JUST BEFORE CLOSING time a short, swarthy man with a mustache came in and spoke to a clerk. He waited while the clerk went to check with the manager. Gatling wondered why Murrill’s man didn’t catch on; the clerk behaved more suspiciously than he did.
Gatling got up when the manager began to fan his face with a stack of message blanks. Murrill’s man went out and headed for the narrow-gauge line that swayed and rattled its way across the border. Gatling boarded the train and took a seat at the end of the dusty little car. Murrill’s man took a folded newspaper from his pocket, moving his lips as he read it.
American border guards didn’t get on because the train was leaving the country. Their only interest was in people coming in. At the sunblasted station in Tijuana, a few Indian soldiers in dirty uniforms watched the narrow-gauge as it pulled in. Their mestizo sergeant showed as little interest as they did. He looked at the case containing the Skoda, but decided against asking what was in it.
Gatling had an answer ready if he did. His name was Gatling, he was a salesman for the Maxim Company of New York, and he was on his way to Mexico City to see if he could interest the military in this new fully automatic weapon. He had done business with General Guzman in the past; all they had to do was to send a telegraph to the general, who would vouch for him.
Gatling hoped General Guzman hadn’t been shot since last they met.
Tijuana was right across the border from San Diego, yet it seemed hotter there. The dry, brown brush on the surrounding hills looked ready to catch fire. In the narrow streets, mostly unpaved, open sewers stank in the sun. Not far from the train station the Mexican flag drooped from a flagpole in the barracks. Meat in an open-front butcher’s shop was crawling with flies.
The streets improved as he followed Murrill’s man from the station. It would have been tough turds if the man had a horse or buggy waiting. But he walked clear through town, past the cantinas, gambling halls, whorehouses. This part of town had boardwalks crowded with Americans, mostly men. Whores leaned out of windows and made sucking sounds. The whorehouses here were big, with Indian soldiers out front to keep the peace.
Tijuana was a small town, but it wasn’t dull.
Not much fighting had gone on here during the war against Maximilian. Bullet- and cannon-scarred buildings dated back to the Mexican War, when the U.S. Army occupied all of Baja California. Now the town was occupied by another army, of gringo civilians. The men gambled and whored round the clock; white women came at night to have abortions performed by “doctors” with dirty fingernails.
Murrill’s man was walking down a long, tree-lined street that led to open country. This street and the streets branching off it were where the wealthy lived. Their big houses, many colored with pink or yellow wash, stood behind thick, high walls topped with spikes.
Inside the heavy gates of wood or iron were well-tended gardens bright with flowers and shrubs. The houses had barred windows and doors massive enough to stand up to heavy gunfire. A cannon or machine gun would knock them down, but very little else.
Murrill’s man stopped at the last house on the street.
Gatling stayed just long enough to watch the man go in. Anybody hanging around here would be spotted in minutes. Surveillance here was impossible: no cover, no places to hide. Scouting would have to be done at night, but there might be guards and dogs outside the walls after dark.
Gatling walked back to the center of town.
There had been no sign of a conference of crime bosses. He didn’t think Gomez had been lying. Uncle Freddy wanted to break with Murrill and his death would make sure of that.
Gatling got a room at the American House, the best hotel in town—which wasn’t saying much. But it was where the American spenders stayed and was reasonably safe from thieves and strong-arm robbers, who were known to use chloroform on their victims. He sure as hell didn’t want to lose the Skoda, the two pistols, the three sticks of dynamite, the wad of cash he always carried.
A good deal of the thieving and killing was done by the soldier police, but most of the time they stayed away from the American House. The proprietor was a California gambler who could shoot two-handed and seldom missed. And when the colonel came from the barracks to play poker, he always managed to win enough to send him home happy.
It was getting dark when Gatling went to his room to sleep for a few hours. Nobody would take any heed of the cased Skoda in the gambling section of town, but away from the tawdry colored lights he’d have to walk as if he knew where he was going. He was dressed all right, he was American, and that counted for something even in Tijuana.
Now it was ten o’clock and he was checking the Skoda. Not that there was much to check; he did it anyway. Outside in the hallway there was a lot of noise, with well-heeled drunks coming and going. Some loudmouth banged on his door and yelled, “Horace, you old stick in the mud, you’re sleeping your life away! Come on out and join the party!”
Gatling didn’t answer and the drunk went away. He put on his hat, pulled on his boots. Time to go. After he snapped the catch on the case, he filled a bottle with water and put it in his pocket. No telling how long he’d be out there watching the house. Danger always made a man thirsty.
Going through the gambling section, another drunk yelled at him. “Hey, mister, you got a little woman in that thing?” The drunk followed him for a few blocks, still carrying on about the tiny woman in the case. Running out of stupid things to say, he turned back.
Gatling found the rich man’s street, and there were more horse-droppings than earlier in the day. No carriages or buckboards in sight; they had been stabled inside the grounds. Most of Murrill’s guests had probably arrived by train, had been met at the station.
Few lights showed in the house; this was a conference, not a party. He turned and went back the other way, then down two streets, passing the house from the rear. Here the houses were smaller, without so much garden space behind the walls. Out past the end of the street he could see the low hills outlined against the night sky. Dust and brush blew in the wind.
Dogs barked. They sensed his presence in the deserted street and were tuning up for a concerted uproar of yips and howls. The barking faded as he reached open country and started for the hills, moving along the bottom slopes until he could see the house in the distance. From here, without the binoculars, the house was simply a massive shape with a few blobs of light.
He climbed to the top of the highest hill. Sparse brush covered the side of the hill; it was bare on top. It would have to do. With the Skoda beside him, he brought the house close with the binoculars. Moonlight made that possible. If it had been full dark he would have seen nothing but blurred lights.
A late-arriving carriage went in through the gate. High up though he was, he couldn’t see into the grounds; the spike-topped walls were too high.
At midnight he picked up the Skoda and came down from the high ground. A lot of space had to be covered before he reached the house. Now and then he stopped and listened, but he wasn’t close enough to get the dogs started again. Somebody less familiar with guard dogs than he was might think throwing chunks of raw meat over the wall would do the trick. Gatling knew better. No matter what was tossed over the wall, the dogs would react with the same murderous fury.
This time there could be no stealthy approach. Compared to this, the massacre on Gold Street had been a box lunch. Best he could hope for was momentary surprise when he blew open the gate. The guards would start shooting, so would the men in the house, and maybe the gang leaders were better fighters. Most had come up from the city slums, where the would-be criminal’s most prized possession was the knife he used to make enough money to buy a gun. As shooters they might be a bit rusty, but the old skills would come back fast when their lives were threatened.
Gatling knew he would have to depend on the awesome firepower of the Skoda. It fired so fast that it used up more bullets than a platoon of trained soldiers armed with repeating rifles. Colonel Pritchett said it had proved itself in some minor war in one of the Balkan states of southern Europe. Men who faced it had run or were destroyed by its ruthless efficiency.
Now the fuse was burning. Men shouted behind the walls, alerted by the baying of the dogs. The dogs hurled themselves at the iron gates, trying to get at the intruder. Gatling didn’t throw the stick of dynamite because it might sail through the bars of the gate and fail to blow it open when it exploded. Instead, he lobbed it to a few inches outside the gate and ran for cover behind the nearest tree.
The blast nearly blew him off his feet. Before the smoke cleared he was through the gate with the Skoda flashing and bucking in his hands. The dogs had been killed or stunned by the explosion. Not so far in, most of the guards had survived and were firing their rifles. Gatling ran straight at them firing the Skoda and howling like a wild man. A row of them went down and he got the others in the back as they ran away.
Bullets came from the second floor of the house. He raked the windows, trying to pin them down while he touched off the second stick of dynamite. A hard throw sent the stick through a window and it exploded and the house began to burn. Flames were leaping from the windows when he rolled the last stick of dynamite at the door. He jumped down beside the stone steps and clapped his hands over his ears to keep from being deafened. The huge door disintegrated as if it had been made of plywood.
He ran in firing the Skoda. Smoke was rolling down the stairs; men were yelling in anger, screaming with pain. A man with his clothes on fire tripped at the head of the stairs and came crashing down. Gatling gave him a short burst to help him on his way. An elderly man rose up from the floor and tried to brain him with a heavy cane. Gatling smashed him in the face with the muzzle of the Skoda.
With another magazine in place, he started up the stairs. This time he didn’t run because the men up there, trapped by barred windows, would fight like hell before he killed them. For an instant there wasn’t a sound except for the crackle of flames. Gatling yelled, “Send Murrill down and I’ll let you live. Murrill is all I want. This is your last chance.”
There was movement but no answer. A sofa or something heavy was being dragged. The bastards were forting up. Could be they were too afraid of Murrill to hand him over. Or he wasn’t there.
Gatling edged to the top of the stairs, then used the thick, lung-searing smoke as cover to dive into the room. They fired at him as he landed and rolled. A section of the carpet was burning; oil paintings and heavy curtains were on fire; the explosion had blown burning logs out of the fireplace. Gatling’s cover was bad, but the hail of bullets from the Skoda drove them down behind piled-up furniture.
Some were killed by bullets or slivers of wood. They hadn’t tipped over the enormous banquet table; it was too heavy. The table legs were as thick as trees and Gatling blew the face off a man who was trying to make himself small behind one of them. Smoke was so thick it was impossible to see, but Gatling kept on firing, long orange flashes jetting from the muzzle of the Skoda.
The ceiling was beginning to crack from the heat. “Stop firing, for God’s sake,” a hoarse voice pleaded. “We’ve had enough.” A violent fit of coughing followed. Then the same voice said, “The roof’s going to go, we’ll burn up. Don’t shoot. We’re coming out, all right?”
Gatling clicked a fresh magazine into the Skoda. “Throw the guns out first,” he yelled back. “I want to hear them hitting the floor. Quick now!”
They came out after the guns and Gatling moved in closer. Bodies were everywhere; the floor looked as if it had been raining blood. Five men were left and they were in bad shape. A man with a gaping chest wound managed to stay on his feet for about ten seconds before he fell down dead.
The others didn’t look at him. “Where’s Murrill?” Gatling said.
“He went downstairs, didn’t come back,” the man with the hoarse voice said. “That’s the truth. Look around if you like. He’s not here I’m telling you. Why should we protect the sneaky son of a bitch?”
“You found salvation too late,” Gatling said. They didn’t like the sound of that, but there was nothing they could do.
Standing apart from the others, a plump man in his forties began to beg for his life. Gatling raised the Skoda and cut down everybody but the plump man, who had his hands stretched out in front of him. He had jeweled cufflinks and stick pin, big rings on both hands.
Gatling prodded him downstairs and out into the garden. There was a crashing sound as the ceiling collapsed. The roof would be next to go. No more than eight or ten minutes since he blew down the gate, but he couldn’t give it much longer. Gun battles were commonplace in Tijuana—supporters of President Diaz were always shooting it out with those who opposed him—but the soldier-police did show up—eventually.
Without being asked, the plump man said he was Charlie Otis from Biloxi. He’d been in the legitimate liquor business until Murrill’s Italian thugs forced him to start handling moonshine. Now all he wanted was to get back to earning an honest dollar. “A fair profit is all I want,” he said. “It was a sad day for me when that man walked into my office.”
Gatling told him to shut up. “Where is he?” he asked.
“As God is my judge, I don’t know where he is. He was outside checking on the guards when the bombing and shooting started.” Otis raised his hand to wipe the sweat from his eyes. He stopped when Gatling rammed him in the gut with the muzzle of the gun. He licked his lips, wanting to say the things that might save his life.
“Keep talking,” Gatling ordered.
“The dogs were raising a racket and Murrill wanted to see what was causing it. He must have been in the garden when the first explosion happened. He must have gone out through the gate—the only way in or out, he said when Billo Mara asked if this was a safe place for a meeting.”
If Gatling had been a more emotional man, he would have cursed himself to hell and gone. He had come so close and yet the evil bastard had managed to slip away. A stinking, rotten, lousy break, but he would have to put up with it.
A good ways behind them, the house was a pillar of flame. Smoke mingled with the sweet smell of garden flowers.
“What does Murrill look like?” Gatling asked.
Otis seemed confused by the question, and Gatling had to slap him hard across the face to get him talking. Trembling with fright, he described Murrill much as Gomez had. Skinny build, under six feet, long sallow face, burning eyes, the rest of it.
“Tonight he had a black suit on, a black derby,” Otis said. “Yes, he talks with kind of a Creole accent, not heavy but definitely French Creole.”
“You wouldn’t be lying, would you?”
“No. No! I told you everything I know. You can’t kill me now.” Charlie Otis would have knelt if he dared.
The walls of the house were starting to fall in. Gatling gave Otis another slap for good measure. “You know where his headquarters are, Charlie? Think hard. Maybe it’ll come to you.”
Otis tried to reach out to touch Gatling and got another slap. “I swear I don’t know.” Gatling stepped back to avoid the frightened man’s spittle. Otis babbled on. “I’d tell you if I knew. He comes from Louisiana. Maybe that’s where his headquarters are. He called a meeting in Galveston when this thing first started. A big hotel, the Gulf coast. He acted like he owned it. Maybe he does.”
“Calm down, Charlie. No need to piss your pants.” Gatling decided to soften his approach, the way the police did when they had a suspect quaking in his boots.
“What I want to know is, where does Murrill spend most of his time? Make a guess if you don’t know.”
Otis responded to Gatling’s new, reasonable manner. Gatling wondered how this weakling ever got mixed up in a crime syndicate. It took all kinds. Good old Charlie might be a bully if he had gunmen to back him up.
“Think,” Gatling said.
Otis swallowed hard, thinking he had a chance. “When he isn’t traveling between his cities, I would say Louisiana. His cities, that’s what he calls them.”
Gatling asked, “How many cities were represented here tonight? Names, Charlie. Take your time.”
Otis said, “Jeff Bogardus, Savannah. Max Allard, Mobile. Steve Griswold, Metairie, Louisiana. Jiggs Flanagan, New Orleans. Phil Florio, New Orleans. J. B. Fullerton, Houston. You want all the names? There’s a lot more.”
“That’ll do for now,” Gatling said. He backed up and raised the Skoda and Otis screamed, “What’re you doing? Stop! You can’t do that! Oh Jesus, my poor children!” He turned to run away from the terrible weapon.
Gatling cut him down, retrieved the gun case from where he’d hidden it, and walked away. It was darker than it had been because all the lights on the street had gone out. The residents of Tijuana’s richest section lived by the same rule as the thugs and roughnecks of the Barbary Coast: “Never poke your nose in where it don’t belong.”
A trail of blood led away from the gate and he followed it. A sliver of iron from the gate or a ricochet had wounded Murrill. The man Gatling had followed from the Western Union office wasn’t among the dead. He must have gone downstairs with Murrill to see what was disturbing the dogs. It was obvious that Murrill was the one who was wounded. A man as vicious as Murrill would never help a wounded subordinate. Murrill would run.
Murrill wasn’t close to the gate or he would have been blown to bits. The blast had knocked him back into the shrubs, where he lay or crouched until it was safe to make for the gate, with the Black Hander helping him along. Now they were somewhere in Tijuana’s maze of crooked streets.
Gatling was two streets away from the house when he heard the police coming. He ducked into a recessed gate that opened into a garden as they swept by in a battered patrol wagon. The driver whipped the lathered horses and the man beside him rang the bell. Whoever owned the burning house must have been pretty important to make the brown-skinned gendarmes move that fast.
What was left of the house cast a glow into the night sky.
Gatling came to a whitewashed house with a bloody handprint on the wall. Murrill had rested there before moving on. No way to tell where Murrill was wounded, or how bad. Gatling guessed Murrill had a head wound, which would account for the way the bloodstains were spread out. Head wounds bled like faucets, though the wound itself didn’t have to be serious.
However he was hit, Murrill’s clothes were ruined; dirty as well as bloody. For the moment at least he was no longer the colorless businessman in his black suit and derby hat. His anonymity had been breached. Until he was patched up by a doctor, and got a change of clothes, he would be gawked at.
If the bloodstains petered out and vanished, something that could happen at any moment, Gatling knew he’d have to begin again. If he had to start over, then he’d grit his teeth and go to it. But the bloodstains went on ahead of him, and he followed along like a dog on the scent. Soon after that the bloodstains started to fade.
On a side street the bloodstains led him to a drugstore, or whatever it was, that stayed open all night. It sold lucky charms for unlucky gamblers, cures for limp dicks, magic potions guaranteed to drive women crazy. It sold liquid morphia for headaches, bleaches to lighten the skin, dye for the hair, corn plasters for ailing feet, solvents for kidney stones. Its principal business was probably steering American white women to abortionists.
The bloodstains went to the counter behind which a sick-faced Mexican who look like a darker Doc Holliday was adding up a column of figures. At the far end of the counter, behind a smeary glass screen, a boy was grinding something with a mortar and pestle. The store smelled of ginger and something else Gatling couldn’t identify. It might have been “blue butter” for lice.
Under the gaslights the Mexican’s wig was grotesque. Instead of the usual heavy mustache he wore a thin black mustache that ran across his upper lip in a straight line. He saw Gatling looking at the bloody handprint on the counter and covered it with the sheet of paper.
“Puede usted ayudarme?” Gatling asked. “Necesito un doctor.” Which translated as: Can you help me? I need a doctor.
The Mexican inclined his head. “I speak English, sir. You need a doctor? Are you sick or injured?”
“No, a friend of mine is,” Gatling said. “He was hurt in an explosion, but I didn’t arrive in time to help him. He is a stranger here and he may have come in to ask about a doctor. You must have considerable experience with doctors and medicine.”
Gatling waved his hand to include every bit of rubbish in the store. He knew the seedy druggist was pleased to be associated with the medical fraternity, even if Gatling was letting him in by the back door.
The druggist was weary-eyed, but he brightened up and straightened his rubber bowtie. “Once it was my ambition to become a great doctor. Unfortunately my father lost all his money in a business venture.”
Gatling sighed in sympathy. “Man proposes, God disposes.” The druggist was bullshitting him just as he was bullshitting the druggist. And they both knew it.
“Have you seen my friend?” Gatling asked. “I have a fee in mind. After all, you don’t stay open all night to make conversation.”
“Would twenty dollars be asking too much, sir?”
“Twenty dollars is exactly what I had in mind.” Gatling put a twenty on the counter and it disappeared. The druggist glanced at the boy still pounding away behind the screen. Then he lowered his voice. All this was being done for the drama of the thing.
“I sent your friend to Dr. Cortina. He was in great pain and needed a doctor. I gave him a little laudanum for the pain and bandaged his face as much as he would allow me to do so.”
“His face?”
“Didn’t they tell you?” the Mexican said slyly. “There was a great deal of blood from many wounds of various sizes. But he would not permit me to wash it off. In fact he became quite abusive after the laudanum stopped the pain. He would permit none but a qualified physician to treat him.”
“Is Dr. Cortina qualified?”
“By God, he’d better be! That sort of thing. Is he a great friend of yours?”
“Not so great.”
“I suppose the pain ... I was glad to see him gone from my store. There was something about him ...”
“Dr. Cortina?”
“He lives on North American Street. Calle Norteamericano. Number twenty-seven. A small white house. Mention my name, Nestor Tantos, if you choose.”
By now they were such good friends that they shook hands before Gatling left. Dr. Cortina lived two streets away. No more bloodstains on the street; the hastily wrapped bandage had stopped the bleeding for now. A tiny country Indian drunk, his sombrero over his face and chest, sat snoring on the rickety front steps. His hat was nearly as big as he was.
Gatling lifted the hat and saw a drunken Indian with ragged straw sandals. No lights burned in the house, but the front door wasn’t locked. Gatling went into darkness, struck a match, and touched it to the wick of a kerosene lamp standing on a bookcase. The windows were open and sandy dust crushed beneath his boots as he took the lamp into the office. The door had a tin OFICINA sign, but one of the screws had been lost and it hung down at an angle.
The doctor lay on his back on the floor, beside his desk. Quite old, he had a great bush of kinky gray hair; he might have been part Negro. A bullet had creased his scalp and there was caked blood, not dry yet, in the hair and on one side of his face and coat. He had been shot twice in the chest with large-caliber bullets. Air and pinkish froth bubbled out of the bullet holes as he breathed. His eyes were open.
“Have you come back to finish me?” he whispered in English.
Gatling wasn’t too surprised to find a doctor with a West Indian accent in Tijuana. Nothing there surprised anybody.
Gatling said he wasn’t there to do him any harm. “Do you want me to put you on the couch? Do you want a doctor?”
“No ... a drink of morphia and brandy ... bottles on the desk ... fill the glass ... more brandy than morphia ... the pain ...”
Gatling held the glass to the dying man’s lips and he drank greedily until the glass was empty. “Ah, yes,” he said as the drug pushed back the pain. Gatling got a cushion from the couch and put it under his head.
Dr. Cortina had a white man’s features and a black man’s skin. His voice became slightly stronger. “Fill another glass. I’ll tell you when I need it. I treated that man for his terrible wounds and when I completed the bandaging, his companion shot me. The Italian. Such a big pistol to kill one old man.” The doctor tried to laugh, a terrible sound. “But he was nervous and frightened and my hair fooled him when he shot me in the head. My beautiful hair. But how could he miss the chest, he was so close ...”
“The one with the face wounds ...” Gatling started to say.
“Oh yes, the face wounds. Very, very bad. Some sort of explosion. I removed fragments of rusted iron. I was afraid to ask how they got there. So sinister, that man. Were you the cause of his disfigurement?”
“I was,” Gatling said.
The doctor drank from the second glass of brandy and morphia. “I hope your next explosion blows his ugly head off. His body smells of hate instead of sweat.”
“Isn’t there anything I can do to help you, doctor?” Gatling felt he had to ask, but was glad when the doctor said no.
“I feel quite all right now,” the doctor said. “The good feeling will last long enough to see me off ...”
Gatling waited.
“After the Italian shot me I lay on the floor playing dead ... They were sitting on my couch drinking my brandy. The Italian was. The Italian said they should get back to New Orleans as soon as possible. He called the wounded man Mr. Murrill. The Italian was so nervous he still had his big gun folded inside the pillow. To muffle the sound of the shots. He said Murrill would be safe once they reached New Orleans ...”
Gatling waited.
“Murrill became very angry, accusing the Italian of insolence and disrespect. He said soon he would be one of the most powerful men in the United States and had no need of protection. No need of protection! You should have seen his face when the Italian brought him in ...”
“Where did they decide to go, doctor?” Gatling knew the old man had no more than a minute or two to live.
Closing his eyes, the doctor whispered, “Galveston ... Murrill said they would remain there until his face healed ... I’m sorry I can’t tell you any more ...”
“I think I know,” Gatling said.
Dr. Cortina smiled, shuddered, and died.