Shadows of Annihilation Page 18

  Then in her own voice: “And mostly nobody even remembers their names.”

  They were all silent for a moment, and then Luz sighed and decided to change the subject; there was little point in brooding on what you couldn’t affect.

  “How’s your little Alice, Julie?” Luz said. “I hope she remembers me; I feel a bit guilty I couldn’t see her more often lately.”

  Luz wasn’t more than a nominal, family-tradition type of Catholic these days. If nothing else, things in her personal life she wasn’t prepared to change made confession and going to Mass impossible unless she simply lied truth out of creation, which she wouldn’t do unless it was required in the way of business. But she’d been raised to consider being a madrina, a godmother, an important link and compadrazgo, coparenthood, a serious business and lifelong bond. And children were looking cuter with every passing year. She knew Ciara felt the same way, only more so.

  A flash of thought went through her: sitting on the patio back home in the Casa, sipping a glass of wine and watching Ciara playing with a toddler . . .

  Julie beamed and reached over to the desk to pass them a color-tinted photograph that showed a curly-haired tot in a pinafore cradling a kitten. The kitten looked a little sulky at being beaten in the adorability sweepstakes, or possibly at the determined grip of the plump little hands.

  “She’s healthy, flourishing, pretty much toilet-trained, and asleep now, thank God. But she celebrated turning two and a half back in the spring by learning how to say no. Very loudly, over and over. Bilingually.”

  Luz grinned at the painful pun; the word was identical in the two languages Alice was being raised in. She and Ciara cooed appropriately over the picture. Luz had to admit the coo-wattage was high; she found children much more appealing past the oozing, belching larval stage, though Ciara liked babies too.

  “And the twins?”

  “Eduardo and Catalina are asleep too, thank God, but they’re at the age where everything lying on the ground gets picked up and crammed in their mouths if it’s small enough and gnawed on where it stands if it isn’t . . . including garden shrubs, chair legs, and various ankles . . . I think Bob’s side of the family must include some maidens from the werebeaver tribes of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Thank God good staff is easier to get here.”

  “Even with security checks?” Luz asked, amused.

  Julie was actually talking about the servant problem, probably the only Black Chamber regional commander who did, and in much the same way that her mother or sisters might with a few additions like making sure no enemy infiltrators entered disguised as cook’s assistants and housemaids.

  “Even with. Anita is an utter treasure . . .”

  “And the revolucionarios burned her house and killed her husband, and the rest of her family only survived because our troops came along.” Luz nodded, remembering.

  The post as family nanny to the Duráns had involved citizenship, schooling and patronage for her own teenage children, as well as a place and a comfortable wage for herself.

  “I’d have gone mad long before this trying to juggle everything without her. How my mother did it with six of us I don’t know . . . no, I do, it was dear old nanny Maggie, bless her and κούφα σοι χθὼν ἐπάνωθε πέσοι—”

  Oh, still quoting Euripides, Julie! Luz thought, and translated:

  “Which is classical Greek for ‘May the earth rest lightly upon her.’”

  Julie sometimes forgot people who’d gone to university and done the classics were a tiny minority.

  “—but even so. Secretary Davenport says three is the absolute minimum you owe the American nation if you have good germ plasm. Three is what he’s got, I notice, not the great thundering herd of seven or eight he recommends for other people. Unless he’s disqualified for responsible reproduction by feeble-minded, epileptic, drunken microcephalic dwarf aunts in the attic he hasn’t let anyone know about.”

  Everyone chuckled. It was notorious that eugenics fanatics were not very progenitive themselves, on the whole, including the Secretary of the Department of Public Health and Eugenics. They were given to do as I say, not as I do pronouncements, when it came to the Party’s slogan:

  The Three Duties of the Citizen: Work! Fight! Beget!

  At least Uncle Teddy practiced what he preached, since he and Aunt Edith had a swarm of boisterously impressive and healthy offspring.

  And an ever-increasing roll call of grandspawn. Even Alice Longworth née Roosevelt is expecting, which is several types of miracle, though I’m not entirely sure even she is sure who Daddy is, except that it’s not Ambassador Nicholas Longworth III. And that’s why she paid him a short and literally flying visit in Tokyo on the American National Airways inaugural run in March: to make the arithmetic at least a bit credible. Alice is what Uncle Teddy would be if he didn’t have a conscience. ¡Dios Mio, what a man-trap, though!

  “And apart from the little incident in the Sierra, how are things going here in general?” Luz said. “I’ve read your situation reports, of course, but . . .”

  The maid set out coffee and plates of churros and a bowl of melted chocolate for dipping the long skinny deep-fried pastries. Julie opened a box—Luz thought it was certainly French and probably Napoleon III—lacquered in a mellow shade of old gold, with a vignette of an eighteenth-century romantic couple dressed in shades of pink and turquoise on the top, framed with a gilded swirling acanthus leaf border; the corners were decorated with gilded scrollwork interspersed with tiny, intricate carved flowers. Its gilt-speckled interior of brown walnut was full of cigarettes, Egyptian ones of a brand named Mogul, and probably more expensive than ever, with the near-total collapse of world trade.

  Julie put her cigarette in an ivory holder and lit it from a granite-encased lighter on the table, waving gracefully at the box as she leaned back in the heavy chair like a lounging cat. Henrietta took one, without a holder; Ciara declined and so did Luz, though she was hiding a smile at the memories the scent brought.

  “I still agree with the Boss,” she said.

  The president notoriously detested tobacco in all its forms, which made using it very mildly daring for Party members. He was an extremely moderate and strictly social occasional drinker, almost but not quite a teetotaler; he’d quashed the Prohibition movement for alcohol because he thought it was stupid or unworkable or both, but he made up for it on cigarettes, which he was convinced were filthy and unhealthy at any dose. He’d found statisticians at the Department of Public Health and Eugenics who thought there were disturbing correlations with various loathsome diseases. That was enough to make Luz glad that she just didn’t like the stuff to begin with, though you could prove anything with numbers if you tried hard enough.

  “Teacher’s pet,” Julie said without resentment.

  When the maid had finished clearing the table and left—the household staff might have been carefully checked but you didn’t take unnecessary risks—Durán resumed her answer:

  “Well, officially, everyone here except German spies and a few of their dupes just absolutely loves us to bits because we invaded Mexico for Mexico’s own good and for the sacred cause of Progress and we are all happy and friendly and cozy as be-damned, tra-la, tra-la. If you don’t believe me, just read the New York Times! Or those articles in the Saturday Evening Post and National Geographic with pictures of adoring Mexican kids getting handed chocolate bars by soldiers or Plenipotentiary Lodge and his wife opening a vaccination clinic.”

  Ciara’s smile was a little pained; the other three Americans laughed heartily.

  “That’s not el jefe,” Luz said.

  Uncle Teddy had never made any bones about the fact that while he expected Mexico to benefit eventually, the Intervention had been launched to protect Americans and their interests, not to mention avenging their wrongs.

  Which is absolutamente why I was there from the b
eginning, lusting for revenge with all my soul and enjoying every moment of getting it.

  “It’s that little toad Croly’s smarm and soul butter,” she went on aloud.

  “And underneath the Department of Public Information’s soul butter?” she asked.

  Julie nodded. “Unofficially, things are . . . not bad at all, compared to the way they were a couple of years ago. Steadily improving, I’d say. Most people are just glad the fighting’s over and there’s enough to eat, though God knows how long that’ll last once they get used to it again.”

  “Ah, but you forget the universal power of enduring gratitude,” Luz said with owl solemnity, and Julie snorted as she continued:

  “The Army’s cooperative . . . we have a new regional commander, Major-General Young, but he seems very competent . . . and the FBS . . . well, they’re the FBS.”

  All four of the Black Chamber operatives smiled or shrugged at that; to them Federal Bureau of Security meant plodding bureaucratic second-raters at best and opinions went downhill from there. Plenty of sulky resentment of reckless cowboys and lunatics came back their way, along with pouting on the order of Daddy loves you best and that’s NOT FAIR!

  “Though I admit the FBS did get the local police up to the mark on suppressing ordinary crime, and they’ve even cut the corruption.”

  “Honest Mexican police?” Luz said skeptically, having lived in the country during the Porfiriato.

  “No, no miracles; they just cut it down to, say, traditional Chicago or New York or St. Louis levels of corruption . . . which on second thought is a miracle and it’s much appreciated and gets us a lot of credit.”

  “The local cops still take bribes, but no more shakedowns or demanding the maidenheads of daughters or shooting people because a personal enemy of the shootee paid them off or because they’re bored and it’s a hot day?” Luz said.

  “About that. Crops have been good the last few years too, there’s plenty of work with all the construction projects—even the hacendados have taken to investing with deranged optimism—and of course there’s plenty of demand for everything the place grows or mines or makes, what with the war, and now that Mexico’s inside our tariff wall. And we’ve managed to keep basic food prices reasonable. By shipping in subsidized corn from the Midwest, sometimes.”

  Luz nodded, happy though not surprised to hear it. “Neglecting that was one of old Don Porfirio’s worst mistakes, there at the end when he started to lose his grip. You don’t want people cursing your name every time they go to market or make a tortilla or hesitate to take a bite for themselves because their children are looking at them but have to do it anyway because they need the strength to keep their job.”

  Ciara nodded vigorously too. She’d grown up in a working-class neighborhood where food took more than half the average family’s budget, and a breadwinner’s accident on the docks or the mass layoffs that followed a trade panic like the one in ’07 could mean going from meat every day to living on potatoes and wearing shoes an extra year, holes in the soles or no. Her own family had always been a little better off than that, but in daily contact with those less fortunate.

  Julie waved agreement with the chocolate-dipped piece of churro in one hand and drew on her Egyptian cigarette and blew a smoke ring toward the ceiling before she continued:

  “Wages are up more than prices, not least because of people working up north and sending money home, which is one reason the landowners are buying American-style farm equipment, a lot of it secondhand. There are still Carranzistas—”

  “Even though he’s dead?” Luz asked curiously.

  She’d helped track Venustiano Carranza Garza to his final hiding place near Saltillo in early 1915, part of the steady grinding-down and tidying-up process, though the FBS had made the actual arrest.

  “Still. A lot don’t believe he just dropped dead in custody. The irony being that for once it really was just natural heart failure.”

  Heart failure was to the Protectorate what shot while attempting to escape had been to Don Porfirio’s government. They were linked; being shot did make your heart fail.

  “And we didn’t get quite all the PNR anarcho-communard revolucionarios, and there are plenty of common or garden don’t-like-the-gringos types mouthing off in cantinas when they think nobody’s listening.”

  “They could find out they’re wrong about that someday,” Luz said with a grin.

  She cleared her throat and sang a snatch from The Mikado, a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta she and Julie had both appeared in as members of the drama club at Bryn Mawr:

  “As some day it may happen that a victim must be found

  I’ve got a little list—I’ve got a little list

  Of society offenders who might well be underground,

  And who never would be missed—who never would be missed!”

  Julie laughed, thought for a moment to summon memory, and then completed it in a pure well-trained soprano:

  “The task of filling up the blanks I’d rather leave to you.

  But it really doesn’t matter whom you put upon the list,

  For they’d none of ’em be missed—they’d none of ’em be missed!”

  Then she continued: “There aren’t any active cells that we’ve found for the last eighteen months, but there are probably sleeper groups hiding in the hills and among the public and waiting for a chance, or for us to get sloppy and let down our guards. They’ve learned to keep their heads way, way down, which is good enough.”

  “Pro-German activity?” Luz asked.

  “Some but nothing serious, the odd ¡Viva Alemania! or ¡Victoria al Kaiser! written on walls, on the enemy-of-my-enemy principle, but the Germans didn’t help themselves by boasting about London and Paris rather than denying it. And of course Public Information had plenty of really, really ugly pictures to show. Moving picture newsreels too, there was some screaming and fainting and vomiting among the audiences. They bothered me, and you know I’m not at all tenderhearted.”

  Henrietta nodded, stone-faced and silent for a moment, with a quiver so slight that Luz wasn’t quite sure she’d seen it. When the woman from Savannah spoke, her voice was flatly calm:

  “I know up here the horror-gas can’t kill you deader than a bullet.”

  She tapped her head and then the spot below her sternum: “But your heart an’ stomach don’t necessarily follow along. Granted that’s how my family died, but I don’t think I’m bein’ softheaded because of that.”

  Sentimentality, or even worse, Victorian sentimentality, was not an attitude the Party encouraged. You were supposed to cultivate a hard objectivity, to be an engineer of your own life and soul.

  Ciara gave her a sympathetic glance, then frowned as something struck her. “Would anyone have believed the Germans if they had denied it? With the pictures and such?”

  “Some would have pretended to, at first, and then actually started really believing it because they wanted to so badly,” Julie said.

  Ciara blinked a bit at the overwhelming cynicism, but Luz nodded; it fit precisely with her observations of how human beings acted. In fact, that type of selective memory was something she regularly checked herself for, despite the unpleasant mental sensations doing so gave you.

  “It does help that the Germans are so reliably ham-handed. It makes it easy to look good by contrast,” Luz noted. “They just have no capacity to put themselves in someone else’s shoes, even for tactical reasons. Look at that medal they put out after they sank the Mauretania, with the passengers buying tickets from a skeleton!”

  “And they never had any earthly idea why the British made thousands of copies of it and distributed them all over; it’s the same thing that makes them such terrible spies,” Julie agreed, and then went on: “We worried that the declaration of war on Germany might start something, but it depressed the holdouts instead. We lost the half of the
15th Minnesota Infantry division assigned here, they’re just pulling out of this military district—”

  Which consisted of four states that covered much of north-central Mexico.

  “—as part of the general mobilization plan, but we got a new division at full strength instead, the 32nd Infantry, Regulars. The switchover’s about complete now. They’re mostly green in terms of work in the Protectorate except for some of the officers and noncoms, but they look menacing enough and the commanders have them out working hard across the countryside and up in the Sierra Madre Occidental.”

  “Green . . . the 32nd . . . that’s a Negro division,” Luz said, her eyes going up slightly as she consulted her mental files. “Major-General Young got them last October . . . West Point, Class of ’89 . . . fought in the Philippines, then was military attaché in Haiti—he did good intelligence work there, I’ve seen the reports and they’re models—fought at Veracruz and Puebla in 1913 as colonel of the 10th Cavalry, brigade command in Morelos and Chiapas, then chief of staff for the 32nd . . . He’s the first Negro ever promoted to general rank, too.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Henrietta said neutrally. “Judgin’ from the fact that they were used in the Gulf states during the martial law period, the 32nd was probably sent here because el jefe is absolutely sure they’re reliable.”

  Yes, she’s quite sharp, Luz thought.

  “And because the General Staff and the White House thought well of General Young’s ability to handle a delicate situation. This is a high-priority posting now.”

  Then to Julie:

  “And because we couldn’t send them to Europe. Without the horror-gas we’d be driving the Germans back through Belgium right now and we’d be across the Rhine before the end of next year. There’d be a massive butcher’s bill, but we could do it.”

  That got a nod; they both knew the plans and the balance of forces. If the American army had been able to funnel itself through Britain and the Channel ports, attacking along the old Western Front with intact French and British forces by its side . . . but it hadn’t.