Days of the Dead (5 page)

“I will show you a universal law, you pettifogging mestizo scum,” bellowed a hoarse bass voice, “if your men advance one step closer to that door.”

“Oh, a thousand curses, it’s that
baboso
policeman Ylario. . . .”

And as January and Rose followed Consuela through the carved doors into the great
sala,
Hannibal remarked plaintively, “Please don’t tell me I’m about to be shot in the name of the Principles of Universal Law.”

As viewed by January from the threshold, the battle-lines appeared thus: two men in the blue uniforms of what January guessed to be the Mexico City
guardia civil
had taken a defensive position against the
sala
’s rear wall. They held Hannibal pinned between them with his hands manacled behind his back. Two more in similar uniforms flanked them, their pistols pointed at the half-dozen ruffians in the attire of vaqueros—leather trousers, dingy underdrawers, tooled leather
botas,
and short jackets—deployed between them and the door. The
guardia civil
were commanded by a chubby little cock-sparrow in neat black civilian clothing and a violet-embroidered waistcoat that wouldn’t have been out of place in the streets of Paris: Capitán Francisco Ylario.

In the center of the vaqueros stood Don Prospero de Castellón, unmistakably: tall, hook-nosed, black-clothed, his long white mane and snowy mustaches bristling and a kind of enthusiastic madness sparkling in his pale-blue eyes.

He had a rifle pointed at Ylario, who to his credit faced the weapon unflinchingly.

In one corner of the room, two men in European tailcoats and stylish cravats were looking around frantically for cover and clearly wondering at what point they should jettison their dignity and dive for it; there was also a priest, fat and unshaven, cowering next to the half-open door at the end of the room, bleating “Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” and roundly ignored by all. Beside Don Prospero stood a slender middle-aged gentleman clothed, like the mad Don, in the short embroidered velvet jacket and close-fitting trousers of a Mexican grandee, saying in the deep, beautiful voice January had first heard, “Prospero, you know that the law forbids . . .”

This was evidently precisely the wrong thing to say, because Don Prospero said, “The law? The
law
?” and settled the rifle close against his shoulder to fire. “What has the law to do with—”

“Father, you cannot have your vaqueros open fire on the
guardia civil
!” Consuela pushed past January and strode to Don Prospero’s side, slapping the rifle-barrel upward from beneath, which, January thought, showed far more experience with such threats than if she’d tried to wrest the weapon from him.

“And why not, girl?” Don Prospero’s mustaches seemed to point like fangs, but he didn’t re-aim the weapon. Hannibal, who stood almost directly behind Capitán Ylario in the line of fire, shut his eyes in what appeared to be brief silent prayer.

“Because those vaqueros of yours have no more idea of aim than armed pigs, and the
guardia civil
are worse, and they would surely hit the Señora in the serpent petticoat there.” Consuela gestured to the Italian marble fireplace directly beside Hannibal’s shoulder, upon whose mantel-shelf stood an image, a horrifying demon adorned with a necklace of skulls and, as Consuela had said, a skirt modeled to resemble writhing snakes.

“Capitán Ylario.” She walked over to the prim little man, who, January now saw, was younger than he had at first guessed, stiff-backed and rather white around the lips beneath his small, neat mustache: he, like January and Hannibal, had seen that Don Prospero really was going to shoot. “You have no idea how full my heart is with joy and gratitude that there is so little crime in the streets of Mexico City that you can be spared to spend all of a day riding out here and hiding in an arroyo, waiting for my father to leave the hacienda, so that you can arrest a single malefactor. . . .”

“Do you mean the man who murdered
your brother,
Señora?” Ylario’s voice was cold. “A crime for which any
natural
woman would have long since wreaked her own vengeance . . .”

“You obviously never met Fernando,” remarked Hannibal.

“I sing in operas, Capitán, but I don’t live in them,” Consuela replied. “Were I a natural woman, I would have married a muleteer when I was fourteen and have had eight children by this time and do nothing with my days but make tortillas for them. Now, Señor Enero here”—she strode back, caught January by the sleeve, and dragged him over to the mantel, apparently oblivious to the amount of armament still primed and ready on all sides—“has been given a mandate from the British minister to look into this matter of my brother’s death. . . .”

“What would it matter if we blew that whore to pieces, eh?” demanded Don Prospero suddenly, showing signs of bringing the rifle up to his shoulder again. “She is minor—petty—without power! Coatlique—bah! Let her be shattered into a thousand fragments! You’re a slut in any case,” he added, apparently addressing the image now rather than his daughter, striding over to the mantelpiece to shake his finger up at the grimacing demon face. “I never believed that story of yours about becoming pregnant from a wreath of feathers, my girl. You women always make excuses, eh? Danaë, eh, that claimed the King of the Gods made her pregnant through a shower of golden coins. . . .”

“Don’t speak ill of golden coins,” begged Hannibal. “I know quite a number of young ladies who became pregnant after showers of golden coins, and some from silver and even copper. . . .”

“And how would this
. . . gentleman’s . . .
enquiries,” asked Ylario, eyeing January up and down with chill disbelief, “differ from those that I have made into the matter, Señora?”

“Heretic!” The chubby priest—black robe smutched down the belly with food-stains—ventured far enough from the safety of the doorway to shake his crucifix at Don Prospero and the idol. “Apostate!”

“Perhaps,” replied January mildly, “because I genuinely believe Señor Sefton to be innocent?”

“Oh, thank God,” whispered Hannibal. He wasn’t much changed from the last time January had seen him seven months ago: still too thin, his gray-flecked hair braided in an old-fashioned queue down his back, incongruous over the shoulders of the short Mexican jacket he wore. There was a little more gray in his mustache than there had been, and his eyes, dark as café noir, had lost the consumptive glitter they’d had in New Orleans. Either the disease that had crucified him for years had gone into one of its periodic abeyances, thought January, or months of absolute rest in the thin, dry air had done him some good.

“Who do you call heretic?” roared the old
hacendado,
rounding on the priest, who popped back behind the door frame like a gopher into its hole. “How am I called heretic? Since when is it heretical to speak disrespectfully to a slut goddess who deceived her son about his paternity? Her son, now, he was a true god, a great god—”

“Blasphemer!” squeaked the voice from behind the door. Don Prospero strode over to pound on the panels, and the vaqueros, hugely entertained, lowered their rifles and grouped around him: evidently, none of them had much use for the priest. In their corner the two gentlemen in European dress scribbled madly in their notebooks.

“If you have been given a mandate by the minister,” said Capitán Ylario smoothly, signing to his men, “you can present your papers to me—and make enquiries concerning Señor Sefton’s defense—at the Casa Municipal.”

“I am the Lord thy God, and thou shalt have no other gods before me . . . ,” shouted the priest from behind the door.

“Nor do I!” Don Prospero flung himself against the door like a maddened bull, and January heard a bolt shoot on the other side. “Coatlique—and even her great son the Left-Handed Hummingbird—I don’t hold them before the Lord of Hosts!”

At Ylario’s nod the blue-uniformed men caught Hannibal’s arms and hustled him toward the outer door, leveling their pistols on January when he moved to stop them. Hannibal braced his feet but was nearly dragged off them; Don Anastasio made a move to close the outer door, but Ylario produced a pistol from his own pocket and pointed it at him: “I wouldn’t.”

“Prospero!” Anastasio shouted, but Don Prospero was hammering on the study door, shouting, “The Lord of Hosts defeated the Indian gods, rode roughshod over them, conquered them forever. . . . And as for your nonsense about making graven images, I didn’t make those images!”

“Prospero!”

“Father!”

“I’ve never made a graven image in my life! You lie-monger, you glutton, you troublemaker who tries to separate a loyal daughter from her father, how dare you . . . ?”

Rose, who all this time had stood watching in the outer doorway, now closed the door and placed herself heroically before it. For an instant, January feared Ylario would threaten her with a pistol also, but he didn’t—though by his expression he clearly wished he could.

He gestured to his guards to thrust her out of the way, and Rose flattened back against the door, her chill eyes promising the struggle—and the delay—that Ylario clearly wished to avoid.

“Señora,” the little man said with steely politeness, “I do not know who you are, but I warn you that you are interfering with the justice of this country. If you and this man whom I assume to be your husband do not wish to spend the night in the jail yourselves—whatever else may transpire—you will let justice take its course.”

Rose glanced across the room at Don Prospero, who was still shouting at the priest, oblivious to his closely-guarded guest’s imminent departure, and said nothing. Only braced herself and left it to Ylario to make the first move.

January always wondered later what it would have been, because at that moment the door behind Rose opened—thrusting her forward into the room—and the gorgeously uniformed man standing framed in it asked in a voice of aggrieved reasonableness, “Ylario, what the hell is going on?”

The westering sunlight slanting into the
corredor
flared on the curlicued scrolls of gold braid—January’s first wife, Ayasha, had called such designs “chicken guts”—that embellished the newcomer’s refulgent scarlet jacket, flashed on boots polished to the inner gleam of the newcomer’s grave, dark eyes. Don Prospero turned from the cornered priest and threw open his arms in greeting.

“There you are!” he cried. “You tell this small-minded and unfaithful servant of the God of Hosts about being a god, my lord. Tezcatlipoca,” he introduced as the priest opened the study door cautiously and peered around it. “The Jaguar-God, the Smoking Mirror. . . . You tell him, eh, my liege, that I don’t worship you before this priest’s God.”

The newcomer inclined his head with the sweet-tempered tolerance of a martyred philosopher forced to humor his benighted friend. “Of a certainty I am not worshipped before the True God,” he told the priest. “That would be a blasphemous thing.” He crossed himself, but his eyes danced with unholy amusement.

Ylario stood where he had been, ignored by all, pistol in hand, and did not move, but the cold, still fury in his eyes told January who the newcomer was, in case he hadn’t deduced it already from the three uniformed aides standing in the
corredor
with their plumed hats gripped reverently in kid-gloved hands. Voices in the courtyard were calling out,
“El Presidente . . . El Presidente . . .”
and there was the jangle of accoutrements and the rising dust-cloud of many more horses. The priest—and the two European gentlemen in the corner—goggled in shock.

“Sir,” said the priest—unnecessarily, when he finally got his breath—“Don Prospero, that is no god, but a man: President and Generalissimo
Benemerito de la Patria
Antonio López de Santa Anna.”

And while the attention of everyone in the room was fastened on the handsome, broad-shouldered dictator whose election the previous year had precipitated so much furor in the country, January and Rose caught Hannibal by the elbows and silently dragged him from the room.

FOUR

“My friends, Shakespeare himself would boggle at the task of expressing the depth of my joy at the sight of you.” Hannibal collapsed onto a stone bench where the
corredor
right-angled into the narrower arcade that fronted the east and south sides of the court; when January put his hand on his friend’s shoulder, he could feel him trembling. “Get these damned manacles off me
—Let us break their bonds asunder,
as the Good Book urges,
and cast their cords from us.
Ylario must have been watching the house all morning. He and his bravos—if such they may be termed—turned up the minute Prospero and Natividad disappeared on their ride.

Even as the sun, with purple-colored face,
Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheeked Adonis hied him to the chase . . .

“You wouldn’t have anything resembling brandy on you, would you,
amicus meus
?”

January took his flask from his pocket as Rose extracted one of the long steel pins from her hair. She thrust the tip of the pin into a crack in the stone bench and bent it into a neat right angle: “Turn around,” she ordered.

“He has a judge in Mexico City,” continued Hannibal shakily, “an ally who was ruined when Santa Anna and the
centralistas
took over. . . . Thank you, I needed that.
Man, being reasonable, must get drunk / The best of life is but intoxication. . . .
Ordinarily a man will wait weeks or months to be tried, but I suspect my neck would be well and truly stretched by morning. I kiss your hands and feet,” he added to Rose as she pulled the handcuffs off him—both of them had at various times assured January that the simple locks on the average set of manacles were the most easily picked things in the world. January took their word for it—he’d never managed it. Hannibal took January’s flask from him and took a second gulp, his hands still shaking badly, then turned to Rose to suit the action to the word and paused, thin fingers touching her wedding-band.

Then he looked back at January with unalloyed gladness in his face.
“God, the best maker of all marriages / Combine your hearts as one.
No wonder Athene of the Owl Eyes here was able to make such short work of the spancels of Universal Law; it’s said love laughs at locksmiths. My dear friends, I wish you both happiness.” He hugged Rose and kissed her cheek, got up from the stone bench and embraced January like a brother: his bones under his jacket felt like a bag of sticks.

“Your letter reached us on the morning of the wedding,” said January with mock severity. “I assure you we were
not
pleased. Particularly considering I’d been up all night delivering my sister’s baby. A girl,” he added at Hannibal’s exclamation of delight. “Charmian. Healthy and pretty, like a little ripe peach.” He took from his pocket the draft Hannibal had sent to pay the ship’s passage, and tucked it into the fiddler’s short Mexican jacket. “We are also now rich. It’s a long story. Now
you
tell
us
a long story, about the night Fernando de Castellón died.”

“Ah.” Hannibal shivered and sank back onto the bench: January saw that the stone was very old, covered with worn bas-reliefs of feathered warriors, sinister scrolled serpents, glyphs he could not read. Here a kneeling man could be made out, piercing his tongue with what appeared to be an enormous needle. Elsewhere four men held a fifth down upon an altar while a figure in a feathered headdress carved out the victim’s heart.

“Consuela tells me you were seen putting something into the young man’s wineglass,” he said.

“In point of fact,” said Hannibal, “I was putting it into my
own
wineglass, and it was laudanum, and not very much of it, either. After sitting for three hours at that table with Doña Josefa glaring at me from one side and Doña Gertrudis from the other, believe me, I needed it. But of course Werther—Fernando’s valet—is convinced I poisoned his master. And after three weeks of watching me walking about in a state of what he considers freedom—having himself never been subjected to what amounts to house arrest by a raving lunatic—he got sick of waiting for the Principles of Universal Law to go into effect and took matters quite literally into his own hands. He crept into my room one night and tried to strangle me. Discouraged from that activity, he promptly fled the hacienda, rode straight to Mexico City, and informed Capitán Ylario that when he had found Franz, Franz was not yet dead, and that he died with the words ‘The
Norteamericano
has poisoned me’ upon his purpling lips.”

“Ah,” said Rose in a tone more resigned than surprised.

“Is there a chance he could be speaking the truth?” asked January. “Werther, I mean, not Franz.”

“Not unless the laws governing the transmission of heat and cold have altered themselves for my confusion,” answered Hannibal wearily. “Which is entirely possible, the way things have been going.” He drew his knees up and wrapped his arms around them, rather resembling a dilapidated cricket in the westering sun that slanted through the arcade. “Not that there was any doubt, cold or not, that the poor brute was dead. It was . . . quite obviously a horrible death. The problem is . . .”

In the court below one of the vaqueros called out something in their nearly-unintelligible
Indio
Spanish; there was a great jingling of traces and the creak and rumble of carriage-wheels. “Ah,” said Hannibal, glancing over the turned wood of the rail. “Where the battle is, there will the eagles gather, full of schemes for the Army to pay them for supplies at six or seven times the market rate.”

January, stepping over to the rail and following his gaze, saw an extremely handsome traveling-coach draw up in the courtyard, barely to be seen through the dust-cloud raised by its six matched bay horses and innumerable brightly-liveried outriders. A slender, graying, and extremely dandified gentleman in a suit of elaborately-ruched red linen stepped from the vehicle, bowing as he gave his hand to help down an elderly matron with a nose like a hatchet and enough diamonds around her throat to purchase the populations of several villages.

“Doña Imelda de Bujerio,” identified Hannibal, coming to the rail at January’s side. “The gent in crimson is her son, Don Rafael; he’ll explain to you a little later what it’s like to be a black slave on a sugar plantation, he knows all about it from reading the novels of the Duchesse de Duras.”

A second coach—smaller and plainer than the first—came through the gates. By the way Doña Imelda immediately began giving orders to the man and two women who got out it was clear that these were servants.

“In addition to being betrothed to that minx Valentina, Don Rafael is engaged with Don Prospero in selling cattle to the Army for the invasion of Texas. Doña Imelda was part of the group sitting out with me here on the night of the wedding-feast, along with Valla’s duenna Doña Filomena Borregos.
Procul este, severae . . .
Señora Lorcha was here, too, playing dragon to her daughter the lovely Natividad, like the three Fates accompanying the Graces, though to do her justice, Doña Filomena is a sweet-natured soul, if a trifle fond of her sherry, and mended my shirts for me up until the time I was accused of murdering her nephew. Ah, there’s Doña Josefa. . . .”

A woman emerged into the light, dust, and confusion of the courtyard, clothed and veiled in funereal black unrelieved by the slightest brightness of ribbon or jewel.

“There’s a gate just beside the stair,” provided Hannibal. “It leads through to the ladies’ courtyard that lies to the north of this building. Doña Josefa, her daughter Paloma, Valla, and Doña Filomena dwell there in a sort of Catholicized purdah. Up until a few months ago Josefa’s son Casimiro was in there as well. Casimiro’s eight, and has just been promoted to that room down at the far corner on the other side of the stair. Señora Lorcha, I might add, was livid that she and her daughter weren’t allotted rooms in the ladies’ courtyard, but there are limits, even in this household. I wonder if we’ll be privileged to witness . . . Ah, yes! Here they are now.”

Hannibal leaned his chin on the railing, like a man high in the gallery of a theater looking down upon the stage, and January, looking past him, saw another little group of vaqueros ride into the yard, guarding two women in black. The taller, dismounting, seemed to ooze from the saddle and into the arms of the vaquero who sprang to assist her down; her riding-dress was cut so as to leave no one in the slightest doubt as to her charms. The vaqueros sent an Indian servant to bring a bench for the shorter woman to dismount. She was stocky, stubby, and moved with a kind of stiff wariness. Even though she was veiled, January could sense the bitter watchfulness of her eyes.

Doña Imelda’s middle-aged son stared at Natividad like a child at a plate of gingerbread. His mother had to speak sharply to him, to wrest his attention away, and she did so without, apparently, even giving the two newcomers a glance.

“And all of them were sitting with you here, at the end of the
corredor,
on the night of Fernando’s death?” asked January.

“As far from one another as they could be and still remain in the same group,” replied Hannibal. “Concha must have told you about Señora Lorcha’s attempt at pre-emptive nuptials. The last time I encountered an atmosphere that glacial was when a cousin of mine married a poacher’s daughter by the rites of an inappropriate church and brought her to Sunday dinner. I don’t think Doña Imelda even looked at either of them throughout the evening. But this far from town one has very little choice about after-dinner entertainment: it was sit out here or go indoors and contemplate the horrors of the religious art on your bedroom walls.”

Rose said, “Hmmn.” In every inn and house January had so far entered—including Consuela’s—nearly every room that did not contain a painting of the Virgin boasted a crucifix, usually of Indian work, Christ’s face and body streaming with blood from graphically depicted wounds.

Just what I want to see the last thing before I blow out my candle at night.

“And no one came in or went out of the study?”

“No. As you see, there’s a torch-bracket immediately opposite the door. Josefa dragged Paloma away fairly early, rather than have her exposed to such a raffish crew as Natividad, Concha, and Señora Lorcha; Valentina left as soon as it grew full dark. Doña Filomena dozed off after her fifteenth sherry, and I can hardly say I blame her.”

January glanced over the rail again, observing, indeed, how Doña Imelda and Doña Josefa kept their distance from—and their backs turned to—Natividad and her mother. “And no one heard anything from the study?”

Hannibal sighed and shook his head. “The door was shut and bolted—the window shutters, too. The walls are three feet of solid adobe. From where we sat we could hear Santa Anna thundering on in the
sala
about how he was going to wipe the Texian rebels from the face of the earth. I doubt that if Fernando had cried out at the top of his lungs he’d have been heard.”

He winced, sickened with pity for even a man who would almost certainly have had him killed. “But I doubt he had the breath to cry out, once the poison started to work. His face was so swollen, I’m not sure I would have recognized him if it hadn’t been for his hair and his uniform. He looked like he’d died of suffocation, mouth gaping, tongue sticking out—his hands were still tangled in his collar, one of those ghastly military ones designed to protect you from inadvertently
breathing
in battle. The room was quite bright. Fernando couldn’t abide what he called the ‘medieval dark’ of candle-light and had a patent Argand lamp on the desk and two more in his room; he’d brought them from Germany.”

From somewhere in the courtyard a voice wailed in French, “The President? Here? And no one has thought to tell me this until now, now, when there is nothing to eat for dinner but that pitiful roasted deer, those wretched
vols-au-vent,
and only
three jellies
to offer! It is enough to slay oneself, to fall upon one’s sword. . . .”

The chef, thought January. Presumably, the one who had counted on the wedding-feast to make his reputation . . .

“How did Franz look when you spoke to him directly after supper?”

“He didn’t look well,” said Hannibal. “But of course, for twenty-four hours he’d been trying to make sense out of Don Prospero’s financial papers, not a task
I’d
care to undertake sober.”

“Consuela tells me he threatened you earlier in the day.”

“And so he had.” Hannibal sighed and took January’s flask for another sip of brandy. “You have to understand that the day had started with Don Prospero standing stark naked in the courtyard, conversing at the top of his lungs with an invisible Jaguar-God. Don Anastasio tried to quiet him and got a
mano
thrown at him—one of those rock pounders that the Indian women grind corn with. By pretending to be Quetzalcoatl, I managed to get Don Prospero back upstairs and into his room, with Father Ramiro telling me all the way I should be garroted as a heretic, but that was followed almost immediately by Señora Lorcha’s attempt at a sneaky wedding—there’s a door from Natividad’s room into Don Prospero’s, and Señora Lorcha had stolen the padlock key. Fernando and his two mad-doctors arrived in time to put a stop to
that,
so I understand his being snappish. After supper I went to see him, quite frankly to see if he’d call off his father’s thugs long enough for me to make it back to Mexico City. I mean,
he
didn’t want me here,
I
didn’t want to be here, so it should have been possible for us to find
some
kind of common ground.”