Shadows of Annihilation Read online

  And frankly, because I enjoy fighting . . . or maybe it’s the winning part. It makes me feel alive, she thought. In a way only you do otherwise.

  Aloud she continued:

  “Human beings have always had tribes, and they always will, and the tribes have always fought for land and booty and power . . . and they always will. So the important thing is to win.”

  “Well, we have nations now,” Ciara said, uncertainly.

  What Luz had said wasn’t exactly Progressive rhetoric, though large parts of the New Nationalist brand of national-social Darwinism could be boiled down to about that. For a naturally jovial, genial man of deep affections and strong friendships . . . who’d once walked all around the White House neighborhood cradling a stray kitten he’d saved from dogs until he found it a good home . . . Uncle Teddy had a rather combatively bleak view of human nature and history.

  Luz spread her hands. “Nations are tribes writ large with fancier names and machine-guns instead of spears. It’s not usually about right and wrong—”

  For her, close reading of Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals in her late teens had confirmed long-held inchoate doubts about whether those concepts had any real substance beyond local custom and personal preference.

  “—it’s just Us and Them, which is a lot more common. I actually like Mexico, and a lot of its people. I’d much rather live here than . . . oh, Illinois, say. I’ve . . . let it go. There’s a time to heal.”

  And especially since meeting you, my heart, my darling. Which reminds me . . . I’ve been putting this off . . . let’s get it over with . . .

  “Ah . . . there is one thing you should be aware of, mi amor, about the station chief in Zacatecas, Julie Durán.”

  “It’s very Progressive, a woman holding a job like that,” Ciara said enthusiastically. “What an age we live in!”

  Well, every word of that’s true, but . . . this is going to be awkward . . . I really should have bitten the bullet and said something earlier . . .

  “She’s the only woman who’s a station chief, so far, I’m afraid, out of fifty-three domestic stations, six in the Philippines, and a round dozen and climbing abroad,” Luz said. “Though there are two more as assistant station chiefs . . . Alma Michaelis in El Paso, and Theresa Baez in Merida down south, if I remember the current roster correctly.”

  “Bob . . . her husband . . . is . . . remind me . . .”

  Her perfect memory doesn’t work quite as well with people, Luz thought, and filled in:

  “Executive Field Operative Roberto Durán. He’s New Mexican—old ranching family from up north of Taos, and they own land in the San Luis—southern Colorado—too. He was the first station chief in Zacatecas, and Julie was his assistant—they were the ones who made sure there wasn’t going to be a ‘marriage bar’ in our outfit—”

  Many organizations public and private made women retire when they married, or used the prospect as an excuse not to hire them in the first place; not, however, the Black Chamber. Everyone got paid the same according to their rank, too, which wasn’t at all common even among Progressives.

  Yet, she thought, and went on:

  “—because he flat refused to take the job without her staying on the rolls officially, and I backed him up and got Uncle Teddy to put a word in and he talked the Director around. The fact that Bob’s a cousin of the governor of New Mexico didn’t hurt at all. The Director has him off doing something hush-hush now, so Julie got the job, to maintain continuity. She’d been doing most of it for a while anyway, while he got roving assignments.”

  “A cousin of State Governor Miguel Otero, he would be; and Otero was territorial governor too,” Ciara said, showing she’d been paying attention.

  New Mexico had only become the forty-seventh state in 1912 . . . though there were fifty-nine and rising now. The starry flag was getting crowded.

  “Yes; Otero’s influential in the Party because he was one of Uncle Teddy’s early backers in ’12, when it was risky. El jefe never forgets that sort of support. The Durán family are very well-to-do but not really rich . . . not by East Coast or Californian standards.”

  Ciara snorted quietly, and Luz made an acknowledging dip of her head; that was a matter of perspective. To a shopkeeper’s daughter from South Boston Luz was rich, though she’d never seen it that way herself. Her father’s business as a consulting engineer planning and running projects had meant contact with people who really were rich—which in those circles didn’t mean having millions, it meant being able to spend millions.

  “Bob’s papá was in the Rough Riders like mine, so we met and hit it off in our teens when our fathers were at the reunions; a lot of the Rough Riders were from the New Mexico Territory, as it was then, and the Duráns are just the sort of frontier-baron-rancher people Uncle Teddy likes—he was at Julie and Bob’s wedding. I put in a word for Julie when she wanted to join . . . our organization . . . in late ’12, when we were just getting going, and the three of us worked together a good bit afterward. I introduced them, in fact . . . she was Julie Foederer then, of course . . . and they fell for each other like a pair of bricks tossed down a well. It was obvious by then that there was going to be war soon.”

  “Yes, I remember how angry people were.”

  Plenty of Americans had been killed in Mexico by that time—including her own parents, and very nearly herself—and tens of thousands driven out, and there had been deaths on American soil. Scores of volunteer Rough Rider regiments had sprung up in response to Uncle Teddy’s call even before the election was over.

  “Julie was in her senior year at Bryn Mawr when I arrived in ’08, though; her people, the Foederers, are from Philadelphia. She took me under her wing . . .”

  . . . her elegant, batlike, old-money, been-to-Paris-and-met-Natalie-Barney wing . . .

  “. . . there.”

  Get to the point, Luz, you’re dithering, she thought.

  “I’m sure we’ll all get along well on this job, then!” Ciara said happily.

  “Ah . . .” Luz said, glancing upward as she summoned all her reserves of social tact, not to mention courage, and cleared her throat. “At Bryn Mawr Julie and I were, um, close . . . extremely close . . . for a while. That ended with a few tears, but no anger, and we’ve been friends since.”

  In fact, we had a brief but extremely torrid affair, Luz thought, as she saw Ciara frown and then drop her eyes and flush beneath her transparent redhead’s skin as she caught the implications.

  “Oh,” she said.

  Luz carefully did not smile at rather fond memories; that oh was quietly pained.

  Third person I’d ever been to bed with, and the first woman. ¡Ay, but that was fun! And an eye-opener.

  It was her turn to reach out and take Ciara’s hand for a comforting squeeze. One of the many reasons she was glad she’d been born female was that women, even Anglo-Saxon ones . . .

  Which, gracias a Dios, I am not, she thought. Though I can fake it if you hum a few bars.

  . . . weren’t expected to act with the sort of perpetual bottling-up and emotional constipation that men had to show, especially in public and especially with each other. It also made discretion about certain things less difficult and irritating than it was for men in the same situation, though you had to be somewhat careful, and annoyance at the world’s idiocies never entirely went away.

  “I’m yours forever now, querida, but I can’t abolish the time before we met,” she said softly. “And I am a little older than you.”

  “I wish you’d told me earlier!”

  Luz met her eyes. “Did you want me to? I didn’t think you did. I’m sorry if I was wrong about that.”

  Ciara hesitated. “No,” she said. “I didn’t . . . but I’m . . . well, I’m a little angry now you didn’t anyway!”

  “So you’re angry now that you weren’t angry earlier
?” Luz said. “If I had told you, would you have felt better on this trip?”

  “No,” Ciara said unwillingly. “I’d have been . . . anxious.”

  “And I was afraid you’d be angry and that there was nothing I could do about it, so I hesitated,” Luz admitted.

  “You? Afraid?” Ciara snorted.

  “Different type of afraid, sweetie. There aren’t many people whose anger I really fear, but you’re one.”

  Ciara’s smile died. “You really mean that, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I . . . I’ll never be that angry with you, Luz. Never angry enough to hurt you.”

  They were silent for a moment, and then Luz nodded and spoke more lightly:

  “Throw in that we couldn’t possibly turn down this assignment for personal reasons!”

  The Director and el jefe certainly know about Ciara and me, Luz thought; they’d been moderately discreet, but they were living together. And as long as we deliver the goods, they’ll look the other way. If it started interfering with business, though . . . and they could certainly find out about me and Julie back in the day, if they started someone tapping into the ever-grinding Bryn Mawr alumni gossip mill . . .

  Ciara took a deep breath and smiled, though it was obviously a little forced. “No, of course we couldn’t, love. Thank you for explaining. It might have been awkward if you hadn’t. At . . . at least we know she won’t be shocked about . . . us.”

  “Well, no. But she’s a bit of a jokester and teases people sometimes,” Luz said, and added to herself:

  Everyone. Incessantly. Mercilessly.

  The fact that Julie was married now, and was triply a mother, and that Luz had introduced her to her husband wouldn’t have much impact on the way Ciara felt, though her basic sense of fairness would; she didn’t dislike men, but Luz strongly suspected that when it came to matters of romance, they just didn’t exist in Ciara’s emotional universe. Until she and Luz met she’d assumed that was because she was a good Catholic girl and God was saving the spark for a husband, but she’d learned better in a hurry.

  Whereas I . . . well, Julie and I used to travel à voile et à vapeur, both by steam and by sail, as the French say. Now I’m just happily monogamous.

  Ciara was silent for a moment, then went on: “I’m . . . it’s very odd, looking inside . . . me.”

  Which she does much better than most people her age, Luz thought. Much better than I did. I was smart back then, but also a tight-wrapped bundle of rage with a hair trigger and a knife in my pocket.

  Ciara went on: “I really am sort of . . . of angry you didn’t tell me earlier! I knew there must have been . . . before me, I mean . . . But I didn’t want to know the details! So now I’m angry you did tell me . . . and that you didn’t. It’s . . . it’s illogical!”

  Luz chuckled; for Ciara that was a serious self-accusation, since she was one of the most spontaneously rational people Luz had ever met.

  “The heart has its own reasons the head knows not!” she said. “That’s jealousy you’re feeling, sweetie. You haven’t met the green-eyed devil much before, which says something good about you.”

  Ciara made a shocked sound of denial and Luz gave her a fond smile. “I’m not blaming you, and I’m not angry! It’s not a rational emotion, and it never feels nice.”

  “The locomotive’s slowing,” Ciara said with relief, her head coming up.

  She was reading clues in the machine sounds, seconds before even Luz’s acute senses caught the feeling of deceleration, and a long melancholy hoot from the steam whistle followed on the heels of her words.

  Shortly afterward the conductor came through, announcing their arrival in Spanish and good, though accented, English just before the train took a steep downward slant toward the valley that held the town, a glowing snake of electric lights amid darkened hills. They went back to their compartment and packed and closed their cabin bags and hatboxes to be ready when the train halted for the fifteen-minute stop.

  They stepped down quickly at the cry of “Zacatecas! All passengers out for Zacatecas! Todos los pasajeros con destino en Zacatecas!”

  And ducked their heads for a moment to avoid the sideways drive of chilly rain in the narrow gap between the train and the overhanging roof that covered the platform. The moderately sized station here was brand-new and well lit, built or at least faced in the local cantera stone, which came in a dozen shades of pink and rose-red, all in a restrained Spanish Colonial style that wouldn’t have been out of place in California or the American Southwest either these days. But it and the small city it served weren’t nearly big enough to extend to the giant glassed-roof shed over the tracks that major centers had.

  Luz smiled again at the contrast with her memories of previous visits, ones of bullet-pocked walls in the bright light of noon, barbed wire and machine-gun nests and the stink of smoke and, faintly, of rotting bodies. Now it was nine o’clock and the sky was black with the drizzling clouds, rain still pattering on the roof over the sidings and reducing the metallic burnt-oily-steamy smell of petroleum-fueled locomotives and sharp tang of creosote tar from the sleepers in the roadbed.

  There were American soldiers this time too, but only a dozen, a squad’s worth of young conscripts from someplace where, judging by the name-tags on their left breast pockets and the faces under their steel helmets, most of the people had four Swedish grandparents, directed by a corporal who looked as if he was old enough to shave but only just. They were spruce and heavily armed and doing everything just as they were supposed to do, right down to never putting the index finger inside the trigger guard.

  But under their discipline they were obviously profoundly bored amid a bustle of people disembarking and meeting friends or family and trundling off to the baggage claim, and they were talking quietly among themselves about an impending reassignment, which couldn’t come too soon.

  One idly whistled the tune of an officially discouraged marching song that dated back to the Philippine Insurrection, a ditty titled “Little Brown Brother” that Luz knew well:

  Social customs here are few

  The females they all smoke and chew

  The men do things the Padres say are wrong;

  So kill beneath the starry flag!

  Let’s civilize ’em—with a Krag!

  And return us to our own beloved homes!

  There was even a local band dressed in vaguely nineteenth-century quasi-uniforms wandering through and wheedle-de-dumping out a brassy march in the background . . . a very Latin version of “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”; street music was one of the features of these highland towns, often leading to impromptu dancing, and they were probably in the station because this was a good place to get out of the rain and get a few tips.

  Mexicans who could took a long leisurely midday rest with their comida, and then stayed up much later than Yankees generally did. It often drove the efficiency-worshippers endemic in the Progressive movement mad with frustration, especially if they were the sort of obsessive who pursued efficient citizenship by doing time-and-motion studies of the best way to put butter on toast to avoid wasting precious time at breakfast that could and should be spent building the nation instead, but long exposure made the adjustment easy for her. It also made the streets lively in a way Luz liked. An equivalent small city in most parts of America would have rolled up the sidewalks by now on a weekday, with a late-night bridge game considered hot stuff.

  “Brrrr!” Ciara said, shivering a little at the contrast with the heated train.

  They set their hatboxes and coach suitcases down on the colored tile of the floor for a moment to await the redcap who would bring their trunk out to the street entrance; the air was around fifty degrees but felt more chill than that with the damp.

  “I see what you meant about packing some warm clothes, darling! In summer, too. How d
id that story about Mexico being hot all the time get started?”

  “At sea level, mi amor. In places like Veracruz or the Yucatán or Tampico, where you stew amid the bananas and mangoes and your shoes rot and fall apart like damp cardboard and fungus grows on you in embarrassing places you can’t scratch in public,” Luz said. “We’re at eight thousand feet here; tierra fría, the cold country. Warm days and cool nights in summer, cool to cold in winter. It’s a different world down there in the tierra caliente.”

  “Nice traveling with a native guide, that it is!”

  Luz laughed, but there was a real pleasure in showing Ciara the places she’d known. She was looking forward to the chance at a long vacation in Boston, for the reverse.

  “Oh, and watch out for being short of breath. It happens sometimes when people come up from sea level. Don’t try to ignore it, just rest when you have to and adjust gradually. And drink lots of water, the air here sucks it out.”

  There was adequate warmth in their quietly modish but not excessively eye-catching summer traveling suits of knit wool fabric, whose cut was among the fruits of Coco Chanel’s first American year, which had included ordinary streetwear as well as high fashion. Luz was quietly proud of suggesting to Director Wilkie that it would benefit the American economy if a message was sent to Biarritz offering asylum to Luz’s favorite modiste. With lightning-quick wits and a ferocious concentration on the main chance, the young designer had set speed records through the deadly chaos of the French collapse for the nearest American outpost waving the letter overhead.

  She was now sleekly ensconced in a splendid apartment in the El Dorado at 302 Central Park West, laying down the law on fashion to the wealthy barbarians of the New World with steely French arrogance, charging heavily for the privilege, and accumulating socially prominent male hangers-on. She’d also—somehow—found out who was responsible for her good fortune and gave them special deals on her output. Luz and Ciara both had the V-necked silk blouses over a chemise, tunics, slightly flared shin-length overskirts and four-pocket vaguely military-style overcoats with natural-waist belts that she’d produced in this spring’s season, in maroon and dark green respectively, and plain low-crowned brimmed hats with only a little Chantilly lace for trim.