He took a seat at the table. After a while he noticed something moving at the top of the stairs. A black hunched back, a shuffling of feathers. He stood up, walked over. Through the banisters he saw a vulture hobble across the landing.
‘Did someone die in here?’ he asked.
Pablo did not answer.
Wilson pushed his face against his sleeve as the stench of droppings reached his nostrils. That smell, he had forgotten it; sometimes it was so bad, you had to tie a rag over your face. He had been spoiled in the hospital. Retreating to the table, he sat down again. There were still five minutes till midday.
His thoughts turned back to Mama Vum Buá. As she cleared his breakfast plates away that morning, he had spoken to her again.
‘I heard the church burned down.’
A smile slid out of the right side of her mouth. ‘I heard that too.’
‘You don’t seem too upset about it,’ he said.
The smile shrank. ‘What are you getting at?’
In that moment, he suddenly remembered what the Director had told him. It had not been a spontaneous act of violence. It had taken real determination. He thought of Mama Vum Buá’s grudge against priests. They had corrupted her family. They had polluted her with their blue eyes. If anyone had reasons for burning the church, she did. Especially since it was being built by Monsieur Valence, a man who had insulted her cooking.
He looked up at her. ‘Apparently somebody piled wood inside the building, then set fire to it — ’
The Señora’s head swung sideways and she spat.
‘I don’t know anything about that,’ she said.
The clock on the roof of the company store began to strike. Wilson had never expected to learn the truth from her, but that sly smile spilling from her mouth intrigued him. She smiled so rarely. Had Monsieur Valence been justified in his suspicions? For the first time, it occurred to Wilson that she might actually have poisoned the Frenchman. Deliberately.
As the twelfth note died away, Pablo stood up and walked to the cupboard where he kept his liquor. His eyes lifted to the landing; the vulture was still up there someplace, shuffling its feathers in the gloom.
‘It’s ever since the riots,’ he said. ‘Can’t seem to keep them off the streets.’ He brought a bottle over to the table. ‘Talking of streets, have you heard the latest? They’re thinking of naming a street after Montoya. The place where it happened. They say it’ll be a kind of memorial.’
Wilson had to slow him down. ‘Where what happened?’
Pablo took Wilson through the events in detail, as Wilson had known he would. Montoya was returning from Frenchtown after another round of discussions with de Romblay when he was ambushed by a crowd of Indians. Such was the Indians’ fury that they tore the carriage to pieces with their bare hands. They stripped Montoya of his uniform and nailed him to one of the wheels. For more than an hour they dragged him through the streets. They believed his suffering would act as a kind of poultice, drawing out the suffering of their people; his anguish would replace their own. Afterwards they took him to the park. There, on the dark corner where the Calle Majore met Avenida Aljez, not two blocks from the hotel, the Indians got out their knives. Montoya was still conscious when they cut him open and threw his intestines on the ground. It was their version of a crystal ball. Nothing like the guts of a Mexican aristocrat to give you an idea of the future.
Wilson grimaced. ‘How did it look?’
‘Peaceful. Or so they said.’ Pablo uncorked the bottle and poured two shots of liquor. He pushed one across the table.
Wilson drank it down.
Pablo offered him another, but Wilson shook his head.
‘It took him two hours to die.’ Pablo poured himself a second drink and swallowed it. ‘People who live on that corner, they can still hear the groaning.’
Wilson leaned back in his chair. He did not want to think about Montoya. He followed a crack as it meandered up the pale-green wall. The square of sky at the top burned white.
Later that afternoon, the two men made their way to the bakery. Along Calle 3 and then right, up Avenida Cobre. People were sitting on their porches, faces slackened by the heat. The mood in the streets was leaden. It reminded Wilson of oceans after storms. All that exhausted water. Spaces had opened in the town’s young memory. For some they would be grotesquely detailed, graphic — food for nightmares; for others, blank. He was not sure he would have called it peaceful. More like numb.
His eyes lifted to the graveyard on the hill. Montoya. Some soldiers from the garrison. And then the Indians, too many to be counted. In 1879 he had spent a few weeks in Virginia City. People always used to tell him that the first twenty-six bodies buried there were murdered men. Life was furious in a new town; nobody had time to die of natural causes.
In the bakery Jesus was sitting with Luis Fernández. Wilson and Luis shook hands. Pablo arched an eyebrow at his younger brother, then leaned against the wall and picked his teeth. Over glasses of black coffee and angel cakes baked fresh that afternoon, Wilson learned of Luis’s appointment to the post of customs officer.
‘So they killed him too,’ he murmured.
‘Ramón was asking for it,’ Jesús said, ‘hiking import duties like he did.’
‘And all those bribes he took.’ Pablo shook his head.
Luis kept silent.
Wilson noticed how slim Luis was, and how there were no pockets to his pants.
‘Just the same,’ Jesús was saying, ‘I wish they’d found some other way. That was a full day’s baking — and I never got a penny for it.’
Medically speaking, José Ramón had suffocated. The Indians had held him down, and forced cake into his mouth and nose; they had done such a thorough job that, during the autopsy, Dr Bardou found icing in the customs officer’s lungs. Not only that but they gouged out his eyes and filled the sockets with marzipan. Then they chopped his hands off at the wrist so he would not be able to accept any bribes in the afterlife. As Jesús said to Pablo. ‘Imagine what they would have done with a baguette.’ But he had only made the one at that point, of course, his first –
Wilson interrupted. ‘I think I saw you, the day I rode back into town. You were waving something.’
‘That was the day he did it,’ Pablo said.
Jesús nodded. He had heard the guns that afternoon, but he had assumed it was fireworks — some festival which he had, in his excitement, forgotten all about. He did not realise the truth until he dashed out into the street waving his baguette and promptly lost the end of it to a Mexican lieutenant’s sabre.
He led Wilson over to the row of shelves behind his counter and drew the cloth off the glass case where he always used to keep his doughnuts. And there it was, resting on green velvet, tapering and golden at one end, brutally truncated at the other: the first baguette.
Nose close to the glass, Wilson examined it. He tilted his head one way, then the other. Then he nodded and stepped back.
‘The doctor must be pleased,’ he said.
‘Free medical treatment for life.’ Jesús beamed. ‘Not just me, either. The whole family.’
Putting on another pot of coffee, he asked Wilson what his plans were now that he was well again. Wilson told him about the balcony that he was going to build for La Huesuda.
Pablo smirked. ‘He’ll get it for nothing from now on.’
‘That’s a relief,’ Jesús said. ‘We won’t have to pay for him any more.’
The three Mexicans roared with laughter.
‘I’m not interested in that,’ said Wilson, grinning.
‘No,’ Pablo said, ‘of course you’re not.’
For the remainder of the month Wilson worked on La Huesuda’s house, starting at daybreak every morning. Monsieur de Romblay was most amused when he discovered the purpose to which his materials were being put.