Shadows of Annihilation Page 14

  Ciara frowned thoughtfully. “That isn’t important?”

  Luz chuckled. “Oh, it’s important, it’s why I told our stockbroker—”

  Ciara shook her head and said with lingering disbelief: “Me having a stockbroker!”

  Luz had made a will naming Ciara her heir after their first mission, when they moved in together; after their exchange of pledge rings and their return from the second operation, she’d set up a joint trust for her considerable and pleasantly compounding inheritance with both of them as co-trustees holding an undivided half-interest. It had taken a bit of effort to convince Ciara she was serious and wouldn’t take no for an answer; just about the same three weeks as it had taken the lawyers in San Francisco to draft something unbreakable and minimally taxed in the way of a transfer inter vivos.

  “—told our stockbroker to sell our shares in all those milling and meatpacking companies and International Harvester and Dow Chemical’s fertilizer company. Eventually the farmers’ co-ops are going to own all that . . . though then they’ll have to deal with the Amalgamated Foods Union and the United Chemical Employees, and much joy may they have of each other. So it’s very important. It’s just not interesting, as far as I’m concerned.”

  Like Uncle Teddy, she found money and finance rather boring . . . which might be due to the fact that they’d both gotten considerable though not huge chunks of property from parents who were working-affluent but not really wealthy by the standards of the really wealthy, and so had never expected to have to think much about earning their daily bread.

  Unlike him she’d avoided losing her inheritance on harebrained schemes like the ranch in the Dakotas that had cost him his shirt and left him dependent on book royalties and writing for the magazines until he moved into the White House for good.

  She patted her lips with her napkin before she went on:

  “Let’s clean up and get going. We’ll see some sights, tour the Plaza de Armas, visit the mercado . . . and let some information roll downhill toward us.”

  “And make contacts?” Ciara said.

  “Different forms of the same thing. Something will come up, one place or another. The trick is recognizing it when you see it, and seizing the fleeting chance.”

  * * *

  —

  Luz and Ciara both removed their hats, letting them fall down their backs. Then they pulled the white lace mantillas they’d brought over their heads and threw one end to the side and over their shoulders to frame their faces before they entered the local cathedral—technically, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption of Zacatecas. The infinitely familiar Sunday scent of old incense enveloped them as they touched their fingers to the holy water in the font and crossed themselves, murmuring, “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti,” and then “Adoro te devote, latens Deitas” as they faced the tabernacle and bent their right knees to the ground for a moment in the genuflection, that graceful almost-curtsey gesture you learned as a girl, one that briefly left your skirts pooling around your feet.

  “Very pretty,” Ciara said softly, looking around at the gold-and-white splendors of the interior rising to an octagonal dome. “Not very much like the outside, though!”

  Luz nodded. It was more neoclassical than baroque, though elaborate not enormously so since it had been plundered by the anti-clericals during the endless Mexican civil wars of the last century, before Don Porfirio gave the place a generation’s respite, and only partially restored since.

  Parts of it down in the foundations were nearly four hundred years old, dating back to the original parish church when this was a Spanish outpost in the country of the wild northern Chichimeca barbarians, and the present building had taken a century to complete.

  Zacatecas had been a city sixty years before Englishmen started dying like flies of starvation and Indian arrows in their first settlements in Virginia, and it had had mansions and a baroque governor’s palace and a Jesuit academy with a library of twenty thousand volumes before a few ragged, quarrelsome Puritan sectaries came ashore in Boston and started hitting each other over the head with ironbound Bibles in their new cod-scented wilderness shantytown.

  The original altarpiece had been lost a few generations ago, but there was a very handsome marble-and-gold-foil replacement in a modern European style, contributed according to an inlaid plaque by one Gobernador Don Carlos Seelmann, with Julie Durán clandestinely kicking in help from the Chamber’s Special Operations fund, a perfectly legitimate use of the money since it would be intended for public relations purposes. It was Protectorate policy to maintain a formal separation of church and state, as the laws of the Mexican Republic had done, but in a way that was ostentatiously polite and respectful to the faith of the overwhelming majority here.

  That had probably done as much as several divisions of infantry to aid in restoring quiet after the main fighting ended; Luz knew it had also been policy set from the top to see that American Catholics were well represented among those in the Protectorate’s administrative posts, and to firmly quash any too-public displays of militant Protestantism.

  It helped that Uncle Teddy himself was barely even a deist, profoundly uninterested in theology and utterly disdainful of the squabbles between denominations, though he valued religion highly as a tool for spreading proper morals and fellow-feeling. He’d been careful to mention the contributions of Jews and Catholics—and men of Spanish and Indian and part-Indian blood—to the Rough Riders when he wrote his famous regiment’s story, and he had bluntly stated more than once that America would have Catholic and Jewish presidents before the century was out.

  There weren’t many people here early on a weekday, though there was a priest kneeling in silent meditation before the altar, and a few worshippers in the pews telling their rosaries. A group of about a dozen more, women of all ages from their teens through their fifties and dressed in respectable middle-class fashion, were reverently taking up and folding the altar cloths before the images of the saints and the Virgin in the side chapels, and gently placing and smoothing new ones, intricately crocheted and embroidered. They would be taking the old ones to be cleaned and repaired; doing that was a devotion volunteers made in many Catholic countries. And they also seemed to be supervising the much more humbly dressed and much darker women who were sweeping and cleaning, and who were almost certainly their servants.

  Luz was conscious of their glances but did nothing more than give a courteous nod in return. She and Ciara lit votive candles before a side altar to the Virgin on the southern side, portrayed as Our Lady of the Assumption, knelt silently with their heads bowed over clasped hands, then respectfully signed themselves with the holy water again as they faced the altar before leaving.

  “I do miss going to Mass, sometimes,” Ciara sighed when they were outside in the bright midmorning sun, giving the façade another look.

  “I too, mi dulce amor,” Luz said; which was true, though apart from a romantic spell in her early teens she’d never been more than conventionally dutiful, and that had faded. “At least we can look, though!”

  The façade of the cathedral was worth any amount of careful attention, though oddly enough it faced the street, with a small plaza where you stepped down. The usual center of a town anywhere in the old Spanish Empire was a square called the Zocalo; Zacatecas had the Plaza de Armas instead. It ran along the side of the church and was faced by the old governor’s palace. This mining town in the hills of a tough frontier had never had the usual elaborate grid plan imposed on it.

  Doing a slow tourist tour of the town fit their cover identities. In contrast to the relatively spare interior, the dusky-rose stone front of the church was a riot of ornamental carving, with engaged statues of Jesus and the Twelve Apostles standing in niches, the Virgin over the entrance, and every inch of the pillars and arches stretching up and up done in a regular froth of Churrigueresque symbolic sculpture, in a local variant of the style
even more ornate than its Spanish and Mudéjar originals.

  “Though it does look just a bit like Balboa Park in San Diego, where we had that lovely stroll in May,” Ciara observed, her eyes methodically memorizing and cataloging dimensions and facts.

  Luz smiled at the memory of a carefree holiday. “It’s the sort of thing that Goodhue and Winslow copied for the San Diego part of the Panama-Pacific Exposition back in ’15, querida,” she said. “Possibly the very one. Extremely popular nowadays, though personally I think it should be kept for churches and big public buildings—Spanish Colonial is wonderful for houses, but not this particular subvariety of it.”

  “The Casa de los Amantes is absolutely perfect,” Ciara said, threading her arm through Luz’s and grinning. “Because it’s our home.”

  “Agreed!” Luz looked up again. “You know . . . this reminds me . . . somehow, I couldn’t definitely say how . . . of the Aztec Calendar Stone, the Piedra del Sol, they keep in the Museo Nacional in Mexico City. Possibly just the intricacy of the carving.”

  “I’ve seen photographs . . . a great round thing, it weighs twenty-four tons. Is it like the pictures?”

  Luz shook her head. “No. They don’t get the detail, the depth, the subtle effects—whoever did that carving knew what they were doing, knew it right down in their souls, just like the ones who did this. And . . . it has this sense of impact, like the cathedral here. It hits the same part of the psyche, but in a completely different way.”

  “Different? How?”

  Luz made a gesture of uncertainty: “I don’t think it was actually used as a calendar by the ancient Mexica. I think it was an altar to their demon gods, an altar of sacrifice, and it still stinks of blood and fear, not to the nose but to the soul. Even after all these years, you can still feel it. Or possibly I’m being overimaginative.”

  Ciara shivered and hugged her arm as they turned to go. Nobody thought anything of young women walking arm-in-arm, or usually even hand-in-hand in the United States, though you had to be a little careful about that sometimes; and if anything even less so here in Mexico. It was one of the advantages of femaleness.

  Someone cleared her throat. Luz turned smoothly, her cover persona falling into place with effortless ease.

  “Yes?” she said politely, smiling and meeting the other’s eyes for a moment and then glancing slightly aside. And remembering to keep the appropriate distance, which was a bit less than she would have in, say, New York or London.

  When there was a London, she thought with a mental stutter; it wasn’t something you adjusted to overnight.

  “Buen día, señora?” she added, starting the conversation as was appropriate from younger to elder, from the petitioner to she who could give or withhold acceptance.

  “Buen día, señorita,” the woman said, smiling also though less broadly. “¿Viene de visita?”

  Which was a polite way of asking what she was doing here in town: Open curiosity about a stranger didn’t violate local custom.

  “Pues, sí. Hé venido a trabajar a Zacatecas. Y pensé venir a visitar la famosa catedral.”

  Which meant she’d come to work here, and wanted to see the famous cathedral.

  That appeal to local pride got her a broader smile; the woman was one of the volunteer ladies from inside, all of whom had followed her in a flock, along with their scrubbing-and-dusting servants putting their gear in bags or baskets.

  In her case she was middle-aged and also socially a lady, and probably a widow, judging from her mourning black and rather old-fashioned but high-quality dress and from the lack of the weather-beaten and prematurely aged look lower-class women usually had here. Her face had a grim strength, though, obviously in the process of becoming one of those formidable abuelas who ended up running so many Mexican families with iron will and hand. Mexican men liked to think they were always in charge of the females in their lives, and in some senses they were. But she’d rarely met one who didn’t regard his grandmother with a mixture of love and fear, and dread her disapproval like a small boy.

  There was a moment’s silence. Luz nodded to the embroidered cloths in the older woman’s hands.

  “Habra un festival?” she said, asking if there was to be a festival.

  The mozas—the much-more-Indian women who’d been scrubbing the floor; nearly everyone in Zacatecas was a mestizo, but some more so than others—were hanging back listening avidly, and the whole little flock of respectable females were gathering around, trying not to appear avidly curious and failing. Though they left the actual speech with the strangers to . . .

  Give you odds her husband was a doctor, Luz thought. Or a notario or something of that order.

  . . . to La Doña del Doctor, as was her right and duty.

  “Have you come to hear Mass here?” the widow lady asked, establishing her bona fides before answering the question.

  “Ah,” Luz said, casting her eyes down and looking sad. “I have fled the battlefield; I have not yet felt ready to come to Mass.”

  Which was a diplomatic way of saying she didn’t plan to, ostensibly at least because she felt too sinful to be worthy.

  “But today, today, me and Miss Cavanaugh felt the need to come to see the great church at least,” Luz went on.

  Ciara smiled and said in her careful Spanish, which was now fully fluent but still distinctly accented, with her b-sounds too strong and the flattened r’s of a foreigner:

  “Such a lovely cathedral! And inside one really feels the presence!”

  Luz nodded. “I have seen larger ones, in Mexico City and Puebla, but none finer anywhere,” she said, which was quite true and more importantly useful.

  That led to an exchange of names; the formidable lady turned out to be a doctor’s widow in truth, and named Dolores Gutiérrez y Coa. Luz gave her own as Graciela de Jesús Calderón Menéndez, and Ciara’s as Mary Cavanaugh; Irish names were exotic but not altogether unfamiliar in Mexico, since Irishmen had been frequent in Spain’s service and some had settled here since, and were known mostly as co-religionists. Nodding once more at the colorful folded cloths in their hands, she asked again:

  “Will there be a festival, Señora Gutiérrez?”

  “Oh, yes, soon there will be La Fiesta de San Juan Bautista. We take these home to mend and make perfect for the Lord before the celebration.”

  The celebration of John the Baptist would be toward the end of the month, on June 23 and 24. It had been a safe bet; there weren’t any months without a saint’s day, and a lot of them had festivals attached. It was another thing that drove the more puritanical sort of American crazed down here.

  “Would you like to see them?”

  “Oh, very much, Señora Gutiérrez!” Luz said.

  Ciara nodded enthusiastic agreement. It was more genuine in her case; they’d both had sustained exposure to needlework, as any respectable girl did, but Ciara had enjoyed it more, or at least accepted it as necessary to keeping life going in her milieu, where a lot of clothing and household linen was still handmade or heavily taken in and altered, and everything was repaired and had its life prolonged as much as possible. Lower-middle-class respectability required a world’s worth of hidden female labor.

  “That is very kind of you, to two strangers such as we,” Luz added.

  The other women were informed by Señora Gutiérrez, as if they hadn’t heard already, that the two strangers were interested in seeing the altar cloths, which made them suitable to talk to. A chattering flock swept up from the plaza and the side of the hill to an iron door in a pink wall that led into a patio, much like Julie Durán’s except that it was about half the size and didn’t have an active fountain, though there were plantings and flowers and shade in the arcaded corridor that ran around it. There was a bustle of shawls and hats and servants, and brisk commands for water of oranges.

  Luz saw Ciara’s eyes darting to either s
ide at the remarks that were being made—Skin like transparent alabaster! So perfect! Those eyes, like fine Chinese jade!—and the fingers reaching up to touch her hair, obviously itching to pull it down and brush and redo it. It was all perfectly respectful, in fact a mark of friendly, companionable interest and acceptance, just a difference in custom. Those could be startling, though.

  “Ladies!” Luz said, smiling and preempting any shocks. “I must make a confession for both of us! Seven months ago, late last year, we were both very ill with fevers, and had our hair cut. Yes, these are wigs! But wigs made of our own hair—see, I will show you.”

  She reached out and parted Ciara’s wig, down to the ultra-fine lace skullcap that underlay it. That exposed a lock of Ciara’s own red-blond hair, drawn out through the lace to mix with the wig’s tresses and hold it firmly. Half a dozen crowded close to look, exclaiming.

  “As you see, exactly the same shades; and the same for me.”

  That got more exclamations, this time of sympathy and also of admiration for the lace and the superlatively fine needlework that drew the individual hairs so densely through it. The thought of a woman having to crop her hair short was genuinely shocking here, but they recognized the folk treatment for a high fever. They were also interested in the newcomers’ clothes, impressed by the workmanship and materials—wool knits weren’t common here—and intrigued by the cut.

  “These were designed by a French lady. From Paris, but now living in New York,” Luz said. “One who escaped recently from the war there.”

  “¡Ay!” one of the younger women said, though she was a childless widow and expected to stay in the background.

  Luz’s memory picked María Luisa Muñoz Herrera out of the list of introductions.

  “The unfortunate one, what she must have gone through, before she found safety! So terrible, what has happened, is happening, in France. All those poor people! Killed by surprise, unshriven, with no chance of the last rites or anyone to bury them in holy ground or mourn them or set out offerings on the Day of the Dead . . . and los niños in their cradles.”