"I walked the barrio. Adobe Row is gone."
"It was a reasonable eventuality. All cultures prefer to replace someone else's vanities with their own."
Rawbone came around the desk again. He took from his pocket a bill of lading and handed it to Burr. "It's from an import-export shipper here in El Paso. What do you know of it?"
Burr studied the piece of paper. "I don't know the company. But I see these are items for building an icehouse." He handed it back. "You and the makings for refrigeration tests the limits of the imagination."
"There's a revolution coming," said Rawbone.
"It's here."
"Weapons will sell for a premium. As will three-ton trucks."
"Leave the city tonight," said Burr. "Go to Juarez. I'll arrange introductions to some very private people."
Rawbone's attention seemed to have drifted momentarily. "What do you know about the boy?"
Burr studied his friend carefully. "He wouldn't be a boy now, would he?"
"Is he here?"
Burr pointed to the paper tent on his desk. Rawbone took it up between two fingers and read: Wk,a4 can'4 be for-o44en, mvs4 remain forjo44en. Rawbone then folded and refolded the paper and put it in a coat pocket.
"You can take up in the apartment above the garage. I have plenty of clothes. Some will fit you. Look the part."
"Thanks, Wadsworth."
He poured another glass and reached for his derby. As he started out Burr, upon reflection, said, "Consider your options but don't get lured into some lost cause." Rawbone stopped partway across the room and looked back. "You were always at your best," said Burr, "when you were selfish and remorseless, with just a hint of humor."
"I'll note it, friend."
"Note it well. The city is not like it was. There's violence at hand. Undercover agents everywhere. More sheriffs, more law enforcement, more Rangers. And now the Bureau of Investigation."
"It's good to know we're in such efficient hands."
"There's a new law . . . the Mann Act. It gives the BOI a wide latitude when it comes to national security investigations. They have offices in the Angelus Hotel. And you know who's in charge ... Justice Knox."
FOUR
The girl remained overnight. She slept on a flimsy sofa bundled up like a child. A single candle burned on a table nearby. Shadows bore out the window in that room was barred.
John Lourdes took up on the stairwell at the end of the hall so he could watch any comings and goings from that office, but there were none. He balled up his coat to use as a pillow and played the role of bum stealing a place to sleep off the street. The building grew dark and empty. Any vague and distant sound was like the fleeting tone of dreams.
As he waited for daylight to continue his surveillance, he could not get the girl out of his mind. She seemed to touch certain inarticulates within him. He also found that she and the conversation with the Germans, if you could call it that, seemed entwined, as if they were part of one single experience.
He had always been at his investigative best when details were studied at a distance. He was at his most comfortable with the world when that too was experienced at a distance.
He approached what he was experiencing with the same cool eye. As for the girl, it was in great part her silence that affected him. The silence she exuded as she crossed that bridge and walked alone almost otherworldly from all that was going on around her, while at the same time being intensely on guard.
Now, the Germans and their comments about the "unclean" left him trussed up with his past openly exposed. What they said had infuriated him not only for its degrading and racist implications but because he, in fact, felt in some way "unclean."
Neither the BOI nor justice Knox had any idea the criminal and murderer called Rawbone was his father. He'd relegated that detail of his heritage to the trash heap of history, inventing a story about an Anglo father, now deceased, named Lourdes. John Lourdes had done so not only because he felt unquestioned shame, but because he was also driven by aspirations of career and betterment and knew this crime of chance would not play to his favor.
That was the term a friend of his father's used, a man his mother thought to be "unholy and unsavory." The friend was a disgraced attorney named Burr. As a boy he'd been to the great white house in the hills above El Paso with his father. Often it was at night, often the men spoke in secret, often afterward his father would disappear for days at a time.
One night, before leaving, Burr had slipped some paper money into the boy's shirt and told him, "See your father there? You can thank him; your birth is a crime of chance ... but all birth is a crime of chance."
Burr's manner was such that even the very young John Lourdes knew the statement was meant in a malicious way to taint him. And now, all these years later, beyond the restless hours and mysteries that afflicted him, beyond all aims, objectives and intentions there was this need as final as final could ever hope to be, that he, John Lourdes, would be the one to bring about his father's bloodletting, that he would be the cause hand behind his death.
As DAWN BEGAN to seep across the building doorway, there came the sound of distant and sporadic gunfire. It was not a good sign. Not much later the girl came out of the office with a man. He must have been in there all night because John Lourdes had not seen him enter. He was a small fellow, bespectacled and Mexican. He was neatly dressed and rather unassuming except for the knife sheath hanging from a pistol belt under his green felt coat.
They made straight for the Santa Fe bridge with Lourdes following, but this was no ordinary morning. The street was spilling over with people. Pamphlets were being passed out urging the citizenry to take up arms against the Diaz government. There was a rabble atmosphere of anger and retribution for the overturning of free elections. Making it through the chaotic foot traffic was near impossible. Everywhere weapons were being brandished and fired off with wanton disregard. A government flag was burned in the street, its smoking ashes singeing the air. Up ahead, at the hipodromo, the racehorses had been loosed from their stables and were being stampeded down the Paseo.
It was then President Diaz's mounted shock troops appeared far up the Paseo, their columns re-forming to become a phalanx across the boulevard. When the commander ordered lances readied, his troops answered crisply.
They held there with the sun to their backs, and their battle line shimmered in the heat. The commander demanded the crowd disperse, but it remained defiant. The Mexican with the girl in tow shouldered his way through the shouting insurrectos toward what he assumed was the safety of the sidewalk buildings. Again the commander shouted his orders and again the crowd answered in a fanfare of epithets and arms held aloft with clenched fists.
The command was given, the surge of troops immediate and brutal. Most of the citizenry fell back in a panic; some stood their ground and fired. The street became a pall of yellow dust and screams. The ensuing pandemonium swept over the Mexican and the girl. They were lost to each other. He was taken in a wave of humanity down the sidewalk while she was trampled over.
John Lourdes managed to hold ground then shoulder his way forward. He reached the girl, who lay on the sidewalk trying to protect herself. He pulled her up and into a doorway. She was bloody and frightened; she was trembling. He held her by the arms till she calmed. She thanked him with a nod and by putting a hand on his heart. His thought: Get her back across the border and somehow question her. Suddenly the Mexican punched his way through a wild frieze of bodies in headlong retreat. He had a revolver drawn and pointed. He threatened John Lourdes in no uncertain terms to be away, now, be away.