THE SOUND OF gunfire was evident as far as the Rio Grande. Word quickly spread about the noonday assault at the hipodromo. Americans gathered along the riverbank. The air above the buildings along the Avenida Paseo de Triunfo was heavy with smoke. By the time the Mexican herded the girl to the bridge, John Lourdes was there waiting.
He watched her descend the weathered planking to the quarantine shed. The Mexican kept her under steady surveillance until she disappeared within that grim-faced building. He then looked over to the American side and seemed to acknowledge someone. John Lourdes scanned the crowd along the river to see who it might be.
The girl appeared, then as usual started up Santa Fe. John Lourdes set off to follow. She hadn't gone but a few yards when a man slipped through the crowd and took hold of her arm.
He was very tall and quite lean. He was much older and wore pleated pants and a vest. He had a long, dour face and said nothing to the girl.
A trolley slowed and the man pressed the girl to board. John Lourdes swung toward the rear steps, and as the girl was being led to a seat, she noticed him. She stared so that the man with her turned to find out what had caught her attention. John Lourdes eased back into a faceless wall of passengers. They rode the line as far as the park at Oregon and Mesa. They entered the Mills Building. John Lourdes followed them and others into the elevator. The girl made sure not to look at him. She was trembling so. They took the grated elevator to the fifth floor. They went in one direction down the hallway, John Lourdes the other. The office they entered was numbered 509. The downstairs directory read: sIMIC SHIPPING-IMPORTS AND EXPORTS, ROOM 509.
There was a tobacconist in the lobby beside the entrance to the Modern Cafe. It was from there John Lourdes called in. Just across the park was the Hotel Angelus, which headquartered the BOI. John Lourdes was told justice Knox and an operative were on their way from northern El Paso. He bought cigarettes and waited by the Cafe doors. He detailed everything in his pocket notebook.
He was slipping the notebook back into his coat pocket and starting outside for a touch of sunlight and air when he walked right into a gentleman entering the lobby. John Lourdes looked up to excuse himself but could only stare.
"Now looking down as you walk along may score you a lot of loose change," said the man, "but you've got to keep those gunsights at eye level if you really mean to make something of yourself."
And with that his father offered an offhanded grin, then was on his way.
FIVE
"May we help you in some way?" said the one sitting at the desk.
"It's the right question, for sure," said Rawbone, "but the wrong man is asking it."
He approached the desk and handed over the bill of lading from the truck. The man studied it with quiet regard as the others looked over his shoulder. His expression tightened further as he glanced up at Rawbone. He stood and walked to a door to a private office and knocked. "Mr. Simic," he said. "I need a moment."
The door opened slightly and the man entered. Through the opening Rawbone glimpsed a young girl wrapped in a blanket sitting in the corner on the floor.
While he waited, Rawbone sat back on the wood railing that demarked the office entry. He took on the men's stares by disinterestedly fanning himself with the derby.
The inner office door opened and the man from the desk came out first. He was followed by an older gentleman with a long and dour face, who held the bill of lading. He did not bother to introduce himself.
"How did you get this?" he asked.
Rawbone gave no answer.
"The drivers?"
Rawbone crossed himself.
The men in the room took on the mood of a hunting party. Simic instructed one of the men to lock the door. As he did Rawbone opened his suit coat and reached for a handkerchief that happened to be in the same pocket where the black handle of an automatic protruded for anyone to see.
"Who are you?" Simic asked.
"Think of me," said Rawbone, "as ... Tom, the bootblack. Ah, you're not familiar . . . Horatio Alger's hero, educated at the hard school of poverty. Who with a smile and good cheer overcomes the hardships of existence to acquire ... a comfortable fortune." His grin of sarcasm disappeared. "Now, let's put our cards and our pure hearts on the table."
JOHN LOURDES CROSSED the street in front of the Mills Building. On that day in the year of our Lord, he was twenty-five years old. He stood under the shade of a great elder at the entrance to San Jacinto Park from where he could watch the lobby and wait on justice Knox. That reviled gusano of a father had walked right out of the scarred regions of memory and straight into the daylight, all suited up like a gent and with the cool arrogance of one who believes himself beyond the trappings of right and order.
But today, there would be a reckoning.
Then something, call it superstition if you will, took hold of John Lourdes. He glanced back into the park down a shadowy walkway. He had come here many times as a boy with his father. There was a pond with a stone wall around it where lived half a dozen alligators. How they'd come to be there was uncertain. But one winter night his father had persuaded a few drunken wilds to go down to the park and sack up those creatures and get them out of the cold to keep them from freezing.
So there he'd been watching as his father and a band of drunks wrestled one prehistoric monstrosity after another into canvas gunnies. They carried them back to that dingy saloon and kept them warm by the stove while the boy sat on the bar cross-legged and watched his old man resting in a chair amongst them. He had a cigarette in one hand and with the other flicked mescal from a bottle onto each sacked gator.
"I baptize you," he said, "in the name of the father and the son . .
John Lourdes needed to remember, nothing was beyond his father's unpredictability.
Justice Knox arrived with another agent named Howell. Knox was a plain, soft-spoken man. He had poor vision and wore spectacles and was singularly obsessed with the security represented by the bureaucracy. His core belief: People's central need and desire was for bureaucracy, not freedom, not rebellion, not individuality. Man longed for effective bureaucracy, and its ultimate expression was order.
Knox was never swayed by anger or revenge. He was in that respect heartless, and it made him, in turn, beyond the reach of sympathy or compassion. He had no personal attachment to his agents, no interest in their private welfare, and he demanded their attitude toward the job be precisely the same as his.
"The girl?" he asked.
"She's still up in 509."
Knox put his hands on his hips and looked at the building, and while he considered a plan John Lourdes gathered himself and said, "Sir, there's something else-"
WHEN RAWBONE LEFT the Mills Building he crossed the street and cut straight through San Jacinto Park. His hands were in his pant pockets and he wore the derby at a cocky angle. Yet he was wary enough to keep glancing back.
At the pond tourists leaned their kids over the stone wall to see the alligators moving through the still and mosquito-laden waters. He was not much beyond it when the memory of a winter night back in '92 washed over him. He could see the boy there in that grimy saloon, the kerosene lamp above him curtained with smoke. His son ... he'd just turned seven.