Cape Hell (7 page)

“Ah. No monetary inducements were offered then. Had they been, it may not have been necessary to recruit my brother at the point of a bayonet.”

“Correct me if things have changed since my last visit, but isn't this evidence in favor of a firing squad?”

“It is, perforce. But we are many miles from the capital, with many more to travel, most of them vertical, and steep canyons whose floors the sun has never reached. Many things lurk there,
Senor
Deputy, some with a hundred legs, and poison enough to paralyze a regiment. However, it is my observation that the danger increases as the number of legs wane, until one is left with but two, that march to the beat of General Childress' drum.”

I tilted my glass, pointing its rim at my companion. “Don't be insulted, but you're a liar. No illiterate can spout such poetry merely from the hearing.”

The yellow bloated face showed no offense. “Is it not wise, sometimes, to feign ignorance, in order to barter time while your foe seeks to educate you?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

He hesitated, turning over the words; then grinned for the first time, looking like a jack-o'lantern on November first. He handed back the flyer.

“I fail to see that this is of use. You knew of this already, from the American detective's report. Surely you did not doubt its existence.”

“He neglected to include a point of contact. Have you tried the local beer? The caterpillar I fished out of it seemed none the worse for swimming in it.”

“Why drink that swill when you have—?” He paused with his glass half-raised. He set it down gently, his eyes fixed on mine. They had a strange quality, like the brother's I'd never had.

“This bartender,” he said, “will direct you to a lonely spot, where you will be assassinated, stripped of your clothes and skin, and dragged still living behind an oxcart, and then they will fry your entrails and serve them up with the local beer.”

“The hell you say. Indians don't eat human flesh.”

“Did I say anything about Indians?”

He was difficult to fathom. How did a man, whose entire life had been lived south of La Junta, know so much about the depths to which humans could sink? Just seeing his family decimated by continuous revolution didn't answer. Some men are born already old in the ways of the wicked world.

“You're forgetting what I have to offer,” I said.

“
Dinero?
” He drank, snorted Scotch out his nose, wiped his face on his sleeve. “
Banditti
apprehended with American gold coins are shot without trial, the gold divided among the arresting officers; these brigands would sooner handle a rattlesnake. Weapons? They will raid this car upon your death and confiscate them all.”

He shook his head. “You
Norteamericanos
are all the same. You think what you own is what you are. You can take nothing from these people that they haven't lost already, including their lives.”

“I have one thing they can't have, without the skills to use it,” I said, “and that, my friend, is your own ticket to life.”

He drank, swallowed. “Now it is you who spouts poetry. What can you possibly give them that they cannot take?”

I settled back in soft pigskin and gestured with my glass, taking in the coach, and by extension the
Ghost
itself.

“As a wise man once said, no revolutionist would be caught dead without a train.”

He set down the rest of his drink, rose, smoothed his overalls with all the care of a New York robber baron tugging down his white waistcoat.

“I am not a slave,
senor,
to be sold with the machine I am employed to operate. You may make your terms with Joseph; but he knows little more about the whims of this particular conveyance than you.”

“You picked a hell of a time to quit.”

“No more so than the time you chose to tell me of your plan. You knew of this in Montana?”

“I did. I had no way of knowing you weren't aware of it yourself.”

He sighed; he did it as well as he shrugged.

“It is ever thus. The peon need not be consulted as to his fate.”

I drained my glass, filled it again, and tipped the rest of the bottle into his.

“I'm consulting you now. If you refuse, I have no choice but to turn back. A train's no good without the man who knows how to run it.”

“What is that to me? Your people are amateurs at war. My country has been at it since Cortes. Should I care whether Chester Cleveland or Oscar Childress is in charge of
Los Estados Unidos
? I have seen emperors and presidents rise and fall, and I am not yet forty years of age. I shall see many more, and yet my people will remain in the same sorry state as they were at the beginning.” He spread his palms. “What have I to gain?”

“You've mixed up Chester Arthur with Grover Cleveland.”

“No more so than those who have the privilege of voting.”

“You're going about it all wrong,” I said. “What more have you to lose?”

“My life.”

“Spent doing what? Carrying passengers from here to there and back? I saw cable cars doing just that in San Francisco. Where do you end? Where you started.”

I stirred my drink with a finger. “Cape Hell, they call the place we're headed. I should have asked you about that back in Helena, as an expert. I can't think of any kind of damnation that didn't put you back where you were in the beginning.”

He picked up his glass, swirled the contents, looked into them, like a gypsy reading leaves in an empty teacup.

“You make an interesting point,
Senor
. I cannot help but think that one way or the other leads to death.”

I raised my glass. “To death. It's the debt all men must pay.”

“
Por que no?
” He raised his. “I for one always feel relieved once I have settled a bill.”

 

TEN

The door at
the front of the car opened. Joseph in his overalls stood silhouetted dimly against the rear of the black tender, the white rectangle in his hand startlingly bright in the light of the lamps. It was a recent arrival, obviously. Nothing in his world of smoke, cinders, and grease remained unstained for more than a few minutes.

“For him.” He pointed a corner of the envelope at me. “It came just now by a messenger.”

He stepped forward to hand it to me. An awkward moment passed during which the engineer and I sat unmoving, waiting. Presently the fireman withdrew, drawing the door shut behind him.

The envelope, in silk bond, was addressed to me in neat copperplate, sealed with a blob of black wax and the letters K.G.C. pressed into it, probably by a signet ring, in the center of an oak-leaf cluster. I showed it to Cansado.

“I do not know these initials,” he said.

“Knights of the Golden Circle. They spied in the North for the Confederacy during the war.” I broke the seal, and read, in the same tidy hand on matching stationery:

Dear Mr. Murdock:

I represent the legal interests of General Oscar Childress, and would consider it a great favour if you would honor me with your presence in my quarters this evening.

A card engraved on heavier stock of the same quality was clipped to the page, replicating the name the writer had signed and his address:

Felix Bonaparte, Esq.

No. 9 Calle Santa Anna

Alamos, Mexico

“This name is French, is it not?”

“It might explain his connection with the K.G.C.,” I said. “France sided with the rebels.”

“It may be a trap.”

“Probably.” I rose, rummaged among the artillery in the drawer of the gun rack, and buckled on the Deane-Adams.

“Shall I go with you?”

“No. The only thing I brought of any value is this train. If I gave them the man who knows how to run it, I'd be hailed as a hero of the Confederacy.”

“I keep a pistol in the cab. Not even Joseph knows about it.”

I got out the Springfield shotgun, laid it across his lap, and handed him a box of shells. “There's no telling how many might come. If you let them get close enough, you can take out several at a time. Do you know—?”

Before I could finish, he opened the trap-door action, poked a shell into the chamber, and slammed it shut. He smiled at my expression. “No,
senor,
I have never held this weapon. It is a poor engineer who can examine a piece of machinery and fail to determine how it works.”

I spread my hands. “Then I'm away.”

“
Senor
Deputy. Page.” He stood, foraged in a pocket of his overalls, and came up with an image of St. Christopher embossed in bronze at the end of a chain. “This was a gift of my grandmother, the day I left the village in which I was born. It has seen me through these many years.”

I reached to take it. He snatched it back against his breast. His lips twisted.

“Do you think, upon the basis of some nights spent in drink, I would give this to you?—this, of all things? I wished merely to say that I hoped you owned something in which you found the same measure of protection.”

I grinned. “You son of a bitch.”

“
Sí
.” He returned the token to its pocket. “I have this same information from the man I called my father, on his deathbed, where lies are useless. The knowledge of my bastardy by nature gives me a certain advantage over those who must earn the distinction by conduct.”

I unholstered the English revolver, spun the cylinder, twirled it back into leather, patted my Bible, and put it in the side pocket of the frock coat I wore in civilization with the same flourish. “What the one cannot deliver, so the other shall.”

Something approaching a wrinkle creased the tight expanse of his forehead. “Mark? Matthew?”

“Murdock.”

“Ah. A book yet to be written; had I but my letters.” He refilled his glass.

A hag draped in tatters, with a tin tiara gleaming in the rats of her hair, knew El Calle Santa Anna, and offered to take me there for the price of an American dollar. She'd have known me for what I was even if I'd worn a filthy serape and a tattered sombrero; they can smell it. A year saturated in fried peppers, cornmeal, and rapid immersions in leechy creeks would hardly have been enough to wash away the gringo. When, nearing the corner, she backed into a dark doorway and raised her skirts, hoping to raise the ante, I thanked Christ for the darkness, slipped another half-dollar into her crusted palm, and shoved away from her. Her parting cackle interrupted itself long enough only to bite into the coin. I'd have trusted her rotting incisors over any assayer's scale when it came to separating silver from lead.

The street had been laid out under the early Spanish colonists, with no thought of anything broader than a dogcart passing through. At times the way was so narrow I couldn't have stumbled over one of the many uneven stones and fallen as far as the ground; a scraped shoulder was as much as I'd get, and the devil of a time prying myself loose to proceed. As the way grew darker and tighter, I had to concentrate to avoid confusing horizontal with vertical, and thinking I was climbing the inside of a chimney. The soot was as thick, and the path as black.

Not all of the buildings bore numbers. I had to strike a match to read the addresses that existed, some painted directly on the lintels above the sunken doors, others, harkening back to a more genteel past, enameled in flaked paint on the pebbled-glass panels of coach lamps, most of them dark and colonized by wasps, sleeping in their paper cells. A rat crossing the alley paused on my instep, its eyes glowing red by matchlight, then humped along the rest of its way. I was the trespasser, but not one worth challenging.

No. 9, when it revealed itself, was something apart from its surroundings. The street broadened just before I came upon it, like a forest clearing in a fairy tale, with the witch's house nestling quietly in its center, all brown sugar and molasses with a roof made of shortbread.

It wasn't quite that; two stories built in the Tudor style, mortar and timber, oak shutters pierced with holes just wide enough to expel and repel bullets. It was of more recent construction than the rest of the village, but created the impression of something older, harkening back to a time of medieval siege. The prosaic sign stretching the length of the street front belonged to a time neither of the building's inspiration nor of its surroundings:

BONAPARTE & SONS

SOLICITORS

A large bronze bust of Napoleon in his cocked hat shared a plate-glass window with a group photograph on a small easel of the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, embalmed in stiff collars and moustache wax. A lamp burning deep in the interior shone through the picture, making the judicial branch of the federal government appear transparent.

The door swung open away from my raised knuckles, framing a small man in a black cutaway and a white cutthroat collar. My other hand tightened on the butt of the revolver, but his hands were empty and he was alone in the room. I relaxed my grip.

His clean-shaven face was as brown as a bottle. I assumed at first that it was the contrast that made his linen seem spotless, but as he pivoted in the direction of the door, beckoning me past him with a dusky palm sticking out of four inches of starched cuff, the inside light fell full upon him and revealed a coat brushed to a bright sheen, a copper-colored necktie snugged tight without a dimple or a scrap of lint, square-toed boots like polished obsidian, and a shirt that would pass muster at a White House state dinner.

He did not shake my hand, but when the door was shut behind him snapped a bow, exposing a round patch of pink scalp in the middle of close-cropped hair, with his thumbs parallel to the seams of his trousers. “Felix Bonaparte,
Monsieur,
and your servant.”