Cape Hell (2 page)

I stopped at my hotel only long enough to grab my town clothes. At the Cathay Gardens I soaked off the sweat of two horses seasoned with forty miles of tableland and caught a shave in the King Alexander Tonsorial Parlor, making use of Minos Tetrakokis, the Judge's personal barber; charging both bills to the court, with a nickel tip. Evidently I was still employed.

The room Blackthorne used for his chambers was a stuffy varnished-oak box with a tattered Mexican flag tacked to the back wall, a large-scale map of the territory plastering the one adjacent, and the cracked and thumb-worn legal books he'd carried on his back over the Divide piled on his leather blotter. He scowled when he smelled the Parisian soap they used at the Gardens, and at the evidence of Tetrakokis' art on my pink cheeks; but he took his revenge.

“I understand they never found your bullet,” he said. “It passed through his brain, down the alimentary canal, and out through the seat of his trousers, true as the Katy Flyer.”

I worked the mechanism of his mahogany-paneled cabinet—a Chinese box it had taken me a year to figure out—and poured us each a tumbler of the twelve-year-old whisky he imported from San Francisco by way of Aberdeen. I handed him his and put down half my portion in a gulp. “I killed a man. A friend. He pulled me out from under a mare in the Yellowstone and pumped a half-gallon of river water out of my lungs. You came that close to losing the best deputy marshal you ever signed on.”

“That would be Cocker Flynn; but point taken. I always wondered just where you developed your antipathy to our noblest beast of burden. Now I know.”

“You're thinking of those civilized geldings tied up to that circus wagon you ride here in town. You can't know how it feels to be outsmarted by a creature with a pecan-size brain and a heart like stove black. That damn buckskin cheated me out of half a year's wages.”

He sipped from his glass, carving deep hollows in his cheeks; the Steinway-ivory choppers were stored securely in the iron safe in the corner.

“With one breath you eulogize a friend, and with the next you complain about losing the bounty on his head. Have you any code of behavior, apart from your continued survival?”

I slid the travel-weary pocket Bible from inside my frock coat and laid my palm on the limp leather cover.

“That's your fault, your honor. You sent me to Texas in a clerical collar, purely as a pose, but it got under my skin. I had to read the book to quote from it.”

He switched subjects like a yard engine.

“Are you aware of the name Oscar Childress?”

“‘Women and Children' Childress?”

“An unfortunate sobriquet, possibly unearned. However, he'll most likely bear it to the grave, alongside the innocents slaughtered in Springfield, Missouri.”

Legend said Childress—who'd given up a colonelship with the United States Army in order to serve as a captain under Jefferson Davis—had stopped a trainload of civilians just outside Springfield and ordered his men to shoot them all as enemies of the Confederacy. After the war he'd led a company of volunteers into Mexico to fight alongside Juarez. This time he won. But instead of being named to high office, he'd dropped out of sight. Some said
El Presidente
himself had had him executed as a threat to his own job.

“He's resurfaced,” I said then.

For the second time in an hour I'd made the old man jump. “In the Sierras,” he said; “an almost impenetrable place. Once again I ask, what have you heard?”

I savored the Judge's fine whisky, knowing how bitter the chaser was bound to be. He saved the best for the men he wanted to seduce into something they'd never agree to sober.

“I've been six weeks breathing nothing but Montana topsoil,” I said, “and hearing no news, short of how the wheat crop's doing. I made a joke about Mexico, which put your bowels on edge, and figured out Childress is back among the living, because you brought him up. Why bother otherwise? With respect, your honor, I'd admire to get you in a hand of poker.”

He drained his glass and set it down with a thump.

“I find it interesting you should bring up the game,” he said. “It's a form of war, purer than chess because of the element of chance involved.”

“Not the way I play it.”

“Precisely. The expedition I've in mind has no place for straight shooting and fair play. War is what I said, and war is what we're looking at if Oscar Childress and our invidious State Department has their way. He's raising an army to capture Mexico City.”

“Again? That country changes hands like a Yankee dollar.”

“This time he's doing it for himself. Once he has control, he intends to add the Mexican Army to his band of irregulars and rekindle the Civil War.”

“Oh, that.” I drank.

“Pardon me, Deputy Murdock, but am I boring you with this latest threat to the union?”

“We don't know if it's the latest until tomorrow morning. Every time I open a newspaper, someone's fixing to bring back Fort Sumter. John Wilkes Booth was seen riding a cable car in San Francisco just last week. I read about it in the barbershop.”

“Some important people are taking this one seriously. I've had wires from the District, each one a brighter shade of yellow than the last. I can only assume the authorities in the border states receive them in greater frequency; however, I take it a compliment to my record that I'm included at all. No doubt there's an ambassadorship for me, in some Godforsaken country on the other side of the world, if I capture Childress.”

“You mean if
I
do.”

He unstopped the bell jar containing the bullet-shaped cigars he ordered from Cuba for six bits apiece and set one afire.

“How's your Spanish?”

“Better than my Greek. I picked up some French on the Barbary Coast, but all that did was snarl up what little Mexican I had.”

He blew a smoke ring. “You're trying to talk yourself out of an assignment.”

“Without success.” I finished my whisky and got up to pour myself another. It was clear I wouldn't be drinking anything but tequila for a long time.

 

THREE

“
Childress is an
enigma,” Blackthorne said. “Graduated West Point at the top of his class, and in the meanwhile published a slim volume of poetry that drew the attention of the eastern elite; not the helmet-headed, wing-sprouting type of epic you might expect of a warrior, but rather a deep thinker on the order of Emerson. I don't expect you to grasp the meaning of all these names.”

“I read
The Conduct of Life
in a lineshack one long winter. Half of it, anyway. The hand who left it used it to start fires.”

“Indeed. I can't imagine you got much out of it.”

I let him have his head there. The truth was Emerson might have been writing in Chinese.

He sat back and contributed to the nicotine stain on the ceiling. “To the men who rode down there with Childress, and to not a few of the locals, he's something of a god; a man you listen to rather than discourse with, and feel yourself the better for the exchange, however you come away unenlightened by it. Before the war, there was talk of running him for the U.S. Senate.

“He's a savant, of sorts; we're just not sure what: martial, literary, political, or scientific: I'm told he submitted a treatise on galvanization to one of those boards that finds such things of interest. After Juarez's victory, he sent a letter to the U.S. State Department, recommending we exploit the peons' near-worship of our civilization to annex Mexico.”

“No wonder he went underground.”

“No doubt his comments led to the assumption he'd been executed. He was already under suspicion for switching his allegiance from Emperor Maximilian to the revolutionists. His success in the field spared him punishment, but once he was no longer needed—”

“That's the problem with being a born general,” I said. “There isn't much call for it once peace breaks out.”

“Evidently he agrees. He appears to have spent the last eighteen years assembling his own private army, comprised of former revolutionists, the remnants of his original rebel force, and the Indians who inhabit the Sierra Madre Mountains twenty miles south of the Arizona border. That's the report, in any case.”

“Who wrote it?”

“A Pinkerton operative, posing as an aimless drifter. He sent a long coded wire to the agency's headquarters in Chicago and hasn't been heard from since. Numerous attempts to make contact through pre-arranged channels have failed.”

“That's two Americans that country's misplaced. I didn't know it was so careless.”

He picked up the bottle, frowned, then set it back down and rammed in the cork. “The obvious answer is he was found out and eliminated. Now it's up to us to confirm or disprove the report.”

“Why us?”

“I volunteered the services of this court, and Washington has generously accepted.”

“That was white of them. How many men did Sweeney leave us with?”

“Irrelevant. One man may succeed where a regiment would not.”

“I'm supposed to comb all of Mexico looking for one Pinkerton?”

“Just the Sierras; and that isn't the mission. You're to infiltrate Childress' command and find out if there's anything to the report. If it's mistaken, or Childress is a harmless charlatan, or there's no truth to it at all, come back and report to me in person.”

“And if it turns out to be right?”

“Must I express the obvious?”

“You must. It might spare me from a firing squad if I can tell the federales I killed him on your orders.”

“Very well. He committed high treason the moment he offered his services to a foreign power. The penalty is death. Especially if any part of that report can be verified. The part that concerns me most is the arms he's supposed to have stockpiled: Gatlings, Napoleons, and a dozen cases of carbines. A shipment of that very number was reported missing from Winchester's warehouse in Boston. Wars have been won with less.”

I uncorked the bottle and refilled my glass without asking permission.

“If I'm to start one all by myself, I'll need some things up front, starting with a decent horse.”

“Black Dan Stuart is holding a bay thoroughbred for you. I made the arrangements when I heard you were back.”

“A good long-distance rifle.”

“Draw one from the arsenal. The deputy in charge has all the paperwork.”

“Two hundred dollars in gold.”

“Absolutely not. Your salary covers all your responsibilities.”

“I can't bribe my way across Mexico on twenty a month.”

“In lieu of receipts, I'll need a detailed record of your expenses. It will be checked.”

“And a case of this Scot's courage.” I lifted my glass.

“More bribery?”

“I get thirsty in the desert.”

“Anything else?”

“If I think of it I'll let you know.”

“Aren't you forgetting transportation?”

“You said I had a horse coming.”

“You'll need it when the tracks end, but until then I'm giving you a train.”

He puffed his cigar, pleased at my uncharacteristic silence.

“We don't know Childress' timetable,” he said, “or even if he has one. In any case we can't risk his plans going into effect while you're crawling your way across the Sonoran Desert on horseback.”

“Won't he wonder how I got my hands on a train?”

“You stole it, naturally. It's your ticket into his camp. The revolutions travel by rail down there; no self-respecting insurgent would be caught dead without one.

“Just return it when you're through playing with it,” he said. “It's on loan from President Diaz, Juarez's successor. He has as much riding on this mission as we do. It's waiting for you in the railyard.”

It was a smart plan. I wouldn't say it to his face. “Do I get to blow the whistle?”

“That's up to the engineer. It has a name, even if he doesn't.” Blackthorne slid a fold of foolscap from an inside pocket and snapped it open. “
El Espanto.
I'm told it means ‘The Ghost'; ‘The Terror'; something along those lines. In some remote regions it makes sense to strike fear into the savages who'd oppose progress.”

“All right,” I said.

“I felt certain you'd assent eventually. I was prepared to offer to stock the saloon car with my entire cellar, had you demurred. You should have held out for more than just one case.”

“I don't mind. I want to talk to Childress. He promises better conversation than I've had in a spell.”

He screwed out his cigar in a heavy brass tray. “From what I've heard, he'll do all the talking.”

“That's grand, too. I never learned anything listening to myself.”

Which was one thing I'd said that turned out to be truer than I knew; and something I'd have torn out along with my tongue when I got the truth of it.

“Is there a settlement where I'm headed? The Sierras cover a lot of ground.”

He hauled an atlas the size of a dining table from the slots where he kept his ledgers and made room to spread it on the desk.

“The map is centuries out of date. We have the pillaging Spaniards to thank for its existence at all; but nothing's come along to supplant it, and I doubt little has changed there since the death of Columbus. It's the last wild place in North America.”

He ran a finger down the coast to a ragged hangnail sticking into the Gulf of California across from the mountain range.

“‘Cabo Falso,'” I read.

“‘The Cape of Lies.' It's home to an anonymous fishing village, the only source of communication with the outside world for a hundred miles. Even a traitor needs a conduit: That's where his alleged weaponry would have landed. If you should need to get in touch with this court, it's two weeks in the saddle from his base of operations. There's no railway spur. The only line crawls through the foothills of the Sierras; the blankest space on the map this side of darkest Africa, all craggy peaks, deep abyss, and dense jungle, teeming with mosquitoes, venomous snakes, and leeches the size of trout in Montana. I exaggerate, possibly; but better that than to underestimate the hazards. It's a pity our modern cartographers have grown too sophisticated to make allowances for dragons. If the mystical beasts were to thrive anywhere, that would be the place.”