Seven

Nogales was a big straggling town where the boundary between Mexico and her northern neighbour ran down the middle of the street. Humorists liked to put one foot across the imaginary line of demarcation and observe that they’d been on a visit to the United States, and, while Americans crossed the border to eat cheaply, gamble and dance, the Mexicans hurried the other way to avoid the attentions of the police. The station was the usual ugly shed lined with wooden seats covered with the dust that blew in from the surrounding desert. Yaqui Indian women huddled inside, their children asleep on spread sarapes. At the Customs House a few ragged sentries were smoking.

It was late as the train arrived, and an army of newspapermen were collecting luggage under flaring lights when Slattery saw Magdalena Graf standing in the shadows. She was dressed in the blue that matched her eyes so well, the waist of the outfit high so that her figure seemed more elegant and slender than ever, in a way that roused in him a sharp sense of excitement.

‘What are you doing here?’

She gave him a long unfathomable stare, and gestured at a poster stuck on the wall of the customs shed.

La Verbena de la Paloma, it announced. Con Magdalena Graf y Hermann Stutzmann.

‘First Chief Carranza enjoys the theatre,’ she smiled. ‘And when we finished in Chihuahua Hermann decided to bring us here. He has a house here, for the same reason I have a house in Chihuahua. It’s easy to cross the border and there have been times when it’s been a good idea. I’m staying there.’

‘Have dinner with me, Magdalena.’

She hesitated only a moment. ‘Why not? The day after tomorrow the First Chief is holding a conference so there’s no performance.’

The only sizeable hotel was full of pressmen clamouring for accommodation. But most of Carranza’s cabinet and political hangers-on were already there, sleeping four to a room, on cots in the corridors, on the stairs, on the floor, under and on the billiard table.

Despite the hour, the newspapermen were still occupied in trying to acquire cars and, finding them not as plentiful as in the States, were settling for carriages, spiders, ancient buggies, even saddle horses. They were far from filled with admiration for the new American president, Woodrow Wilson, who was determined, they claimed, that Latin American countries should be shown how to run their affairs without murder. They didn’t give much for his chances.

Among the yelling crowd was a girl. She wore a stetson, breeches and a leather jacket and, seeing Slattery on his own, she took his arm.

‘Pretend you know me,’ she said quickly. ‘The little guy over there keeps pestering me.’

The man who followed her was small and wore a dark suit and a boater with a pink ribbon. He had a straggly moustache and a lot of gold teeth.

‘Scheele,’ he introduced himself. ‘Doctor Walter Scheele. I am German and I am here to sell the First Chief my secret weapon. Vill I show you?’

Slattery managed to brush him off and the girl smiled her thanks. ‘I’m representing Colliers magazine,’ she said. ‘I’m Consuela Lidgett. Consuela Doyle as was. I speak a bit of Spanish so they sent me to find out what Mexican women are doing. What are Mexican women doing?’

‘Keeping their heads down and praying, I imagine,’ Slattery said dryly.

She was small and delicate with an innocent expression, fair hair and lost-looking blue eyes that made the breeches and stetson seem out of place. She appeared to know little about news gathering and in the end she confessed.

‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I’m not from Colliers. I’m from the Gordonsboro Herald. Gordonsboro’s in Colorado. The editor’s my uncle and I persuaded him to send me. My husband’s here somewhere. Loyce Lidgett – Aloysius, that is. He’s a local boy so he’s news. I haven’t heard of him for some time and I thought I’d better go look.’ She managed a tired smile. ‘I decided that gettin’ myself made an official correspondent was the best way to do it. My uncle said he’d pay me. But it doesn’t amount to much and I’m not much of a hand at gettin’ news. You haven’t heard of Loyce, I suppose?’

‘I travelled to Chihuahua with him.’

‘He’d got a story?’

‘I don’t think it was a story he was after.’

She sighed. ‘I guess not. I heard he’d joined Villa’s foreign contingent. He could never resist being near a fight. Are you a newspaperman?’

As Slattery smiled, she looked up at him, a little awed by his size. ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘I can’t resist being near a fight either.’

 

Most of the correspondents weren’t very interested in Carranza. They were far more concerned with finding Villa, who was a much more colourful figure and of far greater interest to the newspaper-reading public. They had expected to find him with Carranza and, since all Carranza appeared to do was talk, they were having to fall back on stories about Huerta. There were plenty. He seemed to do the business of government in the oddest places about the capital so that foreign envoys had to scour saloons, cafés and parks for him. He preferred tea rooms and bars to offices, and did what little business he chose to do sitting with a secretary in a motor car.

To look after the noisy crowd of correspondents was a member of Carranza’s staff who said they should see the First Chief at once, despite the hour. Slattery joined the crowd as they set about finding a man who would take them to headquarters. But everyone had gone to sleep and the proprietor of the hotel, dragged from the chair where he was dozing because he had given his bed to someone else, didn’t know where anyone was. They kicked on doors and woke sleeping figures, most of whom turned out to be Carranza’s pro tem cabinet officials.

Eventually they found a man who agreed to take them to the office of the First Chief, which was in a large house where sentries in huge hats presented arms as they entered.

‘The First Chief’s very busy,’ they were told. ‘There are two thousand Federals and Orozquistas at Torreón, and we must have Torreón before we can advance on Mexico City. Questions will have to be put in writing to be answered tomorrow.’

Returning to the hotel, Slattery noticed Consuela Lidgett sleeping in an armchair. With the aid of a large denomination note, he persuaded the night clerk to find a cot for her.

Atty turned up with the Studebaker at first light and at breakfast a message arrived that the press interview with Carranza would be held in the evening. When the pressmen presented themselves once more, they found headquarters crammed with people carrying portfolios and bundles of papers; Americans seeking concessions; arms smugglers; ammunition salesmen dishing out praise for their wares, among them a man offering crayon enlargements from photographs at five pesos each; and once again Dr Scheele, trying to hawk his secret weapon. The feeling of watching a comic opera was remarkably strong.

Waiting in the anteroom was a large group of men who were clearly Europeans. They were straight-backed, with high starched collars and upswept moustaches, and once again Slattery was reminded of the words he’d heard in the office in Whitehall. Mexico seemed to be knee-deep in Germans, and the background of these men seemed to shout itself out loud.

A door opened and the military-looking men were beckoned forward. The man who beckoned them was Magdalena Graf’s brother, Fausto.

‘Who are those guys?’ one of the newspapermen asked. ‘They aren’t Mexes and they sure aren’t Americans.’

When Carranza finally condescended to see the newspapermen, he was accompanied by a whole host of hangers-on. He remained standing, surrounded by the pressmen, shaking hands and peering at them through the blue-tinted spectacles he wore, a big man with a big belly and a big nose. As the room filled with smoke from the photographers’ flash guns, the questions began. The American correspondents allowed nothing to slip past. They had a good grasp of the situation and had already spotted things that needed explanation.

‘Why is your government here in Nogales, First Chief,’ the New York Times man asked, ‘when all the action is over in Chihuahua?’

‘We direct operations from Nogales,’ Carranza said stiffly.

Another man lifted his hand. ‘I’m George Wiley, of the Post, First Chief,’ he said. ‘My editor says you’re doing nothing here but hibernate. Wouldn’t it be better to go over there and help?’

Carranza clearly didn’t like the way the interview was going and he began to talk to stop the barrage of questions. There were few interruptions. Just Carranza’s views. Stubborn and dogmatic, he was undoubtedly knowledgeable but was lacking in any spark of personality.

They were introduced to a man called Obregón, a smiling moustached farmer from Sonora who had become Carranza’s general in the west, and more photographs were taken. All the time the group of Germans round Fausto Graf watched in silence, standing in one of the corners out of the light, their backs to the room, showing their faces only when they turned to glance at a newspaperman asking a question. With them now was a new man, young, vaguely effeminate and ginger-haired, looking like one of them but somehow apart. He was speaking German but his accent was different.

Finally, with an expansive gesture, Carranza invited everybody to join him at dinner and the theatre. Someone handed him a wide-brimmed, light-coloured felt hat so that, with his quasi-military dress, he looked like a Confederate general left over from the American Civil War, and there was a clatter of arms and equipment as the guard of honour came to untidy attention. In the street a band started to play and, surrounded by his retinue, all jostling to hold a place near to him, Carranza began to march in step to a lively version of ‘La Paloma’. Other men joined the procession, officers in uniform and civilians in evening dress. Among them was Fausto Graf, with a girl who looked no more than seventeen on his arm.

Atty Purkiss stared after them all, his face blank and cynical. ‘Mucho Pomposo heads for the munchies,’ he said. ‘That’s not a leader, me dear. It’s a walking monument.’

 

More intrigued by Magdalena Graf than he cared to admit, Slattery found his way to the theatre and sat quietly at the back of the pit stalls in an atmosphere of peeling gilt and dusty red plush.

The operetta was a tuneful piece set in the French Revolution, many of its lines adapted to what was happening in Mexico, and Magdalena’s rich pure soprano seemed too good for the lightweight part she was singing. With her blue eyes she stood out from her dark-eyed, dark-skinned fellow-performers. Her opposite number, Stutzmann, had a soft-looking body, a face that radiated good humour, and an ability to reach a wavering high C.

There were several smartly-dressed young men holding roses standing near the bar and when the show finished there was a rush for the stage door. Pushing his way past, Slattery lifted the doorman off his feet and, placing him behind him, dropped coins in his hand.

‘The Diva’s expecting me,’ he said. ‘Hold that lot off!’

Magdalena’s face lit up at the sight of him but she was nervous and worried.

‘Not tonight,’ she said, speaking breathlessly as she pleaded with him to understand. ‘Tonight there is so much to do. The orchestra was terrible. We have to sort it out and it will take until midnight. Tomorrow, though, I promise. I’ll be in the lounge of your hotel.’

As the theatre emptied, Nogales quietened quickly. Slattery had managed to bribe his way into a small room hardly bigger than a cupboard, which he was sharing with Atty Purkiss, and he had just fallen asleep when he was awakened by bells. Atty sat bolt upright.

‘Hotel’s on fire, me dear,’ he said placidly.

Half-dressed, they headed into the street. People were appearing from all directions, shouting and pointing. The fire was not in the hotel but in a small warehouse nearby where a few old saddles had been stored. One end was well alight and the fire brigade was struggling to get water to it. Their hose consisted of ill-fitting lengths, all of them punctured so that jets were hissing in all directions. Wearing brass helmets as big as hip baths, the firemen were shouting frantically at each other when suddenly the water pressure disappeared. As the taut pipes became limp and the miniature fountains sagged, the men holding the solitary nozzle stared at it in bewilderment.

Someone went off to have the pressure restored. As it returned, one of the firemen had his finger down the nozzle, trying to make out if it were blocked. The jet hit him full in the face and knocked him flat on his back while the hosepipe leapt free, to writhe like a wounded snake and saturate everybody within reach. By the time they had everything under control the end of the shed had fallen in.

Watching the uproar near Atty was the little German who had introduced himself as Dr Scheele. He was smiling and rubbing his hands. There was a girl with him. Atty gestured at him.

‘This feller here,’ he pointed out, ‘says he started it.’