Shadows of Annihilation Page 24

  “An’ I gotta . . . gotta pony!” Alice stepped back and threw her arms wide, jumping up and down twice for emphasis. “Big! All fuzzy! Lucero! Gotta . . . !”

  She smacked a small plump palm on her own forehead to show where the star-shaped blaze was, which was what Lucero meant.

  “Come see, Nanna! Lucero eats! Apples! An’ . . . an’ . . . carrots! An’ . . . an’ . . . sugar! Big . . . big . . . teeeeeths!”

  The girl bared her own milk teeth in a grin that unintentionally mimicked Uncle Teddy’s as well as a horse reaching for a lump of sugar, grabbed Luz’s hand, and began to tug. Luz bent, gripped the solid wiggling weight under the armpits, put a smacking kiss on her face, and spun her in a circle until she was giggling helplessly and breathless, and then settled her down on her hip, on the left side so there wasn’t an automatic pistol in the way.

  “¡Qué niña tan grande, mi pequeña ahijada ha llegado a ser!” she said: “What a great big girl my little goddaughter has become! Tomorrow we will see your pony and feed him apples and carrots and sugar.”

  At that age, tomorrow had about the same impact as next week or possibly never, but Luz had cunningly concealed the last of the candied peanuts against this chance. Now she did a stage magician’s gesture—the Chamber kept several prestidigitators on retainer for training purposes, along with the acrobats, cardsharps, and second-story men—and apparently extracted it from Alice’s nose. That left the toddler gaping in delighted wonder and then going Mmmm! and chewing with a pleased expression when her godmother popped it into her mouth. Diego’s eyes and nose followed the peanut with a rapt expression and a piteous whine, showing he’d long since mastered the concept of treat.

  The girl pointed at Ciara as she chewed, frowned in thought, then smiled again as she found what she was searching for and brought out the concept in a happy squeal:

  “Piiiink!”

  “This is my friend Ciara,” Luz said gravely as she set the child on her feet again.

  Ciara, who was a bit sun-flushed, bent down and nodded with equal solemnity, extending a hand that Alice grabbed with both of hers and shook enthusiastically, but as much side-to-side as up and down.

  “Now you must go with your nanny Anita and have your own dinner like a good girl while the grown-ups do grown-up things,” Luz said.

  “Not good girl!” she pouted. “Bad girl! Big, bad girl now!”

  Then with a mercurial change of focus. “’rietta! ’rietta! Kiss! Keera-piiiink! Kiss!”

  Henrietta and Ciara applied the required smacks, and Alice let herself be led off, waving and smiling over her shoulder as the puppy bounced at her heels, its claws clacking on the smooth brown tile of the floor. Ciara and Henrietta grinned back and waved to the child.

  “And now to work. Half an hour, Miss Colmer,” Luz said. “You’ll be our liaison with General Young of the 32nd and set up the meeting. Do emphasize that we need to keep the numbers involved to a minimum; it shouldn’t be hard, he’s an intelligent man and he has experience of clandestine work as a military attaché.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the secretary said, shaking her hand and exchanging a friendly hug with Ciara before she left.

  Luz chuckled as they headed for their two—discreetly connected—rooms.

  “By that age they’re actually cuter than puppies,” she said, casting her eyes back toward the diminishing figures of Alice and Diego. “It takes a while, but all at once they are.”

  “Suddenly everything feels sunnier!” Ciara said, looking in the same direction with a long sigh.

  Luz put her arm around her waist and squeezed.

  “We can, eventually, if we want to; there are ways,” she said.

  Ciara laughed and gave her a look of mock wide-eyed astonishment.

  “But not that way,” Luz said dryly.

  “And I’d like to give my da grandchildren, may it help him rest in peace and smile in purgatory,” Ciara said, crossing herself and sobering. “With Colm dead, I’m the only one to do that for my parents.”

  “And me for mine,” Luz said in agreement.

  Just as individuals were a cell in the organism of the nation, they were also the link between past and future, in the families that were the next step up toward that greater unity.

  “But not yet.”

  Ciara sighed. “No. First the war.”

  And surviving it, Luz thought, knowing the thought was shared.

  * * *

  —

  Looking down from the head of the stairs, Luz could see why the big central courtyard of the casa grande was called the patio del limón: the potted lime trees that alternated with climbing red roses, blue-and-white wisteria, and purple bougainvillea. It had fountains that looked as old as the mansion at opposite ends with beds of white geraniums around them, but the pavement had been relaid with modern hydraulic tile in a repeating pattern of lilies and fronds around pale expanses.

  There was already a fair scattering of guests under Japanese lanterns strung from lines overhead: American men in white tie or (in the case of the younger ones) black, Mexicans mostly the same, with a few instances of a self-consciously archaic local splendor that involved short tight embroidered silver-buttoned silk jackets, ruffled shirts, knee breeches, loose ascot ties, and red sashes about the waist.

  The women were all in evening dresses, though of less uniform cut than they would have been before the destruction of Paris. New York was trying hard to become the fallen city’s successor as unquestioned arbiter of fashion but hadn’t solidified its position yet, and Mexico City—refuge for a good many displaced French modistes, feeling at home there since Frenchmen had long been prominent socially and in business in Mexico—was making a valiant come-from-behind challenge. Chicago and San Francisco were neck-and-neck for third place, and Rio and Buenos Aires were making noises and waving their hands to be noticed from far away southward.

  Nobody outside the reach of German artillery paid any attention at all to Berlin’s pretensions.

  There were soldiers too, officers in the plain but sleekly tailored dress uniforms of darkest midnight blue and peaked caps the regulars used these days, with touches of color in the rank insignia and medal ribbons and the buckles of their pistol belts. One Ranger captain was in the same thing done in green, also showing his regiment in the polished tomahawk he wore through a loop in the back of his belt; it was ceremonial here, bleakly functional otherwise, as well as a symbolic link with Roger’s Rangers back in the eighteenth century, the grim frontier guerillas of the French and Indian War. The Ranger was tall and weathered in the way fair-skinned men got here, with a red mustache to match his cropped hair. The half-dozen regular officers were all Negroes, and only one of them was anything as lowly as a captain.

  A pleasant murmur of conversation sounded below the tinkle of falling water, and a fortunately restrained small charro-suited mariachi group in one corner was doing a soft treatment of “La Negra.” It was much cooler than even an hour ago, and an occasional rumble and flicker from the west showed a storm over the mountains, but she didn’t think it would rain here today.

  Possibly tomorrow, which might be convenient. Rain can draw a veil, and it keeps people inside.

  Ciara took a deep breath beside her as they descended the staircase from the arcaded mirador of the second story.

  “You look wonderful, querida,” Luz murmured, wishing she could give her hand a reassuring squeeze.

  It was true; Ciara was wearing a modish but not extravagant modern green evening gown that flattered her hourglass figure with its wide neckline, long straight sleeves, and a loose dropped waistline above a shin-length skirt, together with a necklace of emeralds in disks of gold filigree that had belonged to Luz’s father’s mother. They looked much better on her than on Luz, bringing out the turquoise of her eyes, the alabaster complexion, and the sunset blaze of her hair.

  Or
her wig, Luz thought affectionately.

  One advantage of their cropped state was that they could do a complex raised hairdo together with the wig on a stand and then simply wear it like an article of clothing. You definitely couldn’t do it by yourself while the hair was growing on your head, and the whole thing could be a serious bother at times, which was why hairstyles had been getting at least a little simpler since the war started.

  “And remember, your cover persona has about as much experience at this sort of occasion as you do—you’re supposed to be a church-raised orphan from the South Side of Chicago!”

  Which showed why cover identities were usually tailored as closely as possible to the real backgrounds of the people assuming them. Truth could be very convincing, and even more misleading.

  “It’s not important to the job if you feel a bit awkward, so you don’t have to worry about it.”

  “It feels important to me!”

  “Ah, but you’re not here, querida. Mary Cavanaugh is here; just remember that.”

  Ciara nodded, then shook herself slightly and firmed her lips into a pleasant smile, though Luz suspected it took as much courage, if of a different kind, as facing gunfire and poison gas in Berlin had taken. The success of their mission meant not attracting attention from the enemy . . . and the enemy could be anywhere.

  That’s my girl! I knew she was a lioness the first moment we met!

  To Luz this gathering was a variation on the infinitely familiar. The social side of her father’s business had taken her into mover-and-shaker circles from her teens on, as soon as she’d been old enough for adult mingling; before that she’d mixed with the children of her father’s clients.

  You could even call those European finishing schools formal training for high-society espionage! It was supposed to be about status-seeking and husband-hunting, but the skills transfer surprisingly well.

  She wore an underdress of black silk, with an overdress of soft black silk tulle, accented with black sequins, and dress straps of silk velvet over her bare shoulders; the only drawback was that it showed that her shoulders and arms were those of an acrobat, not a bureaucrat, but most people were surprisingly obtuse about things like that . . . and these days, most Americans at least would simply assume she was a bit of a fanatic about the Strenuous Life and build your body.

  A faceted French jet appliqué with long dangling beaded tassels hung from the right bustline, and around her neck was a single large pearl in a silver clasp, a Tahitian drop of the genuine deep lustrous black that was the rarest of all colors. Her father had bought it for her mother on their tenth anniversary, and it flattered both of them.

  Let’s see . . . Luz thought.

  The biggest clump was around Governor Seelmann and his bride, who wasn’t showing much yet but had a definite glow in an elegant white tulle gown and tortoiseshell combs in her piled raven hair. That group included Don Raul de Moncada and his rather stout wife, both beaming approval, and a couple of their sons and their wives. The sons were in elegant but modern black tie; Don Raul was wearing something his great-grandfather might have taken to the court of the emperor Iturbide a century ago.

  A bit like a matador’s traje de luces. Or vice versa if you know the history, Luz thought.

  That group also included Julie Durán, accompanied by her brother-in-law Alfredo, and looking extremely self-contained and dressed in the pale azure tint named Alice blue after Uncle Teddy’s eldest . . . who now that Luz came to think of it had a very similar Nordic complexion. Her eyes . . . which perfectly matched that icy color and the blaze of diamonds around her neck . . . flicked across Luz’s in a single second of acknowledgment without affecting her expression at all or the conversation she was having.

  Luz and Ciara attracted quite a few appreciative male and appraising female glances as they came down the stairs, and a few self-introductions as they came to the patio floor, mostly from younger men or those of both genders fascinated by their Coco Chanel gowns.

  Luz slid past them politely with only a few sentences exchanged—about the war, the dresses, the weather, the crops, the war, American bureaucratic intrigues, the war, hints about Mexican hacendado family dramas that sailed over her head, the war, the improvements the Duráns had made to the hacienda, and the weather and crops and the war over again—with the ease of long experience. They both took glasses of chilled white wine from a passing tray and nibbled on a few hors d’oeuvres—Luz’s favorite was a piece of candied nopal cactus, a taste that took her back to her childhood, but the anchovies curled around mushrooms on tostadas were fine, and the little spicy sausages on toothpicks. Ciara’s nerves had smothered her usual healthy appetite until she had to force herself to swallow one, which was a pity because they were worth paying attention to.

  By the time they’d circled around to the officers of the 32nd Infantry Division, even an expert wouldn’t have thought they were making a beeline in that direction rather than just dutifully touching bases; Luz had been using a mental equivalent of flipping a coin to pick directions, and only the lack of pattern might have been revealing.

  Hopefully nobody is looking at the two earnest if well-connected bureaucratic do-gooders Ciara and I are supposed to be; but if anyone hostile is looking in general, they will be looking at the divisional commander of the garrison and anyone who meets with him and his officers. So we need to be very careful about contacts with the military. The Black Chamber station chief has good reasons for occasionally talking to people with our cover identities; a general doesn’t. His intelligence officer especially doesn’t have a reason to be concerned with a schools program.

  Major-General Charles Young was at the center of the group, a striking-looking man in his early fifties and only a little gray at the temples of his close-cropped, tight-curled hair, with the broad-shouldered, deep-chested, lean-waisted build and ramrod West Point stance that the dress uniform showed off well, and a cleft square chin and somber eyes. They lightened as he looked down at his wife, Ada, and she said something that made him smile.

  He has presence, and they make a handsome couple, Luz thought.

  Henrietta aside, Ada Young was the only Negro woman present; the other officers probably hadn’t had time to send for their families yet from their previous posting in Jackson, Mississippi.

  She’s a San Franciscan, I recall. Still short of forty; they met while he was stationed at the Presidio there, and it started with a common interest in music. Young plays the violin very well, according to reports, which gives us something in common.

  Ada Mills Young’s eyebrows rose very slightly as Luz and Ciara approached. General Young and his party certainly weren’t being shunned, the way he probably had been in lonely frontier forts in the 1880s, when he’d been one of the grand total of three West Point graduates of his race. Quite a few of the American guests had spoken to them, mostly the men but including a long friendly chat by the governor and his wife. They also weren’t being eagerly sought out, the way a new white divisional commander and his staff would have been, either, and the junior officers weren’t circulating much.

  Rather more of the locals had approached them, and less stiffly and not visibly making themselves do so, and none of them needing Julie gently chivvying them on from behind with the Black Chamber’s fearsome reputation keeping the social smiles of her guests—or victims—fixed in place.

  It isn’t that Mexicans don’t have racial prejudices, Luz thought; the social complexities were interesting in themselves, and understanding them was essential to her work.

  She’d often heard upper-crust families down here gossiping with snide malice about each other’s precise skin tint, nose and eye and lip shape and for the males the degree of body hair, listing them all with pedantic care . . . while often boasting about some ancient Aztec princess in their family tree with their next breath. And mallate, which was a misspelled Nahuatl loanword and how they’d refer to
the Youngs if the Youngs weren’t the powerful representatives of the current rulers, wasn’t any sort of a compliment.

  The original meaning of the word was “black dung beetle.”

  They just have slightly different prejudices . . . and they’re much more pragmatic about it. For example, if you put a man in a general’s uniform with seventeen thousand heavily armed soldiers bristling with artillery and machine-guns and battle cars and fighting aeroplanes at his back, he suddenly becomes very socially acceptable indeed.

  Luz introduced herself and Ciara under their cover names; Young recognized them immediately, and Luz thought he knew her face too, probably from a file photo—and translating those to reality was surprisingly difficult, which argued for powers of observation and also that the Iron House had sent him emphatic orders about priorities.

  The very young major with intelligence tabs beside him did as well, showing it only with a flicker of the eyes behind his round-lensed spectacles.

  They exchanged pleasantries, and Young gravely agreed that the project setting up technical schools for girls was indeed extremely worthy. His wife agreed emphatically, and probably sincerely. The two Black Chamber operatives moved on after a polite interval, circulated for another ten minutes, then calmly walked through a doorway and into a corridor where Henrietta Colmer stood, as if they were looking for the ladies’ toilets.

  “This way, ma’am,” Julie’s secretary said quietly.

  Her gown was tangerine-orange silk velvet, falling to lower calf length, horizontally gathered at the front waist with long scarflike folds at each side, and a bodice of gold lamé lace over a silk lining. Luz thought she recognized Julie’s taste in clothes and she was fairly certain she recognized the gold-wire and ruby-chip necklace, but Henrietta had been smart to take the advice on the dress . . . and the loan of the necklace. They both went very well indeed with the confidential secretary’s chocolate complexion and large dark eyes, though it would all have been far too bright for the station chief.