“Jez, lemme think it over, Ben… but I got to go back to the daily bunksheet.”
So Mac found himself running a bookstore on the Calle Independencia with a line of stationery and a few typewriters. It felt good to be his own boss for the first time in his life. Concha, who was a storekeeper’s daughter, was delighted. She kept the books and talked to the customers so that Mac didn’t have much to do but sit in the back and read and talk to his friends. That Christmas Ben and Lisa, who was a tall Spanish girl said to have been a dancer in Malaga, with a white skin like a camellia and ebony hair, gave all sorts of parties in an apartment with Americanstyle bath and kitchen that Ben rented out in the new quarter towards Chapultepec. The day the Asociacion de Publicistas had its annual banquet, Ben stopped into the bookstore feeling fine and told Mac he wanted him and Concha to come up after supper and wouldn’t Concha bring a couple of friends, nice wellbehaved girls not too choosy, like she knew. He was giving a party for G. H. Barrow who was back from Vera Cruz and a big contact man from New York who was wangling something, Ben didn’t know just what. He’d seen Carranza yesterday and at the banquet everybody’d kowtowed to him.
“Jez, Mac, you oughta been at that banquet; they took one of the streetcars and had a table the whole length of it and an orchestra and rode us out to San Angel and back and then all round town.”
“I saw ’em starting out,” said Mac, “looked too much like a funeral to me.”
“Jez, it was swell though. Salvador an’ everybody was there and this guy Moorehouse, the big hombre from New York, jez, he looked like he didn’t know if he was comin’ or goin’. Looked like he expected a bomb to go off under the seat any minute… hellova good thing for Mexico if one had, when you come to think of it. All the worst crooks in town were there."
The party at Ben’s didn’t come off so well. J. Ward Moorehouse didn’t make up to the girls as Ben had hoped. He brought his secretary, a tired blond girl, and they both looked scared to death. They had a dinner Mexican style and champagne and a great deal of cognac and a victrola played records by Victor Herbert and Irving Berlin and a little itinerant band attracted by the crowd played Mexican airs on the street outside. After dinner things were getting a little noisy inside so Ben and Moorehouse took chairs out on the balcony and had a long talk about the oil situation over their cigars. J. Ward Moorehouse explained that he had come down in a purely unofficial capacity you understand to make contacts, to find out what the situation was and just what there was behind Carranza’s stubborn opposition to American investors and that the big businessmen he was in touch with in the States desired only fair play and that he felt that if their point of view could be thoroughly understood through some information bureau or the friendly coöperation of Mexican newspapermen.
Ben went back in the diningroom and brought out Enrique Salvador and Mac. They all talked over the situation and J. Ward Moorehouse said that speaking as an old newspaperman himself he thoroughly understood the situation of the press, probably not so different in Mexico City from that in Chicago or Pittsburgh and that all the newspaperman wanted was to give each fresh angle of the situation its proper significance in a spirit of fair play and friendly coöperation, but that he felt that the Mexican papers had been misinformed about the aims of American business in Mexico just as the American press was misinformed about the aims of Mexican politics. If Mr. Enrique would call by the Regis he’d be delighted to talk to him more fully, or to any one of you gentlemen and if he wasn’t in, due to the great press of appointments and the very few days he had to spend in the Mexican capital, his secretary, Miss Williams, would be only too willing to give them any information they wanted and a few specially prepared strictly confidential notes on the attitude of the big American corporations with which he was purely informally in touch.
After that he said he was sorry but he had telegrams waiting for him at the Regis and Salvador took him and Miss Williams, his secretary, home in the chief of police’s automobile.
“Jez, Ben, that’s a smooth bastard,” said Mac to Ben after J. Ward Moorehouse had gone.
“Mac,” said Ben, “that baby’s got a slick cream of millions all over him. By gum, I’d like to make some of these contacts he talks about… By gorry, I may do it yet… You just watch your Uncle Dudley, Mac. I’m goin’ to associate with the big hombres after this.”
After that the party was not so refined. Ben brought out a lot more cognac and the men started taking the girls into the bedrooms and hallways and even into the pantry and kitchen. Barrow cottoned onto a blonde named Nadia who was half English and talked to her all evening about the art of life. After everybody had gone Ben found them locked up in his bedroom.
Mac got to like the life of a storekeeper. He got up when he wanted to and walked up the sunny streets past the cathedral and the façade of the national palace and up Independencia where the sidewalks had been freshly sprinkled with water and a morning wind was blowing through, sweet with the smell of flowers and roasting coffee. Concha’s little brother Antonio would have the shutters down and be sweeping out the store by the time he got there. Mac would sit in the back reading or would roam about the store chatting with people in English and Spanish. He didn’t sell many books, but he kept all the American and European papers and magazines and they sold well, especially The Police Gazette and La Vie Parisienne. He started a bank account and was planning to take on some typewriter agencies. Salvador kept telling him he’d get him a contract to supply stationery to some government department and make him a rich man.
One morning he noticed a big crowd in the square in front of the National Palace. He went into one of the cantinas under the arcade and ordered a glass of beer. The waiter told him that Carranza’s troops had lost Torreón and that Villa and Zapata were closing in on the Federal District. When he got to the bookstore news was going down the street that Carranza’s government had fled and that the revolutionists would be in the city before night. The storekeepers began to put up their shutters. Concha and her mother came in crying saying that it would be worse than the terrible week when Madero fell and that the revolutionists had sworn to burn and loot the city. Antonio ran in saying that the Zapatistas were bombarding Tacuba. Mac got a cab and went over to the Chamber of Deputies to see if he could find anybody he knew. All the doors were open to the street and there were papers littered along the corridors. There was nobody in the theater but an old Indian and his wife who were walking round hand in hand looking reverently at the gilded ceiling and the paintings and the tables covered with green plush. The old man carried his hat in his hand as if he were in church.
Mac told the cabman to drive to the paper where Salvador worked, but the janitor there told him with a wink that Salvador had gone to Vera Cruz with the chief of police. Then he went to the Embassy where he couldn’t get a word with anybody. All the anterooms were full of Americans who had come in from ranches and concessions and who were cursing out President Wilson and giving each other the horrors with stories of the revolutionists. At the consulate Mac met a Syrian who offered to buy his stock of books. “No, you don’t,” said Mac and went back down Independencia.