Bruno points to his quarters and specifies where the letters are stashed within it. Juan Lobo sends a man to retrieve them—fast, as the fire is by now already consuming the roof of that building.
The man is not long about it, panting on his return. He hands the packet of letters to Juan Lobo, who cannot read and passes them to Dax, he of the half-burned face. Dax scans several of them and says they all mention twins named Blake and James and also their wives and children.
Ah, they have families, how excellent, Juan Lobo says, and smiles wide.
All the letters show the same addresses, Dax tells him. In Brownsville, Texas. Across the Bravo from Matamoros.
“Muy bien,” Lobo says. He gestures toward the ready horse and tells Bruno he can go.
Bruno struggles up onto the horse and takes up the reins. “Let’s go, John,” he says.
Before John Samuel can hup his horse forward Juan Lobo grabs him by the nightshirt and yanks him down and sends him sprawling onto his hands and knees. Bruno yells Noooo! as Lobo takes a machete from one of his men and steps over to John Samuel and with one swing beheads him. A thick jet of blood lays a bright red stripe six feet long on the cobbles as the head tumbles and stops with a wondering stare at nothing at all.
You gave your worrrrd! Bruno screeches.
Juan Lobo turns to Fat Pori and says, Count to five and if he’s still here shoot him.
Bruno heels the horse and gallops away.
Juan Lobo picks up the head and sets it on the rim of the fountain and transfers the lensless spectacles from his own face to the head’s. How’s that, patrón? he says. Can you see more clearly how things are, my brother?
He hid in the bush off the hacienda road and waited. And envisioned again and again the wanton slaughter. John Samuel’s severed head. Rogelio Méndez hacked to pieces. He wept. He was there for half an hour before Juan Lobo and three others rode past at a canter. It was another hour more before the others came by, riding at a trot, singing and laughing, most of them drunk. Trailed by three mule-driven wagons creaking under their loads of booty. Bruno would never know it but two days hence the larger band of bandits would encounter a company of Rurales who would kill every man of them and divide the loot among themselves.
When he got back to the charred and smoking compound, corpses were being carted to the Santa Rosalba graveyard. A crowd gathered around him and he was helped down from the horse. They brought him water and tended his wounds and an old woman kissed his hands and murmured a prayer to the Holy Mother. They told him John Samuel had been taken for burial in the village and begged his forgiveness for not waiting until the fire died out and then burying him in the casa grande graveyard. Bruno said it was all right. Then one among them, weeping, told him Lobo took the head with him in a sack. Bruno could think of nothing to say to that, did not know whether to nod or shake his head. They told him Lobo and three companions filled their saddlebags with all the money from one of the strongboxes and left the other two boxes to the gang. There was nothing else to tell him that he had not seen for himself.
Then someone asked, What will we do now, patrón?
Patrón. Bruno Tomás Wolfe y Blanco, battered, and feeling very old, held the word in his mind for a moment. He looked about at the wreckage of Buenaventura. And said, Recover, what else? Then collapsed into a feverish unconsciousness from which he would not fully recover for two weeks.
He would babble in his sleep, hallucinate, intermittently come half-awake and be given water and broth, more than once be thought to have died. And when he would at last regain his senses, among his first clear thoughts would be that he must send a telegram to his border kin to warn them of what was coming. Though by then it had already arrived.
When the end came it came fast. Madero’s forces took Ciudad Juárez on the tenth of May—one of the leaders of that major victory being a bandit-turned-revolutionary who called himself Pancho Villa. Then in quick order fell Durango, Hermosillo, Torreón, Saltillo, many smaller towns. As Emiliano Zapata and his Indians were taking Cuernavaca on the twenty-first of May, representatives of Díaz and Madero reached an accord on a peace pact in the desert outside of Juárez, signing the papers by the light of automobile headlamps. Among other provisions, the treaty called for Díaz’s resignation before the end of May. Three nights later—as the wind whipped stinging dust through the Mexico City streets and thunderheads were massing—Díaz sat before his drafted but yet unsigned letter of resignation. An ulcerated molar had been tormenting him for days and his jaw was now so swollen it was an effort even to speak. He could not believe only eight months had passed since international heads of state were lavishing him with gifts and admiration during Mexico’s commemorative centennial. The agony of yielding his presidency to that little lunatic dwarf, of surrendering to an army of ignorant peons, was hardly less than that of his jaw. Advisors had been coming and going all evening but Doña Carmen never left his side except when he conferred with Edward Little. Edward reported that all the arrangements had been made for his departure. You sign that damn thing and we get you to Veracruz and then you’re off to Europe and to hell with all this. Díaz said that nothing in his life had ever been harder than writing the resignation. Except signing it. Every time I pick up the pen to do it, he said, all I really want to do is ram it in Madero’s heart. You’d have to hunker way down to do that, Edward said—and Díaz laughed in spite of his pain. There was a rumor he would be resigning that very night, Edward told him, and the zócalo was packed with fools waiting to cheer the news. Díaz glanced at the door to be sure it was closed, then said, Well fuck them. For damn sure I won’t sign it tonight. And he didn’t. The zócalo multitude was by then chanting for his resignation and menacing the palace guards. Mounted police were sent out to disperse them, swinging clubs and trampling the fallen. The crowd fought back with stones and banner staves, but when they started pulling policemen off their mounts, the soldiers on the rooftops opened fire. And still the enraged mob fought on. At which point the looming storm at last detonated into thunderclaps and lightning bolts and loosed a torrent of slashing rain that sent the crowd running for cover off the open square, taking their dead and wounded with them. And the battle of the zócalo was done.
In the morning, Díaz resigned.
On the last day of May, Porfirio Díaz sails from Veracruz on the German ship Ypiranga, accompanied by his family—his wife and daughter and wastrel of a son, an army officer via nepotism alone—and a cadre of guards under the command of Juan Sotero Wolfe. Juan Sotero’s wife and two sons, baby Carlos Sebastián only two months old, will remain in Mexico City until his return on some uncertain date that will prove to be more than four years hence. Díaz has appointed Edward Little to attend to a few details that will keep him in the capital perhaps another week. After which, Edward means to return to Patria Chica for good. In his valediction to a group of reporters on the dock, Díaz says of Madero, He has let the tiger out of its cage, now let’s see him tame it. He weeps when he and Edward hug hard at the foot of the gangplank. Two old men, friends of fifty years. It isn’t death that defeats us, he whispers in Edward’s ear, it’s fucking old age! He wipes his tears and says, Come see me in Paris. We’ll find another Lagrimas and dance with the girls all night. Edward tells him to plan on it.
Then the Man of Stone is gone. He will travel throughout Europe and be royally received wherever he goes, then settle in Paris, the Champs Élysées evermore reminding him of the Avenida Reforma. On the second day of July of 1915, lying on silk sheets and listening to a raspy phonograph recording of ranchero music, he will remember the Mexico City night when he and Lalo, already old, were on their way to Las Lagrimas de Nuestras Madres and with their cane swords fought off a gang of rateros. And have his last laugh.