Days of the Dead (13 page)

“But it would pay us to find out.” January raised his hand to signal a halt, and instructed Quacho, the scar-faced vaquero, to deploy his two companions and Cristobál in a perimeter around the outer edge of the wooded depression. “And quickly. Don Prospero’s instability aside, God knows at what point young Ylario is going to abandon the Principles of Universal Law and feel himself justified in simply shooting Hannibal from the shelter of the nearest arroyo the next time he steps out the gate. There’s no way we could protect against that.”

“Do you think he would?” asked Rose as January helped her from the saddle—Valla’s side-saddle, borrowed along with one of Valla’s highly-bred Irish mares. Her riding-boots crunched in the mats of brown oak-leaves underfoot. “He seems most wedded to the Principles of Universal Law.”

“So wedded to them that he might feel justified in bypassing the frustrating letter of the law in favor of what he considers its spirit.” January took his knife from his belt and cut a sapling for a snake-stick, having grown up in the Louisiana countryside with a healthy wariness about long grass and deep underbrush. It was good even to be able to carry a knife, one of the many things he was forbidden to do in the United States. Bandits,
léperos,
and General Santa Anna aside, there were things to be said for Mexico.

Sighting on the flattened crown of the Pyramid of the Sun—visible as a burning amber trapezoid through the ragged treetops—he made his way in what he hoped was the direction of the clearing at its foot, where the broken jaguar statue lay at the roots of the oak.

“So far it doesn’t look like anyone could have poisoned Fernando after dinner but his valet or Hannibal. Werther certainly had reason to—not the logical reason of a police case, but the illogic of a lover. I am very curious as to where Werther Bremer is now, and what he has been doing in the weeks since his flight from Mictlán.”

The trees above them thinned where stone pavement broke through the hard-packed earth. Fragments of carving showed among the twisted roots of soapberry and creosote, and at the foot of a hoary-barked oak-tree, a stone jaguar glared with furious eyes. The depression, Don Prospero had said, had in all probability been a sunken ball-court, where teams of Indians had once vied for the privilege of stripping all the spectators of their feathered clothing and gold ornaments, with the added fillip of knowing that the members of the losing team would end up having their hearts torn out on the altars of the gods. He didn’t imagine anyone ever wore their best to the game.

“Consuela says that she must leave first thing tomorrow,” Rose told him. “She’s singing in
L’Italiana in Algeri
Saturday night, and the rehearsal is Friday. . . .”

“Good,” said January. “Don Prospero seems to have a habit of hanging on to his guests, and much as I hate to leave Hannibal alone, God knows how long it’s going to take us to find out what really happened on the eighth. Hannibal says he should be safe until the second, but if Santa Anna leaves before that for Vera Cruz, I wouldn’t lay two medios on his life lasting another twenty-four hours.”

He did not add, glancing over his shoulder at the silent woods, already beginning to fill with silvery twilight, that he would feel safer back in the city. Safer to know that Rose was away from this place. The sun was beginning to sink, trailing the glassy sliver of the new moon in its wake. Night, when it came, would be like the inside of a cow. He prodded at the dark hollow beneath the roots of the oak and, when no snake emerged or rattled in protest, knelt to reach gingerly inside.

There was quite a little cache there, tucked deep into the crannies of the stone. Two leather bags, double-wrapped in sacking, proved to contain cornmeal; a third held parched corn. Four empty water-bottles, and a fifth containing brandy: January poured a little of it into one of the empties, to take home and test on poor Compair Lapin, though he couldn’t imagine a poisoned decanter going unsampled for nearly two months with such souls as Hannibal and Doña Filomena in the house. Three tiny parcels proved to contain money: small amounts, such as would not be missed from drawers or reticules. The most recent, lying on top, January was amused and exasperated to note, consisted of American coins, clearly abstracted from his own luggage. With them was a pearl bracelet he did not recognize, and the sapphire girandole earrings Valentina had worn the night before at supper.

I search my daughter’s room as a matter of course,
Doña Imelda had said, and Josefa had enthusiastically agreed.
The possession of baubles and trinkets is only a temptation to sin. It is good training to be reminded that the soul possesses nothing.

There was no note.

“She’s getting ready to run for it, all right.” He looked back up at Rose, who stood behind him, holding the horses. “I wonder if Fernando stumbled upon something else, some other evidence of her plans to meet her lover or to flee?”

“If he did, I still can’t see how she could have entered the study.” Rose swung lightly to the Irish mare’s saddle, hooked her right knee around the bar. “She was with others all the way through dinner, and afterwards in the
corredor.
The same goes for Señora Lorcha and Natividad.”

“And Doña Imelda,” said January thoughtfully. “And Consuela, for that matter.”

“Why on earth would Consuela wish to murder her brother?” exclaimed Rose, startled.

January shrugged. “We don’t know that,” he said. “But the fact that we don’t know a reason why Consuela, or Don Anastasio, or Hinojo the butler, or Santa Anna himself for that matter, would have wanted to murder Fernando doesn’t mean that they didn’t have one, maybe as strong a reason as passion or hatred or fear. All we have to go on was what was actually done, and who could actually, physically, have committed the crime. And at the moment,” he concluded regretfully, mounting his heavy-boned gelding, “the only ones who had any contact with anything Don Fernando ate or drank after he left the dinner were Hannibal and Werther.”

“And Don Prospero,” mused Rose. “Bolts or no bolts on the doors to his room, he had the best of all reasons to want his son dead. And his movements in the hour or so after dinner when Franz must have died are unaccounted for.”

The sun had set by the time they returned to the
casco.
The women who worked at spindle and loom were streaming out the front gates of the great court, chattering and laughing and wrapping their long rebosos around their shoulders against the evening chill, as Rose and January, dusty and exhausted, came through the kitchen gates. The long ground-floor workrooms, sheltered by their surrounding arcade, would be deep in gloom now, and the women had to return to their own huts in the village to make tortillas for their husbands and children and parents. The flat cornbread upon which all of Indian and mestizo cuisine was based staled and lost its suppleness very quickly; the women had to bake it anew at every meal.

“I trust and pray there’ll be time for a bath before dinner,” Rose was saying as they climbed the stair to the upper arcade. Light shone through the cracks in the shutters of Consuela’s room; Hannibal’s, as far as January could see, was dark. He wondered if the fiddler was recovered from the exhaustion of the day’s clamber over the pyramids, and if Don Prospero would insist on his playing after dinner that night. “And I’ll speak to Zama about having our things packed at first light.”

“Good,” said January. “I’d like to be able to at least take the
diligencia
back to Vera Cruz without worrying about the police waiting for us on the dock. But how we’re to learn if Don Prospero—”

He stopped, his hand on the latch of their door, every alarm-bell in his mind suddenly clamoring at the smell of blood.

He held up his hand and Rose halted behind him. . . .

Servants had already kindled the cressets along the
corredor,
the smoke thin and pungent against the whining mosquitoes. He took candles from his pocket—experience had taught him to carry them—and he lit one from the nearest flame, then cautiously pushed open the door.

The smell was stronger in the dark. From the wall the massacred Christ gazed sorrowfully at him: January recalled the dead bandit in the pass, the dismembered limbs carved on the temple walls, and thought,
No wonder they show Christ covered with gore and horrors—how else in this land would He get anyone’s attention?

Nothing moved in the room, so he stepped inside, swiftly touched the flame to the wicks of other candles in their heavy iron holder. Golden light broadened. For the first moment he thought that nothing had been changed, nothing touched: the bed still made, the chest still closed, the small travel-trunk in its corner unmolested . . .

Then he saw the little bamboo cage that had held Compair Lapin stood open and empty.

And on top of the chest at the bed’s foot, one of M’sieu Guillenormand’s red-and-white French dishes, half-filled with congealing blood, in which swam what could only be the rabbit’s heart.

NINE

January had hoped to consult Don Anastasio about the heart—to ask whether this was a customary form of local juju or a repetition of some common act of Don Prospero’s madness—but the gentle, scholarly
hacendado
had departed already for his own hacienda of Saragosse. “He’ll be back,” replied Don Prospero carelessly when January inquired after him at supper. “I told him to fetch pears for tomorrow night’s dessert—he has a most astonishing way with them. True French jagonelles,
here. . . .
The Indians are right, he is a
brujo.
And grapes. My father was very partial to grapes, so I want to make sure there are some here when he comes back.” It took January a moment to remember that the father referred to was dead. “Where is that lazy fiddler?” The Don glared around the torchlit
corredor,
where the household had assembled before dinner. “Fetch him,” he ordered the butler.

“I’ll get him,” offered January, and the sharp blue eyes flared like lightning in the flickering yellow light.

“Stay right here—Hinojo will get him. I want to talk to you about the ancient Indians. Little enough decent conversation I get around this place, between the likes of Josefa and Rafael.” He jerked his head at Valentina’s suitor. “An amazing sight, the pyramids, no? Their priests had calculated the cycles of the stars and planets for thousands of years in the past, and centuries into the future, with greater accuracy than the Babylonians did. They were able to predict retrogrades in the orbits of Mars and Venus. . . .”

Hinojo and the foreman Vasco appeared with a haggard and ghostly Hannibal between them: “You should be more grateful, eh?” chided Don Prospero with a glaring smile but an unmistakable edge of hardness in his tone. He prodded Hannibal playfully in the chest. “Instead of Guillenormand’s veal
à la Reine,
you could be eating stale tortillas in the yard of La Accordada prison. Now, tell me if you don’t think tales of that strumpet Helen of Troy parallel exactly the conduct of Xochiquetzal . . . ?”

Although swaying with exhaustion and opium-laced brandy, Hannibal exerted himself to be charming at dinner (“It’s obvious Menelaus married Helen only for her dowry—she’d probably been waiting for
years
to show him that nobody treated
her
that way and got away with it. Helen would have run off with Thersites if he’d had the wits to sing her a love-song. . . .”) and after dinner played the gentle gavottes and old Scots ballads that seemed to bring the Don the only relaxation his furious mind was capable of grasping.

What will your mother say, Pretty Peggy-o?
What will your mother say, Pretty Peggy-o?
What will your mother say when she finds you’ve gone away
To places far and strange to Fennario-o?

January borrowed a guitar from one of the vaqueros and joined him in the lively contradanses and the strange old Irish planxties that seemed to be woven of starlight.

“Stay here, Enero.” Don Prospero removed the cigar from his mouth and regarded January with deep approval. “The violin alone is the song of the gods, but accompanied . . . Paradise itself! I will have Hannibal play for
los niños
in the cemetery on the first night of the feast, when all go to the churchyard to make music. . . .”

“Like Compair Lapin,” smiled January, but he watched Don Prospero’s face as he said it. “Brother Rabbit.”

There was no reaction, no flicker of guilt, only a shaken head and an inquiring look: “It is a story of my people,” January told Prospero. “Compair Lapin once took his fiddle to the churchyard at a place called Red Hill, and played the dead up out of their graves, so that they danced on the hillside in the starlight. His music was so wild and so beautiful—and his power so great—that the angels came down from Heaven to dance, and all the beasts of the earth came also, and ringed the hill with song. Then the Devil himself came up out of the ground, and had to dance, and couldn’t stop dancing. Compair Lapin wouldn’t let him stop dancing, but played on and on, until the Devil swore to leave Compair Lapin and all his family in peace forever.

“And after the Devil swore, they all danced for the joy of it in the Red Hill Churchyard until the sun came up, and the angels fled away into the sky, embarrassed at what they’d tell God about where they’d been all night, and the dead sank away back into the earth, and the Devil went home to Hell with sore feet.”

Don Prospero laughed out loud at this, and Hannibal played a strange trace of some ancient tune, like wind through bones.

“At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise,
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go.”

“Even so,” said the Don. “Like your Compair Lapin—your little Fray Tochtli—I beg you, at least remain until the Feast of the Dead. You will keep the feast with me, and play the dead up out of the ground—maybe even make my Fernando dance, eh? I’d like to see that.”

“I am desolated to be forced to turn down such an offer,” said January, leaning his arm over the slender waist of the guitar. “But Señora Montero is pledged to return to town tomorrow, to rehearse for the opera in which she will be singing. I have agreed to assist her with my playing.”

“She doesn’t need you. I’ll tend to her.” The old man spoke as if Consuela weren’t sitting three feet away, on the bench with Don Rafael, who kept depositing bits of current events and information about his hacienda at her feet like a dog hopeful of favorable notice. January wondered if it would be possible to get out of this place tomorrow before Don Prospero found some means of making him stay.

“I suppose if we were really sensible, we’d steal a couple of horses tonight,” he said later when he and Rose followed Hannibal back to his room and stillness descended on the
casco.

“It would do you no good.” Hannibal dropped down onto the bed as if someone had cut the strings that kept him on his feet, and fished under the pillow for another bottle of laudanum. “I’ve tried it. Vasco and his minions keep a close watch over the corrals
. . . . Where’er yon fires ascend, the Trojans wake,
and one is only watched more closely later. In your case I doubt the American chargé d’affaires, Mr. Butler, would raise much of a fuss if Don Prospero put you in chains: he’d think it only natural. Did you find any trace of the fatal tea-cup?”

January shook his head. “Which in itself is odd, I think. We did find this. . . .” He held up the green-bound ledger he’d taken from Fernando’s desk. “Fernando’s expenses since June, not only in pesos and dollars but in
thalers, silbergrosschen,
and
friedrichsdor
uniforms, boots from London, horses—he seemed to prefer Hanoverian warmbloods to the local stock. . . .”

“I’d prefer a well-raised Swiss goat to the local stock myself.”

“—a rather stingy salary to someone named Laurent. . . .”

“His French cook, back at the town house on the Calle San Francisco. God knows what became of him. Fernando had as little use for the local cuisine as his father does.” Hannibal held up his glass of sherry and carefully dripped laudanum into the golden liquid. “And I can tell you that leaving the carved-out hearts of small livestock in people’s rooms is no local magic that I ever heard of.”

“I didn’t think so,” January agreed. “There was no writing or symbols around it, as you’ll find in nearly any gris-gris I know; no salt or ashes, not even any blood dripped in the cage. I’d be curious to know what was done with the carcass. . . .”

“Don’t stay around to look.” Hannibal’s eyes, sunken in hollows of bruised-looking flesh, were deadly grave. “I’ll search, and let you know somehow. Whatever it means, I suspect that like Macbeth’s dinner-guests, standing not upon the order of your going is your best course of action. I’m sorry now I even wrote to you—a momentary attack of panic on my part. I never for the world thought . . .”

January stepped over to the bed and laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “We’ll get you out,” he said gently, answering, not Hannibal’s words, but the fear that lurked in his eyes. Hannibal glanced up at him, and January saw, behind the fear in those coffee-black depths, naked despair.

Then Hannibal looked away and said lightly, “Of course you will,
amicus meus.
” The lilt of the well-bred Irish gentry was stronger now in his voice, with tiredness and drink. “But best you get yourselves clear of the mess first.”

“Of course we’ll get you out.” Rose said it briskly. “Benjamin, at the very least you can come up with one of those mysterious drugs one hears of that counterfeit death in all its particulars, so we can smuggle him out in a coffin. . . .”

“Don Prospero will begin to be suspicious when I don’t put in an appearance on All Souls.”

“By then you’ll be long gone.”

“Contrary to Mr. Shakespeare and any number of operas and novels,” sighed January, “—not to mention, I am told, a thriving market in patent coffins that can be opened from inside by the twitch of a lever—in all my medical experience I have yet to encounter a poison that reliably induces coma. The closest I’ve ever heard of is belladonna, and I assure you, you wouldn’t like it.”

Hannibal smiled faintly. “Another illusion shattered.”

Outside, Don Prospero’s voice lifted angrily: “. . . my land and I can do as I please!” January had no idea to whom he was speaking—possibly Consuela, though the singer had gone to her room before Hannibal was finished with his playing. Possibly to no one at all. The torches along the
corredor
had burned themselves out, and the moon had set; the Don’s voice came deep and harsh out of the utter darkness.

“Think yourself ill-done-by, I’ll wager. All women do. Don’t know when you’re well off, my girl! The King of the Toltecs sent his daughter to the Aztecs as a hostage to ensure their good behavior—a fair trade if I do say so—you’re lucky I haven’t done as much. They
skinned
her.” His voice rang with satisfaction on the words. “When the King came back to speak to their ambassadors, the High Priest was wearing her skin.”

There was no reply, but in January’s mind he heard the echo of Don Anastasio’s voice:
It might be best to get Hannibal out of here before Don Prospero comes back with what he thinks his son is going to tell him. . . .

He wondered what voice Don Prospero might be hearing in his mind, and what it was telling him.

“Well,” said Hannibal into the silence, “that’s certainly one that even Euripides never came up with.”

January slept uneasily, and dreamed of flight across those hot yellow lands under the burning eye of the sun—the Smoking Mirror—pursued by a gaunt, brown-faced priest, clothed in the rotting skin of a girl. In the morning he rose with the tinny clank of the chapel bell and packed his trunk, then went down to the stables to make sure that Consuela’s coachman Juan was in fact putting to the horses as he had been ordered, to be ready for departure at first light.

He wasn’t, nor did Consuela herself, dabbing marmalade onto a delicate croissant roll in the
sala,
appear to be in the slightest haste: “Those lazy
conchudos
in the stables are just trying to figure out which strap goes into which buckle. The coach will be along.” She looked sleek and well pleased with herself, and there was a love-bite on her neck; January wondered whose.

He emerged from the
sala,
wondering how early Don Prospero would be up and about and if he and Rose might be able to leave on horseback unmolested, and was met by the small black-clad form of the boy Casimiro, who rose from one of the leather-covered benches with a ludicrously tiny white dog in his arms. “Señor Enero?” asked the boy, and January bowed. “Is it true what my Uncle ’Stasio says, that you’re a physician?”

“I’m a surgeon,” said January, “but I’ve studied medicine as well.” He squatted and held out his hand for the little dog to sniff.

“Do you know about insane people? This is Pequeña,” he added, bending to stroke the dog’s snowy head. “She’s my Aunt Valentina’s dog, but Valla doesn’t care for her much. I feed her. Did Uncle ’Stasio send for you, to tell if Grandfather is insane?”

He glanced worriedly over his shoulder as he spoke, down into the courtyard in the direction of the chapel, where, January guessed, his mother was still at early Mass. Then he lowered his voice and whispered, “Did you really have a rabbit in your room?”

“Did you find one?” asked January softly, and the boy nodded, his dark eyes big. “Where?”

“Out by the kitchen. Yesterday before supper.” The boy sat again on the leather-covered bench, and January took a seat beside him. Casimiro was thin, like his sister, Paloma. January hoped Guillenormand was managing to slip Josefa’s children a little extra food while their mother was occupied with her prayers.

“Pequeña had got out, and I went to look for her, because she could be hurt by the big dogs in the stables. The stable dogs had just found the rabbit; they hadn’t torn it up, so I could see . . .” The child shivered. “I ran and got Uncle ’Stasio and he gave it to one of his own vaqueros to bury, and he said to me, ‘Don’t pay any attention to this. But tell me at once if you should ever find another like it.’ And he looked angry, with his mouth all hard, not looking at me at all.”