Brian Garfield (10 page)

Boag watched her move across the room. When she brought glasses to the table beside her husband he rested a proprietary hand on her rump, a casual and natural intimate gesture; and the
señora
who was no young child of the woods made as if to smile, trying to hide the pain in it. Boag wanted to leave this house of death as fast as he could.

The whiskey moved like a soft warm hand over the saddle-worn muscles of his body. He looked around the big room and thought it bare; there were only a few pieces of furniture, the massive divans and chairs; there were no ornaments on the mantelpiece over the great fireplace and he saw discolored rectangles on two walls as if paintings had hung there but had been removed.

Don Pablo smacked his thin lips. “It is good. Even the dying have a few pleasures,
no es verdad?
”

It was consumption of course. It wasn't the first time Boag had seen it.

The
señora
said, “Are you chilled?”

“You might make a fire now,
querida.
”

A slantwise look at Boag, and she went out of the room; he couldn't read the meaning of her glances.

Don Pablo said, “Now this gold bullion. What has it to do with you?”

“Some of it was mine. A little piece of it.”

“And you came all this way trying to get it back.”

“Well it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Have you ever seen a small dog chase a herd of horses around a corral,
Señor
Boag? Did you ever stop to wonder what might happen if the horses decided to stop and let the small dog catch them?”

It gave Boag a very graphic picture of a small mutt being trampled to death by iron-shod hoofs. He smiled over the rim of his glass.

Don Pablo said, “Mr. Jed Pickett has something of mine as well. You and I have that in common.” And broke off to cough into his lace.

The
señora
entered with an armload of wood and kindling. She built a fire quickly and well. When the flame caught at the edges she stood up. “It is time for your soup.” The eyes came at Boag: “Will you take dinner with us?”

“
Grácias.
”

“I shall bring it up here then.”

Don Pablo's shoulders moved. “I can still walk to the dining room.”

“You should conserve your strength.”

“For dying? No, I can still eat at the table where my father and his father ate.”

She rested a hand against the mantel. “Pablo .…”

“
Querida, ténga la bondad.
”

She left the room without further protest. The door clicked shut. Don Pablo said, “I am not fit to hold her stirrup.”

“Why?”

“It is tiresome looking after a dying man. She could have left me and gone to Mexico City where she comes from. It is not as if she would lose anything by that; I have no one else to leave my estate to, and in any case there is no estate left for her to inherit. She knows all this, and there is no tradition in her background that would make her loyal. But she stays.”

“She loves you.”

“That would be more than I bargained for with her.”

“Sometimes a man gets lucky.”

Don Pablo grinned. “You are very wry,
Señor
Boag.”

“No. I reckon there are worse things than dying.”

“You mean having no one to care about you. Well I suppose that is a point. She worked in a house, you know. One of the best parlors in Mexico City. I would not have taken her out of that except that after a while I could no longer stand the idea of sharing her with other men. She came with me because of course it was a great advancement for her. Nothing was said about love.”

“It doesn't always have to be said.”

“Of course I was not sick then.” Don Pablo began dry-washing his clasped hands.

“About Mr. Pickett,” Boag said gently.

“You would like to find him.” Don Pablo nodded his head as if to confirm something. “Yes. Well so would I,
Señor.
If it is my last act on earth I should like very much to find Mr. Jed Pickett and have his entrails for guitar strings.”

“I thought maybe you might have bought the gold from him.”

“I did.”

“But?”

“Even a dying man hates to look a fool,
Señor
Boag. I am reluctant to admit the truth to you. I shall do it, but allow me to explain things. An hour will make no difference to you.”

“Go ahead then.”

Don Pablo coughed and sipped his drink and began to make his explanation. It covered a great deal of ground; it was a tedious apology which did not explain at all, it only tried to excuse. It did not explain, for instance, why Don Pablo insisted on informing a stranger—a black stranger at that—of the fact that his wife had once been a whore in Mexico City. It only ticked off incidents: revolutions, bandits, the mines petering out, the death of the wise uncle who had managed these estates until his death four years ago from the same malaise that now infected the young Pablo.

Boag didn't dislike him but it was hard to find sympathy for him; Don Pablo had too much sympathy for himself, he didn't leave room for anyone else's.

He had contacts in Mexico City, he explained—companions from the days, only a few years ago, when he had been a flippant young blade touring the fandango spots of the city. These contacts knew his good family name and trusted him, or else they were too jaded and cynical to care: in any case they were eager to buy what Don Pablo offered for sale, at a price—the stolen items he traded with the mountain bandits and rebels.

He had dealt a few times with Mr. Jed Pickett in treasures the Pickett gang had collected in its raids on Apache camps in the Sierra Madre: treasures the Apaches in turn had stolen from ranches they raided along both sides of the Border.

Four months ago Mr. Pickett had first mentioned the gold bullion. Don Pablo never knew where it came from; he never asked. A tentative price was settled between them, a price by the ounce because Mr. Pickett was not certain how much gold would be involved. The proposition excited Don Pablo because it meant he could cancel all his debts at once and, he said, “Also it would make a little dowry for Dorotea.”

“Your daughter?”

“I refer to the
señora.
”

A dowry for his wife? It was a phrase that made no sense.

Don Pablo said, “I had to strip myself of what few possessions remained, to raise the cash. Our estimate was on the basis of two million pesos. Much of this I had to borrow of course. I signed notes against my estates to do that—mortgages.”

Boag didn't need to hear the rest of it because he had already guessed.

Don Pablo wheezed into his handkerchief. “When he came here one week ago he had only three companions and one pack mule and I thought the thing had gone bad, but he was in wickedly high spirits. Over the next thirty-six hours his men trickled into this valley from all directions. They all had pack animals. I gathered not a single pack had been lost. The gold was as he had said it would be, a few pounds less than the maximum I had been prepared to pay for. We weighed the gold on my cattle scales and I counted out one million, nine hundred thousand pesos on this table right here. Most of it was in Mexico City scrip, in denominations of one thousand pesos. It was very easy to carry when you compare it with the bullion. It disappeared into the pockets of himself and his men, and you hardly noticed the bulges.”

Boag was impatient. “And then?”

“I am sure you have guessed by now. They leveled their guns at us and backed away to their horses. They took with them not only the nearly two million pesos in cash which I had paid for the gold. They took also the gold.”

5

“You are going to say I was a champion of a fool to trust them.”

“It crossed my mind,” Boag said.

“I did not trust them. My
vaqueros
were armed and watchful. But
vaqueros
are not a match for men like his. They were taken by surprise, overwhelmed before they knew it. Four of my people were killed and three others are still under treatment with the doctor in the town of Coronado.”

“You do any damage to the other side?”

“I think two or three of Pickett's
ladrónes
were injured. I saw one whose arm flopped very loosely, I am sure it had been broken by a bullet above the elbow.”

“But they took the cash and the gold bullion both.”

“Yes.”

“Any idea where they went from here?”

“It is a large world,
Señor.
”

“Then Mr. Pickett didn't drop any hints.”

“No, he is too clever for that.”

“Which way did they ride out?”

“To the south. It means nothing of course.”

“Maybe,” Boag said.

“You have an idea?”

“How much is that gold really worth, in pesos?”

“You mean if it were clean, if it could be sold in the open market without fear of discovery?”

“Yes.”

“Approximately three and one half million pesos.”

Boag said, “So Mr. Pickett has more than five million pesos to spend. You could almost buy this whole province for that.”

“Well hardly,
Señor.
But it is an impressive sum.” Don Pablo's pale hands came together in a prayer clasp. “You said some part of the gold was yours?”

“Yes.” Boag refused to be drawn. He was thinking, if I had all that money where would I take it? But it was hard to think like Mr. Jed Pickett. He didn't have the background for it.

He said, “He left about a week ago?”

“Today is Monday. They left here Wednesday evening. It is five days.”

“You didn't send anybody after them?”

“I had no one left to send,” Don Pablo murmured. He roused himself, shaking his head as though to clear it. “I was obligated to inform my men that I had nothing left with which to pay them, that my estate was under mortgage which could not be repaid, and would be taken from me in due course. I gave them what little I could and dismissed them. The aged one, Miguel, chose to remain with us without pay. He is the only one.”

Well it wasn't the way Boag would have done it. At least you could give them a choice.
If you want to get paid you have to go after the son of a bitch and get my money back for me.
But that wasn't realistic, was it; not when you were talking about Mr. Pickett's rawhiders. They had been fighting Yankees and Apaches and Mexicans for twenty-odd years while Don Pablo's
vaqueros
had been chousing cows.

Miguel appeared. “
La comida.
” Miguel helped Don Pablo out of the chair and half carried him. Boag trailed them down the stairs and across the courtyard in the dusk. There was the rasp of cicadas, a cool dry wind, light clouds scudding by.

You could see where there had been paintings and candelabra in the dining room; now there was only the table and a few chairs which probably had been brought up from crew's quarters.
Señora
Dorotea served the meal on chipped Indian pottery plates; the Don ate soup while the rest of them ate the meat of a rabbit Miguel had shot. The cattle herds, it was explained, had been sold along with everything else to raise money to pay for Mr. Pickett's gold. It had been Don Pablo's plan to sell the estate to the men in Monterrey and Durango who held the mortgages; then he would have been able to take Dorotea to a mountain resort for the cure. The cure seldom worked but it was worth the attempt; what else was there? There would have been money enough to buy their own resort.

“Now it is all ashes,” Don Pablo whispered into his soup.

It was as if he was already dead; it was just taking him some time to quit breathing. Boag said, “How long do they give you?”

There was a sharp glance from Miguel. The
señora
did not look up. Don Pablo said, “A few months, perhaps a year, perhaps two years or five. No one knows, really.”

“Then maybe you're giving up a little early.”

Don Pablo cackled. It made him cough.

6

He lay on a straw tick in a small room off the veranda.

A light rapping at the door; he looked up and it was the
Señora
Dorotea. She rested her shoulder against the door-frame. “I was lonely,” she said.

He looked into her eyes; she gave a little smile as if to say she knew what had not been said and was not going to be said.

When he touched her cheek he felt her tremble. He ran his fingertips up into her thick dark hair, surprised by the cool smoothness of her skin. Her woman-smell filled him.

She sat on the cot beside him; the heavy rope of her hair swung forward. She bent down and he tasted her mouth and then she slipped her face away to guide his lips down her throat.

They took a long time making love.

Then he lay on his back, belly rising and falling with his breath, and she laid her head back against the hard muscles of his thigh and spoke in a voice drowsy with spent passion: “I think we have both been too long without this.”

She turned and curled up with her fists together against him, one knee hooked over his body. He ruffled her hair. “I feel hound-dog lazy.”

“Were you a slave?”

“When I was a little kid.”

“So was I. In a way.”

He turned his head to look at her. She said, “Pablo has not bought me and he does not own me. He knows that.”

“I thought you were married to him.”

“I am. But he has told me I may leave when I wish.”

“But you've stayed.”

“He needs looking after.”

“You're a good woman.”

“I think I am,” she said. “When I said I was a slave I meant before, when I was a girl in the city. I was bought and put into a house there.”

“He told me about that.”

“Did he also tell you he bought me from the madam?”

“He didn't say that.”

“But I had a choice. I could have run away from him. I knew he wouldn't try very hard to get me back. Not that he did not want me, but he has never forced me to do anything unless it was what I wished.”