Wrath of God Read online

  ‘My wallet,’ I said. ‘He stole my wallet.’

  The thief slid the rest of the way down to the hall and collapsed at the fat man’s feet. Janos leaned over him and poked around in the shadows. When he straightened his face was grave and baleful.

  ‘Wallet, sir? I see no wallet here.’

  Which was when my heart really started to sink as it suddenly occurred to me that there was just a faint possibility that there was more to this than met the eye.

  The police arrived on the run, armed to the teeth as usual, ready to spray everything in sight as they came through the door, although the sergeant in charge was exquisitely polite and listened to my story with the utmost patience.

  The wretch on the floor, whom no one seemed to be particularly concerned about, clutched his leg, blood oozing between his fingers and cursed all gringos and their seed to the tenth generation. He was wholly innocent and employed by Señor Janos as a general porter. The sergeant booted him casually in the ribs, left his men to search for the wallet and took me up to my room to get dressed.

  ‘Do not worry, señor,’ he comforted me. ‘The man is a known thief. Señor Janos gave him honest work out of the largeness of his heart and this is how he serves him. We will find this wallet. Fear not, your name will be cleared.’

  But when we returned to the foot of the stairs, and he discovered his men’s lack of success, a fact to which I had already become resigned, his face assumed a more melancholy expression.

  ‘This is a grave matter, señor, you realize my position? To shoot this man for stealing your wallet is one thing …’

  ‘But to shoot him, full stop, is quite another.’

  ‘Exactly, señor, I am afraid you must accompany me to headquarters. The jefe will wish to question you.’

  His hand on my arm was no longer gentle and as we moved forward, Janos said passionately, his jowls shaking, ‘By God, sir, I’ll stand by you. Trust in me, Mr Keogh.’

  Hardly the most comforting of thoughts on which to be led away.

  Above the town the Sierras floated in a blue haze, marching north towards the border. It was all I could see when I hauled myself up by the iron bars on the narrow window and peered out.

  I was in what was known as the general reception cell, a room about forty feet square with rough stone walls that looked as if they might very well pre-date Cortez. There were about thirty of us in there which meant it was pretty crowded and the smell seemed compounded of urine, excrement and human sweat in equal proportions.

  An hour of this was an hour too much. An indio got up and relieved himself into an over-flowing bucket and I moved out of the way hurriedly, took a packet of Artistas out of my pocket and lit one.

  Most of the others were indios with flat, impassive brown faces, simple men from the back country who’d come to town looking for work and now found themselves in prison and probably for no good reason known to man.

  They watched me out of interest and curiosity because I was the only European there which was a very strange thing. One of them stood up from the bench on which he sat, removing his straw sombrero and offered me his seat with a grave peasant courtesy that meant I couldn’t possibly refuse.

  I sat down, took out the packet of Artistas and offered them around and hesitantly, politely, those closest to me took one and soon we were all smoking, amicably, the lighted cigarettes passing from mouth to mouth.

  The bolt rattled in the door which opened to reveal the sergeant. ‘Señor Keogh, please to come this way.’

  So we were being polite again? I followed him out and along the whitewashed corridor as the door clanged behind me. We went up the steps into a sweeter, cleaner world and crossed towards the administration block of the police barracks.

  I had been here once before about four months previously to obtain a work permit and had been required to pay through the nose for it which meant that the jefe in Bonito was about as honest as the usual run of police chiefs.

  The sergeant left me on a bench in a whitewashed corridor under the eye of two very military-looking guards who stood on either side of the jefe’s door clutching Mauser rifles of the type used by the Germans in the war. They ignored me completely, and after a while the door opened and the sergeant beckoned.

  The room was sparsely furnished; desk, filing cabinet and not much else, except for a couple of chairs, one of which was occupied by my fat friend from the Hotel Blanco, the other by the jefe.

  Janos lurched to his feet, and swayed there, propped up by his ivory stick, sweat shining on his troubled face. ‘A dreadful business, Mr Keogh, but I’m with you, sir, all the way.’

  He subsided again. The jefe said, ‘I am Jose Ortiz, Chief of Police in Bonito, Señor Keogh. Let me first apologize for your treatment so far. A regrettable error on the part of my sergeant here who will naturally answer for it.’

  The sergeant didn’t seem to be worrying too much about that and the jefe opened a file before him and studied it. He was a small, olive-skinned man in his fifties with a carefully trimmed moustache and most of his teeth had been capped with gold.

  He looked up at me gravely. ‘A most puzzling affair, Señor Keogh. You say this man was stealing your wallet?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Then what has he done with it, señor? We have searched the stairs and the foyer of the hotel thoroughly.’

  ‘Perhaps he had an accomplice,’ I suggested. ‘There were several people milling around there.’

  ‘By God, he could be right,’ Janos cut in. ‘It could explain the whole thing.’

  The jefe nodded. ‘Yes, that is certainly a possibility and on the whole, I am inclined to believe your story, señor, for the man is a known thief.’

  ‘That is very kind of you,’ I said gravely.

  ‘There was much in the wallet of importance?’

  ‘Twenty or thirty dollars, some rail and steamer tickets and my passport.’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘So? Now that is serious. More so than I had realized.’ He looked in the file again. ‘I see from your papers that you were registered as a British citizen. This is correct?’

  I said calmly, ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Strange. I thought you Irish had your Free State now since the successful termination of your revolution.’

  ‘Some people might question that fact,’ I told him.

  He seemed puzzled, then nodded brightly. ‘Ah, but of course, now you have your civil war. The Irish who fought the English together now kill each other. Here in Mexico we have had the same trouble.’ He glanced at the file again. ‘So you would be able to obtain a fresh passport from the British Consul in Tampico.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  He nodded. ‘But that will take some weeks, señor, and what are we to do with you in the meantime. I understand you are not at present employed.’

  ‘No, I worked for the Hermosa Mining Company for six months.’

  ‘Who have now, alas, suspended operations. I foresee a difficulty here.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m sure Mr Janos can suggest something.’

  ‘By God, I can, sir,’ he said, stamping his stick on the floor. ‘I’ve offered Mr Keogh lucrative employment – highly lucrative. For as long as he likes.’

  Ortiz looked relieved. It was really a quite excellent performance. ‘Then everything is solved, Señor Keogh. If Señor Janos makes himself personally responsible for you, if I have this guarantee that you will be in secure employment, then I can release you.’

  ‘Was there ever any question of it?’ I said politely.

  He smiled, closed the file, got to his feet and held out his hand. ‘At your service, Señor Keogh.’

  ‘At yours, señor,’ I replied punctiliously, turned and went out.

  I heard a quiet, murmured exchange between them and then Janos stumped after me. ‘All’s well that ends well, eh, Mr Keogh. And I’ll stick to my bargain, sir. I shan’t take advantage of your situation. Five hundred dollars and your
steamer ticket. That’s what I said and that’s what I’ll pay.’

  ‘A gentleman,’ I said. ‘Anyone can see that.’

  His great body shook with laughter. ‘By God, sir, we’ll deal famously together. Famously.’

  A matter of opinion, but then all things were possible in that worst of all possible worlds.

  2

  When we got back to the hotel, Janos took me round to the stables in the rear courtyard. A couple of stalls had been knocked out at one end and the truck stood in there.

  It was a Ford and looked as if it had spent a hard war at the Western Front. There was a canvas tilt at the back and it was loaded to the roof with medium-sized packing cases. I checked the wheels and discovered that the tyres were new which was something, then I lifted the bonnet and had a look at the engine. It was in better shape than I could have reasonably hoped.

  ‘You find everything in order?’ he demanded.

  ‘You lost a good mechanic this morning.’

  ‘Yes, an inconvenience, but much of life generally is.’

  ‘When do you want me to go?’

  ‘If you left now, you could make the half-way point by dark. There is an inn at Huerta. A poor place, but adequate. It was a way-station in the old stage-coach days. You could spend the night there. Be at Huila before noon tomorrow. This suits you?’

  Amazing how polite he was being about it all. ‘Absolutely,’ I said, but the irony in my voice seemed to elude him.

  ‘Good,’ he nodded in satisfaction. ‘Let’s go in and I’ll give you the final details.’

  His office was just off the patio at the front of the building, a small cluttered room with a polished oak desk and a surprising number of books. My shoulder holster and the Enfield were lying on the desk and he tapped them with the end of his stick.

  ‘You’ll be wanting that, I’ve no doubt. Rough country out there these days.’

  I took off my jacket and buckled on the holster. He said, ‘You look uncommonly used to that contrivance, sir, for a man of your obvious education and background.’

  ‘I am,’ I told him shortly, and pulled on my jacket. ‘Anything else?’

  He opened a drawer, took out two envelopes and pushed them across. ‘One of those is a letter to Gomez, the man to whom you’ll deliver the goods in Huila. He has a supply of petrol by the way, so you’ll be all right for the return trip. The other contains an authorization to make the journey signed by Captain Ortiz, in case you are stopped by rurales.’

  I put them both in my breast pocket and buttoned my jacket. He selected a long black cigar from a sandalwood box, lit it, then pushed the box across to me. ‘You’ll have a drink with me, sir, for the road?’

  ‘We have a saying where I come from,’ I told him. ‘Drink with the devil and smile.’

  He laughed till the tears squeezed from his eyes, the flesh trembling on the gross body. ‘By God, sir, but you’re a man after my own heart, I can see that.’

  He shuffled across to a side cabinet, opened it and produced a bottle and a couple of tumblers. It was brandy, and good brandy at that.

  He leaned one elbow on the cabinet and eyed me gravely. ‘If I might be permitted the observation, sir, you don’t seem to care very much about anything. About anything at all. Am I right?’

  That strange, rather pedantic English of his had a curious effect. It made one want to respond in kind. I said, ‘Why, it has been my experience that there is little in life worth caring about, sir.’

  I could have sworn that for a moment there was genuine concern in his eyes although I considered it unlikely he could ever have afforded such an emotion.

  ‘If I may say so,’ he observed heavily, ‘I find such sentiments disturbing in one so young.’

  But now the conversation had gone too far and we were into entirely the wrong territory. I emptied my glass and placed it carefully on top of the cabinet. ‘I’d better be on my way.’

  ‘Of course, but you’ll need a little eating money.’ He produced a wallet and counted out a hundred pesos in ten-peso notes. ‘You should be back here by tomorrow evening if everything goes smoothly.’

  By now he was looking quite pleased with himself again which simply wouldn’t do. I stuffed the money carelessly into my jacket pocket and said, ‘Life has taught me one thing above all others, Mr Janos, which is that anything can happen and usually does.’

  His face sagged in genuine and immediate dismay for, as I discovered later, there was a strongly superstitious streak in him, his one great weakness. I laughed out loud, turned and walked out. A small victory, perhaps, but something.

  I was eighteen years of age when I first saw men die. Easter, 1916, and a sizeable section of Dublin town going up in flames as a handful of volunteers decided to have a crack at the British Army.

  And I was one of them, Emmet Keogh, hot from my books at the College of Surgeons, still young enough to believe a cause – any cause – could be worth the dying. A Martini carbine gripped tightly in my hands, I sweated in ill-fitting green uniform and crouched at the window of an office in Jacobs’ Biscuit Factory, a romantic place to die in, waiting for the Tommies from the Portobello Barracks to find us which they did soon enough.

  During a slight lull in the proceedings a Mills bomb came through the window and rolled to a halt in the very centre of that busy office.

  There were six of us who should have died, but for some reason it didn’t go off until I’d thrown it back out of the window at the troops who had chosen that precise moment to make a rush across the yard.

  Life, then, or death, was an accident one way or the other. Time and chance and no more than that. Let it be so. Certainly from that day on it conditioned not only my actions but also my thinking. Janos had been closer to the truth about me than he knew.

  For the first few miles out of Bonito the road wasn’t too bad, in fact had obviously been metalled at some time in the past, but not for long. Soon it changed into a typical back-country dirt road with a surface so appalling that it was impossible to drive at more than twenty-five miles an hour in any kind of safety.

  In the distance, the Sierras undulated in the intense heat of late afternoon and I drove towards them but slightly to the north-west, a great cloud of white dust rising from the loose surface coated everything including me.

  A flat brown plain stretched on either hand as far as the eye could see, dotted with thorn bushes and mesquite and acacias. I was alone on a road that led to nowhere through a land squeezed dry by the sun, barren since the beginning of time.

  God, but there were times when I ached for my. own country, for the sea and the mountains of Kerry, green grass, soft rain and the fuchsia growing on dusty hedges. The Tears of God we called it.

  I passed nothing that lived for the first hour, then a dot in the far distance grew into a herd of goats, an old man and two young boys in charge, barefooted, ragged, so wretchedly poor that even their straw sombreros were falling to pieces. They stood watching me, faces blank, making no sign at all, the sullen despair of those truly without hope.

  I stopped a mile or two farther on to get rid of my jacket, being well soaked with sweat by then and drank and sluiced my head and shoulders with lukewarm water from a four-gallon stone jug someone had thoughtfully roped into place in front of the passenger seat.

  From there on things became so bad that I had to drive very cautiously indeed, sometimes at not more than ten or fifteen miles an hour and the heat and the dust were unbelievable. I had been on the road for three and a half hours, had seen no one except the goatherds, was beginning to believe I was the only living thing in this sterile world, when I found the priest.

  The Mercedes was a little way off the road and had ploughed its way through a clump of organ cactus. The priest stood at the side of the road, his cassock and broad-brimmed hat coated with dust, and waved me down. I braked to a halt and got out.

  He recognized me at once and smiled, ‘Ah, my Irish friend.’

  His front near-side tyre
had burst which explained his sudden departure from the road, but he had come to rest with his rear axle jammed across a sizeable rock and had spent a futile hour trying to push the car free.

  The solution was ludicrously simple. I said, ‘If we raise her off the rock with the jack and give her a good push she should roll clear soon enough.’

  ‘Why damn my eyes,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’

  He would have gone down well on the Dublin Docks, but I didn’t say so. Simply opened his boot which was full of five-gallon cans of petrol, got out the jack and started to work.

  ‘No reason why I shouldn’t do that, it seems to me,’ but he didn’t try too hard to dissuade me, lit one of those long, black cigarillos he favoured and stood watching. I was sweating hard and the shoulder holster was something of a nuisance so I unstrapped it and put it on the rear seat of the Mercedes. Chancing to glance up a moment later, I saw that he was holding the Enfield in his right hand.

  ‘Careful, father,’ I warned. ‘What’s known in the trade as a hair trigger. She’ll go off at a breath.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better to have the pin fall on an empty chamber for the first pull,’ he suggested. ‘In case of accidents?’

  Which was reasonably knowledgeable for a man of the cloth. ‘Fine, if you have the time to waste.’

  ‘Presumably you don’t.’

  ‘Not very often.’

  He stood there, still holding the Enfield in one hand, the holster in the other. ‘You were out in the Troubles,’ he said. ‘Against the English, I mean?’

  It was the kind of language American newspapers had been fond of at the time. I nodded. ‘You could say that.’

  ‘This Civil War back there is a bad business.’ He shook his head. ‘From what I read in the papers the Irish are killing each other off more savagely these days than the English ever did. Why, didn’t Republican gunmen kill Michael Collins himself only three or four months ago and I always understood he did more to beat the English than any man.’

  ‘Then settled for half a loaf,’ I said. ‘Not good enough.’