Shadows of Annihilation Read online

  “That’s not just French, it’s Parisian—she just said n’pus jamais for don’t ever. Let’s pick up something for dessert on the way,” she said, as he darted off with a roar and puff of exhaust.

  Once they were inside and the jangle of the bell over the door subsided Luz blinked; you could overeat just smelling the place, and she was surrounded by glass display counters backed by shelves on three sides, heaped with everything from baskets of plain but authentic baguettes through Kougin Aman—Breton pastries made with a croissantlike dough folded and refolded and baked slowly in rounds so that it puffed into many layers with a crisp crust of caramelized sugar ready to crackle under your teeth . . . and on to things made with candied orange peel and thin coats of dark chocolate . . .

  Past the shop section was a small patio, set with eight tables under umbrellas and surrounded by chairs, all full in the bright midafternoon sunlight; in France they would probably have been out on the sidewalk instead, unless it was a shop in Provence. The customers were women, mostly youngish, including several they’d met repairing the altar cloths with Señora Gutiérrez. A door behind that led to the ovens—she could see a chimney smoking—where Monsieur Teffeau probably toiled, and the family quarters; there were large clay pots with gardenias and bougainvillea and oleanders spilling over their tops.

  Luz waved and got a smile in return from her altar cloth acquaintances. The owner turned to her, and Luz mentioned a few places in Paris in her native-perfect arrondissement huitième version of French. That had Madame Teffeau wiping the corner of her eye with the tail of her apron and shoving a string-tied cardboard box full of edibles into their hands, and in what was very untypical behavior for a French shopkeeper refusing even token payment.

  “We shall return, madame, and more than once, while we are staying in Zacatecas,” Luz said on their way out. “And we shall repay your generosity.”

  “Did you see María Luisa having opera cake and coffee with some of her friends?” Ciara said. “I remember her from the altar cloths; a nice girl. She’s the one who was so upset about Paris, and all the better for her!”

  “Yes, she is a nice girl . . . and she’s out in public,” Luz said.

  At Ciara’s look she went on: “Except in the bigger cities and the capital . . . where they’ve got department stores and such . . . there aren’t many places a respectable woman in Mexico can go just to have a cup and a bite and a chat with her amigas. She can’t possibly set foot in a cantina or pulqueria, of course. Which incidentally means there’s no place she can pee, if she feels the need away from her and her friends’ houses. There are more ways than riveted iron of putting a ball and chain on someone.”

  “That’s still a problem north of the border,” Ciara pointed out.

  “Yes, but not nearly as much as it used to be, or still is, here. This is a beginning! And while I admire the French more than I like them . . .”

  “I love the smell coming from this box I’m carrying, Luz!”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t love their food! Though sometimes you’re better off not visiting the kitchen. But you’ve got to hand it to them for indomitability. The Teffeaus got out and got here and got this shop going in about the same time it takes to produce a baby.”

  “I wish I could just chat with someone like Luisa,” Ciara said a little wistfully.

  “I think you should make a chance to do just that, since we’re not meeting Henrietta for a couple of hours and everything should look casual,” Luz said.

  “We’ll go back?

  “Not me, you. There was something about her . . . Yes, why don’t you go do that now? Let her do the talking as much as you can; say I decided to take Madame Teffeau’s gifts back to our guesthouse. We’ll meet at that dealership in two hours.”

  * * *

  —

  The modest pink structure was next to an open lot behind a chest-high stucco wall and was labeled . . .

  “Fred Foreman’s Fords, Sales, Rentals, and Repairs,” Luz read.

  The Spanish translation below was understandable but a little eccentric: Los Ford de Fred Foreman—Ventas, Rentas, Reparos.

  “A Ford dealership! The gazetteer said so, but it still seems . . . surreal.”

  They stepped through into an office waiting room decorated with dealership calendars and the usual patriotic prints, including one of Uncle Teddy riding up San Juan Hill with a bandana around his hat. A tall slim thirtyish man with carroty hair, jug ears, and freckles dressed in a rather loud checked suit and bow tie jumped up from behind a counter, smiling broadly.

  “Fred Foreman, ladies!” he said in an overly friendly voice, radiating trustworthiness with an extended hand. “What can I do for you?”

  “A Guvvie, please,” Luz said, giving it enough of a squeeze to make him blink. “New, if possible.”

  She also gave their cover story and names, which by no coincidence whatsoever made it perfectly logical that a pair of young ladies would want such a rugged and masculine piece of engineering. Many of the local roads had been improved, but a lot hadn’t yet.

  Guvvie was short for General Utility Vehicle. A young man named Jesse Livingood had invented them a few years ago, just when the Intervention was getting underway, essentially by replacing the front axle of a Model T with a second back one, adding a front driveshaft, a differential case, and a few bits and pieces. It wasn’t fast and even compared to a standard Model T it wasn’t pretty, but with all four wheels pulling and the Model T’s high clearance and ruggedness it could climb like a goat and take fantastic degrees of abuse.

  “Well, I have three, but they’re used, government surplus,” the man said. “I have the Ford Model T touring car model and the light trucks new, but not that. Guvvies really move around here, ma’am—half the hacendados have one now. Why, the president himself—”

  “Owns four, yes, I know, Mr. Foreman,” Luz said.

  Which was true. Ranchers and gentleman farmers and those with aspirations in that direction often did, especially those who’d used them in the Army. Uncle Teddy had been the first president ever to drive an auto himself, back in the opening years of the century, and he loved driving a Guvvie off the roads on western hunting trips.

  Strong men blanched when invited to go along.

  A plumpishly pretty mestiza in her twenties came through a door behind the counter to take Fred Foreman’s place while he dealt with the clients. She wore a good American-style gray day dress with a lace collar and had a baby in the crook of her arm. A two-year-old in a sailor suit peeked out from behind her skirts; the paternal origin of both was obvious, and a younger woman, heavily pregnant, put her head through the door. She looked like a sister to the first, and took the baby when it was handed to her.

  “I take care of desk, Fede,” the elder of the probable sisters said in passable English, except for the last word, which was the local diminutive of Federico, exactly equivalent to Fred.

  “Thank you, Señora Foreman,” Luz said in Spanish. “We will not keep your husband longer than we must.”

  Most of the stock in the gravel-surfaced yard outside were rows of standard Model T roadsters or touring cars, in either the universal black or the Army’s muted gray-green-brown, with plenty of the stretched light truck version as well, and a couple of the newest variety of truck, which had an extra axle and pair of wheels at the back. And half a dozen brand-new Fordson tractors, which ought to do well here with their stone-ax, low-maintenance simplicity.

  Three Guvvies stood to one side, with prices on cardboard signs in their windscreens; the cheapest was three hundred dollars, and the other two were four hundred and six hundred. On the one hand, they were used; on the other, a Guvvie usually cost about twice what an ordinary Model T touring car did, and the current cost for one of those was five hundred fifty, a bit less than half the yearly income of one of the assembly line workers at Highland Park. On the third hand,
used for an ex-military vehicle meant used hard.

  “As you can see, the U.S. Army’s finest creation—I drove one of these myself with the 7th Field Mortar Battalion—Miss, what are you—”

  “This one is complete junk,” Ciara said crisply, her head under the side-mounted flap of the hood and her Baahst’n accent a little stronger. “Three hundred? Parts and scrap value would be about fifty! The fuel line is split . . . and I think the block is cracked! You’d be lucky to get it out of the yard. Lucky if it didn’t catch fire. And the tires are nearly bald.”

  “Well, now, Miss—” he began.

  “Worthless junk,” Ciara said again, without bothering to look in his direction.

  Luz kept a slight, polite smile; inwardly she was chortling as Fred Foreman’s freckled face fell.

  Try saying that ten times really fast, she thought, gently mocking one of Julie’s favorite running jokes.

  Used-auto dealers were a new breed, but they’d mostly started out in the livery stable business as men who rented or dealt in horses, or learned the trade from those who had. You couldn’t file an automobile’s teeth to disguise its age or give it an opium-and-pepper suppository to conceal lethargy and sickness, but new mechanical equivalents of those ancient tricks were discovered every day.

  And the cream of the jest is that he’s flushing with rage that someone like Ciara is laying down the mechanical law to him, but he doesn’t dare offend us. ¡Dios mio! How glad I am I don’t work in sales! At least when I have to butter up annoying people in the line of business it’s not because I want their money. Usually it’s their information or their lives or both, and if it works I ruin them or kill them.

  “This one’s a bit better, but it needs work,” Ciara said, after looking under the hood of the second Guvvie. “I’d better check.”

  The yard had an open-sided workroom with a metal ramp that let you drive an auto up onto a platform over a pit to give a mechanic access to the underside. Two men in grease-stained overalls were working on one; both were in their mid-twenties, around her age. One looked as if he were a close relative of Fred Foreman, and the other had a strong family resemblance to the man’s wife and what were probably sisters married to the Foreman brothers. The redhead had a gold wedding band on his left hand and part of one protruding ear missing; his probable twice-over brother-in-law didn’t have any visible injuries, but they might well have been trying to kill each other a few years ago.

  They both unfolded broad smiles as Ciara marched into their workspace; the grins faded as she went right by them with a polite nod, examined and picked up a toolbox with an electric flashlight in it, and grabbed the rope attached to a little wooden platform on casters that she dragged along behind her.

  “What is she doing?” Fred Foreman asked, honestly bewildered.

  “Not buying a pig in a poke,” Luz answered happily.

  Ciara spent a few minutes guddling around under the hood with a socket wrench, then dropped on her back on the platform, took the flashlight, kicked herself under the high clearance of the Guvvie’s wheels, and went to work there. Things banged and clanked, and Ciara invoked the Virgin and the saints when something rattled, apparently because she was shaking it. She’d never even been a passenger in an auto until she left Boston last summer, but she’d spent years helping her elder brother Colm the machinist on various jobs, and like all mechanically inclined youngsters these days they’d both studied autos just as hard as they could. Hands-on experience since had been nuts and cream to her.

  Luz could clean a carburetor and do other running repairs; it was something she’d had to learn, working in the field. Ciara had a genuine affinity.

  She pushed herself back out; by this time both the mechanics were standing nearby and offered her a hand up. She ignored it, not as a discourtesy but because she was in a state of total focus, tucked a foot underneath herself, and came up that way.

  “This one’s not bad but that engine and drive train needs to be torn down and put back together. Valves reground, everything cleaned out, and I think one of the magneto coils replaced. Probably new spark plugs too.”

  “Sí, señorita,” the Mexican-looking mechanic began, and continued in heavily accented English. “We were going to—”

  His companion elbowed him and he fell silent.

  Ciara moved on to the third. It was the newest-looking, had the double-width tires introduced on the latest model and a folding canvas hood for a roof—one that showed at least one round hole covered with a patch even in the down position. After a few minutes of careful appraisal, she nodded with a judicious pursing of her lips, wiping her hands carefully on a rag from the toolbox.

  “This one’s not bad at all,” she said. “Made early last year from the batch numbers. Several important parts have been replaced and the frame was bent and then straightened with an air hammer and given a riveted reinforcement patch—looks like it was in a bad collision accident and then fairly well repaired.”

  Both the young mechanics nodded vigorously; the redhead listened with his head turned to put his unclipped ear forward. In the loud flat voice that people with damaged hearing often used he said:

  “We did that. Finished yesterday, so we didn’t have time yet for the others.”

  “But the price is ridiculous for an Army auto that was in an accident and sold out of service,” Luz added. “And ridden hard and put away wet every day, too, that’s how soldiers deal with equipment.”

  “You’re government workers, ladies! It’s on your expense account!” Foreman said plaintively.

  As a matter of fact, it was on their expense account, but their cover identities would be careful about the amounts, which were rigorously checked.

  “I’m not going to waste the American people’s substance,” Luz said primly.

  The expression of unanswerably sound Party doctrine shut him up with a snap.

  Technically she could report him, and soliciting the corruption of a public servant was a very serious crime these days. Uncle Teddy had gotten his start in national politics as an anticorruption civil service reformer, and it was a cause still dear to his heart. It was especially dangerous down here in the Protectorate, under martial law. Foreman wasn’t frightened enough to suspect her of being FBS or even worse Black Chamber, but being a Party member with obvious connections in Mexico City would be more than enough, especially considering that a used-car salesman generally had good reasons not to want a light shone under his rock.

  Plenipotentiary Lodge was death on corruption too, in a cold, merciless Puritan Yankee sort of way.

  “Country before convenience,” she added, and he nodded frantically.

  “I would never suggest otherwise . . . ah, five fifty, then?”

  And besides, Mima had taught her bargaining, and taught it as a blood sport.

  * * *

  —

  Ciara drove the Guvvie through the bright midday warmth southwest of the city at about twenty-two miles an hour—just a bit below its top speed—while listening carefully to the little twenty-horsepower engine’s four cylinders hammering away with a ticking tuktuktuktuktuk sound.

  “No problems,” she said happily, weaving past an oxcart whose driver walked beside it; the traffic here wasn’t particularly heavy, but its nature made driving an adventure in itself.

  The little stick-sided two-wheeled thing in front of them was heaped high with some sweet-smelling green fodder that hid everything beyond it—including things in the oncoming lane, given the curve. Most of the animal-drawn vehicles stuck to the shoulders of the road, but not all. The white oxen rolled their great brown eyes as the Guvvie passed them, heading into the downhill turn without much problem.

  Then Ciara saw what was just after the oxcart; a file of mules, tethered together and very close. Which was a problem, given the oncoming truck in the other lane, and she hit the brake and clutch pedals for
a moment while wrenching at the wheel as the A-ogoooogha! A-ogoooogha! of the Guvvie’s horn sent mules skittering and their driver cursing and the auto weaving close enough to get the beasts’ scent and for some slobber from their tossing heads to spatter on the windscreen.

  “Gather at the river! Lord Jesus spare a sinner!” Henrietta Colmer yelped beside Ciara, rearing up in a way that showed she could drive too; she was stamping for the brake that wasn’t there in front of her where she sat to the driver’s right.

  We designed these roads for motor traffic, but I don’t think Mexico altogether agrees with that. Not yet, Luz thought, looking up from the file in her lap.

  She also slapped a hand into the open attaché case beside her on the bench-style backseat to prevent the papers from going flying, as the auto lurched and swayed and skidded and then steadied down again in an empty stretch to cries of relief from the driver and passenger in the front.

  Fortunately the road was two lanes broad with generous graveled shoulders even when it went through cuttings in this rocky ground just west of Zacatecas. Those surroundings looked even drier than they were, with barely enough pasture for goats . . . which didn’t mean there weren’t goats, herded or at least watched by ragged preadolescent boys as they wandered amid a clatter of bells. The surface was as good as any main highway back north, roller-stabilized concrete topped with a layer of asphalt pavement. Asphalt was dirt cheap around here, and the same vast oilfields on the Gulf that produced it helped finance things like the road net.

  Standard Oil and its peers had learned not to complain at the taxes. There was plenty left over, and the roads helped them too in the long run by encouraging the use of autos and motor trucks, not to mention the contracts that had followed when all the locomotives on the new Mexican portion of American National Railways were switched to oil fuel.