MARIANNE DEWINTER LOOKED appraisingly at her reflection in the mirror. She was not, she thought, looking precisely at her best. Which made her one degree short of perfection. Marianne pouted briefly into the glass. She did not approve of allowing her standards of personal appearance to slip. No matter where she might be and whoever she might be with. Politicians or rebels or bandits, staterooms, hotel rooms or a tent blown by the wind and pegged into a field of thickest mud. It was always her prime concern that she look perfect.
One of her elegant hands pushed at the chignon of silver hair: perfect.
She always supposed it had something to do with having been an actress. Something: everything. All those evenings when she would sit in her dressing room in New York or Chicago, her maid fussing with her change of clothes while all she could see was her own face in the brightly lit oval mirror.
Never a crack, never a flaw.
It had been the same when she had begun to make moving pictures. Performing in front of flimsy sets constructed below and hoisted up to the rooftop studios, she had nevertheless insisted on just as much care and preparation as if she’d been on Broadway. Marianne turned away from the mirror, touching her cheek with her fingers in a gesture which was intended to denote thought and sorrow mixed in more or less equal quantities. Had there been an audience other than the mirror its heart would have been stirred and its hands moved to applause.
All of that, Marianne was thinking, has gone.
After the divorce, the wretched scandal, doors closed in her face everywhere, in every civilized city in Europe and America. Her chance to play the Lady of the Camelias for Edison dashed; her banker-husband sending her off into the wilderness with ample funds and an instruction never to appear in his sight.
Never to appear!
What a command to give an actress, how could she agree? How could she refuse? She had come further and further south, Mexico had seemed somehow romantic and lost and there had been an attraction she felt hard to resist. So she had stepped into the midst of a war and somehow the bullets had gone off at a tangent away from her as if there was something remaining from her star quality that gave her protection. Then she had met Hiram Bender and they had come to an agreement, a long-term plan which might never reach fruition. She had met Jamie Durham with his beautiful ruined face and his thirst for morphine and his beautiful young body. She had met the bandit leader Pancho Villa, with ample stomach and heavy mustache and a lust that seemed to be inspired by battle.
And now, very soon, she was to meet Bender again.
Marianne glanced at her watch, slim and elegant on her elegant and slim wrist. She made a last-minute adjustment to the collar of her blouse and brushed an imaginary thread from the pleats of her white skirt. She was walking towards the window when she heard the engine of the long, black Packard drawing up outside. There, through the tattered lace of the curtains of this fifth-rate hotel in Durango, the former movie star watched as the one-time cipher clerk of the American Embassy in Mexico City climbed from the rear seat, settled his broad-brimmed white hat on his head and walked across the sidewalk towards the hotel entrance.
Marianne felt a slight quickening of her pulse—not for Hiram Bender, who in most respects she found quite odious, but for what he represented. Intrigue. Deception. She loved it, fed off it. The opportunity to act and this time with higher stakes than ever before. This was no try-out for Broadway; she was not reading lines for someone else’s play, not using someone else’s words at all. This was her part, her words and actions designed to suit the moment as it came. She was not playing merely for applause and a good review in the daily newspaper. She was acting for history, the chance to affect the lives of populations, countries, the United States of America. She would wield more power than her husband ever did, despite his banks and his stocks and shares and his offices in New York and Boston and Berlin.
She was about to be the greatest star in one of the biggest dramas anyone had been given to act. She listened for Hiram Bender’s footsteps on the threadbare carpet outside and turned towards the door, one hand to her bodice, the other by her side, the fingers slightly curled; she set her head a little to one side, expectantly: she knew that at that moment she was the most beautiful woman in the world.
Bender had agreed to the meeting with Marianne DeWinter through necessity and nothing more. It was unavoidable, if she was to continue to offer him information about both Pancho Villa and those damned Gringos who had been a thorn in his side for so long. Four thorns. But still there was much about the meeting he didn’t like. More than anything else, it was becoming increasingly clear to him that DeWinter was losing her grip on reality. She was no longer certain where real life ended and fantasy began; she could not distinguish between the times when she was acting and those when she was herself. Indeed, Bender thought there was very little real self remaining. She occupied a world in which she was a star, in which her beauty dominated everything else and made her invincible. Well, so far, that might have been true, but in a bloody revolution such as this one not a single person could consider themselves immune and no beauty was so powerful that it could hold at bay a shell from a machine gun or a mortar that sailed arching through the clear, hot sky.
He hesitated outside the door, imagining her pose that was waiting to greet him. Regretting it, but knowing that he had to use her as he would use anything and anyone he could to achieve his end—to bring the United States into the war before it was too late and prevent the revolution from succeeding. Nothing else mattered. Certainly not the feelings of a washed-up actress whose glories were beginning to fade and who was presently the mistress of the grossest rebel leader of all.
He knocked politely on the hotel door and then went in.
It was half an hour before Bender got down to business; he had listened to Marianne and pandered to her sense of self-importance, praised her beauty with his eyes and with words. Now was the time.
He asked her questions about Villa’s progress and was pleased to hear that the movement down towards Mexico City was still being slowed up by the refusal of Villa’s so-called allies to provide him with adequate transport. He relished the news that supplies were running low and ammunition for the heavier weapons was difficult to obtain. Some of Villa’s men were finding the slow progress difficult to handle and had begun to drift away, either heading back north to their homes or joining the already growing numbers of bandits living in the hills.
Bender poured two more glasses of brandy and sat alongside Marianne on the settee; his thin, white fingers stroked the white, slim flesh of her arm.
‘And the Gringos?’ he said.
She smiled and glanced at his hand, but did nothing to remove it. ‘One.’
‘What do you mean, one?’
‘One of these Gringos of yours remains.’
Bender’s hand stopped moving; the fingers squeezed into the bone. Marianne pulled away and there were small red marks on the skin; she stared at them as though they only distantly related to herself, as though they were perhaps some besmirching of her body make-up that would quickly be powdered away before the next scene was shot.
‘Which one lives?’
‘Jamie is at the camp.’
‘The youngest.’
‘The drug addict.’
Bender drank some of his brandy, enjoying the warmth of the taste and the slight bite at the back of his throat. He had started once more to stroke Marianne DeWinter’s arm, he looked at the elegance of her neck and the silver sheen of her hair and he realized somewhere at the back of his mind that her beauty was still capable of taking him in.
But why not let it if there were something to celebrate?
‘Who killed them?’
Marianne leaned back against the worn and stained upholstery as though she were enjoying the comfort of the most beautifully appointed suite in New York or Mexico City—which, in her mind, she probably was.
‘Who killed them?’ Bender repeated, touching the silky hair.
‘Killed who?’ she asked, her voice hazy, husky.
‘The other three.’
‘The Gringos?’
‘Who else?’ Bender’s voice rose in anger, despite his intentions.
‘But who said they were dead?’
He whipped his hand away, sat back from her and stared. The remainder of the brandy quivered inside its glass. His eyes were fierce and staring.
‘Don’t play games with me,’ he warned. ‘I am not a man to ...’
She moved a hand towards him like a wand. ‘I am not playing games. I said nothing about them being dead.’
‘You said ...’
‘That there was only Jamie Durham left at Villa’s camp.’
Bender stood up hastily, anger riding strong within him. He looked down at the beautiful, slowly aging actress and it was all that he could do to keep himself from throwing the contents of the glass into her face. From striking her, trying to drive that meaningless, blank and lovely expression away and replace it with something that knew the meaning of pain. Bender’s hands shook behind his back. He knew what it was like to be on the receiving end of pain. His mind flashed back to an occasion some time ago not long after he and Marianne had met—a hotel room not unlike this one, a woman naked and on her knees beside the bed, Marianne wielding the thin cane he had given her, himself sitting, watching ...
Sweat ran through the sides of his hair and dampened the palms of his hands.
‘Where are they?’ he almost shouted, bringing himself back sharply from that particular fantasy to the reality of the sordid Durango hotel.
‘One of them. McCloud. He had a fight with the others. They were always fighting. McCloud drank too much, spent his time with Villa’s whores. The leader of The Gringos, the Major, he told McCloud to get out. Said that if he saw him again he would kill him. In the night McCloud stole some of Villa’s rifles and a couple of horses. Nothing has been seen from him since.’
‘And where does Villa believe the man to have gone?’
‘He said perhaps to the hills, perhaps to a man called ...’ The name froze on the end of Marianne’s tongue and her head slowly inclined round, as if she were waiting for a prompt from the wings.
It came from Bender instead. ‘You mean Gomez?’
‘Yes,’ she agreed, relieved. ‘Christo Gomez.’
Bender nodded. ‘Villa knows this for certain?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. A length of hair slipped out of place and she pushed it back beneath the silver clasp.
‘Then what of Onslow and the black?’
‘They rode out, the next day, two days later, I’m not sure.’
Bender sat beside her again, reached for the bottle of brandy. ‘Think, Marianne, where did they go?’
But her eyes were like painted glass and for several seconds she was lost in a world of hand-cranked cameras and wooden sets supported from behind, of directors who shouted orders through megaphones and co-stars who were as concerned about their own beauty as she and whose lovers were boys.
‘Marianne!’ Bender twisted her head towards him and hissed her name. The next thing would be to slap her hard around the face.
Slowly, as he watched, the eyes came back into focus. ‘Did you ask something?’
‘Onslow. Onslow and the black. Where are they?’
She smiled. ‘No. Villa has no idea where they are.’
‘You’re sure?’
The smile deepened. ‘He does not lie to me.’
Bender’s face clouded over. He did not welcome the prospect of those two Americans riding free and out of his grasp; they had denied his plans for too long; they had evaded several of his attempts to capture them, kill them, put an end to the efforts they were making on behalf of this damned revolution. They could have gone after McCloud, angry that he had stolen arms and horses and determined to catch him and deal with him for themselves. Or Marianne could be over-estimating her ability when it came to prising secrets from Villa. He could have sent them on some secret mission: it would not be first time.
He straightened his back and made a vow that it would be the last.
‘And now,’ he said softly to Marianne, pouring more brandy into her glass, ‘there are other matters to attend to.’
‘Other matters?’ Clarity was fading from her voice, her eyes once again were becoming glazed.
‘Something more suited to your great talents as an actress.’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ she smiled, shifting away from the back of the settee, hands brushing down her clothes, shifting away creases, lines.
‘I thought a little scene for the cameras.’
‘You have the cameras ready?’
Bender pointed at the blank wall. ‘Over there,’ he said quietly, ‘see them before the wall.’
Marianne smoothed her hair and set her smile in place; she was staring at the empty wall. ‘Yes,’ she exalted. ‘Oh, yes! Yes, of course.’
‘And to perform with you ...’ Bender was walking towards the door.
He opened it and beckoned down the corridor. After a few hesitant moments, two girls came in, dark haired, painted mouths, low-cut blouses; neither of them could have been more than fifteen.
‘And here,’ said Bender, opening the briefcase he had carried with him, ‘are your props.’
He held out towards the white and silver actress a length of cord, a black, shiny riding crop. The girls had already begun to undress. Marianne wound her body towards the blank hotel wall and posed herself for the cameras.
‘Did I ever tell you,’ she said, waiting for the director to shout ‘Action’, ‘that Edison begged me to play the Lady of the Camelias?’