“Do not insult us both by denying the fact,” Bonaparte said; although if he was any kind of lawyer he wouldn’t know by my reaction that I had any such intention. I’d spent too much time in Judge Blackthorne’s courtroom, being turned on the spit by defense attorneys, to change expressions. “A stranger cannot cross the border unnoticed, dragging his mission behind him as clearly as smoke from the stack of your splendid train. I myself have lived here nearly twenty years, and when someday I am found extinct at this desk, the publisher of the village newspaper, who is my oldest friend, will write a stellar account of my life, adding that this late arrival will be missed in this village.”
I watched him scoop the last of the beans into his mouth, repeating the ritual with his napkin and glass of water. Joseph, I thought. The messenger who had brought Bonaparte’s invitation was a phantom; the fireman had lost no time reporting to Childress’ representative, and been asked—politely, of course—to wait while the lawyer drafted his note. Even George Pullman’s superior standards couldn’t construct a private parlor coach with walls so thick they’d foil a determined eavesdropper. Had he tried, no less than three locomotives would be needed to pull it.
“You’ve heard the rumors,” I said.
“General Childress would not be the extraordinary man he is if legends did not grow up round him like desert flowers after a spring rain. As with all great men, it is necessary to discount a third of them as invention, another third as either exaggeration or monstrous distortion, and to assign truth to the rest.
“That he intends to liberate this country at last, most definitely. That he is a traitor”—thin shoulders rose above his pristine collar—“must be left to history. Washington and Jefferson were both marked for the gibbet had they failed to repel the British from their shores.”
“Since you know so much about me, you must know also that I’m not interested in history lessons.”
He sat motionless; but whether he was turning over what I’d said or planning his next move didn’t make it as far as his bland placid face. He knew his own way around a courtroom, it seemed.
At length he stirred; I flexed the knuckles of the hand resting on the thigh nearest the Deane-Adams. But all he did was lift a small copper bell from the desk and shake it once. The tinkle was discreet, like everything else about him.
A door opened at the back of the room. I gripped the butt of the revolver; only to relax once again when a boy entered in white cotton peasant dress and sandals. He couldn’t have been older than ten, with straight black hair cut square across his brows. Bonaparte spoke to him in clipped tones, in Spanish so rapid I couldn’t catch it. The boy withdrew, to return a moment later carrying a leather folder bound with a cord and placed it on the desk. He was dismissed with a snap of the hand.
Bonaparte went on in his pleasant company voice, as if there’d been no interruption, untying the cord as he spoke.
“Do not think that I shall warn the General of your coming. There is no telegraph to his plantation, and the bandit situation is such at present that no mounted messenger would accept the commission. At all events he is prepared perpetually for contingencies of every sort. It is you who should be warned.”
“Merci, Monsieur.”
“Ah! Parlez-vous?”
“Un petit. I spent a season in San Francisco.”
“A cosmopolitan city, I am told.” He removed a bundle of paper from the folder and sorted it into stacks on the desk. His fingers were long, spatulated at the tips, and moved with the swift grace of a skilled faro dealer. “Yes, a most extraordinary man, the General; though he himself prefers the humbler rank of major. These are his papers, which I hope someday to donate to your Library of Congress, and ask no more than a footnote identifying myself as the contributor. Men such as I can hardly expect glory beyond that reflected from the blaze of the truly great.”
I watched mesmerized as he placed portions of Childress’ meteoric life into prosaic piles, according to his file-clerk’s sense of order.
“Your client conducts most of his affairs with the outside world through Cabo Falso,” I said. “How can you represent him from five hundred miles away?”
“I agree the situation has difficulties. That I remain alive is not one of them.” He continued his activity, cutting no-doubt revealing documents like a deck of cards. “I am not courageous, like you. It is a failing, yes, but one over which I have no control. Would you condemn me if I were born without an arm or with my heart on the wrong side of my chest? It is the same, an unintentional omission on the part of our Lord. Cabo Falso is a nest of pirates and worse. A man of my sort would not survive a week. The General understands this, and thinks no less of me, because I am so much better equipped to deal with paperwork quite as crucial as fertilizer and harvesting equipment. It requires a measure of courage, I assure you, to take a dispatcher to task for a serious error in shipment.”
He described his situation so practically I felt ashamed of my own lack of cowardice.
I reflected on what he’d said about fertilizers and harvesting equipment. “He’s keeping up the pretense of producing sugar?”
“There is no pretense about it; quite the reverse. He produces more sugar than his five closest competitors combined. You are aware of the importance of bones in the refining process?”
“I hunted buffalo, and saw pickers collecting the bones. They sold them to manufacturers in Detroit, who ground them into powder and ran raw sugar through them to take out the impurities. The bottom fell out of that market with the buffalo.”
“He’s found a substitute; or another method every bit as good. His merchandise is sought after in all the best restaurants in Los Estados Unidos and as far away as Paris, France, so I am told. It is nearly as fine as flour, but superior in granule texture, refusing to clump under the most humid conditions. Master chefs in the tropical colonies have threatened to resign if their employers will not agree to pay thrice as much for what Childress produces. You have seen his label, perhaps? The armored head of a knight circumscribed by gold laurels?”
Whereupon the son of a bitch turned his lapel, showing me a pin bearing the embossed emblem of the Knights of the Golden Circle. I kept my temper.
“And his opium? Is the quality as good?”
If I’d disappointed him by failing to rise to the bait, he didn’t show it; I’d have been disappointed myself if he had. He dropped the lapel back into place and continued sorting, calm as a stone in moonlight. I had his measure now. A poker face is only so good as the amount of pressure you applied to it. When it blew, it would shake the earth.
“I, too, have heard this canard. It is without foundation; and even if it were, where is the crime? One can purchase it in any chemist’s shop, diluted with grain alcohol and labeled laudanum; good for the miseries of the lumbago and all other manner of complaint. Had I been born to a caste lower than my own, I’d have hired a wagon and gone town to town peddling it by the quart.”
A lawyer to the bone, Monsieur Bonaparte. A client is always innocent; but if guilty, then of nothing unlawful.
At length he squared away his stacks, palming the edges as even as bricks, and lifted one.
“Since, as I believe, you insist upon pressing forward despite my friendly advice, perhaps you will be so kind as to deliver these to your proposed victim.”
Given the cordiality of the exchange so far, it seemed bad manners to leave him holding the bundle he offered. I turned it over, reading the delicate script on the top envelope. Like the rest, it was pressed from pale rose deckle-edged vellum, the whole bound with matching ribbon. It was addressed to “O. Childress.”
“They were sent by his fiancée in Virginia, an estimable woman by all accounts, and upon the evidence of her choice of husband, certainly. She has been waiting months for a reply.”
“Childress has a fiancée?”
“Is it so strange a great man may love in the corporeal sense?”
“He hasn’t been to Virginia in twenty years.”
“The relationship is all the sweeter for the absence. Had the women I married respected my privacy to such an extent, I should not be alone this day.”
I brought the bundle to my nose, but whatever scent she might have sprinkled on the envelopes had long since evaporated in that climate. “I’ll do my best.” I slid the letters into a side pocket.
“When you have finished reading them, please re-seal them as well as you can. He will not be fooled, but he will appreciate the gesture.”
It was as bizarre a meeting as I’d attended, and I’d sat in on Indian tribal councils and armed truces during range wars in Wyoming. “Is that why you called me here, to tell me I’m a suicidal fool and ask me to deliver mail?”
“Not entirely.” Felix Bonaparte returned the rest of the material to the folder and tied it securely. I wondered what it contained that he’d held back. “I doubt you welcome death, or you would not attend so to the weapon you carry. A man who ignores this precaution would ignore others, and not survive. The odds—odds; this is the word, oui?”
“A word, yes.” His relentless courtesy had begun to stand my nerves on edge.
“Thank you; it’s a hazard of my background and circumstances that I sometimes am not sure whether I am conversing in English, Spanish, or French. The odds, you must see, are decidedly in General Childress’ favor. He would consider me small in the light of his own chivalrous nature if I did not attempt to bring them closer to even.”
He pointed. He grew his nails long, but as round as coins.
“On that wall, monsieur, is a map more current than any you have seen. It was drawn by a German cartographer named Muehlig, who took it upon himself to chart all the impenetrable regions of the earth, and thus leave his footprint on the path of the great explorers. The dream ended when he was beheaded by banditti for the value of the surveying equipment he packed upon his burro; but not before he drew this. The rurales who apprehended and shot the brigands found it of no value compared to the other items they confiscated, and so were generous enough to offer it to me. It is less than ten years old, and thus three hundred years more current than any you may have seen. I cannot part with it, but I suggest you commit as much as you can of it to memory. It may mean your life—for a while.
“At the very least you will go to your grave knowing a bit more of where your bones will rest until trumpet’s blow. To die is one thing, but to die lost—” Again he shrugged.
The map, framed in black walnut without glass, hung in gloom. I lifted the milk-glass shade off the nearest lamp and carried it over. The names of various peaks and canyons were in German; I ignored them, not because they were foreign but because they’d been named by men, and of no use to the man who roamed among them. Muehlig, using the inks and paints he’d carried, had washed the whole of the eastern coast of the Gulf of California in pale blue, but tinted the jagged bumpy region of the Sierra Madre a bilious shade that in the flickering flame inside the soot-smeared glass chimney seemed to throb, as if it had a pulse of its own, sickly green, like the discharge from an infected wound.
“The Mother Mountains, monsieur,” said the lawyer. “There the bones of the Conquistadores lay mingled with those of their predecessors, whose civilizations have been forgotten by time, buried by the very riches they sought. They died wealthy. If you will be so kind as to give me the name and address of your closest relation, I shall do my best to report where you were last seen alive.”
I turned his way, and made as much of a bow as I could. It wasn’t a patch on his, but he seemed to appreciate the effort. My last image of Felix Bonaparte, Esq., was of an arrangement of patches of light on a stoic face hovering above the lamp on his desk. If it weren’t for the bundle of letters in my pocket, I’d have thought I’d dreamt the whole thing.
I passed back up the narrow alley, groping my way along the walls, which seemed closer together now, then farther apart, a vast expanse; I couldn’t see as far as the one opposite. The adobe was hot to the touch. I snatched my palm away. I wondered if a fire was gutting the building. The heat followed me, coursed up my arm, across my chest, and down the other arm, passing out the ends of my fingers like electrical current. Raw cold rushed in to fill the void. I shivered. By the time I emerged from those thousand yards of darkness I was staggering.
The Ghost stood on its siding, inhaling flame and exhaling steam, its headlamp plowing a pale shaft through vapors as thick as churned butter. Hector Cansado, ghostlike himself, stood with his back to it, a moderate wind fluttering the end of the bandanna tied around his neck. He had the shotgun clamped to his right hip with the muzzle pointed at me.
I spread my hands. “It’s Murdock.”
“I know this.” He didn’t lower the weapon. “Stop walking, and keep your hands as they are.”
I stopped. Of a sudden I felt no chills, no fever.
“I wondered how long it would take you to come around to that,” I said.
“It requires no genius. There is the train, and here is the man who knows how to run it. Where, Senor Deputy, does that leave you?”
His image swam, shifted right and left, refusing to stay in one spot. I thought it was a distortion caused by the steam. I jerked my right arm, sliding the Bulldog revolver out of my sleeve into my hand. I leveled it and fired.
Missed.
I actually saw the slug float past him, riding the steam like flotsam on the ocean. I saw nothing after that but steam. It thickened, drifted around me, clung to my body, filled my eyes and nose, stung my nostrils. I was drowning in it. I clawed for the surface, lost my grip on the little belly gun. An hour passed before I heard it strike earth with a dull thump, as remote as at the bottom of a well two hundred feet deep.
By then I was falling, too, plummeting through the chill air of the well. I heard the roar of the shotgun, dull also, as if it were swaddled in the same steam that pulled me down and down and shut out the rest of my senses.