Authors: David Downing
The ship’s auxiliary tender moved up the wide Pánuco River in the tropical darkness, showing no lights and, so far, attracting no attention from whoever held possession of the two shores. It was still remarkably hot but not particularly humid, and over the last few minutes a welcome breeze had sprung up. That morning, according to the grizzled Texan named Doherty who commanded the tender, Tampico had still been in the hands of Huerta loyalists. It probably still was, but Pablo González’s Constitutionalist troops had been probing the town’s outer defenses for several days and sooner or later seemed bound to break through.
The tender had already passed abandoned oil-company wharves and storage installations on both sides of the torpid river, and it was hard to judge how far away the occasional bursts of gunfire were coming from. Several fires were burning out on the coastal plain to the north, but it was impossible to tell whether they were intentional burn-offs or consequences of war.
All in all, McColl had been to more welcoming places. Maybe by day it would look less threatening, but by night it reminded him of paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, and he
wouldn’t have been shocked to see men spread-eagle on fiery wheels lining the banks of the river.
A week had passed since his departure from New York City. It had taken him two days to reach Galveston and two more for Cumming to secure him a place on one of the relief ships heading south down the Gulf coastline. This rusty old freighter had a top speed of around eight knots and had been overtaken by every other ship heading their way. Many of those had been American warships, whose reason for rushing southward doubtless had something to do with the escalating squabble between the two countries. This had broken out while he was still twisting his thumbs in Galveston; as the city rag had explained it, some American sailors in Tampico—whose only crime had been to purchase some much-needed fuel for their boat—had been taken into custody by insolent Mexican soldiers. They had quickly been released with an apology, but the local American naval commander had deemed the latter insufficient. He had demanded a more formal obeisance, one that included a twenty-one-gun salute to his flag.
When McColl’s freighter had finally arrived off the mouth of the Pánuco three days later, the sea had been thronged with warships. The Dutch, German, and British were all represented, but most of the ships were American. This threatening presence suggested that the latest Mexican response had been insufficiently obsequious, an impression verified by the locally based Doherty. And in the meantime another incident had taken place—an American army orderly had been arrested in Veracruz, farther down the coast. According to Doherty, Washington had reacted to this second misunderstanding with an equally childish lack of proportion. “Wilson wants to make a point,” the Texan had concluded. He himself had voted for Roosevelt’s Progressives.
Oh, good, McColl had thought—now he had the Americans to worry about as well as the Germans.
The tender was gliding past another silent oil jetty, but if the faintly glowing sky ahead was any guide, the city of Tampico was not yet in darkness. Ten minutes later, as the tender rounded a sharp bend in the river, he could see it for himself, a scattering of yellow lights along the northern shore. These were soon hidden from view by the warehouse stretching the length of the wharf, which seemed suspiciously deserted.
But no fusillade greeted their approach or interrupted their tying up and landing. McColl thanked Doherty for the lift and hung back while the representatives of government, navy and Big Oil who had shared his trip upriver started out, with evident trepidation, in the direction of the town.
It was closer than it looked. Beyond the long warehouse, a pedestrian footbridge carried arrivals over a fan of railway tracks and deposited them at the southern edge of the town’s principal plaza. And here, McColl was pleased to see, life was still going on. There were uniforms on display but no drawn guns, and most of the walkers enjoying the evening air were couples, with or without obvious chaperones. Although the cantinas on the rim of the plaza were hardly doing a roaring business, none looked in any danger of going bankrupt.
A sudden ripple of gunfire sounded in the distance, but no one seemed to pay it any mind. Still, McColl thought, it might be wise to check how far away the front line actually was. In the morning, when it was light.
There were several hotels in the plaza, all looking much of a muchness. He had no idea whether von Schön was still in Mexico, let alone in this one small Gulf port, but if this was where trouble was brewing for the British, then McColl wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised to find him frequenting one of the hotel bars. According to the briefing from London that Kensley had sent on to Galveston, Mexico supplied over 90 percent of the oil that kept the Royal Navy at sea. It was hard to imagine a bigger prize for a German spy.
If McColl ran into von Schön, he supposed he would shake the German’s hand. The man had probably saved his life, after all. And then each would try to thwart the other, in as civilized a manner as possible. Or something like that. But everything being equal, McColl decided, he would much rather that the German remain in ignorance of his arrival. Looking back over his relationship with von Schön, it was hard to escape the conclusion that his counterpart’s experience in these matters was greater than this own.
He decided to eschew the plaza itself. On one of the streets leading off it, he found several other hotels, slightly more seedy perhaps, but less likely to have German guests. The young man at reception seemed slightly surprised to see a gringo, but business was clearly business, and at McColl’s request he showed him a room overlooking the street. It was remarkably devoid of furniture, just a bed and a jug of water, side by side on the floor. The walls were splattered with squashed mosquitoes, but that didn’t worry McColl overmuch—when it came to natural gifts, his unpopularity with that particular insect rivaled his linguistic aptitude.
On impulse he showed the young man the picture of von Schön leaving the Ghadar house in San Francisco. “Yes,” the Mexican said. “I have seen him in the plaza. Two days ago maybe. A friend of yours?”
“A business acquaintance.”
“Ah. You pay in advance, please.”
After handing over the cost of an American coffee for a three-night stay, McColl was shown a cleaner-than-expected bathroom and toilet down the hall and advised to patronize a particular restaurant up the street, which was famous for its guachinango. Once the boy had retreated downstairs, McColl opened the door-length windows that led onto his balcony and stepped gingerly out onto the wrought-iron structure. He could give speeches from here, he thought.
It seemed too early for bed, so he walked back down to the plaza and its parade of local life. He found a seat outside a cantina in a convenient patch of shadow and sat with a beer for half an hour, pondering the task that Cumming had given him. The first step was to seek out any suspicious German travelers without alerting them to his own presence or purpose. And provided he didn’t run into von Schön, that shouldn’t be difficult. The next move would be to intercept any communications with embassy or homeland and get a better idea of what they were up to.
As he sat there in the semidarkness, watching insects orbit the lamp above the door and listening to the singer inside croon mournful melodies over a badly tuned guitar, it all seemed a bit unreal. He had never been to Mexico before, but he already felt fond of the place.
He got up and walked warily around one side of the square and back across the footbridge to the long wharf. A line of big birds was perched on the ridge of the warehouse roof—vultures or buzzards of some sort or other—but they showed no interest in him. He sat on an iron capstan at the edge of the slow-moving river, feeling the weight of the rolling water and wondering what Caitlin was doing in New York. He had not yet written to her, and when he did work out what he wanted to say, the letter would have to be sent via the British consulate in the capital.
Next morning he was coming back from the bathroom when he noticed a set of stairs heading upward. These brought him out onto a flat roof with panoramic views. The sun had risen above the American warships lying off the river mouth, some six miles to the east, and was already bathing the slopes of the mountains that bordered the plain to the west. There was a low rumbling of guns to the north, and smoke was rising in several places. A long black pall seemed to be hanging
over the northwestern outskirts of the city, where Doherty had placed the front line.
He wondered what would happen if the Constitutionalists took the city. Life would presumably go on, at least for most of its Mexican inhabitants. As far as McColl knew, the Constitutionalist leader Carranza was popular with the American government, and he wouldn’t want to alienate Wilson and his cronies by destroying oil installations or shooting the foreigners who ran them. And if the Americans remained persona grata, they would probably ensure that the British did, too.
The Mexicans weren’t the problem. And wouldn’t be, unless President Wilson or Prime Minister Asquith did something stupid enough to unite the warring factions against the United States and Britain. That
would
benefit Germany.
He walked back down to his room, finished dressing, and took to the street in search of breakfast. A café near the plaza provided eggs, refried beans, and a huge cup of coffee, as sweet as it was bitter. A boy of about six sold him a one-page newspaper, which publicized several local society gatherings but avoided any mention of the conflict raging in the city’s outskirts.
The town didn’t seem big enough to warrant a vice-consul, but the oil field clearly did, because the address of His Majesty’s local fixer had been included in McColl’s briefing notes. Following the café owner’s directions, he walked two blocks west and took the next turn toward the river. And there, a few buildings down, was the sign he was looking for.
The vice-consulate occupied a couple of rooms over a local shipping office. There was a secretary’s desk in the outer office but no sign of a secretary, unless he or she was part of the argument under way in the inner sanctum. McColl took the absent secretary’s seat and listened to two male voices angrily expressing their lack of satisfaction with His Majesty’s agent. They were oil engineers, working in the fields to the north of the city,
and most of their personal possessions had been “confiscated” by marauding members of Pablo González’s army. “We need protection,” one kept saying, as if repeating the phrase would conjure up a gunboat.
The vice-consul was given little chance to respond, but McColl had the feeling he’d heard the man’s voice before.
He had. Once the two engineers had blustered their way out, he walked in on a familiar face. They’d hardly known each other, let alone been friends, but Rodney Wethers had been in McColl’s year at Oxford and even attended some of the same tutorials.
“I wondered if it was you when I got the message,” Wethers said, standing up and offering a damp hand. He had put on a lot of weight since Oxford and doubled his number of chins. The heat had hardly begun to build outside, but he was already sweating profusely.
A couple of minutes proved sufficient to establish their lack of common acquaintances. “So,” Wethers said, “you’re looking for Germans. There’s quite a few pass through, but they’re mostly travelers or salesmen. Nothing suspicious as far as I know.”
“How about this man?” McColl asked, sliding across his creased photograph of von Schön.
Wethers shook his head, dislodging several drops of sweat. “Is he a spy?”
“He is.”
Wethers looked at the picture again. “But who would he spy on round here? What secrets could he unearth?”
“What about González?” McColl asked, changing tack. “Will he take the town?”
“Probably, sooner or later. But nothing much will change. I went to see him a couple of weeks ago, at his headquarters. He’s a bit rough and ready, but he seemed reasonable enough. When I stressed the importance our government attaches to
the local oil fields and how upset we would be if extraction or delivery were to be interrupted, he told me not to worry. We would have to pay what he called ‘extra taxes’ for operating in a war zone, but he offered his personal guarantee that the wells would keep pumping. And in the circumstances, that seems like quite a good bargain.”
“Maybe,” McColl conceded. “But what if the Germans offer him more to cut the supply?”
“I suppose they might try. But I think González knows which side his bread is buttered. Unlike us and the Americans, the Germans have only one ship in the area. They can’t put any real pressure on him, whereas we, as a last resort, could occupy the oil fields.”
“If we did that, wouldn’t the Mexicans blow up the wells?”
“And destroy their main source of income? I don’t think so.”
“What if Huerta’s army looked to be forcing them out again—then they’d have nothing to lose.”
Wethers smiled. “That’s all very hypothetical, old chap.”
“Maybe it is. Tell me about this latest business, the arrests and Washington’s response.”
“Ah, the Tampico Incident.” He made it sound like a dime novel. “It was nothing really …”
“The Americans don’t seem to think so.”
“They’re very touchy at the moment. If they’re not careful, they’ll make Huerta’s position untenable and find that they’ve landed us all with somebody worse.”
“Are all the other leaders anti-American?”
“No, they’re just more unreliable. Zapata and Villa aren’t much better than bandits, and the others … I suppose Carranza might fit the bill—he’s the one with the forked beard who looks like he’s itching to part the Red Sea. Villa, Obregón, and González are all ostensibly loyal to him, but who knows? From our point of view, none of them would be an improvement on Huerta. Better the devil you know and all that.”
“The Americans don’t seem to think so.”
“Most of them do. The American ambassador in Mexico City is Huerta’s biggest supporter. The American oilmen around here think he’s everyone’s best bet. It’s Wilson who can’t wait to get rid of the man, and his reason, believe it or not, is that he thinks Huerta is a
bad
man. Forget American interests, which are much the same as ours. He’d rather be righteous.”