He gave us no chance to discuss things with him, but announced that he had decided to ride back to Mojada and went off with fifteen or twenty of the miners, including Moreno, who had their own horses or mules. The rest were conveyed in a large wagon pulled by four mules.
Janos and I followed in the buckboard and he was anything but happy about the way things were going. ‘Did he get knocked on the head down there, by any chance?’
‘Several times.’
‘I thought so. His brain has turned. It can be the only explanation for such madness. De la Plata can’t allow a challenge to his power to go unpunished. It would be the beginning of the end for him.’
‘I suppose that’s what van Horne wants. A direct confrontation.’
‘Which would only have purpose if de la Plata appeared alone and he certainly won’t in this instance. If he turns up at the church during the service, he’ll have at least a dozen men with him.’
‘Van Horne must have something up his sleeve,’ I said. ‘He certainly isn’t doing it just to give de la Plata an excuse to hang him.’
‘There is another possibility,’ Janos pointed out. ‘As I said before, what if he simply can’t resist playing the priest?’
An uncomfortable thought and I tried to push it away, ‘That wouldn’t make sense.’
‘Then explain this morning if you can. He went into the mine with you and Moreno, stayed with that poor devil trapped in the rockfall. Shrived him as well as any priest could from what you tell me and sent him on his way happy. Now why would he do that? Why put his life in jeopardy for no good reason?’
I suddenly realized in a moment of illumination that down there in the dark, I had accepted van Horne for a priest myself, must have done for a while at least, however insane that sounded.
I said lamely, ‘Oh, I don’t know. I went down myself, didn’t I?’
‘No answer.’ He smiled. ‘You see, you sir, are an Irishman and whoever heard of one of that breed ever doing the logical and expected thing in any circumstance?’
Which ended the conversation for the time being for we had reached the hacienda where we were refused admittance to the house by a couple of de la Plata’s men standing guard in the courtyard, but allowed to go on our way in the Mercedes.
Janos dozed in the rear seat and I drove glumly down to Mojada to make sense out of Oliver van Horne, murderer and thief, who had deliberately walked into that situation at Tacho’s to save my neck. Must have done, I saw that now. Who had made me walk proud in the face of imminent death and who could crawl into darkness and extreme danger to hold a dying man’s hand and ease his going with prayers which had no validity anyway, although I suppose that was a matter of opinion.
The plain truth was that there was no sense to be found in any of it.
Back at the hotel, I found a sudden and very definite improvement in the service. When we went into the bar, Moreno was already behind the counter. He must have had a bath because there was no sign of the mine about him and he was wearing a clean white shirt and black tie.
He produced a bottle of that special Scotch and three glasses and said diffidently, ‘If you gentlemen will drink with me, I would deem it an honour.’
‘Very civil of you,’ Janos said, and we joined him.
Moreno filled the glasses, raised his own in a half salute. ‘Señor Keogh, for what you did for my cousin I thank you. In my family’s name, I thank you.’
I murmured something suitably modest, remembering that family was all important to these people. Moreno said carefully, ‘Father van Horne, señor – do you think he will do this thing?’
‘Tomas de la Plata warned him against holding any kind of service,’ I said. ‘That’s all I know.’
‘Hardly our affair,’ Janos put in.
‘You think there will be trouble?’ I asked Moreno.
‘Don Tomas will kill him if he holds that service, señor, nothing is more certain. He will kill anyone who takes part. I tried to tell Father van Horne this when we rode in from the mine together, but he refused to discuss the matter.’
‘With you perhaps, but not with us.’ Janos emptied his glass and glanced at me. ‘Dammit, Mr Keogh, but we can’t let the fellow hang himself for no sensible reason known to man, now can we?’
‘I suppose not,’ I said, playing his game.
‘Don’t worry, Moreno,’ he said cheerfully. ‘We’ll talk some sense into him.’
Moreno was pathetically grateful and escorted us outside, opening the rear door of the Mercedes and handing Janos in. I suppose that as mayor of Mojada he simply didn’t want any unnecessary trouble. On the other hand, van Horne had made his mark, there was no doubt about that.
I drove up through the village towards the church. There was no sign of van Horne, but as I braked to a halt, hooves clattered over the stony ground and I turned to see Victoria pulling in her mount, Nachita behind her. She ran forward, concern on her face, reached out to touch me in a dozen different places as if to assure herself no bones were broken.
I said to Nachita, ‘You heard about what happened at the mine?’
‘I was in to buy supplies at the store, señor, they talk of little else.’
I took her hands in mine. ‘I have business now with the priest. I’ll come down to the camp later.’ She frowned as if uncertain or distrusting me, so I kissed her on the mouth in spite of the company. ‘Now go or I’ll tie you across your horse.’
She smiled delightfully, vaulted into the saddle, wheeled her horse in a tight circle and galloped away so fast that she caught Nachita off-balance. He was actually a couple of yards in the rear as he went after her.
‘At least she does what you tell her,’ Janos observed.
‘Only sometimes.’
I helped him out and when we turned to the church, van Horne was standing in the porch dressed in a cassock and clerical collar and wearing a black biretta, something else which must have come from the trunk.
‘I wondered how long it would be.’
He moved to the Mercedes, got in the back and raised the seat. There was a large piece of felt underneath which he removed, revealing bare metal. It proved to be a false bottom for he got his fingers into some special place and lifted, disclosing a tin box painted khaki with United States Army Ordnance painted on the cover in black.
He picked it up in both hands. ‘You’d better come inside, and don’t forget the cigar,’ he added to Janos.
The Hungarian sighed and tossed the cigar away reluctantly. ‘Don’t you think you are taking all this a little too far?’
Van Horne ignored the remark and led the way in. The worst of the charcoal obscenities had been scraped from the walls although he hadn’t got round to giving them a coat of whitewash yet. The smell of dirt and decay I had noticed only yesterday was almost gone. Down at the altar, the crucifix glinted, a candle on either side and it was peaceful. It was a church again.
Van Horne put the box down on a bench and opened it. Janos said, ‘Keogh and I would like to know what the game is? You are not on your own in this and time you realized that.’
Van Horne looked inquiringly at me. I said, ‘No one will come. They don’t care.’
‘Tomas de la Plata will come,’ he said. ‘And that is all that matters. He’ll come to gloat at my failure and very possibly to kill me.’
‘But not on his own, man,’ Janos insisted urgently. ‘Why should he?’
Van Horne said, ‘Two days, that’s all he gave us. After this morning’s fiasco at the mine, why should he indulge us further. The showdown must be now and on our terms.’
‘He never goes anywhere without at least a dozen men at his back,’ I pointed out.
Van Horne walked to the other end of the church and mounted the pulpit. He stood facing us, hands on either side of a small wooden lectern on which I noticed he had placed a Bible.
‘When he and his friends walk in, this is where they will find me and they’ll never know what hit them.’
His hands dipped out of sight, reappeared clutching the machine-gun. God save us all, but he looked like the Angel of Death himself up there and it would work – I could see that. See Tomas de la Plata and his men walk into the empty church, could hear the jingle of the spurs, the jeers. I had seen van Horne in action remember. Knew only too well how devastating a weapon a Thompson gun became in his hands. Tomas de la Plata and those with him would be dead before they knew it.
There was one snag that I could see and Janos voiced it. ‘What if he leaves some of his men outside, sir, what then?’
‘That’s where you and Keogh come in. You’ll be on the first floor of the bell tower, twenty feet up, with a clear field of fire.’
‘With what?’ I demanded.
‘Look in the box.’
I did and found a dozen Mills bombs, a sawn-off double-barrelled shotgun, a Winchester repeater, at least a thousand rounds of ammunition and a Thompson gun that was twin to his own.
I drove Janos back to the hotel, dropped him there and left the village on foot for I wanted time to think.
Van Horne’s plan was well enough, a dangerous, bloody ambush that had every chance of working, just as he had indicated. With the two machine-guns and a grenade or two lobbed down from the tower, it was more than likely that we could kill or cripple every last one of them within seconds.
In the final analysis it all depended on Tomas de la Plata behaving as expected, which was hardly the most cheerful of thoughts. In the past, I had waited in ambush too many times for those who did not come or came another way and the change from hunter to quarry was easily made.
The pack-horses and mules had gone, that was the first thing I noted as I approached the Yaqui encampment, but the tent was still there beside the fire, four horses grazing nearby.
There was a leather-bound book on a blanket by the fire. I picked it up and opened it. It was a copy of Don Quixote in Spanish. There was no greater sound than a breeze might make through grass and when I glanced up, Nachita was watching.
‘A fine book, señor.’
‘Yours?’ I said.
‘As a youth I spent some time with the fathers at Nacozari. For a while they talked of making me a priest, but my own voices spoke to me of different things and I returned to my people. A man has but one life to live.’
I dropped the book back on the blanket. ‘Where are the others?’
‘Gone, señor, across the mountains with the pack-animals.’
‘But you stay?’
He smiled, or at least his face moved in what for him was the nearest equivalent to such a thing. ‘She is waiting by the pool on the other side of the cottonwoods, señor.’
He dropped to the ground with a kind of easy grace, picked up Don Quixote and opened it, so I left him to the delights of great literature and went in search of different pleasures.
It was a pretty place. A waterfall dropping twenty or thirty feet into a small pool surrounded by great tilted slabs of stone. She sat on an old horse blanket, knees drawn up to her chin and stared into space, caught in some private place of her own, yet she knew it was me and was on her feet at the first footfall.
She stood looking at me warily as if expecting some visible sign of something, although of what, I had no idea. I said quietly, ‘It is good to see you. Good to be alone with you.’
She smiled gravely and yet there was a slight frown on her face, a wariness, as if faced with something she did not fully understand. Above us clouds spilled out from the mountains, obscuring the sun for a little while and it was quiet there by the water at the edge of the trees, quieter than I had thought it possible to be and cold. I found myself shaking violently and something even colder thrust like a sword into the deepest part of me.
It was a thing I had known on more than one occasion, the Celt in me again, and always before bad things happened. And she, God bless her, knew, understood in some strange way of her own, reached out and pulled my hands hard against her breasts.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid. It happens to the best of us. Even to little Emmet Keogh, Emmet of the good left hand.’
She was frowning now and I pulled her down on the blanket and kissed her lips. ‘Edmundo – Edmundo Keogh. Would you like to hear about him?’
She nodded, half smiling, still wary. ‘I’ve a grandfather back home who would bless the day he met you,’ I told her. ‘He always did say God’s greatest gift to Man was a beautiful woman who could keep a still tongue in her head.’
She liked that, her smile said as much. Probably even liked the sound of him and it was as good a place to start as any. So I began to talk, a monologue to end all monologues, the personal testament of little Emmet Keogh. A story that took in most things and I shirked none of it. They all received honourable mention. Big Mick Collins, the men I had killed for good reason or bad, my own brother included. By the time I had finished she knew all there was to know about our bargain with Bonilla, as much about van Horne and Janos as I knew myself.
All this I told her because out of some strange foreknowledge, I knew van Horne’s plan was not going to work. Knew it for no logical reason possible to man, but could not prove it.
I lay with my head in her lap quietly, at peace at last, all talk ended and gazed into a sky of limitless blue and her fingers gently stroked my forehead, easing me into sleep. Her deliberate intention, I am certain, and she would have left me so, but I came awake with a start at the first note of the church bell, the bell which van Horne had said he would ring half an hour before the service.
She did not try to stop me and I did not kiss her in parting, the thing was too deep for that now. I simply looked at her for a long and final moment, then turned and walked away through the trees towards whatever waited for me in the heat of the afternoon.
Janos was on the veranda at the front of the hotel and came to meet me cheerfully, suggesting a walk, the remark obviously being intended for Moreno who sat in a cane chair looking thoroughly worried.
‘He doesn’t seem too happy,’ I commented.
Janos smiled. ‘His wife is, I understand, in labour, though whether at this precise moment in time he is worrying more about her than van Horne is a matter of doubt.’ He blew out a cloud of cigar smoke with a sigh of content. ‘Really a most excellent afternoon. Good to be alive.’
I could never decide to what extent he said things for effect and yet on the whole, I am inclined to feel that his nonchalance was not studied, but real. The plain truth is that he was one of those odd people who really did live in the here and now and for whom the future and its prospects held few terrors for it simply did not exist.
We strolled casually through the village by the east wall, coming in the end, to the rear of the church where we were admitted by van Horne at the back door which led directly into the vestry.
He wore a white linen alb over his cassock and now he put on a green stole, crossing it under his girdle to represent Christ’s Passion and Death, as I remembered. The green chasuble came next and he was ready.
‘I must say you look the part, sir,’ Janos told him.
‘I damn well better do,’ van Horne replied grimly. ‘About fifteen minutes to go, so the sooner you two get up that tower, the better.’
He took us out through the church and opened a small wooden door at the rear of the pulpit which I had never noticed before, disclosing a stone spiral staircase.
‘You’ll find everything you need up there,’ he said. ‘Just remember one thing. You fire when I do. No private parties, no matter how it looks to you from up there. We want this thing to turn out just one way.’
The door slammed and I went up through the half darkness behind Janos who was making such heavy weather of the steep and narrow stairs that I had to put both hands to his back and push.
We made it and found ourselves in a room perhaps ten feet square with long narrow windows on three sides reaching almost to the floor. Everything was ready for us as van Horne had promised, laid out neatly on a blanket. The shotgun with ammunition, the Winchester, several Mills bombs and the Thompson gun, half a dozen drum magazines in a neat pile beside it.
Janos collapsed on a wooden bench struggling for breath, sweat pouring from him. He took a flask from one of his pockets, unscrewed the top and had a long swallow as I examined our situation.
There was one snag. The position of the windows in the wall on the side which counted was such that it was impossible to see down into the village itself unless one leaned out, although it gave a clear view of the immediate area around the porch which was twenty feet below and a little to one side.
I showed Janos, who seemed himself again, how things stood and he nodded soberly. ‘That means we won’t be able to see him coming so we had better be ready.’
I moved a bench, positioning it against the wall by the window so that Janos could sit in comfort, out of sight and yet with a clear view of the area around the porch. I gave him the Thompson and he nursed it on his knees, a cigar between his teeth. My intention was to support him with two or three judiciously placed Mills bombs and if necessary, the Enfield or the Winchester. The shotgun, because of the shortness of its barrels, didn’t seem much of a proposition.
There was a single narrow slit, some nine inches wide, in the wall with no windows. When I peered through I found myself looking down into the pulpit, the church beyond. There was no sign of van Horne and then the vestry door opened and he came out holding the Thompson gun. He turned towards the pulpit which meant that he now faced the altar and as I watched, he genuflected smoothly, automatically crossing himself, then mounted into the pulpit, his face impassive.
‘And what, my dear sir, would you make of that?’ Janos breathed in my ear.
Van Horne placed the Thompson carefully on a small shelf where it would come to hand, sat down on a stool and opened the Bible. I straightened and shook my head. ‘God knows,’ I said and meant it. ‘I no longer try to understand him. I just accept.’
It was very quiet and far too hot. Janos wiped sweat from his face and sighed. ‘I’m not built for this kind of thing any more.’
‘But you were once.’ It was a statement, not a question. As much for the sake of conversation as anything else.
‘When I first came to Mexico I served as a cavalry advisor to a federal force that was trying to exterminate the Yaqui in the mountains north of here and finding it hard work, in spite of the fact that the going rate for a Yaqui warrior’s ears was one hundred pesos.’
‘They must have wanted rid of them pretty badly.’
‘The government wanted their land, it was as simple as that, which explains why the survivors now live in areas like the Wind River country where no one else could. This all took place in the bad old days under Diaz.’
‘And afterwards?’
‘In the early days of the Revolution I served with Francisco Madero at the taking of Ciudad Juarez. There were many like myself. What he called his foreign legion. Men like the great Garibaldi’s nephew, Guiseppe. A fine soldier.’
‘You must have had some interesting experiences.’
‘Indeed, but then they murdered Madero, or that at least is my own interpretation of what happened. Too good to live, poor man. If he’d been harder on the rogues that needed it. Dark days, sir. One never quite knew who to follow next.’
Hooves rattled on the cobbles of the street out of sight to the right of us, laughter drifted up on the warm air, the jingle of harness. When they rode into view, I saw that we had all miscalculated woefully for there were at least two dozen of them, each man an arsenal in himself.
Tomas de la Plata was in the centre, as dark and sombre a figure as usual and greatest shock of all, his sister rode at his right hand.