El Paso: A Novel (6 page)

How maddening, to watch all this and not really know what to do. Arthur faced a task of almost heroic proportions. As operations manager he was responsible for everything that went on at NE&P: right-of-way disputes, building track, repairing washed-out track, maintenance of rolling stock and locomotives, acquisitions of new equipment, planning and strategy, the hiring and maintaining of thousands of men, theft from freight cars parked on sidings, loading and unloading, scheduling, payrolls, lawsuits, train wrecks, and, yes, even grasshoppers on the tracks.

And now: SEE IF YOU CAN HANDLE IT.

Arthur snapped the pencil in two. They needed an infusion of cash, and quickly. Sure, the Old Man had assets, but these were now in great part reduced to his playthings—the yacht, the damned cattle ranch in Mexico where he’d go to get away from Arthur’s mother and everybody else, the “cottage” in Newport with its thirty-six rooms.

The times Arthur had tried to talk to his father about taking the company public, the Old Man invariably changed the subject. In fact, NE&P was one of the last privately owned railroads in the country. But the Colonel was vehement: “The moment we begin selling shares in this company,” he’d railed, “buzzards like Morgan and Harriman and Stanford and Gould will be all over us, secretly buying up our stock until they add us to their private collections, and we’d both be out on our ears. They’d pack the board of directors with their own people and squeeze us out. Then they’d issue more and more stock shares until the value was worthless. I’ve seen them do it! No, sir! My word! No, sir!”

“But I thought those people were your friends,” Arthur had reminded him.

“They are, Arthur, they are. But you know the saying: ‘All’s fair in love in war.’ And business, my boy,
is
war! Besides,” he added, “I’d do it to them, if I could.”

In this, at least, Arthur conceded that his father was correct. And if the Old Man considered the men he had just mentioned “friends,” he truly needed no enemies. Since they had not been able to buy the company out from under him publicly, those great tycoons seemed determined to ruin the NE&P in every way possible. In the great war that was exploding across Europe, the British and French needed all the munitions and supplies they could get from the United States. Obviously these would be transported to the Atlantic ports by rail—but did the NE&P have a single contract? No. They had been deliberately underbid across the board by such as the New York Central, Union Pacific, Great Northern, Illinois Central, Central Pacific, Southern Pacific, Lackawanna, B&O, and even the lowly Wabash and Rock Island. A single contract was all Arthur needed at the moment to put his company back on track. But no—thanks to the very same people his father had just included as his “friends”! And now he was going to have to go and kiss somebody’s ass at the National Bank of Boston because his Old Man didn’t want to sully what he considered his reputation by doing it himself.

SEE IF YOU CAN HANDLE IT. Yes, Arthur concluded, I suppose I can; at least for now, but you’re not going to like it.

Arthur went to the trash basket and retrieved the telegram. He smoothed it out on his desk and studied it again. It did say, exactly: SEE IF YOU CAN HANDLE IT. And so it in fact gave him the authority. He placed the telegram in his top desk drawer and locked it and rang for his secretary, whom he told to book him a berth on the next train to Boston.

THREE DAYS LATER,
when Arthur went to the bank in Boston to renegotiate the loan, the officers balked. He’d expected it.

They wanted to see the company books; Arthur didn’t want that.

They persisted.

He figured they would. But he had come to them with an alternative that from the instant he came up with it in Chicago seemed crazed—he would offer them collateral instead: a new note with the Colonel’s prized
Ajax
as security.

The stiff-collared old men were struck silent by this suggestion. They all knew of the Colonel’s famous yacht, “grander than the one owned by the King of England”; its picture had been in the newspapers and whenever it sailed into Boston it was the talk of the town. None of them had been invited on it, of course, because none of them ever invited the Colonel into
their
private domains, but they knew it was a very magnificent piece of property, worth more than the loan. After a short whispering conference in a corner, the bankers accepted. Officially, the
Ajax
was owned by the NE&P; Arthur had brought the title with him. Papers were signed. As Arthur was leaving the room, one of the bankers thought to ask: “Where is the boat now?”

“On its way to Ireland with Father,” Arthur replied.

Again, the room fell into a sort of electrified silence.

“But he cannot remove the collateral property outside the country,” the man gasped. “The agreement specifies it.”

Arthur stood facing the man, who seemed as though his collar were beginning to choke him.

“You must cable him and tell him to return at once.”

“You tell him,” Arthur said, handing the man a slip of paper with the
Ajax
’s wireless call signals. Then he smiled, bowed politely, and left the bankers in their boardroom.

FOUR

L
ate in the afternoon of the same day, and thousands of miles to the south, deep in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, General Francisco “Pancho” Villa nudged his horse over the top of a gently rolling ridge to survey a wide expanse of green that spread out from him as far as he could see. Grazing on the plains below, tens of thousands of brownish red cattle, practically motionless, appeared as figurines placed in a painting.

General Villa was not thinking at this moment about stealing these cattle. Instead, his mind was on Halley’s Comet, which had appeared to him in 1910, the very evening he crossed the Rio Grande at El Paso with his pitifully small band of followers to join the Great Revolution.

They had all heard of this spectacular comet, but, seeing it then for the first time, Villa took it as a bad omen, for reasons he did not himself fully comprehend. And as he reflected on this now, after five more years of killing, it seemed he’d been correct. His Grand Army of the North, once fifty thousand strong, was fading away to nothing, like the comet that had arced briefly across the sky, never to return again in his lifetime.

As these disturbing notions passed through Villa’s mind he heard a horse come up slowly behind him, then stop.

“You want me to give the signal, General?” asked a voice belonging to his most trusted aide, General Rudolfo Fierro, known by everyone as “the Butcher,” a sobriquet that by rights should have belonged to Villa, since he had actually owned a butcher shop in Chihuahua City before the Great Revolution. But Fierro came by his nickname honestly, too, as a butcher of men, not beef, and trouble seemed to follow him like a cloud of flies on a steer.

Villa nodded, and a few moments later a pistol shot rang out. From his vantage point Villa watched as a dozen of his horsemen trotted out from behind a swale and crossed the green plains toward a large herd of the cattle.

“Well, General Fierro, tonight at least we won’t have to eat beans again.”

Villa was a big, stocky man with huge shoulders, a thick neck, and a bushy mustache, and it was said that when you looked into his eyes you could see the lights of a freight train bearing down on you.

“No,” Fierro said. “You know whose cows it is we are taking here?”

“Some rich gringo named Shaughnessy. I guess it’s still him. He stole this place from the people twenty-five years ago. We should have brought more men and got the whole herd.”

“I was just thinking that myself. But that’s a lot of beefs,” Fierro said. “How many you suppose?”

“Who knows? Hundred—two hundred thousand? How can you count them? They’re moving all the time. You can’t see far enough to see them all, either. This place goes on nearly to the mountains.”

“You know what that many beefs would bring in El Paso?” asked the Butcher.

“
Would
have brought,” Villa reminded him.

Another reason he was sour on things today. All through the years the Americanos on the border had left him a free hand, allowed him to ship millions of rounds of ammunition and boxcar loads of rifles, machine guns, cannons, cars, and even airplanes and coal for his railroads. They had been betting on him in Washington in those days, but now the times had changed. The border was closed both ways.

In the beginning, the general’s acrimony had been visited on the Spanish, because they were the symbol in Mexico of all the stinking foreigners since the days of Cortés. For the four hundred years they’d been in power, the Spanish and their descendants treated the people as if they were beneath contempt, which to the Spanish they were. So Villa’s first move was to get rid of the Spanish, first by threats, then by carrying out the threats and confiscating their vast properties and even killing them—at least the ones who raised objections. There were also the
latifundistas
, the rich Mexicans. The
latifundistas
had allied themselves with the Spaniards, and so they came next.

And then there was the matter of the Chinamen.

Villa did not like the Chinamen any more than he liked the Spaniards or the rich Mexicans. In fact, he liked them so little that he had corralled and slaughtered more than six hundred in one afternoon in the state of Sonora. The Chinamen had been brought in by the Spanish, rich Mexicans, and Americans to work in the gold and silver mines, thereby displacing even the poorest Mexicans, but after a time most of the Chinamen quit the mines and began opening restaurants and laundries. But Chinese food made the Mexicans sick, which didn’t help matters. In any case, there were now six hundred fewer Chinamen in Northern Mexico.

But so far as Americans went, Villa’s attitude had been more or less “live and let live.”

That is, until recently.

He had not wished to rile the Americans because, after all, he needed the military equipment that the U.S. arms factories such as Colt, Remington, and Winchester had been so willing to sell him at the El Paso border. Besides, Villa had even come to be on good terms with the American general in command there, who thought Villa was a splendid fellow and communicated this opinion personally to President Woodrow Wilson in Washington, D.C.

But in the past few months everything had changed. The Americans recalled the good old general and replaced him with a stinking customs agent named Cobb, and the honeymoon was over—no arms shipments, no selling stolen cattle across the border, no—

Fierro pointed ahead. “Look there!” Fierro was a tall, swarthy man, with a mustache that drooped down almost to his chin and beady weasel eyes. Furthermore, one of his eyelids sagged, which gave him a curiously untrustworthy look. He was the kind of man who exuded meanness. When he looked at you it was through mean eyes, and when he smiled it was through mean lips, and when he laughed, there was meanness in his laughter.

Down on the plains, Villa could see his men beginning to round up the cattle. They must have had a hundred head or so cut off and were herding them back up to the low hills.

Far to the southeast they could barely make out the sprawling hacienda that, from this distance, appeared to the lens of the eye as a frozen configuration of miniature buildings set amid a miniature copse of trees. In fact the hacienda covered more than half a square mile, employed more than two hundred people, and some of the trees were actually a hundred fifty feet tall. But Villa could clearly make out the dust of a number of horsemen, apparently barreling full-tilt toward Villa’s cattle rustlers.

“Well, now,” Villa said, “there’s some vaqueros in for a big surprise.”

FIVE

T
wo thousand miles to the northeast, the owner of the Mexican cattle stood aboard a great yacht that lay at anchor in the harbor of Newport, Rhode Island. It was one of the largest private yachts in the world. John McGill Shaughnessy had named his ship
Ajax
, after one of the recently built British dreadnought-class battleships. In fact, if the Colonel had it his way, he would have preferred that it
had
been a battleship.

The Colonel stood on the bridge of
Ajax
, smiling with pride while his guests debarked from half a dozen motorized tenders belonging to the ship. He watched with satisfaction as they were piped aboard with the same military formality that might have attended the real battleship
Ajax
.

The blue-green waters of Newport shimmered in the setting sun. The Colonel resisted an urge to step up to the glistening varnish and polished brass of the bridge panel and begin barking orders down the tube. Too grandiose a gesture even for him, since the captain, second officer, and several of the bridge crew all stood on deck watching the guests board.

The Colonel’s guests for this evening’s formal stag dinner represented the titans of American industry: steel barons, steamship owners, railroad magnates, mining czars, automobile and manufacturing kings, as well as practically every major broker with a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.