THE SITUATION SHOULD have been simple. Like most situations in life, it was not. Like most situations in war.
The Federal troops were holding the town of Ojinaga, which was on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, or as the Mexicans themselves called it, the Rio Bravo del Norte. The garrison had been expecting Villa’s forces to attack for weeks now; Villa himself had been expecting to attack for weeks.
Ammunition had been a problem. Arms had been a problem. Once those things had been overcome, Villa had waited to hear from Obregon how soon he would be ready to send a detachment of men to catch Ojinaga in a pincer movement and so squeeze every last federale out to his death.
Eventually the answer from Obregon had arrived: his commitment to the drive to reach Mexico City was complete; there would be no detachment coming to Villa’s aid.
So while this dragged on, the Federal forces sought for ways in which to strengthen their depleted supplies and their low numbers. They sent men over the river into the American town of Presidio to bargain for arms and ammunition, for food and medical supplies.
Villa knew this and he sent his gringos across the Rio Grande also. In the past he had dispatched them to deal on the black market for his own needs; now he was sending them to prevent his enemies from doing the same thing. The boot was on the other foot but it was not yet kicking.
‘More coffee?’
Cade Onslow looked up at Jonas and shook his head.
‘Yates?’
‘Sure.’
The negro poured the luke-warm black coffee into the southerner’s cup, not unaware of the patterns he was repeating. Nor was McCloud, a grin forming on a face that had been handsome before it became lined and showed too many hints of debauchery. Tiny red veins were beginning to spread from McCloud’s nose, his cheeks were reddening beneath their tan, the flesh becoming loose. A second chin was falling beneath the first. Yellow was starting to cloud his sometimes bloodshot eyes. Back in Mazatlan McCloud had nearly lost it altogether: his nerve had been all but shot. If Jamie Durham had not arrived when he did, McCloud would have been shot too. Under threat, drunk, McCloud had not even drawn his gun.
Since then things had been better, but not a great deal. Onslow had spelled out to McCloud in no uncertain terms what would happen if his drinking and his whoring didn’t slacken off. The two men had no liking for one another, but Onslow was not the sort of man it was easy to disobey. His years in the United States army had left him with an authority which commanded respect and almost automatic obedience.
Jonas Strong had been his top sergeant and he had quit the army when his major did and had served him as faithfully ever since as if they were still in uniform.
McCloud didn’t feel the same way, but he knuckled under to Onslow’s orders as best as he could. He didn’t see that there were a great many alternatives. For one thing—the most important thing—there was no way in which he could ever, legally, go back to the United States. There was a matter of an eighteen-year-old girl who had lived in Galveston. A girl called Venetta Chance. Who had lived and died in Galveston.
If he couldn’t go back then there was only Mexico—and to survive in that blood-torn land he needed the other gringos. He would never have admitted it aloud—hated to admit it to himself, but it was true. Onslow and Jamie Durham, even Jonas Strong, they had all pulled him out of too many tight situations for McCloud to be able to fool himself he would have survived on his own.
No, he needed them and as long as they thought they needed him, then he was sticking where he was.
He tasted the coffee and grimaced at its taste and coldness.
‘How ’bout Kennedy?’ he asked Onslow.
Onslow didn’t know; he said so. The arms dealer might accept his escape as good fortune and leave it at that. He might try to keep out of the gringos’ way and continue his business unscathed. Or he might not.
Onslow knew that Kennedy had money and that money buys powerful friends. It also buys people to use the guns that Kennedy had so many of.
‘Reckon he’ll get back at us?’
‘Could be.’
McCloud set down his cup; pushed away his breakfast plate. ‘We goin’ to wait an’ see?’
Onslow hesitated a moment before shaking his head. In him, even that gesture was a disciplined movement. ‘No. We’ll finish up here, collect Jamie and be pulling out.’
‘Where the Hell is the Kid, anyhow?’
‘He had a woman to see,’ Onslow answered.
‘Huh! You mean he had some dope to shoot up into his Goddamn arm!’
Onslow shrugged and turned his head towards Strong. He knew that what McCloud had said was almost certainly right. Jamie’s addiction was something that Onslow understood and did not condone; he put up with it, as he put up with McCloud’s drinking, because as long as the habits were kept under some control both men were useful to him. He couldn’t trust them as much as he did Strong, but he doubted if there would ever be another man he could trust as much as the big negro.
‘You sure go easy on him,’ said McCloud, needling Onslow. ‘You sure let him have as much rope to hang himself as that fool Kid needs.’
Onslow pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘Forget it, Yates. What’s between Jamie and me is our business. What’s between me and you, that’s for us and no one else.’ He stared into the southerner’s flaccid face. ‘So long as you know where you stand—and when you stand you don’t fall flat on your face for want of someone holdin’ you up.’
McCloud flushed and for the merest of moments, his hand strayed in the direction of the shoulder holster he wore under the gray jacket of his suit. But only for a moment.
Enough for Onslow’s own hand to edge towards his Colt automatic, covering the man’s move; enough for Jonas Strong to lean towards the butt of the Browning pump-action shotgun.
McCloud licked his lips and let his hand fall back to his lap.
‘Shall we move?’ said Onslow, the tone of his voice allowing no response other than yes.
Strong and McCloud stood away from the table. All three men went towards the eating house door.
The door opened fast and a man fell, or stumbled through it. He pitched against the frame, tried to regain his balance, staggered a little until the door bounced back and hit him on the left elbow. The man groaned, grabbed for the elbow, missed it and dropped to his knees.
He let out a shout and when he looked up there were three guns covering him.
‘My God!’
The man rocked backwards till he was squatting on his heels, both arms thrust up and wrapped across his face.
‘Jonas, check the street.’
Strong went past the man and stepped through the door fast, looking this way and that. It was still early and there were few folk about, a couple of riders drifting past opposite, a man and a woman talking further down, little else.
He swung his head back in, remaining in the doorway. ‘Clear.’
Onslow went forward, holstering the Colt automatic as he did so. He pulled the man’s arms from around his face and underneath, the face was chalk white. The man was shivering and it wasn’t with the cold.
‘Someone chasin’ you?’
The head shook from side to side quickly, eyes finding Onslow’s then sliding away.
‘You been beaten up?’
Another hasty shake of the head.
‘Drunk?’
The head shook once more.
‘What the Hell’s wrong then?’
‘No ... nothin’.’
‘You mean that’s the way you always come through doors?’
The man shook his head so hard he risked ricking his neck.
‘What then?’ put in McCloud, impatient.
‘I sort of, I guess, tripped over something as I was opening the door and after that I ... Oh, my God! ... after that there were all these guns pointing at me and I thought ... I thought ...’
Onslow signaled to McCloud to put up his gun.
‘You thought you were going to get shot, huh?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Come into places that way, you’ll likely be right.’
Onslow bent down and hauled the man to his feet. He could feel through the rough wool of the man’s jacket that he was still shaking.
‘Sit down,’ he said, giving him a light push in the direction of one of the tables. ‘Have some coffee, you’ll get over it.’
Onslow and McCloud went for the door.
‘Wait.’ The voice squeaked a little at the end of the word, but it was urgent enough.
‘What now?’
‘Are you the men who know Pancho Villa?’
Hands returned to gun butts fast.
‘What sort of question is that?’ asked McCloud.
The man blinked, eyes gray and nervous in a round, white face. His Adam’s apple pushed out above his collar at a sharp angle. A small scrap of paper had been stuck to the left side of his jaw where he’d cut himself shaving. The wool coat was made in a pattern of small white and black checks and the shirt underneath it was a pinky-red with a cream-colored neck-tie. His pants were light gray cotton. He wore a gray and cream hat that was more like a cap, round and loose on top with a deep peak at the front.
He looked as inconspicuous as a bottle of French champagne at a Mexican bandit’s wedding breakfast, as a Belgian lace garter round a Dallas whore’s leg.
‘I was told ...’ His tongue flickered out, pinky-white and lizard-like, and licked his thin, pale lips. ‘... there were three men in here who knew Villa. Were close to him. Real ...’ The voice drained away to a gurgle of nothing.
Onslow said to Strong over his shoulder. ‘Shut the door.’
He went back close to where the man was standing, his hands gripping the back of a chair for support but the legs of the chair were rattling against the floor boards.
‘What in Hell’s name d’you want with Villa?’
The man gulped a mouthful of air as though it might be his last. ‘I want you to take me to him.’
Harry Johnson had seen his first moving picture in 1897 at Thomas Tally’s Phonograph Parlor in South Spring Street, Los Angeles. He was seventeen years old and it cost him five cents to watch a Vitascope film of the fight between James J. Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons. Harry Johnson was the one who was knocked out.
He got himself a job as relief projectionist in Los Angeles and later in Chicago, where he showed short travel films and advertising films on beer and the Central Pacific Railroad.
It wasn’t enough.
Johnson rode a boxcar to the outskirts of New York and walked until he found the offices of the Edison Studios. For three weeks he badgered at men walking in and out until he was given a job humping scenery around the rooftop studio sets. He hauled painted backdrops up innumerable flights of stairs and then dragged them down again and back to the local vaudeville house from which they had been borrowed. He stood around during filming with a carpet-beater tied to the top of a pole and waved it into the path of any stray pigeon that threatened to fly into any scene in which the presence of a pigeon would have been inappropriate.
He climbed scaffolding and shifted heavy lights.
He begged and borrowed and sometimes stole clothing for costumes from the sweatshops of the East Side.
He backed into D. W. Griffith during a tea break and knocked the director’s cup over in his saucer, the tea splashing down Griffith’s tailored pants and across his patent shoes.
He hand-tinted copies of Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery.
In the barn dance scene where one woman wears a yellow dress, bouncing and jigging around the frame, that yellow was painted in by Harry Johnson.
When a group of riders gallop between lines of trees, riding at the camera, firing pistols, those puffs and spurts of orange-red flame—they were hand-painted by Harry Johnson, frame after loving, laborious frame.
When the Patents Trust tried to drive the independents from New York and Philadelphia, tried to drive them out of the industry altogether—using law suits and sheriffs, high-court injunctions and eventually men with guns in their side pockets who weren’t frightened to use them—Edison sent Harry Johnson back to Los Angeles to spy out the opposition. Stopping only at a few dozen nickelodeons on the way, Johnson found the opposition and joined it.
He told a few lies about what exactly he’d done in New York and they made him assistant cameraman.
He showed an aptitude for working twenty-seven hours a day and eight days a week and they made him a cameraman.
He went to bed with the wrong producer’s girl and they made him a tea boy, a messenger boy; they said to him, get the Hell down to the Mexican border and set up a meeting with this bandit, Villa. The border was the last place Harry Johnson wanted to go. For one thing he didn’t like tequila, for another tortillas made him retch and for a third it was a good hundred miles away from anything that resembled a movie studio. But he did want to squirm his way back into the company’s good books—anything to get his hands on a camera again. He finally got a deal: if he paved the way for a couple of the company high-ups to talk with Villa, and if that talk came out successfully, then he got to go back as assistant cameraman.
Harry Johnson knew there was no way he could refuse—how else could he make it to the top in his chosen profession? How else was he to become a director?
It took him three weeks, two days to get a lead on the gringos. He paid through the nose for information and much of it was useless. He expected that. Bargained on it. He drank tequila and was sick; ate tortillas and was worse. He met a woman called DeWinter who had once acted on Broadway and got the kind of notices that only came once in a lifetime. She played tragedy and melodrama as if they’d only been invented the play before yesterday. Then when Edison was trying to tempt her into the movies in a two-reel version of The Lady of the Camelias, she married a banker and stockbroker who was related to the English royal family or the German royal family or was it all the same one? When she’d been a child herself and living in London, their nannies had met and swapped stories while doing their knitting in Kensington Park. In a sense they were made for each other.
A scandal that held the front pages for at least a week wrecked the marriage and Marianne DeWinter’s solicitors got her a good settlement on the condition she was never seen in New York or Washington or anywhere civilized people might meet.
She went to Presidio.
She met Harry Johnson late one night or early one morning when she’d been losing too much money at blackjack and drinking too much white wine and felt maudlin enough to reminisce about the days she’d been the most promising dramatic actress in the American theatre.
Harry could recite her reviews word by word.
She loved him: that night she bathed in the afterglow of her fame and she loved him.
She wanted to show her love for him so much that she considered sweeping him off to her white satin sheets, but in a moment of unsteady sobriety she knew that would be a failure.
She could have given him money.
She could have given him sweet cocaine.
She was a sensible, if drunken lady: she asked Harry Johnson what he wanted most in the world.
He told her.
Which was how he found out that there were four Americans who were in town doing some kind of shady business—she didn’t know what and she certainly had no intention of asking—and she was pretty sure she knew where three of them would be around breakfast time.
Harry Johnson, who had been afraid she was going to take him to bed and dreaded it—not because she wasn’t beautiful, but because of what had happened after he’d taken the producer’s girlfriend for a little nocturnal meandering—was so relieved when she gave him the information, he could have broken down and wept.
‘Villa ain’t goin’ to thank us for this, you know.’
Yates McCloud stood alongside his horse, waiting for the ferry to arrive back at the northern bank of the river.
‘He may,’ answered Onslow, scraping a layer of mud from between the sole and heel of his scuffed leather boot. ‘It depends how much money it means to him.’
McCloud snorted. ‘A feller like that, who can’t even walk through a door without falling over, who’s afraid of his own shadow—what sort of money is he going to have?’
Onslow shook his head, threw away a stickful of mud, readjusted his position and began to clean the underside of the other boot. ‘He’s just the messenger. He’s not the one with the power to offer money. He’s just going to sound Villa out. The ones with the money will come later.’
McCloud didn’t look convinced. ‘And what are they going to pay him for? Acting in one of these nickelodeon dramas?’
‘I don’t know. They must want him for something.’
‘Huh!’ McCloud turned away and cursed the ferry for being so damned slow.
‘You seen one of them nickelodeons, major?’ asked Strong.
‘Yeah. A few times. Some of it was pretty amazing. Soldiers fighting somewhere in Europe. The Balkans, I think it was.’
Strong shook his head: ‘I never saw one.’
‘Had one close to where we was stationed once,’ Onslow said.
Jonas Strong grinned. ‘Sure thing, major, but they didn’t allow no blacks inside. Not even if they was in uniform.’
Jamie Durham looked up and laughed, a strange laugh, almost a giggle.
Strong shot him a glance that shut him up.
The ferry was less than fifteen feet away from the shore.
A group of riders, four or five of them, came cantering in from the direction of the town, looking to travel south across the water and the border.
Onslow and the others turned their heads, but gave the men no special attention.
The ferryman’s shrill, off-key whistle was loud enough now to jar on every nerve. The water splashed up onto the river bank as the rope was hauled through the final feet. Harry Johnson, not as used to watching men on horseback as the gringos, was still watching the approaching riders, their canter continuing—only now their leader was beginning to turn his mount broadside on.
‘Hey!’ Harry yelled, stumbling backwards as he tried to attract Onslow’s attention. ‘Hey, look there!’
He banged into McCloud instead and McCloud pushed him off angrily and Johnson cannoned from one horse’s rump into another.
‘Hey!’ He shouted as he went down on one knee. ‘Hey, they’ve got guns!’
Onslow heard him all right, heard and swung his head, body already ducking, hand diving inside his vest for the Mauser automatic in its wooden holster.
Jonas Strong was the next to react, seconds later, throwing himself well to the right, clawing the Colt .45 from his side as he split the air.
A volley of shots came from the mounted men; a man screamed with sudden pain; one of the horses bucked and reared as blood plashed down its pinto flank.
Cade Onslow had cocked the hammer for the first shot and sent it a foot in front of the leading rider. The spent shell ejected into the air before him and the remainder of the magazine splayed the attackers. Strong rested his left elbow on the ground, gripped his right wrist with his fingers, aimed at the last man and dropped him from the saddle.
A horse behind Jamie Durham shied and sent him sprawling, the Colt Thunderer jarring from his hand, unused.
McCloud dodged backwards, slowest to react. His first instinct was one of self-preservation, wheeling behind his mount and then reaching for the pistol in the shoulder rig, ducking low as bullets sought him out. He flattened himself in the mud and dirt and angled up the Colt Lightning towards the group of riders.
He was too late: superfluous.
Onslow and Strong had accounted for them already. Three to the major, the other to Jonas. Only one of them was still alive and that soon to be a matter for conjecture. One man lay on his back, eyes staring sightlessly up into the clearest of skies, his face was stubbled yet untouched and showed no pain. Not even distress. One of the 7.63mm slugs had driven across his ribs, causing no more than a deep graze which tore his plaid shirt and lanced a red groove through his tanned skin.
The force of it had twisted him in the saddle so that the second bullet had taken him low in the back, several inches left of the spinal column. It had deflected upwards and burst out through the center of his chest, flowering through the space left by the rib cage, a neat symmetrical burst of tissue and blood.
His face still didn’t look dead.
That of the rider who’d been struck by the major’s automatic fire next looked very dead indeed. Three shots had spun him from the back of his mount, stitching him from upper thigh to side to neck, strands of blood linking one to the other in a seamless chain.
Jonas Strong had taken his time: he had only fired a single shot.
Enough.
He had shot the man immediately below the line of his hat brim, an inch in front of the ear.
The rider still alive had his left boot trapped inside his stirrup and was lying on his back and shoulders, writhing this way and that where the chestnut mare stood, some fifty yards away up the sloping ground that led down to the river.
Jamie Durham mounted up and trotted out towards him.
He had one bullet still in his right arm, trapped in the fat above the bone; another had smashed through him, crumbling his left side in a bloody welter that seemed to have sucked his shirt and vest into it. He was half-yelling, half-crying, tears splashed across his jowled face.
Jamie freed his foot from the stirrup and the chestnut immediately shied round and cantered away.
The man blinked at Jamie and saw the mask covering half his face and for an instant he wondered if he were, in fact, already dead.
Jamie convinced him that he wasn’t with a well-placed kick into his left hip.
There was something he wanted to know and only this man now could tell him; it was perfectly reasonable—he wanted to know who had paid four men to ride in and try to shoot down himself and his friends.
A perfectly reasonable request.
The wounded man didn’t seem to agree—not at first.
Jamie knelt alongside him and did his best to convince him otherwise.
The man was frightened to say too much: if he told Jamie what he wanted to know then he’d get killed for it.
Jamie explained to him that he wasn’t thinking logically. After all, he was going to die anyway and soon. All he had to do was say a name.
The man seemed to agree, his eyes seemed to agree, though his mouth still didn’t open. Jamie hurried him along a little. There was a shrill scream, and for a few moments Jamie feared he might have overdone things, but then the mouth opened and apart from a sliver of surprisingly bright blood, the name slid out.
Satisfied, Jamie stood up and went over to his horse. Not quite there, he turned around and walked back, drew his pistol and put a bullet through the wounded man’s brain. There were days when Jamie Durham was a very considerate person indeed.
‘Kennedy?’ asked Onslow as the Kid rode back.
Jamie nodded: ‘Kennedy.’
Onslow’s face was grim. ‘Before very long we’re going to have to make another ride into Presidio.’
‘And finish Mister Kennedy?’
Onslow nodded. ‘No doubt about it.’
One of the other people waiting for the ferry had been injured in the attack, a flesh wound in the arm which caused him a great deal of shock, not a little pain, but little more. One of the horses had been badly shot up and had had to be killed.
Otherwise there were no casualties except to the attackers.
And to Harry Johnson’s blood pressure.
It had taken McCloud several minutes to prise Johnson’s arms from around his head and to get him up to his feet. His face was still flushed and his pulse was racing.
When he tried to speak all that happened was that his teeth chattered together in an irregular tattoo.
‘You okay?’ asked Strong, when they were at the midpoint in the river crossing.
Harry Johnson leaned back from the side of the ferry and he was still swaying. ‘Does this sort of thing happen often?’
A broad smile lit up Strong’s face. ‘From time to time.’
Johnson nodded and his eyelids flickered, vomit rose to the back of his throat. His mind ran back to those hand-tinted scenes from The Great Train Robbery. They hadn’t simply been exciting, they had been beautiful, too. Beautiful hand-painted flowers of pinky-orange flame. He had not been called upon to color in the blood: nor yet the pain.