Shadows of Annihilation Read online

  October 6th—changing everything again, Luz mused, knowing they were all thinking the same thing, that everyone who’d been an adult on that day would go on doing so all their lives, and went on aloud:

  “But as it is, the Army’s all dressed up with no place to go—the General Staff are still racking their brains about it in the Iron House, and so is the Boss.”

  “Better el jefe and the Iron House than me,” Durán said. “I’ve got quite enough to do cultivating my own garden, if you want to invoke Voltaire. Fortunately, the civil government in this state has been doing quite well too. Governor Seelmann’s been doing well implementing Plenipotentiary Lodge’s program here—roads, tube wells in the villages, clinics, forestry . . . The death rate’s down, there are more kids in school, a lot more paved roads, a couple of small factories have opened this year, that sort of thing. Just as importantly, people are getting to believe there will be more of the same to come while we’re in charge, which also gives us added prestige.”

  Ciara nodded happily, Luz noticed; that was more the sort of thing she wanted to hear, being basically inclined to carrots rather than sticks. Durán went on:

  “He speaks the language well, which is appreciated . . . I know it’s supposed to be compulsory for permanent upper-level administrative types here, but a surprising number seem to be baffled at anything more than the pass the salt level . . . and he married a local girl this spring, which was popular. Except with the people who really, really hate the hacendados, and they’re not going to like us anyway.”

  “I heard her mentioned by some local gossips. Details?”

  “One of the de Moncadas; María Concepción Ursula de Moncada y de Camino. Seelmann y de Moncada now.”

  “The de Moncadas . . . land, of course, and silver and lead mines,” Luz said.

  She recognized the surnames of the local elite, but not the young woman specifically.

  “The de Moncadas have been here and rich for centuries,” Julie said. “Younger son Catalan cavallers originally, arrived in the 1530s, successful free-lances during the Chichimeca Wars . . . ennobled under the Bourbons . . . rode out the independence war and the First Mexican War and the French occupation, and then did very well out of the Porfiriato. The revolucionarios scared them into our arms along with all their followers, clients, and hangers-on. Concepción’s a nice girl, very pretty indeed if you like the Latin type, which I do—”

  “Your name is Durán these days,” Luz pointed out. “Why, you might as well be a damned dago yourself.”

  She did not add aloud: since you’ve slept with so many of us, though she was sure Julie had caught that in the smallest quirk of an eyebrow.

  “Exactly. Concha’s quiet—”

  Concha was the standard short form for the rather formal Concepción. She’d go by that, because as the local joke went, if you walked out the door and shouted ¡María! here, half the women in the street would turn and look at you.

  “—but no fool, and she was educated at private schools in Mexico City and by good European governesses . . . English and French and Swiss, not German, I checked . . .”

  “Not that someone named Seelmann would have anything to say to that,” Luz noted.

  An amazing number of Americans with German surnames had paid quick visits to registry offices lately and emerged to bland Anglo-Saxon anonymity; going for patriotic handles on the order of Lincoln and Jefferson and Washington and Grant and Sherman was popular, and the number of Roosevelts would have soared if Uncle Teddy hadn’t put his foot down. Governor Seelmann had apparently decided the Governor part and his military record were more important than an unquestionably Fritz moniker.

  “Agreed. She speaks English and French and has passable general knowledge as well as the accomplishments, and her family took her along on trips north . . . not Europe, she was too young before the war started, but St. Louis and Chicago and New York. She’s just nineteen now, in fact, which is a little bit young for him if we were up north; he’s a childless widower and thirty-five.”

  That sort of age gap between bride and groom was nothing out of the ordinary among upper-class Mexicans, particularly when a man married for the second time.

  “Was it political?” Luz said.

  Julie and Henrietta both grinned and glanced at each other as if at a shared joke, and the station chief continued:

  “No, it was a love match. Really. Carl was smitten in the grand fashion, though her family most certainly didn’t object to having the governor as an in-law, and neither did their innumerable relations. They started inviting him over all the time as soon as they knew his intentions were honorable, which was obvious from his stunned-ox look and the way he treated her as if she were made of spun glass and silk and went babbling on about her keen wits and natural gentle charm and beautiful laugh and deep, kind nature. Honestly, you’d have thought he was sixteen from the way he shuffled his feet when she smiled at him. And he started asking me for advice on how to court her, which was flattering, but . . . sad, in a way.”

  “What about her?” Luz said. “Or did her parents just lean on her?”

  Henrietta sighed melodramatically and put the back of one hand to her forehead while patting her heart with the other in a quick vibrato:

  “Oh, he talks to me,” she said, obviously quoting what she’d heard from Concha, with Julie’s company rendering her socially invisible. “Oh, he’s the only man who ever listened to me. The others flatter me but they don’t talk to me, they’re such boys, all they want to talk about is love. He’s interested in what I think about things . . . oh, he has such depths of soul, he’s so lonely and misunderstood, and he knows Wordsworth . . .”

  Julie joined the general laughter. “I remember those conversations. I think she meant ‘he’s not just interested in getting his hands on mis chichis’ and ‘likes the same poets.’ Granted, that would be a contrast with most boys her own age; her duenna could keep them at bay and polite but not control the direction of their hot panting gaze . . .”

  Henrietta nodded. “God’s truth, judging by the ones I meet. You feel like puttin’ an arrow on your blouse and a note sayin’ My eyes are up here.”

  Everyone sighed or groaned.

  “There are worse reasons for a nineteen-year-old to decide a man is interesting than the fact that he listens to her,” Luz said.

  Ciara nodded. “Especially if the girl wasn’t one of those who think flirting is a sport like baseball and spend all their time on batting averages and trading cards, so to say.”

  “No, she’s serious-minded,” Julie said.

  “He converted?” Luz asked. “I don’t suppose the de Moncadas would let their grandchildren grow up outside the Church, governor-in-law or no.”

  Julie had done just that when she married into the Duráns; Luz knew she paid exactly as much attention to the Catholic Church now as she had to the faded, attenuated post-Quaker Unitarian wishy-washiness of her parents as a girl, which she’d once described to Luz as the Church of GAAVEB—God As A Vague Elongated Blur. And also as a form of inoculation against ever taking religion seriously, like the weakened virus used in the vaccination against smallpox.

  “Converted? I’ll say he did! He went Catholic publicly, and well before he got a yes from her.”

  “While they were still talking Wordsworth and he was revealing the depths of his soul,” Henrietta said. “Maybe she tried to save his soul—she’s very regular about confession and going to Mass.”

  “If she’d been a satanist, he’d be wearing a crucifix upside down now and intoning the Lord’s Prayer backward,” Julie said. “But if the hierarchy has a passkey, Carl’s through the Pearly Gates already. The ceremony was overseen by the archbishop. In the cathedral, at the Easter Vigil . . . he spent the night on his knees . . . with her parents as padrinos. Baptism, confirmation, and first Eucharist all in one. And then a procession, with piñatas full
of silver quarters hung up in the streets, dedicating a chapel to the Virgin of Zacatecas as Our Lady of the Assumption and a new altar for the cathedral . . . which incidentally mysterious sources helped pay for . . .”

  “¡Ay!” Luz said, startled. “That’s going the whole hog!”

  Julie went on with an ostentatiously evil smile:

  “I managed to convince him that doing a serenata during the courtship would help. In full charro fig, underneath her balcony, with two mariachi guitarists also in full fig backing him up . . .”

  She strummed an invisible instrument, threw back her head with an expression of exaggerated blissful torment, and sang, quite well, but with a deliberate cat-on-a-fence-seeking-love overtone:

  “Despierta

  Dulce amor de mi vida,

  Despiertaaaaaaa . . .”

  “In a charro suit?” Luz said; that was what folk singers wore, an exaggerated version of old-fashioned Mexican cowboy garb. “Oh, Julie, you didn’t talk him into that!”

  Henrietta wiped her eye. “Yes, ma’am, she did—I heard her do it, as solemn as a judge. And when she told Concha about it at the reception, the poor girl flushed like a beet and began hitting the station chief here with her fan and calling her an evil triply cursed daughter of Satan and saying: I hate that song!”

  “¡Dios mío!” Luz wheezed. “I’d forgotten how diabolical you could be, Julie.”

  Ciara was smiling but looking a little uncertain. “I don’t quite understand . . . it all sounds so sweet? Except the bit with the fan.”

  Luz recovered. “It is sweet, querida . . . but . . . oh, my goodness, let’s say a man went to Ireland and moved into Wexford or Cork . . . or the village of Skibbereen, for that matter . . . and tried to fit in by wearing knee breeches and buckled shoes and a green tailcoat and a weskit with brass buttons and a top hat and smoking a little clay pipe like a pottery leprechaun. And carrying a shillelagh and starting all his sentences with begorrah or bejabers or top o’ the mornin’ to ye!”

  Ciara winced, and then started laughing too.

  “Oh, it’s not nearly as bad as that.” Julie grinned. “Though one of my informants did report a spectator saying during the procession after the wedding that he hadn’t realized that Don Raul’s daughter was marrying the king of Spain instead of just some gringo. They do like a performance here, but there’s a certain sense of proportion.”

  That set everyone off again. When she could speak coherently, Luz asked:

  “No, seriously, as a professional, what was the reaction?”

  “Affectionate and indulgent, more than anything—he got real points for trying and for meaning well and for being so desperately in love—particularly from our half of the population. It would have been different if he weren’t respected for being firm when he has to be, but he is, and he’s a very good horseman and was a champion fencer at West Point and has a couple of combat medals and some nice small romantic scars, which also gets him credit for being a real man, as they say here.”

  The actual phrase she used was un varón de verdad, which had a rather . . . earthier . . . connotation, something more like a complete stud. Julie went on:

  “Don Raul gave them a hacienda west of town as a wedding gift, not far from our place, as a matter of fact—it was part of Concha’s herencia materna from her grandmother’s sister anyway, who died without issue. She’s expecting, by the way . . . Concha, not the dead great-aunt . . . and that’s popular too. Protectorate HQ has quietly let it be known that Carl can be governor here as long as he wants, and that’s popular, since people know they’re not going to get a stranger who doesn’t know them dropped on their heads and they like the idea of a governor who’s tied his fortunes and his bloodline to the place and to their people.”

  Julie turned sober and cleared her throat. “And he’s getting credit for snagging this Dakota Project they’ve been building since January out east of town . . . Everyone loves the government money that’s gone into circulation here.”

  Silence fell; Julie was carefully not mentioning the risks involved in having a V-gas plant that close to town. Luz said, a little defensively: “Well, it has.”

  More silence, and she went on: “Julie, mi amiga, this decision was made far, far above my pay grade or yours. You can imagine how urgent the priorities are, and it has to go somewhere; that it’s here shows the men at the top think you . . . and Carl Seelmann and General Young, I suppose . . . have things well in hand. All we can do is try to make it work safely. Do you want me helping with that, or a stranger doing it? Someone who’d tell you not to worry your pretty little head about it? I can call in some markers and get us assigned to something else, if you’d rather.”

  Julie sighed. “That is a point. All right, let’s do it. Oddly enough, I’ve started to think of this place as home . . . certainly more than Taos or Santa Fe. Or Philadelphia!”

  They shook hands on it, a firm grip. Ciara yawned involuntarily behind a hand, and Julie said:

  “The altitude here makes people sleepy until they’re used to it. Let’s have a toast, and then back through the tunnel and off to bed.”

  She produced a bottle from a cabinet, and Henrietta set out the four small glasses. Luz smiled when she saw the label; it was tequila, but not the usual silver variety, double-distilled and unaged. This was from Don Eladio Sauza’s property in Jalisco, just outside the town of Tequila, and he’d taken to aging it in Tennessee white-oak barrels lately—originally simply because he was the first to export the liquor to the United States and could get them cheap and used from the bourbon distilleries there, and then seizing on it when he discovered how different it made the drink. This añejo variety had a slight golden tinge and a much mellower taste, and returning soldiers had spread its fame north of the former border and bade fair to make Don Sauza fabulously wealthy.

  “He still sends you and Bob bottles?” Luz asked.

  “Regular as clockwork, Christmas and the birthdays. And to you and James, I suppose?”

  “Well, the four of us did save his life and his hacienda. It’s rather charming, in a way. And it is the best tequila in Mexico—the Sauzas were the first to use only the agave azul.”

  “To gratitude—not quite as rare as the passenger pigeon,” Julie said, and they all raised their glasses and sipped.

  “I hear James got married,” Julie added, dipping back into Chamber gossip. “Who’s the unfortunate Mrs. Cheine? He’s quite scrumptious and dreamy, I admit, and rich as sin too, but marrying him? The man’s a shameless tomcat, and a heartless one too.”

  “It’s a Frenchwoman of my acquaintance, Yvonne Perrin . . . Yvonne Cheine, née Perrin, now . . . and a very strong-willed lady, pretty much a match for him, I think. A refugee—she saved his life, under circumstances . . . well.”

  They both made a gesture that involved pinching the lips together.

  “He’s effectively adopted the baby, too. Though nothing official was necessary, little Eléonore wasn’t quite born yet at the marriage, though it was close, but you know what I mean. I’m . . . well, Ciara and I are both madrinas.”

  “And he has officially adopted Simone—she’s a young girl, about six years younger than me, who escaped with Yvonne and the others,” Ciara said enthusiastically. “A really nice girl, and smart as a whip, too.”

  She and Simone had become fast friends during that last mission in Europe, which had involved rescuing Yvonne Perrin and her circle of friends from German captivity and more or less certain death. There had been good operational reasons for it, but it had been done; all of them had settled in San Francisco, where Simone had been ensconced in a private girls’ school with good mathematics and science teachers, she having decided that Ciara was a heroine to emulate.

  And there are certainly worse models, Luz thought.

  “They seem quite happy, the Cheines,” Ciara added. “Well, not Mr. Cheine’s par
ents, but they and he have never gotten along anyway, I understand. Politics.”

  Julie’s brows went up, but Luz confirmed it with a nod.

  “I don’t understand it either,” she said. “I always agreed with you about James . . . brave and clever, and a highly polished piece of Knickerbocker old-money cad pur sang. But people can surprise you.”

  “Well, I never saw him do anything ungentlemanly, darling,” Ciara said. “Except deceive and kill people, of course, but that was in the line of duty—they were all Germans.”

  They all shared a chuckle, and Henrietta’s eyes showed a flicker of grim satisfaction. She raised her own glass:

  “Confusion to the Kaiser!”

  They all echoed it and drank the last drops, and Julie refilled the glasses.

  “To el jefe and absent friends!” she said.

  That was the usual concluding toast; absent friends were the Black Chamber’s dead, of course.

  “El jefe!” they all chorused, and drank. “And absent friends!”

  “And three times three, to the Boss!” Luz thought she heard Henrietta Colmer say under her breath as she drained her glass.

  Which wasn’t surprising, considering what had happened down south since Luz and Ciara came back with the news that the reborn Klan was conspiring with the Kaiser’s men. That panicked response to the collapse of the power of the Democratic Party, and hence of Dixie, in Washington and the growing strength of the federal government under the New Nationalism had spectacularly backfired. Not least by activating Uncle Teddy’s old-fashioned Lincoln-loyalist, Union-forever side, and while Party activists weren’t usually much concerned with the plight of the Negro—even those who didn’t actively dislike them mostly wished deeply that they just weren’t there—they were also very happy to use them as a handy political stick to beat the Bourbon Democrat opponents of the Progressive project.

  They were calling it the Second Reconstruction now.

  They all parted, and Luz and Ciara took the tunnel back to their apartment; they’d walked in from the street the first night here, to fit with their covers, but this time the whole visit was in secret.