Shadows of Annihilation Read online

  The guesthouse had started out as a mansion much like the Black Chamber HQ; it had been split into six apartments, each of four rooms plus a small bathroom with a shower-bath and modest kitchen complete with icebox. Nobody knew—hopefully—that the Black Chamber actually owned and ran the place, and that one particular suite had a neat little tunnel connection running into the back of a wardrobe in the bedroom, disguised in the best adventure-fiction style.

  A seventh apartment housed the large local family that did the maintenance and provided maid service and laundry and deliveries; the other suites were occupied by groups of engineers busy with the Dakota Project, or in one case an engineer and his wife and two small children, all of whom would move out when they found more permanent quarters or the Dakota Project was up and running and they moved on to the next project.

  When Luz flicked on the electric light within, their night-things had been laid out on crisp lavender-scented sheets, and a cheery fire crackled in the tile-bordered hearth behind a screen of pierced brass. A fire at night was almost always pleasant here, even in high summer when days could be hot.

  Ciara was slightly unsteady; a large beer and two quick shots of tequila were more than she was used to.

  “Julie . . . Mrs. Durán . . . is very elegant and sophisticated,” she said. Then: “You two . . . really are still good friends, aren’t you?”

  Luz met her eyes. “Yes, darling, we are,” she said. “Bryn Mawr and what happened there isn’t the biggest part of that. Afterward we . . .”

  Her own eyes glazed for a moment: She smelled death again, and tasted fear and pain and an exhaustion that was pain in itself.

  “We went through a good deal together.”

  Ciara blurted—probably due to the tequila: “I am jealous!”

  Luz reached out and took both her hands. “I know, darling, and I know it feels . . . rotten. And it doesn’t help that Julie never did know when to stop teasing.”

  “You’re not angry?”

  “No, I’m not—not at you. And I’m used to being annoyed at Julie! We’ve been friends for . . . ¡Dios mio! Eight years now! And I can’t recall ever being in her company for any length of time without being annoyed with her about something, except when we were both in peril of our lives or concentrating totally.”

  “I’m doing better than that!”

  “Infinitely! I want to live with you for the rest of my life. I’d kill her within a month, or vice versa.”

  “I know who I’d bet on!” Ciara said stoutly. Then, softly and looking down: “She made me feel such a . . . such a schoolgirl! And a frump!”

  Luz didn’t reply in words; instead she swept Ciara into a clinch and a long kiss that tasted of tequila and chocolate and spices. That went on for some enjoyable time.

  “Oh . . . my!” Ciara said, breathless. “Let’s do that again!”

  They did. “There’s my opinion on who is or is not a frump,” Luz said softly a long minute later.

  They helped each other undress—even wearing Coco Chanel’s latest, that was still easier with some assistance, and besides that it made a pleasant little evening ritual—and Ciara carefully removed the lace skullcap of her wig before the tall mirror, set it on a folding stand, and ran her hands through her six-inch mass of fine red-gold hair, rubbing her fingertips vigorously into her scalp. Her hair was straight or very gently wavy when it was long, depending on the weather, but right now it had a tendency to stand out in all directions like a glorious silky sunset or a very colorful dandelion ball. It also made her roundish, freckled, snub-nosed face look rounder than it was.

  “I hate this!” she said. “It makes me look like a boy!”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Luz said sincerely; hers was an ear-length cap of midnight now. “Nor do I.”

  “You look dashing with short hair, darling,” Ciara said. “Like Artemis or a dryad or Queen Maeve. But . . . oh, Mother of God, it would have been awful as the dye grew out . . .”

  Not least because everyone would have seen that she’d dyed her hair, still rather fast behavior in the circles she’d been raised in; she could scarcely pin a note to it reading Done for Patriotic Reasons.

  “. . . but . . . I do look like a boy. Or one of those bug-eyed dolls . . . only a boy doll.”

  Her hair did look a little strange like this. Luz had been bobbing hers to shoulder length for several years now, a look inspired by the French actress Polaire, and it wouldn’t be long before it was back to that, but Ciara wouldn’t be content until hers fell to the small of her back again. Bobbing was still a minority habit and a bit daring though spreading fast . . . but not yet in the intensely respectable lower-middle-class circles Ciara had inhabited until recently.

  Luz came up behind her, smiling over her shoulder into the mirror and touching a finger to each side of her garter belt below the chemise she still wore. Ciara was two inches shorter than her, weighed about the same, and had an hourglass figure that would have been much more fashionable back at the turn of the century before an athletic slimness became the female ideal.

  And she’s got this underlying conviction she’s not desirable. ¡Qué absurdo! Well, if persuasion fails, there’s always demonstration. It’s almost embarrassing how I look at her sometimes . . . or just smell her hair, or see her smile or laugh or tilt her head or vanish into a book . . . and my mind leaps into bed and the toe-nibbling stage. Love and lust are both wonderful things, but when you put them together . . . ¡Ay! Fire!

  “Mi amor, you don’t look anything like a boy, gracias a Dios . . . not above the neck and even less below it . . . but . . . well, if you wanted to, we could pretend to be two boys together . . . that might be interesting . . . You can be Kevin and I’ll be Lucio . . .”

  A peculiar expression came over Ciara’s face as she parsed what Luz had just said, followed by a crimson blush and a laugh. Then:

  “Luz!” and a poke in the ribs delivered backward. “Oh, you!”

  Her face grew sober. She turned and gripped Luz fiercely.

  “I wish . . .” she began. “Darling,” she said into Luz’s shoulder. “Would you do me a favor?”

  “Anything, my heart,” Luz said gently, a little surprised.

  “Right now . . . would you make me forget everything but you for a while?”

  NINE

  City of Zacatecas

  Hacienda of the Sweet Arrival, near Jerez

  State of Zacatecas

  United States Protectorate of México

  JUNE 20TH, 1917, 1917(B)

  Luz called “Good morning!” through the open kitchen door, as Ciara came yawning into the dining-room-cum-breakfast-nook of their suite. “If you’re following the coffee, it’s by your plate!”

  No, she’s not the sort who springs out of bed bright-eyed unless woken by something much more emphatic than the smell of bacon frying; an explosion might do, Luz thought, lifting the bacon out of the pan; she’d started the process this morning with a kiss on the back of the neck.

  The arrangements didn’t include a cook’s services, but Luz didn’t mind that. She’d always found cooking soothing and a good way to relax and think, almost as much so as music.

  And feeding my darling gives me an absolutely absurd degree of pleasure, Luz thought.

  Luz—who woke completely in an instant like a cat and at whatever hour she’d set her internal clock—slid the last of the pancakes onto the plates; set them on the table with the whipped cream, honey, and strawberries; and put the platter of crisp bacon and spitting sausages and mushrooms fried with them between. Then she brought a pitcher of water—you had to be careful to drink a lot of that in this climate. The scents of cooking and the coffee filled the space agreeably, with the fresh crisp air of a highland morning coming with dappled sunlight through the slatted louvers of the windows that overlooked the courtyard.

  “And good morning again, my
sleepy and adorably tousled . . . Kevin,” Luz said.

  She also deepened her voice on the last word.

  “Good . . . arrghpht!” Ciara said, nearly choking on the coffee as she realized what her partner had just said.

  Luz helpfully thumped her on the back.

  “You are impossible!” the younger woman croaked after a moment. “And shameless!”

  “I plead merely improbable on the first count, Your Honor, and guilty on the last, but I throw myself on the mercy of your heart’s own court.”

  Ciara laughed, unwillingly at first and then with no restraint, and threw an arm around Luz’s waist and hugged her; Luz rested her head against the top of Ciara’s for a moment.

  “And what has my love made for me? Oh, that looks heavenly!” Ciara said, managing to take a whole sip of the coffee this time.

  She fell on to the stack of pancakes, carefully slathering each with butter and local honey and strawberries and stiff whipped cream before she stacked another on top, and helped herself from the sausages and bacon. Luz took a moment to stand smiling before she ducked back into the kitchen, set the pans to soak—dishwashing service was included—and returned to sit across from her partner and eat, admiring the way the shaft of morning light fell across Ciara’s face.

  “And today?”

  “Today we buy an auto, then drive out to the hacienda later in the day,” Luz said. “The rest . . . depends on circumstances.”

  * * *

  —

  Well, well, Zacatecas is becoming more modern,” Luz said. “This part’s different from how I remember it, at least.”

  They got off the trolley into the mild warmth of midafternoon and walked through the southwestern part of the town past streets crowded with traffic, where its serpentine S-curve valley grew a bit wider and the bare hills drew back. The buildings here were more recent, the streets broader and laid out on something close to a grid, and some had sidewalks and small roadside acacia trees; farther away from the main avenues and up the slope were patchy warrens of self-built jacals of adobe and rock and mud plastered over poles and grass and patched with flattened tins and corrugated iron, where rural migrants fleeing violence and just lately the very beginnings of mechanized farming had settled with their families and chickens and goats.

  Women with braided black hair and dressed in colorful striped skirts and wrapped in loose fringed rebozos woven in geometric patterns were fetching clay jugs of water from the public standpipes and carrying them back toward those neighborhoods on their shoulders or heads, often leading a child by the hand or carrying one on their hip as well. More children and skinny dogs were running around on their own and anonymous laborers in sombreros and ragged off-white shirts and trousers plodded by, dodging the thick roadway traffic of cars and wagons and carts and bicycles.

  There was a smell of dust and waste and sweat, but there were also important-looking—or self-important-looking—men striding along with watch chains across their waistcoats, and women with some pretensions carrying parasols and trailed by servants carrying bundles, lottery ticket sellers with trays at their waists crying their wares, women with dubious sweets or pan dulce well acquainted with the local flies doing likewise, a crowd of men talking and laughing around an open-fronted barber’s shop and the barber making dangerous-looking gestures with a straight razor above a client whose face was buried in soapsuds, a blue-uniformed policeman in a cap with a leather bill whistling and swinging his truncheon from a loop around his wrist as he sauntered along . . .

  “How is it different, darling?” Ciara said; she loved facts and details.

  I’m an Impressionist painter, and she’s a Pointillist, Luz thought, before she went on:

  “No aguadores, no water sellers, now that we’ve extended the pipes within reach of everyone. The municipal supply here was always fairly good, but you didn’t buy from the men with leather water bags if you valued your intestines. Particularly if you were an outsider! More autos and motor trucks . . . but my last visit in peacetime was six . . . nearly seven . . . years ago, so that would be true anywhere, even New York or Los Angeles.”

  Motor vehicles had gone from a few thousand to nearly a million in the United States during the last decade, from toys for the rich to a staple of everyday life.

  “More bicycles. More mule and horse carts, too. Not as many porters carrying loads on their backs like that,” she said.

  She nodded toward a man bent nearly double under a huge net of clay jugs, trudging along with his hands braced on the tumpline across his forehead.

  “All the delivery work would have been done by porters back then unless the load was just too heavy for a man to lift. They’ve patched up all the battle damage . . . mostly putting things back the way they were, people are conservative about their houses here . . . but there are more wires now too, more telephones . . . and those are new . . .”

  At the edge of vision when the streets pointed west of south were a couple of blocky structures with big windows, skylights, a water tower, and the other tokens of manufacturing. The files said one was a shoe factory . . . though most of what it made was sandals . . . and the other made tack and harness. A cement plant was under construction, swarming with workers.

  “When I was a girl visiting here, if you needed shoes or mule harness you went to a cobbler or harnessmaker and had it done to order; I remember my papá going into one to get a bridle repaired the first time we came through . . . that would have been 1903 . . . and how it smelled like new shoes and I was fascinated by the scars on the harnessmaker’s hands . . . And some of the posters are different, of course.”

  The familiar ones were colorful advertisements for bullfights with matadors swirling their capes, or for plays at the Teatro Calderon, or perfectly ordinary examples advertising various brands of household goods. But there were some for moving pictures, from studios in Hollywood or Mexico City. And also the newly inevitable Department of Public Information type, some of them the same as you’d see in the north. Many others showed a heavily idealized Mexican peasant shaking hands with an equally stalwart and muscular American worker or soldier or farmer, or their female equivalents doing the same, or working side-by-side on dams and canals and roads to build the future, along with teachers and doctors and engineers.

  That was the Progressive message, though of course it rather clashed with the attitude summed up in a standard local benediction on parting: Que no haya novedad—may no new thing arise.

  One she nodded at showed a prosperous-looking man with an upturned mustache looking grave, with José Luis Yaguno for Alcalde! above the picture of the would-be mayor and More jobs—Honest municipal taxes—Efficient cooperation! below it; both were done bilingually.

  “Efficient cooperation?” Ciara asked.

  “Cooperation with us. That one over there has just cooperation, which means if you elect him he’ll be cooperating too . . . but with as little as I can get away with tacked on the end.”

  They weren’t the only gringos on the street; there were skilled workers and technicians from the Dakota Project in town for one reason or another, and businessmen or bureaucrats striding along—their bouncy walk made her self-conscious about the gliding local pace she’d fallen back into automatically—a brace of Negro soldiers seeing the sights with local girls on their arms, all four eating ice cream cones, and even a family of prosperous tourists, tow-haired all the way down their stepladder assortment of children running at three-year intervals from fifteen to a youngster clutching a stuffed Teddy bear. The parents were consulting a guidebook and looking more than a little baffled. Before the war they might have been equally bemused in France or Italy.

  Luz stepped over to them. “Excuse me, sir, madam, are you having trouble finding something?” she said.

  “Ah . . .”

  Mr. Probably-from-Racine-Wisconsin-or-possibly-Indianapolis looked at her dubiously, and t
hen visibly totted up her respectable clothing, impeccable Californian General American accent, and extremely Celtic-looking companion, and nodded. He had the beginnings of a potbelly, but the formidable shoulders said he’d done something physical as a young man, farming or lumberjacking or the like.

  “Thank you, miss . . . we’re looking for the, um, cathedral?” he said, confirming her second guess with his Hoosier rasp.

  “Ah, you’re in the wrong section of town, sir, but it’s not far. If you turn around and go there—”

  “I’d have been just as lost a little while ago,” Ciara said with a smile as the midwesterners walked off.

  “No, you’d be able to read a map.” Luz looked around again. “All these new shops, too . . .”

  Not all the new structures were flat-roofed either, as had been the custom in this town; many had pitched tile roofs, including one that looked as if it had an apartment over a shop, with a sign reading, in French:

  Boulangerie—Patisserie—Confiserie—Creperie

  And beneath it:

  Café Chaud

  Followed by:

  Anciennement Rue Jean-Jaures, Paris

  M. Teffeau, Propriétaire

  With the Spanish equivalents, which included things just taken for granted in a Parisian setting:

  Café y Panadería Francesa

  Le Chaud

  Pastelitos y Bebidas Deliciosas

  Servidos en Nuestro Comedor y Patio

  “Formerly of Jean-Jaures Street, Paris?” Ciara asked; her French was elementary, and mostly picked up from the female part of the Cheine household since the New Year.

  “Yes, and I believe it,” Luz said, laughing to herself.

  Outside the door stood a dour, plumpish someone in an apron over a goodish dress who could only be Madame Teffeau. Her outfit would have been moderately chic in Paris when there still was a Paris; she was flanked by a daughter twenty years younger and thirty pounds lighter who had flour on her apron and hands, and talking to a skinny, wiry boy who could only be her teenage son. He was driving a delivery tricycle, like a three-wheeled motorcycle, whose box was heaped with paper-wrapped bundles and boxes. She was doing the talking in French with the occasional Spanish word thrown in, mostly street names, and . . .