Country of the Bad Wolfes (68 page)

He had never met General Espinosa but he had heard Díaz speak of him. He was young for a general and a favorite of Porfirio, who was going to be unhappy about this. Which was why Edward would not assign the job to any of his agents. He would not place any of them at direct risk of the president's wrath. He could not be sure that Porfirio would forgive even Louis.

He set aside Sofia's telegram and said, “I'll take care of it.”

“I can do it,” Louis said.

“I know you can, but it has to be me.”

“Why's that? Because he's a friend of Porfirio's? Hell, Pórfi don't have to know it had anything to do with us.”

“Of course he does, son.”

Louis held his father's gaze. “Yeah, well. Even so. I'm willing to take my chances with him.”

“I said I'll do it.”

He turned to Gloria. You may tell your sister the matter is being attended to, but do not mention my name. Not now or later.

“Muy bien, Papá Eduardo,” Gloria said.

I
n addition to Patria Chica's general telegraph line, there was a private one in Edward's study. For the rest of that evening he swapped messages with his agency's main office at Chapultepec Castle and studied topographic maps. The agency office was belowground, in a stone room that had once served as a dungeon and a section of which still did. Stored there were files on every member of the federal government, every state governor and important political chief in the country, every general officer in the Mexican military. By two in the morning he knew all he needed to know about General Mauricio Espinosa de la Santa Cruz and his residence near Durango City. He then slept three hours and woke refreshed.

The dawn horizon was a hazy pink when his train left the Patria Chica depot. The train consisted of two cars behind the locomotive, one for himself and one carrying his horse. That afternoon it halted in the high country a few miles outside of Durango City. The umber landscape isolate and hardrock. Mountain peaks looming and dark with timber, low ranges brown as old bone in the arid distance. Edward saddled the horse, a sturdy pony bred for just such country, and tied on his saddlebags and then the deerskin sheath containing his rifle—a Sharps chambered to fire a 550-grain bullet a half inch in diameter powered by a cartridge with ninety grains of black powder. With just such a rifle had buffalo killers been able to fell their quarry from as far away as a mile. He hupped the pony onto an old timber trail that led to the other side of the mountain. The train went ahead to the city's station, there to await him.

General Mauricio Espinosa's manorial estate was set on a tableland projecting off a mountainside and overlooking a gorge several hundred feet deep, at the bottom
of which a swift river ran through a misty dell. An hour before sundown Edward settled into position behind a small boulder flanked by a pair of larger ones on a shadowed outcrop of the mountain directly across the gorge from the general's residence. There was heavy pine and scrub growth all about and the horse was tethered on the track back among the trees.

Edward's spot afforded a clear high-angled view of the rear courtyard, awash in the last of the day's sunlight. It was the general's habit to observe the sun's setting behind the western ridge, as often as not in the company of his paramour of the moment. Edward took off his hat and put it aside. He pushed forward the Sharps's trigger guard to drop open the Sharps's breech and then slid a cartridge into the chamber and reclosed the breech by snapping the trigger guard back into place. Attached to the tang was a folding vernier peep sight and he unfolded it and peered through it at the courtyard across the way. He adjusted the little calibration knob with the finesse of a scientist at a laboratory instrument. Then sat back and waited with the rifle across his lap.

He had been there half an hour when a trio of figures came out of the house. Two of them walked very close together and the third trailed behind. The couple came all the way to the low rock wall overlooking the gorge. There was a table a few feet behind them and the other figure paused there a moment and then headed back to the house. A servant, Edward surmised, who'd carried out a tray of refreshments for the lovebirds. He had judged the distance to the couple at a stone's throw beyond eight hundred yards. They were specks hardly bigger than birdseed but he would not look at them through a field scope because he believed a telescopic lens dulled the aim of his naked eye. Even if he had not already known whom he was looking at he would have known the two figures at the wall for man and woman, so closely were they standing, no doubt with an arm around each other. And as far away as they were, he still could discern their difference in size and so knew which was the man and which the woman. More likely a girl. It was said the general had a preference for young ones. Who did not? He saw no one else in the patio. He rested the rifle's forebarrel on the small boulder to steady the weapon and made a final gauging of the light breeze. Then put his eye to the vernier peep and cocked the hammer.

As always at this hour Mauricio pronounced on the beauty of the sunset sky along the jagged crest, and the girl, whose own loveliness would have been evident even without the face paint and powder, said yes, it was truly beautiful. It made one very happy to be alive. They turned to each other and embraced and were in the midst of the kiss when all in the same instant she felt him flinch and without knowing what she was hearing—the sequence so fast it seemed a single erratic sound—heard the thuck of the bullet striking at the base of his neck and the snaps of bone as it passed through vertebra and rib and the shatter of the wine bottle and the
thunk through the tabletop and the ricochet whine off the flagstone. Then heard the rifleshot itself and the resounding echoes of it all along the gorge. The dead weight of him slipped from her grasp to an awkward crumple at her feet and she saw the bright spreading blood of his destroyed heart and lungs and even as she began to scream soldiers were coming on the run.

Before boarding his train at the Durango depot that night, his horse already in its car and being tended, Edward sent a telegram to Esmeraldo Lopez in care of the Hotel de las Palmas in Veracruz—Your chief is dead. Leave there and live.

Then sent one to Gloria that said, Tell sis all is well.

As soon as she received Edward's wire, Gloria had the hacienda's telegrapher send one to Sófi by way of Amos Bentley that said, Am told all is well.

She then went to Louis's room to tell him of the developments.

“That's good,” he said. “I knew Daddy could take care of it. I could've done it, you know, if he'd let me.”

“I know,” she said.

When she remained standing there and looking at him, he knew she was giving him the chance to set things right between them. “Listen,” he said. “I feel bad that, ah, that
you
feel bad on account of . . . things.”

She stared at him.

He cleared his throat. “I mean, I
want
everything to be all right between us.”

Her eyes narrowed a little.

“I mean, I don't want to make you, ah, feel bad anymore.”

He got the smile he was hoping for. Well, it was an odd smile, true, with a sort of sadness in it, he had to admit, and for sure not as big a smile as he'd hoped for. But very much better than no smile at all.

When Amos arrived at his office on Thursday morning and read Gloria's message, he immediately sent a runner to take it to Sófi and María Palomina.

That afternoon Sófi came to his office to send a wire to Bruno. But the Buenaventura line was still down.

Esmeraldo Lopez was sitting his horse in the darkness of the trees and watching the ranch hands rescue the horses from the burning stable when his man from the hotel arrived with the telegram, his mount lathered and sonorous and near to
foundered. Another man struck a match and held it close so Lopez could read the wire. Lopez asked the messenger if he had contacted the Durango army post to check the truth of the message, and the man said he had and it was true. The general had been killed by an assassin. That was all the post dispatcher could tell him.