25

Rains of Terror

“El gobierno attacked before dawn.” José’s hands shook as he reached for the canteen Angel held out. He took a long drink from it before he went on with his story. “They went from one house to another, shooting what ever moved.”

“How did you escape, Papá?” asked Antonio.

José glanced at his wife, Serafina, sitting nearby with a blanket draped around her shoulders. She rocked back and forth, crying silently. “Your mother and I have not slept inside the house since General Fatso returned to Morelos.”

“General?”

“Rubio is a general now.” José continued his account. “Every night we unroll our mats in el corral, the courtyard. When we heard the shooting, we ran out the back gate and hid like mice in the cornfield. We saw black smoke rising from the village.”

“Did they take the women?” Angel asked.

José stared at the ground. His answer was barely audible. “I don’t know.”

It was a question none of the men would have bothered to ask because they knew the answer. Of course, the federales took the women. When the army was through with them they would send them to labor camps in a jungle so far away the forest canopy might as well shade the muck of another continent. The only way to save all the women was to drive los federales out of Morelos and General Huerta from the President’s Palace.

Angel had a more immediate plan, although “plan” might be too ambitious a name for it.

“We will hunt down the curs and free the women.”

Angel could tell by the looks on their faces that no one liked the idea. Even Antonio shook his head.

Angel couldn’t believe it. “¡Carajo! You let them defile our women and yet you pretend to be men?”

“If we attack the federales they will shoot the captives,” said Antonio. “And Colonel Contreras would not approve such a raid.”

At least the men looked chagrined as they skulked back to their off-duty pastimes. Angel spat in their direction, then stalked away to perch on a boulder and brood. She stared at the dark clouds massing over the mountains in the direction of the Capital. She was so preoccupied she didn’t remember that the rains weren’t supposed to come for two more weeks.

She gave a start at the sound of Plinio’s voice behind her.

“Trying to rescue those captives will not return your mother to you, my child.”

“Quien de los suyos se aleja, Dios lo deja,” said Angel. “He who leaves his family is forsaken by God.”

“Then God has forsaken most of us, for we are truly orphans.”

“Mexico is our mother. These mountains are our casitas, our little houses.” Angel scooped up a fistful of dry, rocky soil and shook it at him. “This dirt is our soul.”

“I pray you are right, my daughter. I pray God has not forsaken the handfuls of dirt that are our souls.” When he walked away, his shoulders slumped as if still bearing the eighty pounds of sugarcane he had carried on his back most of his life.

Angel decided to ride to San Miguel and track the federales to wherever they were keeping the women. Then maybe she could convince her comrades to rescue them. Her plan involved leaving camp without permission, but she would take that up with Contreras when she returned. She had never tried to take advantage of the fact that her commanding officer was her father’s old friend, but she would this time.

Even if she couldn’t locate the captives, a trip to San Miguel could be useful. Maybe the soldiers’ ravening horde of galletas, the camp followers, had overlooked some caches of corn or beans. And if el gobierno had burned the houses and corn cribs, Fatso’s troops would not likely return there. The caves in the cliff face below the village would be safe. They would provide shelter from the rains.

In the distance, thunder rumbled approval of her plan.

 

From the balcony above the Colonial’s wide entryway Grace watched lightning flick like snakes’ tongues at the mountain peaks near Tres Marías. She could count on two facts of life in Mexico. The tabachine trees would adorn themselves with flame-red flowers in March and the annual rains would arrive in May. So why was an escort of dark clouds mustering in mid-April?

Their color, like tarnished gunmetal, matched Grace’s mood. Two factors fueled her gloom. One was Rico’s absence. The other was Rubio’s presence.

Rubio had arrived in Cuernavaca much puffed up over his double promotion to general and governor. General Huerta must have learned an important lesson from his former boss, Porfirio Díaz: promote incompetents. Bumblers rarely staged successful coup attempts. Porfirio’s cousin Felix had recently proven that.

Rubio spent a lot of time with his troops in the field, for which Grace was grateful. But when he came to town he passed more of his waking hours at the Colonial than in the pink stone hulk called the Governor’s Palace. He claimed he came here for María’s spicey stewed plums and the piano music, but Grace had seen him staring at José’s daughter, Socorro. She kept the girl busy in the kitchen whenever his brass-bedizened bulk darkened the hotel’s doorway.

Grace had nicknamed José’s daughter Cora, but the child was so silent and sylph-like that Lyda called her The Wraith. The only time Grace heard her laugh or speak above a murmur was when she and Annie had their heads together. Because of her friendship with Cora, Annie was becoming fluent in Nahuatl.

Grace envied Annie’s ease with languages. She considered Nahuatl, and not the digestive distress known as the trots, to be Moctezuma’s real revenge. She suspected the Aztecs had designed their talk to trip up the tongue, not trip off it, but she loved to hear her employees converse, their voices as soft and mysterious as black velvet.

Mrs. Fitz-Goring’s voice was neither soft nor mysterious. It erupted from the dining hall below the balcony.

“Stupid girl!”

“Bollocks,” Grace muttered. Rubio, the spring rains, and now Fitz-Goring. What vengeful Aztec deity had she offended to bring all this down on her head?

Grace headed for the dining hall at her emergency gait. She had had the seamstress sew gored panels into her skirts to allow more movement. An unfashionably long hemline hid the walk that to casual observers looked regal. Each stride, however, swallowed two stair steps or covered a meter of the Colonial’s tile-paved corridors.

She found Mrs. Fitz-Goring standing like a monument to umbrage in the middle of the crowded dining room. Socorro stared up at her, as wide-eyed as a rabbit hypnotized by a cobra. Grace gently grasped the girl’s shoulders and turned her toward the kitchen.

She reassured her with one of the few phrases she knew in Nahuatl, “Ca ye cualli. It’s all right,” and gave her a nudge to set her in motion. Then she faced the wrath of the dowager du jour.

“Good evening, Mrs. Fitz-Goring. What seems to be the problem?”

“It’s not what seems to be the problem, Mrs. Knight. It’s what is the problem.” The dewlaps on each side of Mrs. Fitz-Goring’s jaw quivered with indignation. They quivered so often that Wattles had become her nickname in the kitchen and back hallways.

“That clumsy girl spilled hot tea on me. She scalded me and ruined my gown.”

Try as she might, Grace could see no evidence of tea on the dress, but saying so wouldn’t help matters. “Bring the frock to Lyda tomorrow and she will see that it is laundered. And of course your dinner this evening will be complimentary.”

“Your girls won’t be scrubbing my new charmeuse on a rock in some filthy river, will they?”

“I assure you we have a proper laundry.”

Wattles looked unconvinced. “Spigs are so lazy, it’s a wonder you coax any work at all from them, Mrs. Knight.”

Grace lowered her voice so as not to create more of a scene by chastising a guest. She also had discovered that in situations like these the more quietly she spoke the more closely people listened. It was as if she were sharing a secret rather than delivering an ultimatum.

“What you say in the privacy of your room is your concern, Mrs.

Fitz-Goring, but we do not allow the word ‘spig’ in the public areas of the Colonial.”

“What harm in it?” Wattles looked genuinely surprised that Grace would find offense. “It is merely short for ‘No spigga da Eenglis,’ is it not?”

“Nevertheless, I must ask you to help us maintain standards of decorum.”

Grace had found that the word “decorum” worked like a charm for most British patrons, at least when they were sober. She waited until Mrs. Fitz-Goring had sat back down on her chair and wedged herself between its sturdy arms, then she left to comfort Cora. Behind her, she could hear Wattles soliciting sympathy from the other diners for the shabby treatment she had received at the hands of help and management. She did not, however, repeat the word “spig.” And Wattles wasn’t likely to get much sympathy anyway. These days, most of the hotel guests were grateful to have a roof over their heads, three meals a day, and no one shooting at them.

Because Fitz-Goring occupied a room here, Lyda had to turn someone away today. The Mexicans might be able to view coups with a fatalistic fortitude, but not so outsiders. Wattles was one of thousands of foreigners who had come to Cuernavaca to escape the ominous uncertainty in Mexico City. As a result, the Colonial was full to capacity.

And then there was the army. In the upstairs wing, officers slept on cots, eight to a room. Grace was grateful for the business, but she felt as frayed as the hems of José Perez’s white cotton trousers.

That reminded her. José was supposed to have brought more pottery two days ago. He never missed a delivery. She would ask Cora about him in the morning. In the meantime, she had to convince the poor child that she had done nothing wrong and Grace was not angry with her in the least.

Socorro was always quiet, but these days Grace detected fright in her eyes, like a deer facing a shotgun. Maybe Annie could find out what was troubling her.