The door at the front of the car opened. Joseph in his overalls stood silhouetted dimly against the rear of the black tender, the white rectangle in his hand startlingly bright in the light of the lamps. It was a recent arrival, obviously. Nothing in his world of smoke, cinders, and grease remained unstained for more than a few minutes.
“For him.” He pointed a corner of the envelope at me. “It came just now by a messenger.”
He stepped forward to hand it to me. An awkward moment passed during which the engineer and I sat unmoving, waiting. Presently the fireman withdrew, drawing the door shut behind him.
The envelope, in silk bond, was addressed to me in neat copperplate, sealed with a blob of black wax and the letters K.G.C. pressed into it, probably by a signet ring, in the center of an oak-leaf cluster. I showed it to Cansado.
“I do not know these initials,” he said.
“Knights of the Golden Circle. They spied in the North for the Confederacy during the war.” I broke the seal, and read, in the same tidy hand on matching stationery:
Dear Mr. Murdock:
I represent the legal interests of General Oscar Childress, and would consider it a great favour if you would honor me with your presence in my quarters this evening.
A card engraved on heavier stock of the same quality was clipped to the page, replicating the name the writer had signed and his address:
Felix Bonaparte, Esq.
No. 9 Calle Santa Anna
Alamos, Mexico
“This name is French, is it not?”
“It might explain his connection with the K.G.C.,” I said. “France sided with the rebels.”
“It may be a trap.”
“Probably.” I rose, rummaged among the artillery in the drawer of the gun rack, and buckled on the Deane-Adams.
“Shall I go with you?”
“No. The only thing I brought of any value is this train. If I gave them the man who knows how to run it, I’d be hailed as a hero of the Confederacy.”
“I keep a pistol in the cab. Not even Joseph knows about it.”
I got out the Springfield shotgun, laid it across his lap, and handed him a box of shells. “There’s no telling how many might come. If you let them get close enough, you can take out several at a time. Do you know—?”
Before I could finish, he opened the trap-door action, poked a shell into the chamber, and slammed it shut. He smiled at my expression. “No, senor, I have never held this weapon. It is a poor engineer who can examine a piece of machinery and fail to determine how it works.”
I spread my hands. “Then I’m away.”
“Senor Deputy. Page.” He stood, foraged in a pocket of his overalls, and came up with an image of St. Christopher embossed in bronze at the end of a chain. “This was a gift of my grandmother, the day I left the village in which I was born. It has seen me through these many years.”
I reached to take it. He snatched it back against his breast. His lips twisted.
“Do you think, upon the basis of some nights spent in drink, I would give this to you?—this, of all things? I wished merely to say that I hoped you owned something in which you found the same measure of protection.”
I grinned. “You son of a bitch.”
“Sí.” He returned the token to its pocket. “I have this same information from the man I called my father, on his deathbed, where lies are useless. The knowledge of my bastardy by nature gives me a certain advantage over those who must earn the distinction by conduct.”
I unholstered the English revolver, spun the cylinder, twirled it back into leather, patted my Bible, and put it in the side pocket of the frock coat I wore in civilization with the same flourish. “What the one cannot deliver, so the other shall.”
Something approaching a wrinkle creased the tight expanse of his forehead. “Mark? Matthew?”
“Murdock.”
“Ah. A book yet to be written; had I but my letters.” He refilled his glass.
A hag draped in tatters, with a tin tiara gleaming in the rats of her hair, knew El Calle Santa Anna, and offered to take me there for the price of an American dollar. She’d have known me for what I was even if I’d worn a filthy serape and a tattered sombrero; they can smell it. A year saturated in fried peppers, cornmeal, and rapid immersions in leechy creeks would hardly have been enough to wash away the gringo. When, nearing the corner, she backed into a dark doorway and raised her skirts, hoping to raise the ante, I thanked Christ for the darkness, slipped another half-dollar into her crusted palm, and shoved away from her. Her parting cackle interrupted itself long enough only to bite into the coin. I’d have trusted her rotting incisors over any assayer’s scale when it came to separating silver from lead.
The street had been laid out under the early Spanish colonists, with no thought of anything broader than a dogcart passing through. At times the way was so narrow I couldn’t have stumbled over one of the many uneven stones and fallen as far as the ground; a scraped shoulder was as much as I’d get, and the devil of a time prying myself loose to proceed. As the way grew darker and tighter, I had to concentrate to avoid confusing horizontal with vertical, and thinking I was climbing the inside of a chimney. The soot was as thick, and the path as black.
Not all of the buildings bore numbers. I had to strike a match to read the addresses that existed, some painted directly on the lintels above the sunken doors, others, harkening back to a more genteel past, enameled in flaked paint on the pebbled-glass panels of coach lamps, most of them dark and colonized by wasps, sleeping in their paper cells. A rat crossing the alley paused on my instep, its eyes glowing red by matchlight, then humped along the rest of its way. I was the trespasser, but not one worth challenging.
No. 9, when it revealed itself, was something apart from its surroundings. The street broadened just before I came upon it, like a forest clearing in a fairy tale, with the witch’s house nestling quietly in its center, all brown sugar and molasses with a roof made of shortbread.
It wasn’t quite that; two stories built in the Tudor style, mortar and timber, oak shutters pierced with holes just wide enough to expel and repel bullets. It was of more recent construction than the rest of the village, but created the impression of something older, harkening back to a time of medieval siege. The prosaic sign stretching the length of the street front belonged to a time neither of the building’s inspiration nor of its surroundings:
BONAPARTE & SONS
SOLICITORS
A large bronze bust of Napoleon in his cocked hat shared a plate-glass window with a group photograph on a small easel of the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, embalmed in stiff collars and moustache wax. A lamp burning deep in the interior shone through the picture, making the judicial branch of the federal government appear transparent.
The door swung open away from my raised knuckles, framing a small man in a black cutaway and a white cutthroat collar. My other hand tightened on the butt of the revolver, but his hands were empty and he was alone in the room. I relaxed my grip.
His clean-shaven face was as brown as a bottle. I assumed at first that it was the contrast that made his linen seem spotless, but as he pivoted in the direction of the door, beckoning me past him with a dusky palm sticking out of four inches of starched cuff, the inside light fell full upon him and revealed a coat brushed to a bright sheen, a copper-colored necktie snugged tight without a dimple or a scrap of lint, square-toed boots like polished obsidian, and a shirt that would pass muster at a White House state dinner.
He did not shake my hand, but when the door was shut behind him snapped a bow, exposing a round patch of pink scalp in the middle of close-cropped hair, with his thumbs parallel to the seams of his trousers. “Felix Bonaparte, Monsieur, and your servant.”
His voice was a mild tenor, touched with an accent I associated with the French Quarter of New Orleans. How a Creole had come to light in a village perched on the ankles of the Sierra Madre was as much a mystery as how he managed to support such linen in that climate. The first was none of my business, but I couldn’t resist asking about the second.
“The widow two streets over was born in Shanghai, of a Spanish missionary and a fille de joie. An aunt shipped her to the New World at the time of the 1864 rebellion, for her safety. San Francisco was the destination, but the navigator was blown overboard in the same typhoon that altered the vessel’s course. I can but assume that God intended for me to keep up appearances in this barbaric country. My credentials, you see, are not honored north of the border.”
He’d managed to satisfy my curiosity in less than a hundred words. If he could settle all my questions in such short order, the American Bar Association had missed its bet in denying him permission to practice law.
He circled the room, turning up other lamps until the walls were visible, wainscoted halfway to the ceiling, with more pictures leaning out from the walls, suspended by wires to a rail. They were the usual three-quarter portraits of men in fierce whiskers and black broadcloth, one-eared representatives of eastern schools and northern authority, glowering down on the usual office furniture of oak and maple and overstuffed leather. A plate of beans and a half-eaten tortilla occupied the copper-cornered blotter on the desk.
Bonaparte caught the direction of my gaze. “Have you dined?”
It struck me just then that I hadn’t. I was hungry enough to sample the local fare, but wasn’t sure how well it would sit on a reservoir of beer and Scotch. I said I was fine.
“You will pardon me, then. I received a packet of material by the morning train, and at such times I frequently work straight through breakfast and dinner. I am anemic, you see. The head, it spins.” He gestured toward one of his temples, sat behind the desk, tucked a napkin the size of a tablecloth under his excellent collar, and began scooping beans into his mouth with the skill of someone born to the process without utensils. “I must ask your pardon as well for the lateness of the hour. That same work prevented me from issuing the invitation sooner.”
I sat in a tufted love seat facing him. “I don’t work by the clock myself. I can’t imagine what business you and I have to discuss. I haven’t come all this way to enter into any legal agreement.”
“Your business is decidedly not legal.” He chewed, swallowed, touched a corner of the napkin to each lip-corner, and chased the mouthful with water from a glass goblet. “Everyone in Alamos knows you have come to kill General Childress. It is my responsibility to turn you from this path.”