She got closer and rubbed her flank against my leg.
I had to admit, the mare didn’t just appeal to Rojo, but to me. She was a beauty, the type I looked for in horseflesh when I was stealing horses. That life was behind me now. But there was something I could do.
“Hey, señorita, I’ll tell you what, I’m going to come back tomorrow and buy you.” In the meantime, I would have to get her back to her owner before she got lost.
Thinking about taking the mare back and getting her in the corral and tying a hitch on her, I was caught by surprise as four horsemen came out from a crop of trees and surrounded me with drawn pistolas.
“Hold it,” I said, “I’m not armed,” which was a lie, although I didn’t have a pistola visible.
In the group was a gachupin and three vaqueros. The arrogant-looking Spaniard came up beside me and hit me across the shoulder with a quirt.
“You horse-thieving sonofabitch, we’re going to hang you from the nearest tree.”
SEVENTY-FIVE
A TRAP, THAT’S what I had walked into. The ranchers in the area had been plagued with horse thieves and had set up the sweet mare in a corral, removing the top fence timber to make it easy for her to be stolen.
Tied to a tree, listening to them talk, I knew that word had quickly gone out that they had a horse thief. It was an invitation to a hanging, not an arrest.
More of the horse ranchers had gathered until there were four gachupins and half a dozen vaqueros.
My laments that the mare had followed me on her own volition fell on deaf ears. I got another hit from a quirt from the man who hit me earlier. His name was Lopez, and he had taken charge of my hanging.
“Shut up or I’ll stuff my whip down your throat,” Lopez said.
I couldn’t tell them that I was a respectable citizen named Antonio de los Rios, because I couldn’t pass for Spanish wearing a livestock worker’s clothes. I looked exactly like what I was—a mestizo horse thief.
Lopez threw a noosed rope over a thick limb and got off his horse and pulled it down over my head.
“I swear I wasn’t stealing—” I started for about the tenth time.
He kicked me on the side. “Shut up or I’ll strangle you myself.” He jerked the coarse noose tight around my neck.
“Put him in the saddle,” he told the vaqueros.
It was the first time in my life I hated being in the saddle. I had spent most of my life envying those who were able to ride a horse every day, but this was one time I wished I was on a donkey, where my feet touched the ground, rather than on a tall stallion.
Rojo was nervous, and I hummed and held my knees tight against his flank. “Steady, amigo.”
“He thinks he can talk to a horse!” Lopez howled.
“Should we blindfold him?” another Spaniard asked. He appeared more nervous about lynching me.
“Hell, no. Let him look el diablo, his new master, right in the face the moment he dies.”
Rojo stamped his hooves and shifted enough for me to feel the rope closing around my throat.
“Steady,” I croaked, my humming getting hoarser as my wind was being shut off. He didn’t like the sound of Lopez’s voice. Neither did I, but this wasn’t a time to be particular.
“What’s that he keeps whining?” the blindfold advocate asked.
“El diablo’s song,” Lopez said. “He’s letting him know he’s on his way.”
He gave me a big grin to let me know he was enjoying watching me sweat from the anticipation of dying. But not a quick death. My bandido companions and I spent many a night around the campfire talking about the difference between the slow strangulation of being hanged from a horse and the quicker, neck-breaking technique used on gallows.
“El diablo awaits you, thief!” Lopez raised his quirk to give Rojo a good swat.
“Stop!”
Everyone froze as if a shot had been fired. The whole group of us turned to the newcomer.
“Why are you hanging my vaquero?” El Mestizo asked.
Lopez stared at him for a moment before answering. I could tell he knew who El Mestizo was.
“He’s a horse thief,” Lopez said.
“Did you steal a horse?” El Mestizo asked me.
“No, señor, it followed me. Followed the stallion, actually. I was returning it when these men jumped me.”
“He’s a lying bastardo! And it’s time for him to die.” Lopez lifted the quirt again to swat the stallion.
“Señor,” El Mestizo said quietly, “I told you he works for the Cortés family. Neither the marquis nor I will be pleased if you hang our man.”
That froze the bunch of them better than if a reprieve from the viceroy had arrived. Lopez was down, but not finished. Of the bunch of them, he appeared stupid enough and eager enough for a bloodletting to defy even the heavens.
“He was caught red-handed,” he insisted.
“I can prove that the mare followed me with no effort on my part,” I said. “Put her back in the corral and I will show you.”
“Do what he says,” El Mestizo said.
“And if the mare doesn’t follow him, he hangs,” Lopez said.
El Mestizo pursed his lips and nodded in my direction. “Sí, he hangs.”
My heart was pounding, my throat was parched and raw, my legs ached from pressing desperately onto Rojo’s flank, but I know females, at least the four-legged ones.
SEVENTY-SIX
I SAT IN the shade of the blacksmith shop at El Mestizo’s ranch and drank cool water flavored with lemon as I watched El Mestizo correct a blacksmith’s work on a horseshoe. He didn’t ask my advice and didn’t need it—like me, he had learned the art because he was a lover of all things about horses.
My throat still ached and my back and shoulder were raw from Lopez’s quirt, but I was alive. After I demonstrated that the mare would follow me with no effort on my part, El Mestizo had put salve on Lopez’s agitation by telling him the marquis would be sending him a note of thanks.
El Mestizo sent the blacksmith away so we could talk. He wanted to know what I was doing in the area dressed as a stockman, and my answer caught him by surprise.
“Looking for the murderer of Antonio and Ramos de los Rios.”
He paused as he was about to give the horseshoe on the anvil a tap of a hammer. He turned slowly to face me.
“Is it not true,” he said, “that Antonio was killed in a robbery on the Vera Cruz road and Ramos was struck down by a thief in the evening walking home in the city? They died far apart in time and distance, though in a manner that is sadly much too common in the colony.”
He listened gravely as I laid out why I believed the attack on Antonio was an assassination and not just a robbery.
“I put aside your suspicions about Carlos when we spoke in my carriage,” he said, “because there was suspicion but no proof. The most telling point of your tale is still that it comes from a seasoned bandido. But some highwaymen are more violent than others.”
I shook my head. “No, it makes no sense. The coachmen were not near their weapons and Antonio wasn’t armed. None of it made sense. I’ve seen a hundred bandidos like those two in bars from Xalapa to Vera Cruz. Every one of them knows you don’t kill unless it’s necessary.”
“And Ramos?”
“He was hit several times on the head with a club … yet his purse and jewelry were left untouched. He was frail. There was no need to beat him to death.”
“Another robbery turned to murder,” he said. “It happens a thousand times, but I agree that, unless the robber was frightened away by other people, it appears strange that the theft would not have finished his mission. I knew Don Ramos. I’d bought a sword from him last year. He was rather feeble. Hitting him several times was unnecessary. A good punch would have sent him down, much less a beating with a club.”
“So you agree with me.”
“I agree that the circumstances of both incidents are strange. And I concede Carlos has a motive for both crime
s. He’s desperate for money, and everyone he has turned to has refused to assist. We Cortéses have our own reasons for refusing him, but it can be said that Carlos does not stimulate sympathy toward himself from anyone.”
“What do you think of Carlos?”
“Are you asking me if he would murder for a large fortune? Certainly—but so would most people I know.”
El Mestizo put aside his tools and came over to me. I couldn’t tell from his stoic features what he was thinking.
“Do you have any idea of the mire you are getting yourself into? You don’t understand the system and how it all turns on silver and gold. If Carlos finds out you’re not Antonio, nothing you say or do would save you. Even if you had absolute proof of his guilt, he would offer the viceroy part of Ramos’s fortune, the archbishop another part, and your part would be your neck back in a noose.”
“There are other ways to extract revenge,” I said.
“You’re not involved in this. You came upon Antonio by accident. Had you arrived at his coach before the other bandidos did, it would have been you who would have robbed him.”
“But I would not have murdered him.”
I had not mentioned my suspicions about Carlos’s stallion. His deceased sister’s husband being a murderer was enough for El Mestizo to deal with in one day.
“It doesn’t matter. You are now involved in something beyond your ability to cope with. It is a miracle that you haven’t already been unmasked. It will happen, soon, and when it does, take what you can from Ramos’s house and leave the city at a gallop on that fine horse you stole from me.”
“I can’t do that. You told me that my destiny lies in the city. I have to finish what I came for. If that includes a rope around my neck, so be it.”
El Mestizo gave me a long look. “Perhaps,” he said, “perhaps. You certainly tempted fate today.”
“No, I told the truth, señor; I was humming out of habit when I attracted the mare.”
“Which habit is that? Horse stealing?”
SEVENTY-SEVEN
THE SOCIETY BALL I was ordered to attend by Doña Bernaldina was another opportunity for me to expose myself, but I had been warned not to offend the marquis, that he could help get my money released, so I was fated to go for good reasons, none of which made me feel any less certain I would meet up with someone who had once looked down the barrel of my pistola.
I got the tailor out to fit me again, this time sticking with black except for dark gray stockings and a gray hat, and those only because the tailor said I looked like el diablo dressed entirely in black.
Mercedes would not be at the ball because her father, as a mere merchant, despite his wealth, was not considered colonial aristocracy. One had to be a descendant of nobility or the conquistadors; merely having money was not enough.
I found the way the gachupins ranked themselves on a social ladder less reasonable than how léperos did it on the street. A lépero’s ability to fight for survival was the key to success on the streets, but the gachupins held in esteem even those who had done little but possessed much.
The palace of the Marquis del Valle was his new home. Four years earlier he sold what is now the viceroy’s palace on the Zócalo to the Crown for use as the colony’s seat of government. His conqueror-father had built the viceroy’s palace by stealing the location and the building materials from what had been Montezuma’s palace.
Cortés, of course, was the biggest bandido in history, having stolen an empire.
My entrance to the ballroom in clothes similar to all the other men created no great attention, and I quickly faded back, trying to keep away from everyone by pretending to be fascinated by the room’s painted panels.
El Mestizo found me and asked in a low voice whether I was trying to hide myself in the paintings. “Or planning to come back later and steal them?”
The fact that I was once again socializing with notables seemed to mildly amuse him.
The party had no sooner started when a sensation was created as the doors to the ballroom opened and a parade of Spaniards wearing Aztec costumes marched in.
The “indio” procession was colorful, with the Montezuma character dressed as the emperor would have appeared, including a brilliant headdress that was several feet high. Behind him came twenty-four Aztec nobles, all dressed only slightly less colorfully than the emperor.
“What’s this?” I asked El Mestizo.
“A joke in poor taste. Montezuma is Alonso de Avila, a friend of the marquis. His brother is the Aztec on his right. At the moment they are unhappy with the way the colony is being administered.”
“Why are they displeased?”
“Like my brother, they’re encomienda owners. Even though they received encomienda rights from their father, just as my brother has, the rights are not permanent. They’ve petitioned the king to make the right of encomienda pass to the owner’s male heir, as a title or another estate would.”
“Like a fiefdom,” I said, repeating inn talk I’d heard over drinks.
“Yes, as if they were lords of the realm and the indios were their subjects. The king has refused. The encomienda owners believe they are entitled to the right. The Crown of Spain never financed the conquest. My father gathered adventurers around him who volunteered, and he borrowed the money for weapons and ships. The encomienda was their reward. The Avilas are just heirs, but some of the conquistadors are still living, and they also want the right to pass to their descendants as if they were feudal lords.”
The sudden entrance of the Aztecs may have come as a surprise to the guests, but obviously not to the host. Even as we spoke, as if they were changing sets for a play, servants were transforming the ballroom into what a great hall would have looked like in Montezuma’s palace, replacing food and furnishings, adding feathers, pottery, and blooming plants all about.
With the marquis playing the role of his father, Hernán Cortés, and Avila as Montezuma, the two Spaniards acted out a short drama in which Montezuma surrendered his empire and his crown to the conqueror.
I found the play by grown men, one of whom was the wealthiest and most prominent man in the colony, amusing and was surprised to see El Mestizo’s features lined with tension, his body rigid.
Why was he disturbed by others acting out a scene from the history of the colony? One that everyone in the colony knew, although it was not completely accurate. Montezuma never handed over his crown to Cortés. Instead, the Aztec emperor died from a wound received from a stone thrown when he went to a balcony to try and calm a crowd that had gathered because it was believed the emperor was being held hostage by the Spanish. Which he was, of course. And there was the matter of whether he died from the stone or was strangled by the Spanish when he refused to cooperate.
As I stared around the room, I saw more rigid postures, more tense features that would shatter if hit by a stone. Not by all of the guests, most of whom, like me, appeared amused by the silly farce, but in a group of men who had congregated together near the marquis. And I saw something else in the faces of these men—elation, as if the interchange between Cortés and Montezuma had special meaning for them.
“Señor,” I said to El Mestizo, “what is the importance of this playacting by your brother and his amigo?”
El Mestizo’s features were now worried.
“That man wearing a red sash,” he said, nodding toward a portly man across the room, “is the royal visitador. He was sent by the king to inspect the colony, to judge how well the viceroy is performing his duties and the temper of the people. He will not be amused by a drama in which my brother receives a royal crown.”
A stir passed among the guests as Montezuma’s slaves marched in, carrying a large arrangement of flowers that was presented to the marquis. The flower design spelled out a phrase that I was unable to read but heard others speak.
“Fear not,” El Mestizo said to himself, repeating what I heard.
I wondered why, if there was nothing to fear, El Mestizo and some
of the other guests acted as if they were sitting on a keg of gunpowder.
SEVENTY-EIGHT
WHEN I CAME out of the ballroom, instead of my open carriage, a covered coach came forward to pick me up.
“Come aboard,” Mercedes said, speaking through a crack in drawn curtains.
When I was inside, seated across from her, she said, “I sent your carriage home.”
“How did you get out of the house at night without your chaperone?”
“My father went to Vera Cruz to purchase goods coming off the fleet. He will not be back for days. My aunt enjoys a splash of brandy in the chocolate drink she has after dinner. I made sure she had a generous amount of my father’s strongest this time.”
“And the coachman you bribed to keep his mouth shut. Once again, I am amazed at how clever you gachupins are.”
“Don’t call me that,” she snapped. “It’s not a nice word. I know there are Spanish who deserve it, but I don’t rake the backs of my servants. I’ll give my coachman a coin for the extra work he did tonight, but he would do it for me regardless because I treat him fairly.”
“I surrender!” I held up my hands.
“No, it’s me that must surrender tonight.”
I started to move across to the seat next to her. “Sí, we are meant for—”
She pushed me back to where I’d been.
“I was talking about the apology I owe you.”
“Ah … but, no, it’s not necessary.” I touched the scar on my cheek. “It caused little pain and—”
“You deserved the cut for attacking me. But I didn’t thank you for returning my locket. It’s very precious to me. My mother died when I was a baby and the picture in the locket is the only one I have of her. Do you have one of your own mother?”
I stared at her gravely. She was in dangerous territory. There was a certain amount of excitement generated in a woman when she deals with a dangerous man like a highwayman. But finding out I was born in a whorehouse and raised on the streets as a dirty lépero was not going to gain me respect from a woman.