THE INSURGENCE of CHAN SANTA CRUZ

BOOK SEVEN: CUAHTENOTL EPACT

CHAPTER NINE

The church, as has been said, stood open to the elements and impulse of any passers-by and, as soon as José... or Jorge, as he now called himself... stalked down its aisle, the irrelevance of security became apparent.

There was no gold chalice on the altar... in fact the altar was not marble, rather a plaster block representing one of the ancient Aztec gods, turned upside down and partially covered with a filthy tablecloth. Half the wooden pews had been removed, half of those remaining had been hacked at and scarred in an obviously desperate search for firewood. No icons of saints survived, but plenty of canvases were nailed at odd angles upon the walls or stuffed into windowframes. Some of these were sacred, others were not, and even more were water-coloured landscapes, abstracts and portraits, all deformed by the rain and wind and generations of tiny white and pale green mushrooms.

There was no Jesucristo... however, an icon of a fat, Turkish pasha, a relic of display to sell cigarettes, had been secured to crossed segments of scrap wood by good, Yucatecan hemp.

José wandered the back rooms, the bell tower... the clarion itself was of metal, but of a suspicious sort that gave only a muffled clank when he reached out to strike it. He even scoured the dungeonlike basements of the church for Padre Luis, but there was no sign of him, nor any other. He emerged disturbed by the swirling, bleeding dark colors of the profane art, grateful for the rain which washed away the stains of despair and desecration, proceeded to the municipal building, and knocked upon its many doors, without receiving a reply. He remembered the careless words on the Epact of Cuahtenotl, glared down the row of shops to his left... beneath the hazy ribbon of silver sluicing upwards against the mountain of no name over which lay Puebla and Veracruz... and then discerned that, indeed, there was one establishment that had lifted its shutters to the world and its rain.

A tavern!

But... of course!

The name of this wretched establishment was "El Gato Vasilante"... or, in the tongue of one as Mister Tymmonds: "The Staggering Cat". Some wag had found the time to create... on the crumbling plaster between the bar and the closed undertaker's parlor adjacent, a mural, now faded, of a great, black tomcat with a Zapatist sombrero and bandoleers of bullets... legs crossed and rubbery, face screwed up into a scowl of lust or, perhaps, drunken anguish... since all the pussycats who danced round this Rabelesian grimalkin were skeletons, coifed in combs and ribbons, garbed in silks and corsets like the debutantes that flocked to Chapultepec for its military balls.

Assuming the possibility that the Jackal himself might have come to such a place, José drew the Webley in advance of entry but, though the interior of the Gato was dim and iridescent as the muddy street outside, he distinctly perceived only three persons to be seated at the long, black bar, and not one of them within six inches of the height of the fearsome El Chacol.

The publican of El Gato was a stout fellow of middle age or somewhat beyond, attired in a white shirt with long sleeves of the sort that a clerk or manager might wear. Over this hung a green, rubber apron which, with the waxed, upturned moustache of a vaudevillian and dark, bowler hat, resulted in an appearance not so much comic as not right... as though he were only an actor, playing the role of barman for the day. He glared back at José, not at his eyes, of course, but at the automatic in his fist.

The three men at the bar were all foreigners. One was blond, tanned and bearded... he was attired all in leather and khaki like, the Major thought, Colonel Roosevelt on one of his African hunts. A German, from the looks of him... and José wondered, briefly, whether Herr Unstedt had dispatched someone to this vertical slum to spy upon him. If so, the fellow wasn't much of a spy. His companions both seemed Americans... one mature, dark-featured and almost lost within a dark suit and overcoat. The other was little more than a boy in ringlets... guileless, innocently-featured, a rabbit among wolves, the Major reckoned. It was this one who stood and waved, calling out in English...

"Hi ho, company!"

The other two foreigners... and the tavernkeeper... glared at José, and he glared back at them, advancing slowly, his right hand at his side but within quick reach of the gun.

"Drink?" he queried, and José decided to have some sport with the fellow.

"Whiskey," he replied. "Scotch, if you have it, or Irish... Canadian if you must..."

Betraying no emotion, the bowler-hatted bartender picked a bottle of Souvenir scotch off his wall and waved it in front of the Major. "That'll do," José admitted.

"Scotch, schnapps," said the bearded man, "if you were to ask for genuine Tokyo sake, Limón would pull it out of the wall for you. Amazing place!" After gesturing for José to take the nearest barstool, he extended a hand, which the Major accepted cautiously. "Doktor Wilhelm Krankenhauer," he introduced himself, "botanist and Americanist."

"Have you any affiliation with the Gummigeschaft of Berlin?" José ventured.

"Nein!" Doktor Krankenhauer waved a fat finger, then continued in fair, though heavily accented Spanish: "I am on leave from the University in Basel, doing my research in the field. I am of Switzerland, not Germany, although I know of the company of which you speak. Are you in the business of..."

"Coffee?" José caught himself before he could mention chicle... even if the Doktor wasn't a spy, there was no virtue to letting his identity be gleaned. "My name is Jorge Bustamente," he added, sipping at the scotch (which was the equal of any served in Mexico City, despite the fingerprints on the glass).

"This fellow here calls himself Smith... is it Roger or Robert today?" the Doktor chided. "He's been having a rough time of it, lately," Krankenhauer added, in a lower voice.

"Don't give these fellows any impression things are worse than they seem," the shrunken American charged back. "It's just that it's so damn hard to do business when the people on the top keep changing around without regard to the time, the way we do every four years – predictable as clockworks. Pardon me mister... Señor Bustamente, I'm in the oil equipment trade, out of Tulsa." His dark eyes glittered with spite. "Used to be there was one fellow in charge, old Diaz, but things have gone to hell here over the past two years. Some oaf in the capital ordered all our equipment sent over these mountains to Tampico, then dumped half of it down the mountain... and of course we haven't been paid, not more than ten percent anyway. Every day... well, if it isn't too wet... I go out picking up valuable pieces of gear before some illiterate peon melts a compressor or a nine thousand peso drill coupling down into a skillet or a shovel to bury their grandmother with!"

"I'm Ferriday!" chirruped the boy with the angel's face and curly hair, rewarding the Major with an otherworldly stare.

"He's an adventure-seeker," Krankenhauer growled, "one of those filibusters," then placed a finger to the side of his head and tapped it. José replied with the barest of nods and pleasured himself with another sip of Highlands nectar.

"By the way," he ventured, speaking loudly enough so that the tavernkeeper could hear and, also, see the American one-dollar silver certificate under his finger, "I believe there is a competitor in town... an unsavory fellow who already has been supplying San Sebastien with poor quality beans. A big lout, poorly dressed and shaven, funny voice, high... like a girl... smells as bad as his wares..."

The patron of the Cat had smirked at the mention of San Sebastien as he approached José or, as he had no reason not to believe, the coffee broker Jorge Bustamente. "I've sold drink to that one, but he's too cheap to come in here. Hair like that one," and he pointed to Ferriday, "but dark. Crazy eyes! Prefers his aguardiente by the bottle... ten minutes old and with the flies not yet drowned in it?"

"Does he live around here?"

"Up the mountain," the tavernkeeper pointed in the general direction of the railroad tracks and José, after giving the matter some consideration, slid the dollar across the bar.

"Otra copita," he said.

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