the beam let go the rope and reached for their pistols. They were too late. As I flung myself forward, my shoulder catching the girl behind the knees, bringing her down with me, van Horne took care of all three, the stream of heavy bullets knocking them back against the wall.
He certainly knew his business. There was a round drum magazine on the Thompson and he kept on firing, swinging in a wide arc which shattered the mirror behind the bar and ripped up the floor behind the two remaining rurales who were running for the kitchen door.
The first one made it, mainly because his companion acted as a shield, the bullets driving him headfirst through the door, shredding the brocade jacket across his back.
The rear door banged as the lone survivor ran into the darkness and van Horne went after him.
The girl rolled over and sat up. I got to my knees with some difficulty because of my bound hands. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked her.
She nodded, turned Delgado over, pulled a knife from his belt and sliced through my bonds. When I got the noose from around my neck the skin was raw and broken on one side. The girl examined it, her face still quite expressionless, then got to her feet and ran into the kitchen.
Outside, a horse broke into a sudden gallop, there was a wild cry followed by the sound of another burst from the Tommy gun. I got to my feet and looked around me. There was blood everywhere, the stench of cordite and burning flesh, a butcher’s shop in hell. Tacho was behind the bar pouring tequila into a tumbler, his hand shaking.
I reached for the bottle and a glass and helped myself. It was the nearest thing to pure alcohol I have ever drunk, but it pulled the pieces together again which was what I needed.
‘Not so good is it?’ I said.
Tacho’s face had sagged into complete despair. ‘To kill the police, even the rurales, is a very bad thing and there’s a lot of Federal cavalry out between here and Huila. There has been much trouble in this area lately.’
The girl appeared with a stone jar containing some kind of grease. She rubbed a little into the raw places on my neck, frowning in concentration, her fingers delicate and birdlike, then tore a strip of muslin off her petticoat and wound it round my neck a couple of times.
I patted her face. ‘That’s a lot better. I’m very grateful.’
She smiled for the first time, glanced uncertainly at Tacho then went back into the kitchen. ‘Your daughter?’
He shook his head. ‘Her name is Balbuena, señor. Victoria Balbuena. Her father owned a hacienda near here. I used to work for him. Five years ago it was burned to the ground during the fighting and the patron and his wife perished. Victoria saw it all. She was twelve at the time, only a child. Something happened to her, something most strange.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, up here in the head, señor.’ He tapped his skull. ‘She has been unable to speak from that day to this.’
There was a step in the doorway and van Horne stepped inside, the cigarillo still clamped between his teeth, the machine-gun under his arm.
‘What happened?’ I demanded.
‘He got away, that’s what damn well happened.’
It was as if a cloak had slipped away revealing another kind of man entirely underneath. Everything had changed, the way he moved and walked and his voice had become harsher, the speech clipped, incisive. There was a powerful, elemental force to the man which he had kept hidden before for obvious reasons.
He slammed the machine-gun down on the bar and snapped his fingers at Tacho. ‘Give me a bottle quick. Anything. I’ve got to think this out.’
My Enfield was stuck in Delgado’s belt. I pulled it free, checked the loading mechanically and shoved it into its holster. I stirred Delgado’s body with my toe. ‘Something else you picked up on the Western Front, father?’
‘Son,’ he said solemnly, placing a hand on my shoulder. ‘I’ve got a confession to make. All is not what it seems.’
‘It very seldom is.’
He laughed, that strange, harsh laugh of his. ‘Explanations can wait till a more suitable time. Right now, I’ve got other fish to fry. This is a mess. How long before the guy who got away reaches friends?’
‘Tacho says there are federales all over the place between here and Huila. There’s been a lot of trouble in the area lately. Did you mean it when you said you were hoping to get through the sierras to Guyamas?’
‘Yes, a friend of mine tells me they get trading schooners in there all the time from the Pacific islands with cargoes of copra. It seemed to me like a nice quiet way to leave.’
‘And you need that kind of passage out?’
‘I think you could say that. I’ll go and get a map.’
He went out to the Mercedes and while he was gone, the girl, Victoria, came in from the kitchen with a pot of coffee on a tray and several cups. When she filled them, she served me first which was, for some reason, curiously disturbing. She stood at the end of the bar watching me gravely, not even responding when I smiled at her, like some good dog waiting for its master’s command. Van Horne came in briskly with a large-scale map of northern Mexico which he spread out across the bar counter.
‘North, south or east seem out of the question to me,’ he said. ‘They’ll be telegraphing ahead of us within a few hours.’
‘Which only leaves the sierras.’ I ran my finger along the road to Huila. ‘That way would be by far the best. The road through the mountains branches off about forty miles this side of Huila.’
‘We’d never get that far, not without running into trouble.’
‘You’re including me in this business?’
‘Have you any choice? You’ll swing, anyway, if they ever lay hands on you, and two could make out better than one if things get a little rough.’
In other words he needed me. The true reason for his suggestion as I realized a moment later when he slammed a hand down hard on the map.
‘God, what a mess. Why the hell couldn’t I mind my own business?’
Which had already occurred to me, but I said nothing. It was Tacho who spoke then, leaning over the map, squinting at it short-sightedly. ‘There is another way through the mountains by way of the Nonava Pass. A very bad road and seldom used but during the Revolution some Yankee gringos brought arms through from the coast that way in two trucks. It has never been done since to my knowledge.’
‘He could be on to something,’ van Horne said. ‘They’d never look for us going through that way if what he says is true.’
‘What about petrol?’
‘There’s still about twenty-five gallons in the tank including the reserve and I’m carrying another fifty in the boot in five-gallon cans. Enough to get us all the way to the coast.’
I looked at the map again. We had to stay with the road to Huila for about fifteen miles, indeed had no choice in the matter. Then we cut off across the foothills through rough country, following what was obviously going to be little more than an old pack trail.
‘We could run into trouble out there in the dark,’ I said. ‘Lights or no lights.’
‘So what do we do? Sit on our backsides till sunrise and the federales get here? Be your age, Keogh. Sure, we might end up nose down in a hole or even drive straight over the edge of some arroyo, but we don’t exactly have a choice, do we, so let’s get moving.’
He folded his map, grabbed an unopened bottle of tequila and went out. I said to Tacho, ‘He’s got a point. No sense in hanging about.’
The girl caught me by the arm as I turned away. Her eyes tried to speak for her, the mouth opened and shut, the whole face working.
‘What is it?’ I demanded.
‘I think she wishes to go with you, señor,’ Tacho said.
She nodded eagerly as I turned to her and I took her by the shoulders and gave her a shake. ‘Don’t be a damn fool. What could I do with you? Where would you go? I’m running for my life.’
She gripped my hands convulsively, the eyes still pleading and I shook my head. ‘No, it just isn’t on.’
Something went out of her, I don’t know quite what. Hope perhaps, or something even more important to her. Some vital essence that is in all of us. She turned away, her shoulders sagging.
Tacho said, ‘In a way, she is running too, señor. For such a young one, she has known much sadness, many bad things. The Balbuenas were a name in these parts, and her father was a great aristocrat, but he committed the unforgivable sin for one of the high blood. He married an Indian. More than that – a Yaqui. A woman from the Wind River country on the other side of the mountain. His family never forgave him.’
‘So the girl has no one?’
‘Not here, señor, but on the other side of the mountains where her mother was born it would be a different story.’
‘All right,’ I said to the girl, bowing to the inevitable. ‘I’ll give you two minutes to get your things together.’
She gave me one startled glance over her shoulder, then disappeared into the kitchen. ‘Sometimes God looks down through the clouds, señor,’ Tacho said.
‘Not very often in my experience. What about you? How will the federales treat you?’
‘An innocent bystander and roughly treated, señor.’ He shrugged. ‘Besides, where would I go, an old man like me?’
The Mercedes horn sounded impatiently and a moment later, Victoria came in from the kitchen, clutching a small bundle, a heavy woollen shawl about her shoulders.
‘You will look after her, señor,’ Tacho called as I pushed her towards the door. ‘She is in your care from now on.’
A disturbing thought to know that one had some sort of responsibility towards another human being again, but too late to draw back now.
As we approached the Mercedes I took the girl’s bundle and threw it into the back. Van Horne said, ‘What in the hell do you think you’re playing at?’
‘The girl goes with us,’ I said. ‘No arguments.’
‘Over my dead body.’
‘That could be arranged,’ I told him flatly.
I didn’t know what would happen next, already had a hand to the butt of the Enfield in the darkness, when surprisingly he capitulated.
‘Oh, get her inside for God’s sake and let’s get out of here. I can always crack your skull later.’
I put her into the rear seat, climbed in next to him and he drove away.
The fifteen miles for which we stayed with the Huila road were no problem and took us about thirty minutes to cover, a remarkable performance considering the darkness and the state of the road.
It was when we reached the place where we were to turn off that we ran into difficulties. For one thing it took a good half-hour to find the start of the trail, so faintly was it marked. When we turned on to it, I knew we were in trouble.
It was almost impossible to see, even with the head-lamps full on and we seemed to be threading our way through a ghostly maze of thorn bushes and organ cactus. We kept this up for a while, crawling at five or ten miles an hour for most of the time and on two occasions it was only van Horne’s quick reflexes that prevented us from plunging into a dry arroyo.
In the end he braked to a halt, and switched off the engine and lights. ‘So you were right and I was wrong. I don’t even know if we’re on the trail any more. We’ll move on at first light.’
I turned and looked back at the girl. ‘Are you all right?’
She reached for my hand, pressed it gently. Van Horne said, ‘Now may I ask why in hell you had to bring her along? Can’t you do without it or something?’
‘The federales would have passed her from hand to hand.’
‘If it doesn’t happen to her here, it happens somewhere else,’ he said. ‘So what’s the point?’
‘Her mother’s people live on the other side of the mountains. They’ll take her in. Look after her properly. Yaquis have a strong kinship system. They wouldn’t turn her away.’
He was in the act of lighting one of his cigarillos and turned to look at me in surprise, the match flaring in his cupped hands. ‘Are you saying she’s Yaqui?’
‘Her mother was. Her father was straight out of the top drawer. One of the big landowning families.’
‘Son, that doesn’t mean a damn thing. She’s branded clean to the bone. Why the Yaquis are worse than the Apache and that’s going some, believe me. First night she doesn’t like you in bed, she’ll take a knife to your privates.’
‘My affair, not yours.’
‘It touches both of us while we’re together. You get rid of her the moment we break through to the other side, understand?’
‘We’ll see about that.’
‘We certainly will.’ And then, with one of those puzzling about-turns that I was to find so typical of the man, added, ‘It’s going to get a damn sight colder than this before morning. If she cares to lift up the back seat she’ll find some car rugs.’
He turned, as if suddenly exasperated and repeated the information in Spanish. The girl stood up and fumbled about in the darkness. After a while, she passed a heavy car rug over to me.
‘No, for you,’ I said.
Van Horne laughed uneasily. ‘She’s going to hang on to you like a leech, Keogh. You mark my words.’ He grabbed an end of the rug, unfolded it and spread it across our knees. ‘She should be snug enough back there. There are two more. On the other hand I don’t mind if you want to get under the covers with her.’
I think he was deliberately trying to bait me. I refused to be drawn, but turned and said to the girl, ‘Wrap up well and go to sleep. We’ll move on at first light.’
Van Horne switched on the dashboard light, found the bottle of tequila he had taken from the bar and uncorked it.
He took a long pull and sighed. ‘Heaven alone knows what this stuff does to the liver, but it’s all that’s going to get me through this night. You’d better have some.’
I took a mouthful, fought for breath as it burned its way down and handed the bottle back hurriedly. ‘I think old Tacho must have made that himself in the back room.’
‘I can believe that all right. I can believe anything of this damned country.’ He shivered. ‘God, if I had my time over again.’
‘Would anything be any different?’
The neck of the bottle chinked on his teeth, there was a gurgle, a long gurgle and then he sighed. ‘No, it’s a long dark night at the mouth of nowhere, Keogh, and we’re both far from home, so the truth for once.’
‘Which is …?’
‘The old, old question.’ He laughed shortly. ‘Would you believe me, Keogh, if I told you I spent four years in a seminary? That I actually trained for the priesthood?’
‘You certainly made a convincing enough job of it at Huerta this morning when they were executing those men.’
It was as if I had touched an open wound and he turned on me sharply. ‘They were dying, Keogh, they’d only minutes to live. They went easier thinking they’d had a priest. Whether they did or not doesn’t matter a damn where they are now.’
‘So you think they’ve gone to a happier place, do you?’
It was a stupid and ill-judged remark in the circumstances and received the reply it merited. ‘Don’t get clever with me, boy.’
‘All right, I’m sorry.’ He took another pull at the bottle and passed it to me. ‘What do you do when you’re not wearing a cassock?’
‘You might say I’m in the banking business.’ He laughed loudly and without the slightest sign of having taken drink in spite of the quantity he’d already put away. ‘Yes, I like that. You know I was once in a little town in Arkansas where the local police insisted on a permit if you owned a hand-gun and you had to state your reason for needing one.’
‘What did you put?’
‘I told them I often carried large sums of money. I didn’t say it was usually other people’s.’
‘I see – so you’re a thief.’
‘I rob banks, if that’s what you mean, and believe me you’ve got to be good to get away with it.’
‘Which is why you’re running round Mexico playing the earnest priest?’
‘That’s it exactly. I knocked over the National Bank at a little place called Brownsville in Texas two days ago all on my own. It’s a funny thing, but priests and nuns – everybody trusts them. I knocked on that door a half-hour before time and the guard opened it without a qualm.’
‘How many dead men did you leave behind you?’
‘Dead men.’ He seemed surprised. ‘I told you it was a nice, clean job. Four guys lying on their faces with their hands tied and an empty vault was all I left behind that day.’ He leaned forward as if trying to see my face. ‘Anyway, how many men have you killed, Keogh, that’s the question.’
He was right, but if I’d told him, I’d have given him the shock of his life. ‘One too many.’
‘It always is, even when you think you’ve got an excuse for it like you and your politics. We’re a lot alike, you and me, Keogh, in our different ways, and I’ll tell you why. We’ve both got death in the soul, it’s as simple as that.’
Which was probably the most terrible thing anyone had ever said to me, mainly because it was the kind of remark that brings out into the open a truth one has always attempted to avoid.
‘What was it you called it?’ van Horne said. ‘The last place God made. That about sums it up. My old lady would say I’d ended up with what I deserved. She and my father were Dutch. Moved to Vermont when he opened a little printing shop in Altoona. Her religion was everything to her. Believe me, boy, nobody takes it more seriously than Dutch Catholics. When I walked out of that seminary on account of a stupid little bitch, who left me six months later, my mother laid it straight on the line. The Wrath of God and the Day of Judgement rolled into one. That’s what I’m going to get and any time now the way things are going.’
He rambled on in this way for quite some time, not drunk and yet it was the drink talking. Finally, it started to rain in great, heavy cold drops that hurt where they made contact. We got out quickly and put the top up and only just in time for the rain soon increased into a persistent downpour.
‘My God, this is all we needed,’ van Horne said.
I wondered if he appreciated the seriousness of this new turn of events. That by morning, half the ground we had to traverse would be quagmire and a hundred dry arroyos rushing torrents and quite impassable.
There seemed little point in going into that now and it certainly wouldn’t change anything so I pulled an end of the car rug around my legs against the cold and turned up my collar.
How many men have you killed, Keogh? It was a hell of a thought to go to sleep on.
The morning dawned grey and bleak, heavy rain still falling. We had stopped close to the edge of what had once been a dry stream bed. Water was rushing through it now in full spate like a moor-land burn on a November morning back home. The mountains were closer than I had expected and we got out the map and finally managed to place ourselves.
We had about ten or twelve miles of open country to traverse before reaching the trail we were seeking, the one which would take us up through the Nonava Pass. It was marked quite clearly on the map between two mountains, one a sugar-loaf and the other with three distinctively jagged peaks. We could see them both in the distance quite clearly in spite of the rain.
That magnificent engine fired without difficulty when van Horne pressed the self-starter and he took the Mercedes away slowly, working out his route as he went, for any remaining trace of the track we had been following had been washed out by the heavy rain.
It was still bitterly cold and the girl, Victoria, stayed muffled in the two car rugs she had used during the night and peered out into the morning, her face as serious and grave as ever. I asked her if she was all right and she nodded and actually smiled which was something.
Van Horne said, ‘How come you speak Spanish as well as you do?’
‘My mother was born in Seville.’
‘Is that so? Your old man must have got around. I picked mine up in Juarez one year, working as manager in a small casino there. I had to stay out of circulation for a while on account of the fact that I’d broken out of Leavenworth – that’s the Texas State Penitentiary.’
‘What were you in there for?’
‘Shooting a guy who was trying to shoot me, only he had friends at court and I didn’t.’
Strange, the change in him. The brash, confident manner, the excessive toughness in the voice as if he was trying to prove something, though whether to me or himself was debatable. I was thinking about that for want of something better to do when we went over a slight rise a couple of minutes later and saw Federal cavalry in the hollow below.
They were saddled up and grouped in a rough circle as if waiting to receive their orders after breaking camp. The surprise was mutual and the whisper of the engine at the slow speed at which we were moving combined with the heavy rain, explained why they had not heard our approach.
There was a single, excited cry as we were seen and as van Horne swung the wheel and slammed his foot hard down, a couple of shots whistled through the air. We went down the slope in a great sliding loop that took us through a patch of water a foot deep and out into the final stretch of open plain rising into the mountains.
By now, the hunt was up with a vengeance and the result was by no means a foregone conclusion for the federales, as usual, were superbly mounted and try as he could, there were stretches where van Horne had no option but to slow down considerably.
We were perhaps two hundred yards in the lead when he cursed and braked sharply as we went over a small ridge and found the way blocked by a flooded arroyo. By the time we had extricated ourselves, the gap had narrowed to no more than fifty yards. We started to climb steeply, cutting across a broad shoulder at the foot of the sugar-loaf mountain, the wheels spinning in the loose shale.
‘Once over the top there we’re certain to hit that trail,’ he shouted. ‘They don’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of keeping up with us. The Thompson’s under your feet. Give them a little discouragement.’
I pulled out the celebrated Gladstone bag and found the sub-machine-gun inside resting on top of dozens of packets of crisp bank-notes. An interesting discovery, but I had more important things on my mind. I leaned out and loosed off a long, rolling burst well above the heads of our pursuers. It certainly started them reining in, but when I attempted to repeat the performance, the drum magazine jammed, a common fault with them at that time.
The federales urged their mounts up the slope, but a moment later, we were over the shoulder of the hill and saw the trail quite plainly no more than fifty yards below us. It was in much better condition than I had expected and the moment we reached it and the Mercedes started to climb, I knew we were home and dry.
Van Horne turned and grinned savagely at me, dropping a gear as the trail lifted along the side of the ravine and then, as he looked back, he gave a sudden exclamation and jammed on the brakes. A whole slice of mountain seemed to have broken away in a great wave of earth and rock, probably a result of the heavy rain during the night, wiping the trail off the map for all time.
He slammed the gear stick into reverse, and started to turn the Mercedes, but he was already too late as a dozen or so federales came over the rise and boiled around us like an angry sea.
The Enfield was ready in my hand and there was little doubt that I could have dropped a couple of them, but no more than that which seemed rather futile in the circumstances. I put it down on the seat and raised my hands as ostentatiously as I could.
4
The next few minutes could well have been my last and probably almost were. I got a boot between the shoulder blades as I stepped out of the Mercedes that put me down on my hands and knees. No place to be with a dozen horses doing their best to trample me into the ground. I was kicked twice, the second time with such force that I thought a rib had gone and then a grip of iron fastened on my collar and brought me to my feet.
Van Horne steadied me with one hand and swung a fist into the rump of the nearest horse with such force that it reared up, almost unseating its rider. Someone struck at him with a plaited leather riding whip. He allowed it to curl around his arm, then pulled the owner from the saddle with no apparent effort, the first hint I’d been given of the man’s enormous strength.
There was considerable confusion for a moment or two after that as the soldiers frantically hauled their mounts out of the way to avoid trampling their unfortunate companion. One or two of them drew sabres and for a moment things looked decidedly nasty and then a single pistol shot sounded and a young officer burst through the outer ring and reined in sharply.
He had a thin, sallow face, a dark smudge of moustache and wore the silver bars of a lieutenant. Unlike most of his men, he was not wearing a rubber poncho and his tailored uniform was soaked with rain.
He smiled coldly, leaned down from the saddle and touched van Horne between the eyes with the barrel of the pistol. ‘Large or small, strong or weak, señor, one bullet is all it takes.’
‘Just call the dogs off, that’s all,’ van Horne told him. ‘We’ll come quietly.’
‘You will indeed. My orders were to apprehend you alive if possible, but I would be happy for you to give me an excuse to act otherwise. I find you an affront to all decency. Take off that cassock.’
Van Horne glared at him, hands on hips. ‘And what if I tell you to go and do the other thing, you pipsqueak.’
The lieutenant dismounted, tossed the reins of his horse to one of his men and faced van Horne squarely, raising his revolver to belt level. He thumbed back the hammer very deliberately.
‘Señor, for reasons of my own which are none of your business, I do not like you or anything about you. I assure you now, on my mother’s grave, that if you do not do exactly as I say, I will give you what you so richly deserve.’
He was no longer smiling and if one looked closely, the gun was shaking a little. Van Horne raised a hand as if to placate him. ‘All right, soldier boy, anything for a quiet life.’
He unbuttoned his cassock at the neck, pulled it over his head and tossed it into the Mercedes. He was wearing a pair of very clerical-looking trousers in black worsted and a white shirt.
The lieutenant said, ‘The collar also, if you please.’
Van Horne removed it and threw it into the Mercedes after the cassock. ‘Satisfied?’ he demanded.
‘Only when I see you hang, señor,’ the lieutenant said. ‘You will now drive this automobile back down the trail under my instructions. The slightest attempt to escape and I shoot. You understand me?’
‘You’ve got a big mouth with that in your hand, that’s all I understand, sonny.’ Van Horne turned and moved back to the Mercedes.
‘You can walk,’ the lieutenant told me and started after van Horne.
‘What about her?’ I nodded towards the girl who was being held unnecessarily by two of his men. ‘Can’t you take her with you?’
He looked towards her and frowned. ‘She’s the one from old Tacho’s place, isn’t she? The one who can’t speak.’
‘That’s right. Have you spoken to him? Did he tell you what happened last night?’
‘No, but I’ve had a reasonably full account from the sole survivor of the rurales you butchered.’
‘Very interesting,’ I said. ‘Did he tell you what they were trying to do with the girl? Did he mention they were about to hang me for trying to intervene? Would have finished me off if my friend there hadn’t arrived when he did?’
He believed me, which was the only important thing, his face turning paler than ever and the expression in his eyes was terrible to see.
‘A dirty world, lieutenant,’ I said softly. ‘And that kid couldn’t even raise a scream to save herself.’
He turned away without a word, grabbed Victoria by the arm and shoved her into the back seat of the Mercedes, then climbed in beside van Horne and told him to get moving. It took van Horne quite a bit of manoeuvring to get the Mercedes pointing the right way but he managed it after a while and we all got out of the way to let him drive past.
We started down the trail, the rest of us, the troopers riding, but the sergeant in charge, a small dark-haired man with a heavy moustache, dismounted and walked beside me, a pistol in his hand.
I produced a packet of Artistas. ‘All right if I smoke?’
‘Sure, I’ll have one with you.’ I gave him a light and he blew out the first lungful of smoke expertly. ‘Had yourselves a ball last night at old Tacho’s, you and your pal, didn’t you? How many rurales was it you saw off – five?’
‘What’s happening now?’ I asked.
‘Oh, the colonel’s waiting to see you down there. Colonel Bonilla. He’s the military governor in this region. He joined us for a routine patrol yesterday morning, just to see how things were going for himself. He’s like that. We were bivouacked for the night at an old rancheria near the main road when this rurale rode up. The one you let slip through your fingers at Tacho’s.’ There was sincere admiration in his voice when he added, ‘You and your pal must be hell on wheels.’
‘What made you come straight out here instead of going to Tacho’s?’
‘That was the colonel.’ He put a finger to his nose. ‘He’s really got it upstairs, that one. He figured you’d make a break for it so he only sent half a dozen guys to Tacho’s with a sergeant in charge, then he had a look at the map with the lieutenant. He said if it was him, he’d make a break for it through the Nonava Pass because it didn’t look possible.’
‘He certainly hit the nail right on the head.’
‘He usually does. He pushed us hard last night. Only stopped when it really started to rain, but he was right again. If we hadn’t been where we were you’d have got through, wouldn’t you?’
Quite a man, this Colonel Bonilla. We reached the place where the trail finally merged with the desert to find the Mercedes standing in the entrance to a narrow ravine. Someone had already started a fire in spite of the rain, no great feat with so many thorn bushes around and the smoke curled lazily on the damp air.
Van Horne was standing beside the Mercedes and I realized that someone, presumably Bonilla, was sitting in the rear seat, the door open. He was a tall, handsome man with sideburns which were prematurely white for I judged him to be no more than forty years of age. He made a rather gallant figure in his caped cavalry greatcoat and he had an intelligent, cynical air to him, the face of a man who has seen it all, everything possible in life and simply doesn’t believe in anything any more.
The sergeant handed me over to the lieutenant who took me the rest of the way. Bonilla looked me over calmly.
‘Your name, señor,’ he asked politely.
‘Emmet Keogh. I’m a British citizen.’
‘Keogh?’ He frowned slightly. ‘An unusual name, señor, and I have heard it before. You are the one who was in charge of security at the silver mines at Hermosa.’
‘That’s right. You seem surprised.’
‘You are not what I would have looked for, señor. I had expected a different kind of man.’
‘In what way? Two horns and a tail?’
‘Possibly even that. Your papers.’
I took out the travel permit signed by the jefe in Bonito. ‘That’s all I’ve got with me.’
He examined it gravely. ‘So, you are supposed to be delivering a truck-load of supplies to this man Gomez in Huila.’
‘That’s right. For Señor Janos, the owner of the Hotel Blanco in Bonito.’
To know Señor Janos is not much of a recommendation, believe me. This man has just given me his personal version of what happened at the way-station last night. Now I will hear yours.’ He nodded to the young lieutenant. ‘Take him away.’
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